By Jeffro on June 18, 2013
In what is the first time I’ve ever seen the issue raised, WP Garage brings up the topic of whether scandalous images sell more WordPress Themes? In the examples Rebecca Markowitz provides within the post, there are a couple of images featuring women covered in different colors of paint while barely having any clothes on. The third example shows an image of a topless female and male laying on the floor apparently hugging each other.
Rebecca’s main concern is showing these themes to clients, especially younger ones where these type of images border on inappropriate. Obviously, for porn themes, sex sells, but I can’t remember the last time I saw a theme on a marketplace that stopped me dead in my tracks because of a demo content image of a naked woman or a naked man or anything close that I would consider to be inappropriate. Have you? Also, is this a legitimate concern amongst other WordPress consultants?
Posted in Themes | Tagged images, sex, Themes, women |
By Jeffro on June 13, 2013
A few days ago, I received an email informing me that the WordPress importer plugin was having issues and was at the brink of receiving as many 1 star ratings as it had 5. It’s never a good sign when you see support forum stats like this: 0 of 10 support threads in the last two months have been resolved. But considering the topic creator has to mark the topic as resolved, this is not a fool-proof method of determining if a plugin is broken. From what I can tell, most of the issues surround partial imports and the importing of images.
I used the importer to move all the content from WPTavern.com to a local install of WordPress. I chose to do a full export/import. The WXR file was around 17 megs but WordPress seemed to take forever to process the file, even on my local machine. While all the images were imported properly, they were not attached to the proper posts. The images that were displayed on the local site were linked to the ones within the media library on WPTavern.com. After dropping all the tables from the database and starting over, I tried to import my files again with the same results. Just to see what would happen, I exported only my posts with attachments to see if both would be imported correctly. While the posts were imported correctly, none of the media attachments were brought over into the media library. As illustrated in the support forum post I linked above, the only way to move media attachments from one site to another is to export/import EVERYTHING. If I select attachments to be downloaded and exported, then that’s what should happen no matter which variety of ways I export the content.
It’s been a long time since I’ve exported/imported content from one WordPress site to another so I don’t remember how the process is suppose to play out but if the behavior I described above is considered normal, the import process is definitely not as painless as it should be. After all, exporting/importing from WordPress to WordPress should be as easy as counting 1,2,3. Unlike other plugins that have a specific author, this one is developed by the WordPressdotorg team so it’s not clear who to contact.
If you have used the WordPress export/import plugin within the past few weeks and have also run into problems, I’d love for you to chime in on the comments. I’d especially like to hear from those that export/import sites on a routine basis.
Posted in Plugins | Tagged attachments, export, images, import, plugin |
By Jeffro on April 5, 2012
In what seems like forever since the last major release of WordPress, 3.4 Beta 1 has been released. You should know the routine by now. Don’t run beta software in a production environment. Instead, set up a local install or a mirrored copy somewhere else for testing. If you encounter a situation that you think is a bug, you can use the methods described within this Codex article to report it.
If you decide to give WordPress 3.4 Beta 1 a whirl, here are a couple of things to take a closer look at.
- Theme Customizer with Previewer
- Flexible Custom Header Sizes
- Selecting Custom Header and Background Images from Media Library
- Better experience searching for and choosing a theme
If you noticed that these all appear to be improvements around themes, there is a reason for that. Back in early January when the scope for WordPress 3.4 was being discussed, the overall theme (pardon the pun) for this release centered around the sites appearance.
The idea is that a combination of front-end features, dashboard features, and under-the-hood improvements all tied to managing your site’s appearance will be the focus of 3.4. It will also include smaller things that don’t live in the appearance section but are related to the overarching goal, such as making it possible to have links in image captions.
Speaking of links within image captions, this functionality should be in 3.4 beta 1 and is something I, and many others have wanted within WordPress for a long time. This little addition will make it a breeze to add attribution to images when performing an image only post. There are under the hood improvements as well but what I’ve covered here should be a good start.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged images, themes scope |
By Jeffro on February 10, 2012
It was an idea that was proposed by Jeremy Clarke about a year ago and soon, that idea will be turned into a reality. His idea was to fix the image caption system to allow links within the caption area of images. It’s an idea that I support as I’ve mentioned in a previous post as the image caption serves as the perfect opportunity to provide attribution and is especially useful for the Image Post Type.
