By Jeffro on April 29, 2009
Pretty awesome to see that in such a short notice, there were ten different header tweaks submitted including one by Kaspars Dambis. I placed my vote early this morning but I followed Janes instructions in opening each full view screenshot in a browser tab and viewing each one. I must have looked at all of them for about 7 minutes without any of them screaming out at me. I finally placed my vote and I’ll just say it was for a design tweak other than the current one.
One interesting thing to note is that when I voted, the second most voted for choice in the poll was to keep the current header design.
Have your say in the header design tweak before the poll closes tonight at 8PM EDT.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged design, header, poll, tweaks, vote |
By Jeffro on April 29, 2009
Bradley Gillap sent me a note not too long ago that he was going to publish a lengthy blog post which explained why he moved from the Drupal community to WordPress. I checked out BastardGeek.com today as that is the site he maintains and he has his story published. Here is a sampling.
I found WordPress to be more like the homely girl from high school. She was stable, got along with my friends, was less likely to leave me in the dust, and not afraid to let me drone on for hours without interruption. Where as Drupal is the cheerleader in the red dress. She moves fast, takes no prisoners and clouds my judgement.
With regards to some of the cons for WordPress listed by Bradley, I think the issue with narrowing the search for plugins has largely been addressed by the search actually working. Type in the exact name of a plugin and it shows up as the first result which was not the case before hand. Also, he mentions WordPress feels bloated after 15 or 20 plug-ins. Well, that’s not the fault of WordPress is it?
All in all, it was a good read and I’d like to see more stories like Bradley’s come out of the wood work. In fact, I’d like to read some stories about people switching from WordPress to another platform to see what they listed as their cons. I bet that would be twice as interesting. If you know of any, link me to them in the comments.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged community, drupal, migration, wordpress |
By Jeffro on April 29, 2009
A few days ago, I was alerted on Twitter that a new WordPress News centric site had launched called WPInformer.com. The site was created by Aaron D Campbell and is part of the Xavisys brand. So far, there are a couple of posts on the site including a detailed look at the new widget interface that will part of WordPress 2.8, 5 minutes to improve the performance of your theme and a few others. So if you need another WordPress centric site to add you your feedreader, here it is. By the way, you can also follow WPInformer on Twitter. Good luck Aaron with the site!
Posted in News | Tagged aaron campbell, community, News, wpinformer |
By Jeffro on April 28, 2009
John Kolbert, who wants to enter this years plugin competition has a problem. He is out of ideas. What better place or group of people to ask than the Tavern community? Stop by the forum thread we have going on and share your thoughts or ideas on plugins you would love to have created which don’t exist yet.
Posted in From The Forum | Tagged competition, ideas, Plugins |
By Jeffro on April 28, 2009
Theme Frameworks. Those two words have buzzed around the WordPress community since the beginning of this year. Every time I turn around, someone else is developing their own theme framework. But, if you side with Dion Hulse’s line of thinking where any theme can be classified as a theme framework then there are thousands of them to wade through.
1stwebdesigner.com has put together a compilation of 20 different theme frameworks and starting resources. The usual suspects show up on the list: Hybrid, Thematic, Carrington, and WP Framework. New to me on this list is Vanilla as Alister Cameron is still working on it, Whiteboard, OnePress, and The WordPress Starter Theme Project.
Looks like our buddy Dan Cole is going to have some work to do conducting another one of his framework charts so we can see how all of these frameworks compare.
Posted in Themes | Tagged compilation, frameworks, resource, Themes |
By Jeffro on April 28, 2009
Jeremy Visser published what I believe to be a great post regarding the recent WordPress 2.8 header design challenge which took place this past weekend. In his post, Jeremy discusses the fact that the challenge requires entrants to work from a .PSD file which is a proprietary format tied to Adobe Photoshop, a program which costs hundreds of dollars and is not readily available to use by everyone within the WordPress community.
