piece of shep » Wordpress

WordPress 2.9 Usability Fail

shep — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:20:43 +0000

This isn’t a tutorial on how to bulk-update/upgrade plugins in WordPress 2.9, just a tip in case many users are confused as to where this much sought-after feature is. It’s under Tools -> Upgrade. Seriously, this has to be one of WP’s dumbest decisions yet. Why in the world would you put the bulk update for plugins under Tools -> Upgrade? It should be a button or an action from the bulk action dropdown. Usability Fail!

PhoenixBlue Widgetized

shep — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:42:18 +0000

Thanks to Kris Britt at Silente.com the PhoenixBlue theme has been widgetized. I’ve also made a few other minor tweaks to a theme that seems to still be very popular even though I’ve not had time to update it in over a year. Post meta information now includes what tags are used in the post and the theme now supports WordPress image captions that came out in WordPress 2.6. You can check out a demo of PhoenixBlue Widgetized here. You can download the PhoenixBlue Widgetized theme here.

Thanks again to Kris for widgetizing the theme. If time permits I may add support for threaded comments, but I’m not entirely sure I will yet. If anyone else wants to add the functionality, feel free, just let me know. Also if you find issues with the theme and want to help fix them let me know. The theme isn’t exactly my main priority right now so if any help is greatly appreciated. I know one area that needs some work is the tag cloud styling so if you want to take a crack at that feel free.

Why Habari isn’t Ready for Me

shep — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:13:08 +0000

I’m writing this post so I don’t have to constantly explain my reasoning to everyone in #habari. This is not a post describing how bad Habari is, it is a fine product. It’s just not ready for me and I’ll explain why.

Everyone who visits my site knows that I like to change themes. The lack of quality themes on Habari is one thing that is keeping me from changing. Themes aren’t a make or break deal, but I do like to change things up and not having the ability to do so with a variety of different themes is something that will weigh heavily on my decision. If there was nothing else that made me hesitant about switching, I’d do it. But there are other things.

Lack of widgets or modules built in are something I really want. Because I like to change themes often, not having a widget system for sidebars and whatnot makes things difficult. I like to rearrange the contents of sidebars, footers, etc. without having to edit code. It’s not that I don’t know how to edit the code, it’s just that, these days, I shouldn’t have to.

Lack of documentation makes it hard to do the things I want to do. Back in the pre-widgets WP days this page was my Bible. When editing themes, I still use this page quite often. Habari’s documentation is seriously lacking and it’s difficult to find what it is I need to accomplish certain things. WordPress’s codex spells it out in a great way. This isn’t Habari’s fault, they are young. It took a long time for WordPress’s Codex to get to where it is now. Even a lot of the plugins that are released for Habari have come without clear documentation.

There are also other things that aren’t as big, but I wonder why they aren’t included. For example, Habari uses tags instead of categories. So why isn’t there a template tag to display a tag cloud? You have to use a plugin in order to display it if you want one. I’m sure there are other things like that but I’ve not dealt with it enough to see what they might be. Also, since the codebase is ever changing at this early stage, it takes a lot to keep up with themes and plugins as they are changed quite often and, well, WordPress is much easier to do with the introduction of the automatic plugin upgrading. I can’t tell you when the last time I had to edit a theme because of a WordPress upgrade.

So, there are a few of my reasons why I’m not switching to Habari…. yet. Hopefully, once they mature a little, these things will be introduced and worked on and it will make the transition from WordPress to Habari easier.

WordPress 2.5 Widget Interface

shep — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:48:15 +0000

I would like to state that who ever designed the widget interface in WordPress 2.5 is a complete moron. A retarded monkey could have done better. Gone are the days where you just drag and drop widgets. Have more than one sidebar or widgetized area? No problem, just drag the widgets to the corresponding widgetized area. No, in 2.5, you have to select which sidebar you want to edit from a dropdown, then add the widgets to that sidebar. Then you have to click save and choose the next sidebar from the dropdown. Oh wait, you want to move something from sidebar 2 to sidebar 1? Ok, instead of dragging and dropping like you did before you have to go to sidebar 2, remove it, save, go to sidebar one, add it, save. What a pain in the ass. EDIT: Also, if you go to a theme that has less sidebars than your previous, the widgets mess up. It’ll display whatever widgets you have in sidebar 1 from the previous theme, but when you change it and hit save, it removes them all and puts widgets from sidebar 2, making you do the whole process over again.