Ticket #18311 which centers around this functionality has been blessed and looks like it will be added to WordPress 3.4 if all goes well. Everyone interested in this feature should follow the progress made on the ticket as well as test the patch and last but not least, provide feedback.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged captions, features, functionality, images |
By Jeffro on December 22, 2011
With the Santa hat on, Matt Mullenweg has decided to try out an experiment specifically for plugin authors and their respective plugin pages. He’s decided to give plugin authors a little more control with regards to how their plugin pages look by offering them a chance to upload a 772 x 250 pixel image that will be used as a banner. Here are a couple of excellent examples of this experiment in action:
Inline Quote Tag
Hello Dolly!
WordPress SEO By Yoast
YARPP or Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
bbPress
BuddyPress
TinyMCE Advanced
JetPack
FancyBox
One thing that I am thankful for is that most of the images I’ve seen have not detracted away from the information presented on the page. Right now, there is consistency amongst all of the various plugins hosted on the repository. I want that consistency to stick around. However, I will say that some of the plugin banner images give the page an additional pop and enhance the offering. As long as the header images are somewhat nice to look at and relevant to the plugin, I support this change!
Posted in Plugins | Tagged banners, experiment, headers, images, Plugins |
By Jeffro on November 30, 2011
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?
Posted in WordPress | Tagged funny, images, logos |
By Jeffro on November 3, 2011
Who doesn’t love a good infographic? Oli from WPLift.com has gone through the work of collecting all of the infographics related to WordPress that have been released so far this year into one long post. What’s neat about seeing all of these images on one page is the diversity in displaying relatively the same information. Also, quite a few of these would make for a good poster to hang on the wall. ∞
Posted in News | Tagged images, infographic. wordpress |
By Jeffro on November 1, 2011
Sucuri Security has a great post that begins to review the aftermath of the massive exploitation of the TimThumb image re sizer script. According to their calculations, about a million pages have been compromised by the script but when filtering down their results for the past thirty days, there were over 200,000 results. The exploitation of the script is still an ongoing problem and will most likely continue to be for the foreseeable future. If you think an old version of the TimThumb script is on your server, use the TimThumb vulnerability scanner plugin.
The TimThumb exploitation event is interesting in that so many websites became compromised despite the issue not being relevant to the core of WordPress itself. I wonder if there are any other popular scripts or dependencies that plugins or themes use that could end up in the same situation? ∞
Posted in News | Tagged exploit, images, security, timthumb |
By Jeffro on October 18, 2011
Occasionally, I ‘ll take a look through the WordPress Ideas site to see what kind of activity is going on. The other night, I discovered an idea that immediately lit the light bulb over my head, mostly because I couldn’t believe that it was not already a feature in WordPress. Approximately one year ago, Jeremy Clarke submitted the idea to allow URLs to be inserted into image captions with the primary goal of making it easy to attribute images to their source. I’ve personally come across the issue where instead of applying the image credits within the image caption, I have to add a note somewhere within the post which is stupid since image captions are the PERFECT spot for attribution. Fast forward to October 18th, 2011 with WordPress 3.3. knocking on the door and this ability is still not present within WordPress. However, there are a couple of things that point to this feature being added soon as the status for the idea is marked Good Idea! We’re Working On It. There is also a ticket in trac, #18311 that has a patch but is currently awaiting review.
While there is not a native, user-friendly way of adding links to image captions, there are a couple of ways in which it can be accomplished. The first is by using ‘ instead of ” when entering the code for your link. However, when switching between the code and visual editors, the link is erased leaving text in place of the link.
Second, you can try using the code provided by Kaspars of Konstruktors.com inside of your functions.php file which will add a “Source URL” field to every image that is uploaded through the WordPress media library. When using this method, it’s important to note that the source URL will be visible only if you specify an image caption upon inserting the image. If implemented correctly, it will look something like this.
Third, you can try using the Links In Captions Plugin by Zack Katz. After activation, you can add links to captions via the following format: {link url=”http://www.example.com”}Anchor text here{/link} Two benefits to this plugin is that it has support for the Target and Rel attributes and you can use shortcodes within the caption area.
Personally, I think Kaspars solution is the most user-friendly after the functions.php file is setup correctly. I’d like to see him package that as a plugin so more users can take advantage of it as it looks as though it was part of the media manager all along. However, the best scenario is for this functionality to some how end up within the core of WordPress. If you have the know-how, please consider contributing to the ticket or writing a better patch to get this into core.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged captions, features, images, links |
By Jeffro on September 14, 2011
WPBeginner has an excellent tutorial that describes how to use the built in functions of WordPress to generate additional image sizes for use in themes. This is possibly a better alternative than using TimThumb. ∞
Posted in WordPress | Tagged images, timthumb, tutorial |