So because I choose to use free software for my day-to-day tasks which is morally better and technically superior (SVG is much better for such mockups), I and hundreds of other WordPress contributors would be unable to submit my designs for the competition because of the simple fact that they choose to be locked into a proprietary format.
In response to Jeremy’s post, Matt Thomas who created the mockup design in the first place responded to the criticism in a comment left on the post. Granted the challenge was created virtually without notice. If there had been more time, I think Matt Thomas and company would have opened up the challenge to more formats just as long as they preserved the layers and could be edited in Photoshop which is what they plan on doing in the future.
I think Jeremy did a great job with his post raising this issue as it flew right by me after reading the initial challenge announcement. I’m also enlightened to see folks such as Jeremy keeping a watchful eye on everything the WordPress project/Automattic does to see if it falls out of line with the open-source mantra. In the end, I think this was all just a hasty mistake. What do you think?
Jeremy said something in his post that I think could be turned into one of those motivational posters you see in corporate offices regarding open-source projects.
Do not alienate the community that gives you your very existence.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged adobe, design, header, opensource, psd |
By Jeffro on April 28, 2009
WebDevStudios headed up by Brad Williams and current sponsor of WordPress Weekly has recently announced that they now have WordPress specific support packages. The packages enable site owners to practically hire a team of people who are accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week to maintain your site covering aspects from upgrading the core installation to upgrading and installing plugins.
By the way, check out the great work the company did with the redesign/relaunch Corneliamarie.com which is home to one of the fishing vessels featured in the Discovery Channels series Deadliest Catch. A great rework of the WooThemes Papercut theme.
Posted in News | Tagged packages, sponsor, support, webdevstudios, wordpress |
By Jeffro on April 28, 2009
A few days ago, I reported on a piece published by Andy Peatling regarding why BuddyPress themes were future proof and how the themes provided functions where you could perform most backend tasks on the frontend. This perked my interests because I’d love to see the same thing implemented on the WordPress side of things. After monitoring the WP Hackers List and doing a search on the plugin repository, I’ve come across a plugin developed by Scribu called Front End Editor.
Installation is simple and can be performed from the plugin section of the administration panel. Once installed, you’ll have a new option in your Settings menu called Front-end Editor. This is where you’ll find options for the plugin. From here you can enable/disable editing of the following:
- Post/page title
- Post/page content
- Post/page excerpt
- Post tags
- Post/page custom fields
- Comment text
- Text widget content
- Text widget title
The great thing about doing this from a plugin approach is that you don’t need to do anything special with your theme. This is great news for theme developers and end users alike however, as you’ll see in a little bit, not all themes play nice.
After you configure the plugin, checkout your front page. You’ll notice that nothing has changed but if you double click on post content, widget title headers, or anywhere else you configured the plugin, you’ll instantly see a real time editor show up around the content. If you’ve selected the WYSIWYG editor, a full blown TinyMCE editor will show up around the content which is great if you’ve ever wanted the ability to edit a text widget with one of these. However, here are a couple of screenshots which show the plugin not playing nice with my version of Hybrid News.
In the first screenshot you can see how my list item graphic shows up multiple times within the WYSIWYG editor. The second screenshot showcases the top header widget messed up when widget title editing is enabled. The final screenshot shows how the editor box appears to be wider than the content box itself.
Final Thoughts:
Other than these quirks which is probably due to the theme itself, this plugin works great. One thing I would suggest is that any editable area should have either an edit icon next to it or a small edit link. As it is currently, you have to double click an editable area such as a tag or post title in order to open the editor. I would also like the option to use the HTML version of the editor rather than the Visual version. Other than that, this plugin fits the bill quite nicely for moving WordPress administration from the dark ages to something more relevant. I bet if someone did a study of how much time was wasted during a year of using WordPress by doing all sorts of mundane tasks through the backend as opposed to a simple way of performing those tasks on the front end, I bet we would see a huge amount of time lost, like sitting at a red light.
