Category: WordPress

WordPress is my favorite Content Management System (CMS). Once in a while it helps me make some extra money. Once in a while it helps me look at the problem from a different perspective. But even when it doesn’t, I still enjoy using it for this (and a few other) websites. And I enjoy interacting with the community. I use this category to share bits and pieces which are WordPress related.

WordPress Themes : Flounder, with Colorful Post Formats

Via WPTavern I came across Flounder – a free WordPress theme with colorful post formats.  This looks rather awesome for use in personal blog, like mine.  Have a look.

flounder

The colors are customizeable and the theme is responsive, as any new theme should be.  Here is how it looks on different screens:

responsive-flounder

 

I’ve installed it and tried out with WordPress’ Live Preview functionality – it looks pretty good.  There are a few things that I’ll need to fix if I am to use it.  Namely, the archives list, which has an item for each month in history, and the menu with a few submenu items.  The archives would work for a younger blog, but mine span from October 2001, which makes the archives list way too long.  Maybe switching to years instead would be a better option.  And the main menu looks ugly when there are a lot of submenu items.  Gladly, WordPress menu editor makes it trivial to change.

There also seems a slight variation on post formats between Flounder and Favepersonal – the theme I’m currently using.  For example, the Video post format doesn’t display a video on the homepage.  But, once again, these are trivial to fix, albeit with an SQL query rather than with a graphical user interface.

WordPress 3.8 plans responsive redesign of admin area

WordPress 3.8 beta 1 has been announced a couple of days ago.  As always, lots of fixes and improvements are making their way to the new version.  But for me personally, the major change is the planned redesign of the admin area with responsive layout and support for mobile:

The new admin design, especially the responsive aspect of it. Try it out on different devices and browsers, see how it goes, especially the more complex pages like widgets or seldom-looked-at-places like Press This. Color schemes, which you can change on your profile, have also been spruced up.

Why is this so important? – you might wonder.  After all, there are native WordPress apps for both iOS and Android.  The thing here is that some WordPress themes and plugins modify the admin interface, and these changes aren’t supported by the mobile apps.  For example, when writing a new post, post formats might be different between what’s supported by the web admin interface and mobile interface.  With a responsive web design of admin interface, I’ll be able to use the web interface on my mobile and thus have the same options.  It’s possible to do it now with a table – where the screen is slightly larger, but using it on the mobile currently is the pain in the back.  So, that’s why I’m looking forward to WordPress 3.8.

WordPress plugin repositories

WPTavern covers an interesting early stage development of WordPress plugin installations directly from GitHub source code repositories.  Here is a quick video on how it works:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCV_EomzXIU]

That got me thinking.

WordPress.org provides an API for plugins checks and updates.  WordPress software allows a plugin to overwrite the location of the repository.  But it still doesn’t seem to cover all the bases.  What if I want to install plugins from several repositories now?  Say – the official WordPress plugin repository, GitHub, and my personal or corporate repository.  There might be a way, but it seems tricky and non-standard.

I’ll look more into it, of course, but I think there should be a standardized way to setup WordPress plugins (or even themes) repository, and add it to a list of repositories that WordPress checks for updates.  Something along the lines of YUM and APT in Linux.