A Disappearing Community

shep — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 03:35:52 +0000

One of the things that has bugged me over the past year or so with WordPress is that the community seems to be disappearing. Some of the developers have left to create other software and some have just left. It seems the passionate group of volunteers that helped support WordPress have moved on as well. The WordPress IRC channel was once a place I enjoyed hanging out in and helping whenever I could. Now, I never speak in there. I hardly look at what’s being said in there at all. Some of the volunteers that helped out in the forums have even been asked to leave by Matt and company. Matt seems to be doing a great job at driving a wedge in the community. His way, or leave. Or as he once put it, you don’t like it, fork it.

Themes.wordpress.net is pretty much a graveyard. I used to go there several times a week to check out all the nice new designs that people were making. Even if I wasn’t ever going to download the themes it was nice to see what was being produced. Now the only place that publishes new WordPress themes on a regular basis seems Weblogtoolscollection.com, and that has even seemed to slow down a bit. I don’t know if that’s because passionate theme developers aren’t producing themes anymore or what. Now your choice is to use Google and hope you don’t find a site that puts malicious links and/or code into the theme you download.

The latest thing that Wank pointed out is that the Plugins page on the Codex no longer exists. It was a fairly complete list of plugins for WordPress. It’s no longer there. So if Matt chooses to tell you your plugin isn’t good enough for the official repository, there’s no place to notify users that your plugin exists. That page on the Codex was a great page. Also absent from Extend is the link for themes. It was there before 2.5 came out. So, Matt takes away the theme repository, has the plugins page deleted, drives away developers and volunteers and this is supposed to be a community? Yeah, right.

New Theme and New Version

shep — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 18:24:04 +0000

As you probably know by now if you’re a WordPress user, WordPress 2.5 came out today. Along with that, WordPress.org received a redesign. I won’t say much about the new version, as it seems to be the same, except an ugly admin redesign. I will however point out that I have a new theme up here. It probably won’t stay up too long, but I figured it’s a great theme for the season. Cardinals opening day is Monday and the baseball season will be underway. Just wanted to throw up a theme that celebrated the season a bit and this theme I thought was very elegant looking. Anyway, let the baseball commence!

Traffic Spike

shep — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 14:55:23 +0000

These past few days I’ve had a huge influx of traffic. The reason behind it is someone stumbled upon an article I posted back in 2005 and liked it and thus it was shared with thousands upon thousands of people around the internet. On Tuesday I had about 900 visits, Wednesday went up to 7,110, and today so far I’m at 2,243 and it’s not even 9 am. WordPress is known for not handling large traffic spikes, especially on shared hosting (which is what I’m on). Luckily, after Tuesday’s small influx to 900 visits I decided to download and enable WP Super Cache. It has worked quite well and my site has been loading fast and the server seems to be handling all the traffic quite well. So, we shall see how long this traffic spike will last and how the shared hosting of HostGator handles it.

Testing a New Design

shep — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 17:30:27 +0000

I’m testing a new design here. Things can (and probably will) break off and on today. I really like this design and hope I can get it to do everything I want it to do.

WordPress 2.3 is a Joke

shep — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 14:25:39 +0000

Well, let me rephrase. Tagging in WP 2.3 is a joke. Tagging was pulled out of 2.2 because it wasn’t ready for prime time. Well, after using 2.3 release candidate, it still is far from prime time. In fact, it belongs in daytime soap opera land. Cheap, cheesy, and incomplete. There is no way to manage tags. Once you create a tag, it’s there forever, unless you go back to the post you created it in and delete it. Also, if you have been blogging for a while, do not use the convert categories to tags function. When it says convert, it does just that, but it doesn’t leave your categories behind. It deletes them. So then you will have 404s for all those category pages. For someone like me, who’s been using WordPress for a long time, I’d want my categories to be categories and tags and then continue to add tags to the new posts. They say the left tags with a lot of holes because they want to let plugins fill in the gaps. That sounds lazy to me and will cause a lot of confusion. “Hey guys, we released a new version of WP. The new version contains tagging ability. Oh, but you won’t be able to manage them or anything out of the box because we’re lazy and didn’t want to write that ability. Instead, use these third-party plugins that aren’t supported or updated by us. Kthxbai.” WP is really dropping the ball with development.

