By Jeffro on February 26, 2010
Previous to WordPress having post thumbnails built in, there was a script called TimThumb. I know quite a few themes that integrated TimThumb in order to automatically generate post thumbnails instead of relying on the old method of using a custom field. Ben Gillbanks has chronicled the short history of TimThumb.
Development was started by Tim (hence the name) one of the programmers at Category4 where Darren worked. Shortly after the release of Mimbo Pro, with Tims blessing, we decided to open source the code releasing TimThumb on Google code, and that’s when everyone else started using it. Nowadays 95% of the premium themes teams are offering TimThumb support – and it’s a great feeling, knowing so many are making use of code I worked on.
The article was published in 2009 but I was fooled because I saw it as a recent submission on WPVote.com. Still worthy of a good read though.
Posted in News | Tagged history, images, scripts, timthumb |
By Jeffro on February 26, 2010
Hot off the press is the announcement of the BuddyPress template packs plugin. This plugin makes it very easy to use your current theme with BuddyPress on a single site install of WordPress instead of having to use the default BuddyPress theme. Kudos to Andy Peatling for making it even easier for people to use BuddyPress without reconfiguring their entire site. Note that the template pack won’t do anything unless you have BuddyPress installed.
Posted in BuddyPress | Tagged BuddyPress, pack, templates, wordpress |
By Jeffro on February 26, 2010
Darnell Clayton of BloggingPro.com takes a look at the prospects of WordPress possibly overtaking the popularity of Blogger thanks to mobile applications. At this point, WordPress has an application for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia, and Google Android. That covers most of the smartphone market. However, I have a hard time believing these devices are being used to publish full length content on a regular basis.
In my experience with using the WordPress app for the iPhone, I’ve come to realize that it’s just not the same as having an actual mouse and keyboard with multiple monitors. Blogging on the iPhone is a pain in the rear thanks to an inefficient work-flow and the on-screen keyboard which I’ve still have not been able to master. I’ve relegated to using the WordPress app as a management utility to moderate comments, perform quick edits on pages or posts, and other small tasks. I wonder if I’m alone in this respect or if others have had the same experience when blogging from a mobile device.
Posted in News | Tagged blogger, google, mobile, wordpress |
By Jeffro on February 26, 2010
Back in July of 2009, I wrote about my experience of deleting a field within my database that unknowingly, was important for WordPress to have. The field is called comment_karma. At the time, I had no idea why this field was important to WordPress. Today, I stumbled across an article on True/Slant that explains their use of this particular field with AJAX to curate and filter comments. They provide the code snippets along with explanations as to what the code does.
Posted in News | Tagged comments, hacks, karma, tips |
By Jeffro on February 25, 2010
Woo Menus Update
Jane has published her UX manifesto regarding the new navigational menu system that you can read here. Ryan and Jane will catch up with Jeff Ikus tomorrow as he couldn’t make the meeting today. Accessibility is a concern as without JS, the menus become inoperable. Ptah Dunbar and Filosofo have volunteered to try and tackle the accessibility issues before release since it’s considered a release blocker.
Schedule Update
3.0 should be ready for freeze on Monday.
Multi-site configuration implementation
For more on this, I suggest you review the log file and scroll up.
To read the dev chat from the beginning, click here and scroll up.
How To Participate:
If you want to suggest a topic to be discussed at the next meeting, you can by visiting the WordPress development updates blog. If you would like to participate in the chat next week, install IRC or an IRC compatible client and connect to the following IRC server.
chat.freenode.net or any random server on the Freenode network and then join this channel at 3:30PM Eastern time or 20:30 UTC Thursdays. #wordpress-dev.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged devchat, developer, meeting, releases, wordpress
By Jeffro on February 25, 2010
ReadWriteWeb has published a short and sweet interview with Matt Mullenweg regarding cloud computing. When asked if WordPress.com was hosted on a grid or in a traditional data center, Matt responded with:
“That’s a silly question, like asking whether Facebook is a cloud computing environment,” Most ‘clouds’ besides Amazon’s are just marketing BS. WordPress.com is a collection of many physical servers across multiple data centers to create a scalable, resilient environment for our customers. You could call it a grid, or cloud, we just call it service.”
Pretty cool to see Matt give the straight talk. As for the term cloud, I can’t think of a concrete definition of what that means other than what Amazon and other businesses have stated. So perhaps it really is marketing BS?
At the end of the article, you get a sense that sometimes, it’s just better to do things on your own without relying on a cloud or service provider.
Posted in News | Tagged cloud, mullenweg, readwriteweb
By Jeffro on February 25, 2010
WPBeginner has a great writeup of what we can look forward to in WordPress 3.0. Of course there is the merge of WordPress MU into WordPress, the awesome Woo Navigation menus, a new default theme, and custom post types just to name a few. WordPress 3.0 has a tentative release date in early May but that could be pushed back if any major breakage occurs during the beta cycle.
Now you’ll have to tell me what is it your most looking forward to in this version of WordPress. For me, it’s the new navigational menu system.
Posted in News | Tagged 30, features, software, wordpress |
By Jeffro on February 25, 2010
PollDaddy, the polling service acquired by Automattic on October 15th, 2008 has revamped their entire site. The new design features a rich red color with swirls and all sorts of nice eye candy. The overall design is more in tune with the logo. Even the back-end of the website has received a face lift. The only problem I encountered with the new design is that the navigation menu is not where it should be in Internet Explorer 8.
While the design touched up the asthetics, the focus was more on usability and it shows as the back-end of the website is much easier to navigate. Props to Kevin Conboy on a job well done.
Posted in News | Tagged design, polldaddy, Polls, service
By Jeffro on February 25, 2010
Scribu who is the author of the Front-end Editor plugin that I reviewed in April 2009 has published some common mistakes found within themes. For some reason, themes sometimes don’t have the wp_footer template tag declared which is used by analytic plugins such as Woopra and by Front-end editor. The other problem deals with the_title being used in the wrong places. If you’re an aspiring theme developer, keep these mistakes in mind and don’t make them!
Posted in Themes | Tagged mistakes, Plugins, Themes |
By Jeffro on February 24, 2010
Peter Westwood has published a short document on the WordPress Developers Prologue site that outlines what the focus of the developer chats should be. In recent weeks, issues that are related to WordPress but not to the core code have been added to the meeting agenda providing less time to talk about core development of the software. This is the one hour during the week when all developers get together to talk about the core software, how to implement something, etc so it is imperative that the 60 minutes are put to the best use possible.
However, there is a reason why non core related subjects were added to the agenda for discussion. There is no single page that lists which items should be discussed where. Just like Automattic, the WordPress.org project is like liquid with barely any hierarchy allowing people to fulfill multiple roles. How to get in touch with the people that fulfill those roles is one of the core problems that I hope the WordPress.org website redesign solves. Until then, I highly encourage you to participate in an ongoing project I have started called the WordPress Whitepages Project. The goal is to round up all of the contact information for various aspects of the project and put it together in one big list, bringing order to chaos. The list will also include links to places where ideas and feedback can be discussed.
Once this list is complete, I’ll add it to a Codex page and then ping someone who is in control of WordPress.org and have them take a look at it to see if they would be interested in publishing the information on a centrally located page. There have been a few times where I’ve wanted to get in touch with someone about a particular issue but find myself at a crossroad with no idea on where to go. I hope this project fixes that.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged chat, developers, westi, wordpress
Page 1 of 6123...5...»Last »
Comment_Karma In Action
By Jeffro on February 26, 2010
Posted in News | Tagged comments, hacks, karma, tips | 6 Responses