If you’re a WordPress Plugin developer, you may find yourself in the unenviable position of needing to maintain one of your plugins across multiple versions of WordPress. Until recently, I maintained the IntenseDebate plugin for versions 2.5 and up of WordPress, including versions 2.6 of WPMU and up. That’s a lot of versions (10 actually, not counting minor revisions). Here are some tips I picked up/developed to try to make my life a little easier along the way.
Read the rest of this post…
One thing that’s always bugged me in writing Posts/Pages content within WordPress is that you have to cater for different presentation possibilities. If you’re into web-standards, then that makes life difficult for things like headings (h1, h2, etc), when a block of content is presented in different contexts.
Ideally, your page should be structured with an h1 tag around the title of the most important concept on the page, an h2 around a sub-topic/concept, etc. On your home page, the h1 usually ends up going around your logo/site title, since that’s the over-arching concept. Then under that, you might have a listing of recent posts. Each of those posts should probably have their titles in an h2. No problem so far, right? You just set up your template like that and you’re good to go. Read the rest of this post…
$ svn up
Now running WordPress 3.0. This is going to be a game changer.
I’m now running the development version/alpha of WordPress 3.0 on this blog so that I can get a feel for any changes (and fix any bugs!) before the official release. So far so good, the upgrade was clean and nothing significant is broken. This release is going to be awesome!
WordCamp Indonesia. The event was very well organized, with a core team (the same group from last year) involved in putting together all the logistics, handling media, organizing speakers etc. They handled things very well, despite a few problems which were out of their control (like bad name-tag printing and their stickers/WordPress buttons not making it in the mail!) and the day seemed to be a success for everyone.
Below are the slides and notes from my presentation, which covered the current state of WordPress, what’s coming up in the next release and some of the related projects. You can also get the slides on SlideShare. Click the link below the slides to expand my full outline/notes.
Read the rest of this post…
If you’ve spent some time poking around in the code for either WordPress or bbPress, you may have come across comments that mention “BackPress”. You may have wondered what this BackPress thing was, well, wonder no more.
In the last few days, I’ve put together a quick site to try to help introduce people to the BackPress project. From the site:
BackPress is a PHP library of core functionality for web applications. It grew out of the immensely popular WordPress project, and is also the core of the bbPress and GlotPress sister-projects.
So effectively, BackPress takes all of the best core functionality (on a code level) from WordPress and bbPress, and makes it available to you and your next PHP-based web application/project. By using BackPress in your projects, you are then able to use most of the code you’ve come to rely on while working on WordPress-based projects, such as $wpdb, trailingslashit(), make_clickable(), __(), wp_remote_fopen() and more. The site includes some details on how to use BackPress in your project, and has the beginnings of a collection of documentation covering the main parts of the code library.
I’m personally really excited about this because I think BackPress has huge potential as a library for other folks and other projects. It allows them to benefit from the lessons learned through years (and thousands of “man-hours” worth of development) on the WordPress and bbPress projects. I’m using it as the core of my HTFS project (not released yet), and I know that some other projects are starting to use it as well. As a developer who has spent a lot of time in “WordPress land”, it makes life so much easier to be able to continue using a lot of the design patterns and techniques that I’ve become accustomed to.
Check it out, and please let me know what else we could get on the site, what needs more documentation etc!
While I’m here in Santiago, one of the things I’ll be doing is putting together a presentation for WordCamp Indonesia. I’ll be keynoting, although I’m not 100% sure what I’ll be covering yet; it’s sure to be something interesting 
If you’re anywhere near Indonesia, book your tickets around January 30, 2010 and come and chat about WordPress with a bunch of like-minded folks! Michael Koenig (a fellow Automattician) will be joining me, and spreading the love about IntenseDebate (which is a major sponsor of WordCamp ID).
I just saved yet another link in my Delicious account, and suddenly thought — “man, it would really suck if Delicious one day disappeared and I lost all of this”.
Indeed.
According to my stats, I have 1,164 bookmarks, mostly with descriptions and manually crafted (to some extent) titles, 1,813 different tags in use, with some being used 187 times. That’s a lot of rich, valuable data that I’ve collectively invested a lot of time in. I want control over it. I want insurance.
Read the rest of this post…
WordCamp Savannah, 2010
I was lucky enough to spend last weekend in Savannah, Georgia for their first WordCamp. This was the first time I’d ever been to beautiful, historic Savannah. The humidity/heat was a bit much for me, but in general I had a great time. I gave a short presentation on the new comment_form() function which is available for themes to use since 3.0. I’ve embedded my slides below, along with a link to download a PDF version.
Read the rest of this post…