Displaying 1 To 16 Of 16 Comments WPTavern Is My Home And You’re Just A Guest Gotta say I’m torn by this dilemna in my work on a daily basis. I negotiate labor agreements with people who the definition of “asshat” certainly applies from time to time. But, unlike a used car sale, I have to deal with them week after week, month after month. I’ve learned to pick my spots – call out the behavior without personal attacks. Once you get good at it, it’s more effective and can be just as fun as “giving them a piece of your mind.” Doesn’t mean you need to agree with people or condone their behavior. Doing that may only feed it. I do agree that positivity attracts a different audience than negativity. Both get an audience though. Choose what you want to do and do it. You’ll live with the consequences either way. » Posted By designOdyssey On September 1, 2010 @ 12:17 AM Marshall – Newest BuddyPress Core Contributor Take a look under the hood of BP Links and it’s clear he knows his stuff. I just hope he can make it understandable for lowly ole me who couldn’t make heads nor tails of much of that code when I tried to emulate it for my project. It’s good to know I’m emulating well-regarded code though. » Posted By designOdyssey On April 7, 2010 @ 5:50 PM What Plugin Authors Shouldn’t Do . . . and the debate rages on. Thank God for 25-year olds. They make stuff for fun and then wind up billionaires by accident. There is nothing wrong with that either. If someone wants to make a living with plugins for open source software, make something no one else would duplicate and enough people need bad enough to pay for. As WP evolves more as a CMS, blogging plugins will give way to fully featured apps like NextGen or others for which payment might be warranted. I bought Gravity Forms and love it. But, I want to eventually make money with my site. I like the pay for support model or clubs for dev who make a living writing code. For the hobbyist, being nickeled and dimed to death makes me rather by an Adobe/Microsoft product and take a course. That doesn’t sound open-sourcy enough for these parts. » Posted By designodyssey On February 14, 2010 @ 2:35 AM I’m Pretty Happy With MY WordPress I’m building my own Buddypress/Hybrid Child theme and will probably do a mix of my own plugins vs. customized versions of others. I find that plugins made for the masses seem to add too much overhead. However, making your own plugins means you do the updating. Where I can avoid that with a well-coded plugin, I will. » Posted By designodyssey On February 12, 2010 @ 10:52 PM Woo To Power Menu Management In WP 3.0 This is great stuff, but it seems upgrading will create some serious breakage given home many customizations folks have made in this area. » Posted By designOdyssey On February 11, 2010 @ 4:58 PM Should Themes Have Plugin Functionality Built-In? After lifting under the hood with Buddypress themes, I’m facing this issue now. I’d prefer it if the functiionality in themes was deselectable in files that could either be deleted or simply not loaded (to remove load time issues). That takes greater effort and pre-thought, but it would be appreciated. If functionality in themes were essentially plugins for themes, they could be appropriately deactivated. It would also facilitate themes having an api for plugins that others could build from. In my case, I’m taking a BP theme, putting it in a Hybrid theme and then changing the functionality pretty extensively through plugins that will need to act differently with the theme. Although I hated them at first, I’ve grown to like hooks and unless someone has a better idea, I’d rather look through functions.php than search all over creation to fix stuff. » Posted By designOdyssey On February 9, 2010 @ 8:16 PM I’ve been trying to help my wife with this question for her startup. Reference. Use this when the userbase is sophisticated, hands-on and will want to understand HOW things work instead of just getting them to work. Example would be Buddypress or WordPress theming where how things work supports structured creativity. FAQ. Best used with discrete questions of how to get a task completed. If it’s frequent enough, it suggests a hidden feature, bug or area where enhancement is warranted. Example would be help in MS Excel – How do I copy multiple cells? Discrete question, discrete answer. No desire to understand how things work, just get things done. Forums. Best used in two situations. First, complex queries that require an iterative response where information is iteratively provided to understand the issue and solve the problem. Reviewers of the thread can determine if their context is the same as the original poster. Second, creating something new where iterative test-retest posts allow answers to become apparent asynchronously over time. Tickets. I think tickets are best when forums are too unwieldy and don’t provide support fast enough. Also, when privacy is important, tickets are superior. However, if structured forum posts are used in a vibrant community, I think they should be superior to tickets in most cases except when emergency response times are needed and supportable. In the end, I use all the above, but gravitate to reference and forums. FAQs are usually seldom updated to incorporate lessons learned in forums – a shame. Tickets except to webhosts tend to have horrible response times. Unfortunately, structured posting in forums is rare (and GF is a great position to change that on their site). As a result of these realities, I search forums to answer questions I know others must have and use reference to fine tune my implementations. » Posted By designodyssey On January 29, 2010 @ 11:49 PM Write For People, Not For Spiders OK, I’m no expert, but there are hundreds of articles out there on SEO and quite a few books. It seems to make sense (if you care) to read an article or two, ask questions of theme developers and get referrals. That’s what I do already when I spend my money with someone. That said, I intend to use Hybrid myself which in version 0.7 leaves open SEO for plugins. That means I have to decide which plugins (or my own) will do the best job. I certainly believe it can be counterproductive to write for SEO, but it makes sense to present what you write in a way that search engines will find it and readers will enjoy it when they do. Each site/business will have to decide what investment of time/resources is warranted for a potential increase in traffic from SEs, but at some point the marginal return from better content, outways the marginal return for theme tweaking. » Posted By designOdyssey On January 26, 2010 @ 1:43 PM WPWeekly Episode 83 – The WordPressMU Gurus I