It’s an idea proposed by Ipstenu that might just work. The gist of her suggestion is to manage widgets similar to how we manage menus. Instead of all that fancy drag and drop stuff, we switch to a check box approach where users can check which widgets they want to have added to a particular sidebar. Judging by the comments left on that post, a number of people feel that her concept is a great idea and should be considered when the time to rework the widget management area arrives. Drag and drop was cool when it arrived but having 3-5 sidebars with 30 available widgets makes drag and drop not so cool anymore. ∞
Michael Fields Media Wishlist
Michael Fields, one of the many theme wranglers for Automattic has published his wishlist of items he’d like to see implemented into the WordPress media manager. Of the things he mentioned, The ability for a theme to define multiple types of images like Logo, Custom Header, Body Background, Content Background, etc. We have two of these already, but IMHO it would be awesome if themes could define more than these two sounds like a really cool idea. What’s on your wishlist? ∞
Case Study On How WordPress Won The Crown
Interesting case study using a number of cool data points that shows how WordPress has won the crown amongst Joomla and Drupal for being the most widely used CMS in the world. One things for sure, it certainly paid off for WordPress to be focused on making the democratization of content publishing as easy as possible first, then making WordPress incredibly extensible later. There is an entire laundry list of reasons of why WordPress is at the top of the mountain right now, the success of the platform can not be traced back to one thing. The comments in the article contain a couple of those reasons while the others are spread amongst the various comment and forum threads on the web.
The past 7-8 years is very interesting to look back upon to figure out how WordPress ended up in it’s current spot of being the best in breed within the content management space. But, what I find even more interesting is if whether or not the things that made WordPress successful in the past will continue to stick around so that the platform is equally or more successful in the future. Focus, ease of use, extensibility, etc. Be right back, I’m going to go ask my magic 8 ball. ∞
Dre Armeda On WordPress End-User Security
From WordCamp Chicago 2011, Dre Armeda who is one of the guys behind the awesome security service/site Securi. His presentation contains a ton of information that all end users should take note of.
How Ryan Imel Created The WP Quarterly Page
One comment I have that applies to all of the e-commerce plugins I tried out is this: the initial setup process is quite overwhelming. During my toying process I set up the basic Quarterly sales items and process for each plugin on a testing location. Without exception, each plugin presented me with options I never ended up needing, or didn’t even care about. I realize that WPCandy’s shopping cart needs aren’t as complicated as some, but that made me wish for a simplified setup process even more.
It would be great to see these plugins take more of a “decisions over options” approach. When that isn’t possible, stashing less vital options in an advanced section would lessen the initial impact of a screen full of checkboxes and dropdowns.
Ryan Imel explained in-depth how he created the sales page for the WordPress Quarterly magazine. Within the post you’ll find his thoughts on the various e-commerce systems he tried, code snippets to produce the page, and much more. Definitely worth a read.
Interesting Logo Copycats
Shared by Ozh on Twitter, image consisting of the ingredients necessary to turn an original logo into something that’s different but still retains some of the original characteristics. Can anyone figure out what’s wrong with the WordPress image?
Cleaning Up The “Cannot Redeclare Mess”
Looks like there’s an exploit going around that appears to be similar in nature to the TimThumb vulnerability. If you noticed a bunch of “Cannot Redeclare” errors when browsing your website recently with eval code, chances are you’ve become a victim of this attack. Jeff Starr of DigWp.com and co-author of the book, Digging Into WordPress has laid out a series of steps on how you or consultants can clean up the mess that’s left behind. It’s also worth noting the following forum thread on the WordPress.org support forums where a number of people have been trying to investigate how this attack works.
Tips On Creating A Good Plugin Readme.txt File
SmashingMagazine has a great article that covers some tips on how WordPress plugin authors can create better readme.txt files. While the code within the plugin is important, the readme.txt file is what users are going to encounter first. It’s the means by which we discover plugins within the repository so it’s important that relevant information be written within the file or else you’ll end up with no one using the plugin. I’m happy to see that amongst their tutorial, they included how to add a changelog which is still something many plugin authors are failing to do. Speaking of changelogs, plugin authors should write them in such a way that the latest version appears at the top of the file and not at the bottom. Too much scrolling is a bad thing! ∞
Things You Should Know About WordPress 3.3
Aaron Brazell of Technosailor.com has come through once again with his traditional 10 things you should know post, this time covering WordPress 3.3. The article covers mostly the user experience side of WordPress 3.3 but Aaron also points developers in the direction of the ever changing Codex article for 3.3 that they should take note of. With four different beta releases and a pretty long development cycle, plugin and theme authors have no excuses for any incompatibilities that may arise due to lack of testing.
I’d say that the drag and drop media uploader will probably end up being the most talked about aspect of WordPress 3.3. After using a test version of WordPress for a little while, I’ve become quite fond of the new media uploader. ∞
Feature Filled Comment Administration
By Jeffro on December 2, 2011
Comment administration within WordPress has come a long way. As illustrated by Lorelle VanFossen, the comment administration panel these days has 18 different features for comment management. While the current iteration of comment management features are great, there is one particular quick link that I hope gets added in a future version of WordPress. It’s called ‘De-Link‘ and it’s one of my favorite features of the WP Ajax Edit comments plugin.
Delinking Feature Within WP Ajax Edit Comments
I’ve noticed that a large amount of comments that I have deleted or trashed in the past can now be approved after I de-link them as the content is usually related to the post. It’s their way of trying to get a link on the site. I have my own rules for which sites are allowed to be linked to and which are not but if the comment is relevant to the post at hand but contains a bad link, I’ll simply de-link, then approve it. Sure, I could go into the Quick Edit mode within the comment management area and manually remove the links but the method of clicking once sure seems a lot easier to me then clicking the mouse button a few times.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged comments, features, Plugins | 4 Responses