Archive for October 2011: Page 3

Plugin Review – Expanded Admin Menus

By Jeffro on October 17, 2011

If you’re not happy about WordPress 3.3 taking away the ability to vertically expand and collapse menu items, you now have at least one option to bring back that functionality. Sort of. After quite a bit of discussion amongst community members regarding the new menu flyouts in WordPress 3.3, Aaron D. Campbell contributed with a thought out post which concluded with a link to a plugin he created called Expanded Admin Menus.

After activating the plugin in WordPress 3.3 Beta 1, this is what your left handed navigational menus will look like.

Unfortunately, it’s a far cry from what users enjoyed in WordPress 3.2.1. Instead of being able to choose which main menu item is expanded or collapsed, all of them are expanded. That deafening cry of pain you hear is from mouse scroll wheels all across the globe. After using the plugin for five minutes, it was clear to me that it’s even more of a usability nightmare for myself then dealing with the flyout menus. With all menu items presented at once, my eyes have to scroll through each one to find the specific link I’m looking for. I’m presented with too much information at one time making browsing a pain in the neck. If that were not enough, the collapsed menu looks completely different than the normal collapsed menu, probably due to the CSS it uses.

Collapsed Version Of Expanded Menu Items

While I’m not going to discount the use of this plugin because of that particular bug, the bottom line is that this plugin does not solve the problem that the forum thread was dedicated to. It’s not about having all of the admin menus opened or closed. It was the end user opportunity to pick and choose which menus were vertically expanded or collapsed while being able to have multiple menus opened or closed. Nice effort on the part of Aaron to provide an option to users who loved that particular feature in WordPress 3.2 but in its current form, the plugin comes nowhere close to solving the problem.

Posted in Plugins | Tagged admin, flyouts, menus, review | 3 Responses

WPWeekly Episode 115 – WordPress 3.3. Beta 1 Edition

By Jeffro on October 14, 2011

wordpressweekly1 In this episode of WordPress Weekly, I give you the news making headlines of the week. I also give you a rundown of what to look for in WordPress 3.3. Beta 1 and give you my experience thus far with some of the new features. The end of the show has a 3 minute audio sound byte from Schipulcon where the founders of Drupal and WordPress shared the stage to talk about Open Source.

Stories Discussed:

WordPress.org Experiences DNS Issues – Not Hacked
Win A Ticket To WordCamp Toronto
Plugin Repository Now Has A Proper 404 Page
Spots By Interconnect/It
The Best Thing On Peter Brights iPhone Is The WordPress App
Things To Look For In WordPress 3.3 Beta 1

WPWeekly Meta:

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe

Length Of Episode: 37 Minutes

Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode115.mp3

Listen To Episode #115:

Posted in WordPress Weekly | Tagged 3.3, beta, podcast, talkcast, wpweekly

Video Featuring Matt Of WordPress With Dries Of Drupal

By Jeffro on October 14, 2011

Here is the recorded video featuring the presentation of Matt Mullenweg of WordPress with Dries Buytaert of Drupal discussing open source. Kudos goes out to the Schipulcon group for getting these two together for an awesome presentation. The audio is terrible until you hit the 4 minute mark. If you want to see a transcript for some of the questions you can read them on the Schipul Blog. Definitely watch from 32 minutes onward as that is when the audience starts asking some pretty good questions.

Open Source Discussion with the Founders of Drupal and WordPress from Schipul – The Web Marketing Co. on Vimeo.