guess, I’m part of the “Millions” of folks listening to the mp3. Andrea and Ron did a great job demystifying MU. It’s really not that hard. I did a good amount reading first, but there are even youtube videos on setting it up. Of course Andrea has been great in WPMU forums and I’m patiently awaiting Ron’s Hybrid version of Buddymatic. Something for you jeff to think about given that you use Hybrid News (modified). After this talk about the merge and the fact that BP trunk runs on regular WP, I’m stuck on what to develop on. My goal is a BP site with ONE blog. I started on MU because of this but worry that WP plugins won’t work. But, if I develop on BP trunk and regular WP, I’ll be stuck with whatever plugins or other BP code breaks without MU. Ah, the possibilities. » Posted By designOdyssey On January 7, 2010 @ 5:38 PM BuddyMattic – A Myriad Framework Good questions. I still wonder about the upgrade process when WP and/or BP upgrade functionality. I’ll have to dig through the files and file structure for all of them. I’m thinking of applying this concept to theme Hybrid as I have no experience with Thematic and like Justin’s coding. » Posted By designodyssey On December 1, 2009 @ 2:42 AM Should WordPress Change The Blog Nomenclature Within The Backend? I heard Matt W. give an explanation why this wasn’t important to change and I tend to agree with him. WordPress will change it’s reputation over time and some will be sooner to the party than others. » Posted By designodyssey On November 3, 2009 @ 11:51 PM Great news. JJJ definitely has led me in the right direction in understanding what’s under the hood of BP. » Posted By designOdyssey On October 30, 2009 @ 9:54 PM I’m really impressed by Buddypress and plan to start working with it when WPMU 2.9 comes around (unless I get a reasonable timeframe for WPMU/WP integration with 3.0). I’m really interested in the new theme architecture, but even after listening to Andy on WP Weekly, I couldn’t get a clear understanding of how the framework does/doesn’t integrate with existing wordpress frameworks. For example, Justin’s Theme Hybrid seems to use creation of child functions.php and style.css as the major ways to customize Hybrid with child themes. I like this, but BP seems to take the direct override approach with new templates in the “child” theme directory (which is also possible in Hybrid, but seems less desirable). Ultimately, I assume developers would want the WPMU, bbPress and BP theme frameworks to work through ONE child theme to create a unified look and feel for the entire site. Not quite sure if that’s possible or even contemplated. Hopefully, someone will answer that question before WPMU comes out and I have to find out for myself. » Posted By designodyssey On October 2, 2009 @ 1:04 AM I think we need to have a broader perspective. WordPress should figure what it is committed to (like any decent organization) and focus on that. For example, if the goal is speed, focus on that. If it’s flexibility, focus on that. If it’s ease of use . . . Maximizing for everything is impossible. I’m only worried to the extent that WordPress takes on being all things to all users. I don’t think that’s happening. Functionality will improve. Ease will improve. Speed can improve at the same time. The technology that WordPress runs on is not static. The skills of the WordPress gurus are not static. The tech savvy of the village idiot isn’t even static. The key is to get the balance right. Don’t leave the developer frustrated with unnecessary bloat. Don’t cater only to the newfound masses. Don’t neglect featuresets that target markets see in your competitors. Innovate consistent with your core principles. I’m not worried about gurus being inundated with stupid questions because the gurus and the stupid question askers have a choice. For example, I pay for support for some things I’m new at and I colloboratively share with other experts in other things I know well. Models exist and will grow to support noobs (either paid or free) and models exist to support developers (paid and free). I pay for support for Theme Hybrid and hopefully between Justin and the community, it’s worth it for everyone involved. The more people using the WordPress, the more features and ease of use will matter and the same is true for security. These are the tradeoffs of life. Any good company navigates popularity and expanding user demographics. I think WordPress will do fine as long as they get the balance right and don’t chase after the noob market without proper supports for everyone else. Cautionary note. As a Palm OS user since the very beginning, I can’t resist mentioning that story. The eschewed features for simplicity for so long, they got their lunch handed to them and were near the brink of extinctions. Only by embracing new technology and features (although done in their characteristically simplified way) are they moving away from the cliff. » Posted By designOdyssey On October 21, 2009 @ 5:47 PM Is A Plugin Validation Team A Pipe Dream? @Scott I agree with the secondary repository that would have enhanced features like searching on additional fields like version, author, update date range, screenshots available and better categorization than the current tags. WordPress.org could link to this additional site with enhanced features/security/testing which would encourage developers to submit their plugins (for more targeted exposure). They might even have a section for non-GPL and search on that field as well. @trent I thought of creating a page on my site just with Google custom searches for the repository because I’ve had to build these searches to ensure I was getting the best plugin for the task. I saw one site that had done this with their own collection of plugins, but not linked to the repository (so the data was old). This seems like a simple interim fix that I’ll get around to at some point. I’m just getting started. Maybe Jeff wants to do it. » Posted By designOdyssey On September 30, 2009 @ 4:16 PM Custom Install Profiles Sounds Like A Cool Idea Not really a developer (only three sites for myself), but this would be a great idea. Although, like DD32, figuring out which plugins to use is the biggest problem. Trying to get used to coding styles, community around plugin and whether the developer will stick with it (are they compensated – monetarily or otherwise). WordPress.org could do some things other than downloads and ratings to help with this. Heck, even the Google custom search I have to check “freshness” of plugins is a start. » Posted By designOdyssey On September 29, 2009 @ 11:08 PMComments Posted By designOdyssey
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