Also, my If you liked that (multi-category) plugin will not work with 2.3 due to changes in database structure. I hope to have an updated version out soon for anyone who wants to use with with 2.3.

Automattic: We Change the Rules When We Get Caught

shep — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:17:10 +0000

In short, guy has wp.com account, new employee joins with the same name and wants that account name. Automattic takes it (supposedly without notifying current account holder). Guy gets mad and shouts at Automattic. Automattic points to their FAQ’s which they changed overnight to show what they were doing was ok. There’s probably more to the story. I could care less. I just find the whole thing funny. Another example of questionable practices on behalf of Automattic and WordPress leader, Matt.

Read Wank’s take on it and the original thread where the complaint arose.

Even if the whole thing isn’t true (which it seems to be true), their handling of it was a complete joke.

If You Liked That (Multiple Category) Plugin

shep — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 20:57:25 +0000

I’ve been using the If You Liked That plugin for quite a long time. Following the content of a post, this plugin inserts links to a user selectable number of other posts in the same category as the main post. The problem was, I often have posts in multiple categories and people might find it more useful if it displays posts from all the categories the post is published in. This version does exactly that. This version of the plugin supports multiple categories being listed below the post instead of posts just from one category. I’ve contacted the original plugin author with the changes but have yet to hear back from him, so I labeled this 1.2 (his is 1.1) and am releasing it from my blog in case anyone wants it. He did all the hard work and I have to thank him for an excellent plugin. Also, thanks to MellerTime for the help on making this multi-category.

Download it from here: Download If You Liked That plugin

Is a Switch Coming?

shep — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 15:51:50 +0000

I installed Movable Type 4 on another site of mine and imported all the WordPress posts from this blog. I’m kind of tired of WordPress and the direction it’s going (It seems WordPress (as in .org) has went from being what’s best for the community to what’s best for the users of WordPress.com, the for profit version, which hey, you’re a business, that’s your job to make money, but don’t hide behind a facade of benevolence when you make decisions thinking about your profit margin instead of the community). I don’t know if MT will be any different, especially since it just became open source, but I think MT could be a suitable replacement. There’s going to be a large learning curve and I’ll lose all Google juice for a while, but I’m not a business that’s trying to make tons of money off my website. I do it for fun. I guess it all depends on whether MT will be fun to learn or frustrating. There is always Habari, but they have a long way to go before I can even consider using them.

New Theme

shep — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 00:26:47 +0000

So for the past couple weeks I’ve been searching for a new theme. You might have stopped by while I was testing some out. I had maybe 3 different themes up over the past few weeks but kept going back to the previous because I wasn’t feeling any of them, even after some modifications. This one I do like and might keep up for a bit. I have to see it on my website for a few days in order to determine if I like it. We’ll see. Any thoughts?

If You Liked That WordPress Plugin

shep — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 02:59:50 +0000

I really love this plugin. I was using it for a while, then quit because it was displaying the “If you liked that” on pages too. I notified the author and asked if he noticed this and was planning on releasing a version that didn’t do this or if he knew how to easily change the plugin to prevent this. He got back to me right away stating he just noticed this behavior himself and planned on changing it in the next version. Well, the new version is here and I’m using it again. I think it will be a great way to get users to go deeper into your site. If they came for one post, they might see another post that intrigues them and go to that one. Who knows, you may get a valuable new reader. Props to Martin for the great plugin.

This is Why I’m Hot

shep — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 18:30:14 +0000

No, not because I’m a rapper named Mims, but because I’d changed my site to this sexy new theme. The front page is still basic format as the changes I made a few days ago, just using a new theme. (and yes, it took me like 2 or 3 hours to mod that front page when it would have taken Kristin only like 15 minutes. Oh well, we learn as we go along I guess). And I must say, it would have been so much harder to do this if not for having my own web server and wp install on a usb stick. No uploading, just saving and refreshing. Very nice.