Posted in Video | Tagged community, drupal, wordpress

Share Your Experience With WordPress 3.3 Beta 1 With Me Tonight

By Jeffro on October 14, 2011

For those that don’t know, I produce a live podcast every Friday evening at 9P.M. Eastern time on Talkshoe.com called WordPress Weekly. On tonight’s episode, I’d like to hear from you regarding your experience thus far with WordPress 3.3. beta 1 if you’ve had a chance to use it. I’m especially interested to know your thoughts on the new fly out menus and the drag and drop media uploader. If you can’t call in to the show tonight, at least show up in the chat room to be part of the conversation as the show is recorded live.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged beta, podcast, weekly, wordpress | 1 Response

Score Tickets To WordCamp Toronto 2011

By Jeffro on October 13, 2011

If you’re planning on going to WordCamp Toronto 2011 and have yet to purchase tickets, think about participating in this contest being held by Miroslav Glavic. The rules are simple. All you have to do is leave a comment on the post and explain how attending the event will help you. Each winner will receive one ticket to the event. Of course, the winners will need to pay for their own accommodations and travel costs to get there. Winners will be chosen on October 19th. ∞

Posted in Meetups | Tagged tickets, toronto, wordcamp | 2 Responses

UK Civil Service Site Switches To WordPress

By Jeffro on October 13, 2011

We (the Digital Engagement team) were tasked with producing a new site at very little cost and within a six week window. To restructure the content to make it easier to find we used Google analytics to analyze typical user journeys. Harnessing user insight will be an iterative process through the ongoing development of this site.

We chose to use WordPress as it offers a simple, quick (with such a short development window) and flexible open source solution to a site primarily designed for publishing content. As such it is easy to use for a wide range of content editors and, of course, provides significant cost savings for maintenance and development. Rather than develop a theme ourselves we chose to use a theme called ‘striking’ developed by Kaptinlin that fitted what we needed with a little customization. – Via Holding the Fort

-UK Civil Service Site Switches To WordPress

Posted in WordPress | Tagged government, uk, wordpress | 1 Response

WordPress Not The Choice For Multinational Search

By Jeffro on October 13, 2011

Chris Liversidge of Search Engine Land gives an explanation as to why WordPress is not his platform of choice when it comes to multinational search. I was with him up until the point he discussed security where he states that WordPress is plagued by frequent security updates. This is not true. Security within WordPress has gotten better with time, not worse and it’s not like we’re updating WordPress every two weeks. I’m not sure what Chris wants in a CMS platform. One update a year? One update every 3 months that fixes security vulnerabilities instead of getting that fix immediately? ∞

Posted in WordPress | Tagged platform, search, security, wordpress | 7 Responses

Revamping The 404 Page For The Plugin Repository

By Jeffro on October 12, 2011

WPBeginner has laid out an interesting question. Do we need a better 404 page for WordPress plugins repository? They think so and I do to. I’ve experienced the issue of clicking a plugin link only to be redirected magically to the plugin repository page without any explanation as to why. From here, I perform a search to find the plugin that I was linked to only to come up empty. In my opinion, the 404 page on the plugin repository should give a few explanations as to why the plugin was not found. It could have been its removal, its suspension, or a bad link but at least give a little explanation. I especially like the idea presented by GraphicsCove in providing a list of 3 or 5 similar plugins. I’d also like to see a little bit of Matt’s witty humor. What better place to put it than on a 404 page.

If you had the opportunity to create the 404 page, what information would you present on it?

Posted in WordPress | Tagged 404, redirect, repository, wpbeginner | 6 Responses

Some Not Happy With Flyout Menus

By Jeffro on October 12, 2011

In my short look at WordPress 3.3 Beta 1, I highlighted the fact that all menus were going to receive the Flyout treatment. The ability to vertically expand or collapse menus will be disappearing in favor of the flyout animation. Personally, I like the feature as I now get to see all of the menu items without having to click a button. However, many others have voiced their discontent with this User Interface change. In fact, there is a thread on the WordPress.org support forums that is nearing 50 posts specifically dealing with this issue.

Even though I like flyouts, I don’t have any problem with the way menus work in WordPress 3.2. In fact, it was the best of both worlds. I typically use the Icons only approach which has the flyouts while always having the option to see the full menu with the ability to vertically expand or collapse. In the newest instance, that choice has been taken away. This response by Jonschlinkert has some interesting questions that I think would be good to have answered from the WordPress UI Team.

