Technology

WordPress goodies of the week

I spent some time playing around with WordPress themes and plugins this week. While most of the stuff I discovered was cool, as usual, a few thins stood out. For the benefit of the general public, here they are.

Automatic thumbnails in Swift theme. One of the problems that I face when choosing a new theme is that often theme author would expect you to do things in a certain way – organize your menus using pages and not categories, or use specific custom keywords, etc. For some time now I was interested in a theme with post thumbnails, but never dared to try. After all, I have more than 4000 posts and the last thing I want to do is go through all of them adding thumbnails. That’s why I was so surprised by how nicely Swift theme handles this problem. It does expect that you add thumbnails using custom fields, but if you don’t, it just grabs the first image from the content of the post and prepares the thumbnail itself. If there are no images in the content, it uses a default one, which can change easily. Awesome! Here is how it looks.
After The Deadline spell-checker. Michael Koenig commented on the post about me trying IntenseDebate comments plugin, and suggested that I enable After The Deadline plugin for comments, which I did. Looking further into it, I noticed that After The Deadline spell-checker is also available for posts. I already have a spell-checker built into my browser, but it doesn’t seem to check the grammar or anything else beyond the syntax mistakes. So, I installed the After The Deadline and I do enjoy it. It doesn’t stand in the way, while at the same time, provides some feedback about my writing style. It has a number of useful features, such as highlighting passive voice, suggesting replacement for complex words and expressions, and more. Recommended, especially for non-native English speakers.
Security tips. A reader of my much outdated, lost, and forgotten WordPress Bits blog asked for some tips to improve WordPress security. I compiled my list of tips and then looked around for a few suggestions from other people. Apparently, there are a number of blog posts (one, two, three) on the subjects and even some plugins (one, two, three) that can help you out.

Jobs vs. Schmidt = product vs. service

Gizmodo is running a very speculative – and yes, there are speculations, – post about a meeting between Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt. It took place in a public place, and someone noticed it and made a couple of pictures and now everyone and their brother is running around trying to figure out what these two were talking about. Things went as far as even consulting a body language expert.

Firstly, my reaction to this is: “C’mon! Leave them alone already!“. Who cares? But it seems too many people do. So there kicks in my second reaction – since we don’t really know what it was all about, let’s speculate and blow this out of all proportions. After looking at the pictures, reading through the comments, and through the body language expert’s analysis, here is my view of what is captured on those pictures.

This is, quite obviously, a historical moment, where two schools of thought are standing against each other. Steve Jobs represents the old school which stands for closed things and for products, as in things that you can touch, feel, and break. Eric Schmidt represents the new school of thought, which is characterised by openness and the idea of a service. Two great men with two great companies behind them meet at the neutral point. And while Eric seems to be more uncomfortable, as body language expert suggests, the important bit here is that they are at the same table on the same terms. The clash of the titans, so to speak. The outcome is obvious for some of us though. Go, Eric, go!

P.S.: Before you start throwing lava balls at me, I do mean this as a joke, and yes, I am drunk. It’s Friday night after all.

P.P.S.: There is some truth to every joke.

User interface changes

Here is a bit of a conversation we had today in the office:

– I hate it!

– What?

– They changed the context menu slightly in Windows 7, re-arranged a few items.

– You mean you end up clicking on a wrong menu item all the time?

– Yes.

– Like what? “Print this page and shut down the computer”?

– Yeah, very close.

– Imagine if there really would be such a choice. Instead of, say, “Cancel” button.

– Someone should write a virus for this. It will be the most annoying virus ever.

Trying out IntenseDebate

It’s been some time now since I wanted to play around with IntenseDebate. Something triggered an action today and now this blog’s comments are powered by IntenseDebate. All previous comments are imported and fully synchronized, and the new comments should be working now (tweaking ahead though). I’d appreciate if you could leave a test comment to this post just so that I could see if it is really working. You could also tell me what you think of IntenseDebate – and that would make your comment so much better…

Finally, custom post types in WordPress 3.0 !

The rumour has it that WordPress 3.0 will have custom post types built-in. These are excellent news! This means that 90% of all web development companies will be able to drop their own, complex and ugly in-house built systems and switch to WordPress development. And while WordPress code isn’t the prettiest thing you can find, it’s still better than most of that code that will be dropped soon. And it’s small, which is also an improvement.

If you are not familiar with the concept of custom post types, these are basically your average posts + custom fields + theme and plugin support + steroids. In short, these are beautiful. It doesn’t really matter what your blog is about – cooking, political news, movies, or technology – you can always think of a way to make posts better than they are in the default installation. For example, cooking recipes can have a section on ingredients, cooking instructions, and serving instructions. You can have your theme support those sections and display them in a consistent and beautiful way. Now you probably wouldn’t even bother. You’ll do your best with built-in post editor and maybe, if you are half-insane, you’ll play with custom fields. But that’s too technical, complicated, and not even remotely convenient. You can try one of those few plugins available, but chances are you’ll either come across a limitation, or a plugin won’t work for you at all. With WordPress 3.0′ custom post types your chances are better.

And why did I mention web development companies? Because that is exactly what so many of them do – build web applications that work with custom object types (cars in automotive shops and rentals, real estate items, products with online shops, etc). A lot of work is put into defining those object types, building searching functionality, promotion bits, nested categories, integrating image galleries and contact forms, and such. Needless to say, most of this functionality is already available in WordPress, either built-in or via a plugin. Custom data types though weren’t. And now that custom posts will make it into WordPress, most of the average small company’s needs will be so much easier to take care of.

This is a much needed and long awaited bit of functionality and I am very excited for it to finally make it. These will cause a new wave of activity around WordPress, and we’ll see more and more sites built with it. Awesome!