I recommend this plugin to anyone who would like to perform simple tasks without the need to login and navigate your administration panel. Hopefully in the future, WordPress intertwines more backend tasks to the front end. Let me know if you experience the same theme quirks I did.
Posted in Plugins | Tagged front end editor, Plugins, Reviews, Themes |
By Jeffro on April 27, 2009
Over the course of this past weekend, I migrated content from one domain to another. My biggest concern regarding the migration was all of the backlinks that the site had received plus the Search Engine pointers which would exist for some time to come. Thankfully, I discovered two things which made the migration very easy.
First, I came across a plugin called Update URLs. This plugin created by Velvet Blues is really simple to use. Since I was moving my content from one domain to another and quite a few URLs within the content were hard coded to images, I needed a quick and easy way to simply replace the site URL. That’s exactly what Update URLs enables me to do as it provides a box for the OLD url and then the NEW url. Once I set that up, I click the button and like magic, all hardcoded site url links are changed.
My second tip is an htaccess modifcation that drove me bonkers until community member Mark McWilliams pointed me to an article which contained the exact bit of code I needed. What I wanted to do was make sure that if someone were to visit /articlename it would automatically redirect them to http://jeffc.me/articlename that way, all backlinks are kept in tact until the domain expires. While I’ll eventually lose some link love because not all backlinked sites will update the link, doing this provides me enough time to hopefully have Google change the URL in their search engine result pages
In the article, this is the bit of code which provided what I needed:
Redirect Old domain to New domain (htaccess redirect)
Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
This code works wonders and will buy the time I need to get my backlinks in order. Thanks Mark for helping me out and I hope this comes in handy for someone else down the road. Thanks to the WXR format or WordPress Extended RSS file which easily exports my comments, file attachments including images, posts, pages, etc, moving the actual content was the easiest part.
Posted in Blogging | Tagged content, domains, migration, rss, tips |
By Jeffro on April 27, 2009
Checking out the WPTavern Twitter stream early this morning, I noticed this tweet from Matt: This could be interesting for WP themes: http://wpgorilla.org/ They should add finished product to theme directory. Taking a look into the Gorilla Project, looks like they will be producing open-source ‘Premium‘ WordPress themes.
The Gorilla Project is an opensource project created by Jeremie and Chris to overcome common issues encountered by a single WordPress theme designer.
I’ve never heard of Chris before but Jeremie should be a somewhat familiar name to most of you since he is the creator of the slick looking OneRoom WordPress theme. I’m intrigued by why these two developers are going down this road essentially doing the same thing every other theme author is doing but for a price.
I mean, everything on paper regarding this project looks great from an end users perspective, I just can’t believe there is no mention of revenue or money. I would be very, very surprised if this really was a project centered around benefiting the WordPress community as a whole, only because I’ve never seen something like this. Matt even suggested that once they have a finished product available, they should put it on the Theme Repository. If OneRoom and Jeremie’s latest project PigNews is the type of design work we can expect to come out of this project to be freely accessible to anyone in the WordPress community, that will be a huge plus not only for the repository, but for the community as a whole.
I’m going to try and get a hold of one or both of these guys to figure out what the ultimate motive is behind the project either in an interview on WPWeekly or a text based interview.
They are currently looking to build their team so if you’re interested and are a theme designer, a plugin developer, a PHP Ninja or only a graphic designer email them at joinus {a-t} wpgorilla {d-o-t} org. they also ask that you please attach a link to your portfolio if you have one.
Posted in Themes | Tagged gorilla, matt mullenweg, premium, Themes |
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Pretty awesome to see that in such a short notice, there were ten different header tweaks submitted including one by Kaspars Dambis. I placed my vote early this morning but I followed Janes instructions in opening each full view screenshot in a browser tab and viewing each one. I must have looked at all of them for about 7 minutes without any of them screaming out at me. I finally placed my vote and I’ll just say it was for a design tweak other than the current one. 