Who was asking you to remove the expand/collapse feature? Can you point us to that request and the support for it? In other words, why is the designer “fixing” something that wasn’t broken?

If you’re interested in seeing how the feature evolved, look at the log for ticket #18382. For the curious, here is a short list of statements made in the WordPress Development Channel from May 31st 2011 to October 11th 2011, talking about the flyout menus. Nothing really exciting to read with the exception of Otto42s comment on September 19th.

Otto42 – they make everything take like 3 times longer to find. i used to just scroll the page and go right to the menu i want.. now it’s a matter of hunting and searching and checking the f-ing flyout menus

If Flyout menus get past beta and are in the final release, that is when we will be able to measure the success or failure of the change. If a major revolt happens, it’s not like reverting the change will be hard and it could come in a follow up point release. At the end of the day though, the folks in the forum thread have to be commended for providing valuable feedback during the beta testing process.

Related But Not Required Reading: Why Hover Menus Do Users More Harm Than Good

Posted in WordPress | Tagged accessibility, beta, menus, usability | 27 Responses

Things To Look For In WordPress 3.3 Beta 1

By Jeffro on October 11, 2011

WordPress 3.3 Beta 1 has finally been released for the curious at heart to get a glimpse as to what’s coming in the final version. There are quite a few visual changes that you should look out for and provide feedback on. Here are a couple things worth noting.

New Feature Pop-ups – After WordPress 3.3 is installed, you’ll see popups that display information pointing users to new features. When testing, see if the popups close upon clicking the close button. Also see if the popups reappear multiple times. There has been an issue with popups and IE7/8 with them not going away but Alex Mills is betting that those have been fixed as of ticket #18693

Admin Bar Revamp – The Admin bar now sports a darker color. The biggest changes to the admin bar reside within the rearrangement of menu items. Instead of the username and gravatar aligned to the left side of the bar, it’s now all the way on the right hand side. The search box has been moved to the right of the Add New menu link. Updates has been added as a top menu item. However, your website name now shows up on the far left side of the admin bar and this is where you’ll find all sorts of administrative tasks when you hover your mouse cursor over the link. The dashboard link as well as Appearance has been added to this menu item along with an assortment of other options. The drop down menus also look a lot like their Administration panel counterparts compared to the 3.2 version. Last but not least, on the left side of the admin bar, there is a small WordPress icon. This icon acts like the HELP button in typical software. From here, you can get information about the specific version of WordPress, Freedoms, Credits, links to WordPress.org, the support forums, documentation and giving feedback.

Flyout Menus – All of the top level links within the left menu now have Flyouts where as previously, Flyouts only occurred when the menu was collapsed.

Drag And Drop Uploading – I think users will be surprised the most by the new upload media screen. Thanks to something called plUpload which has been added to WordPress 3.3, we can now drag multiple files into the editor. This has also allowed the dependence on Flash within the uploader to disappear as support for HTML 5, Flash, and Silverlight are supported with plUpload. I’ve given it a try with 5 images and it worked great. Users who upload photo sets to WordPress are going to love this enhancement.

Uploading Multiple Files Or Images At Once Is Now Easier In WP 3.3

One Media Button – In WordPress 3.2.1, there are 4 icons within the post editor that allow you to add some type of media to a post. Images, Audio, Video, and strangely enough, an icon named Media. In WordPress 3.3, all of those icons have been replaced by one icon labeled Media. From here, you simply drag whatever media files you have into the uploader. No more picking and choosing since the uploader is smart enough to distinguish between different media types. You can add your typical meta data after the media has been uploaded.

One Instead Of Four

WordPress 3.3. will have more to offer than what I have listed here but if you plan on beta testing the new version, you now have a couple things to play around with. If you come across something you think is broken or not working as you think it should, the best thing you can do is report it within the Alpha/Beta section of the WordPress.org Support forums while being as descriptive as possible.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged beta, features, testing, wordpress | 15 Responses

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