cdcstudios.com | portfolio v8.1

WordPress is one of the greatest blogging if not full fledged CMS tools you can find, it’s greatest strength is the ease of adding new functions via a plugin. Once I hit a list of 30 plugins I’m going to try and release a plugin a day every day for a month. Every day an unreleased plugin that tweaks your site in a variety of different ways. Whether you want to be a better admin, better with social media, or to provide cooler functions for your readers there should be a plugin you’ll want.

My current idea list:

1. refresh comments admin dashboard
   A simple idea that adds “refresh me” to the recent comments widget on the dashboard, and uses ajax to only refresh that widget.
2. feedburner widget for dashboard
   Integrated dashboard widget that shows the summary of feed data.
3. plugin compatibility checker
   The idea is when you try and add a new plugin it will check your plugin list against the plugin compatibility checker to see if it will fail. This one is likely to not be done by me lol.
4. mint stats dashboard widget
   I love Mint stats so much. I just don’t love always opening an external page to see it. Giving me my stats via the dashboard in widget form is a no brainer.
5. social media welcome mat with follow me message.
   If people are referred by twitter the header would say “Welcome twitter users, Like what you see? Consider adding <twitter handle> to get updated on new posts” or whatever the user decides to have the message say.
6. Referrer widget for dashboard
   show your readers where the most recent hits came from.
7. WPMU plugin installer permissions
   allow users to only install admin approved plugins from wordpress.org/extend/plugins gives users flexibility but protects your WPMU site (Not even sure if this one is possible or worthwhile)

Obviously this is just a very rough list and I’d love more input and more importantly feedback about what functions you want new plugins to serve. So take a moment and suggest something you’d like me to try and build.

Not my picture (again courtesy of the tagaroo plugin and Flickr).

So noticing that Matt Mullenweg blogged that there was a release candidate for WordPress 2.5 up I decided to try an upgrade to see what the fuss was all about.

From the official WordPress blog:

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It's been in the oven for a while, and we're finally ready to open the doors a bit to give you a taste.

Pretty big list, but how easy the upgrade? Easy as ever. I did a quick backup at lunch (while sitting in the Roxy no less) including a database backup then deleted the site. Next I opened up Transmit (thanks to Verso for introducing that tasty little app to me). and uploaded the shiny new WordPress 2.5 and then ran the upgrader. It finished in record time (about 5 seconds less than the last upgrade script I did) which was my first nice reaction. Logging in and seeing the new dashboard was fantastic. Nice neatly divided boxes compartmentalizing each different section. Seeing the stats graph integrated into the dashboard is a masterful idea. The only real wish I had is that they were rearrangeable using AJAX and some css (might be a nice plugin if I can find the time before someone else beats me to it. Speaking of plugins I did finally have to stop using Tiger admin plugin I’ve been using for a couple years. I will definitely miss having the navigation bar on the side instead of the top. Also a nice new feature to play with is the fullscreen editing mode. No other distractions on the page. Just a big huge word fillable area.

So after testing all the rest of my plugins I didn’t see any other problems. I did notice that Gravatar’s had an upgrade notice on the plugins page. I clicked the upgrade now link and after quickly typing in my server info it upgraded perfectly. Ironically I just noticed that I no longer need that plugin since the functionality has been written into the core code. Excellent!

Next up is an attempt at using the new media manager and gallery tool (now added to the neatly upgraded TinyMCE toolbar in the write window). I’m using some old artwork as well as an unused rough draft of the redesign of this site since it was handy.

Pretty easy to add. Select the files you want, click upload and then using some nice ajaxy goodness you can edit the description of each photo and alter the title.

All in all this is an amazing upgrade and quite a nice bit of work both under the hood and on the front. It’s nice that so much from the old “shuttle” concept has finally made it into the code. Looking forward to continuing to experiment with the theme design as well as figuring out what other surprises I might find as I explore the tasty goodness of wordpress’ php.

So I get a lot of requests from friends to reskin this and reskin that. I have no problem with this. I enjoy it and seeing friends smile when they look at their new blog, myspace profile, or just about anything else they ask me to reskin/recolor. Most of the time it’s a relatively quick job without any real issue.

Of course since it says annoyance up at the top of this post obviously there are times when it’s not. Some of you will probrably immediately roll your eyes at this little rant of mine but whatever. Go read /. or fark…

So I’m in awe of some of the open source developers out there and the amazing products they write/code/make/bleed their hearts into. But is it really that hard to take 5 minutes and write out a clean(ish) html page with all the divs/classes/tags in it that calls the same css they have running the layout of the actual app? Getting under the hood of an app is something I obviously love since I spend 50+ hours a week doing exactly that. But when I’m trying to learn the ins and outs of some new RoR or php app I don’t want to have to hunt through 500 files in the includes folder so I can find that view_penguincheese.php is what makes use of the #penguin div. Granted I just want to be able to see a big standalone html file with no php so finding the aforementioned php file isn’t something I necessarily care about (I just wanted to say “penguincheese”)

I understand that the OS movement puts an astounding amount of work into their projects and can’t always be expected to have the same graphic knowledge to compare with their php/asp/mysql/Ruby on Rails/Ajax knowledge. That’s fine. Just make it easier for those of us that do excel at making things pretty make your apps look better. Most of us will do the right thing and upload them to your site so more people can and will use your application because it looks more professional.

All that said (over a year ago when I first started writing this post) I’ll add one last thing: don’t skimp on making things use CSS without making sure it’s sensible. You won’t necessarily always be the developer/designer for something forever and it really makes those who follow in your footsteps admire your work as opposed to thiking you’re likely just drunk.

Oh yeah, I just overhauled the look of my myspace profile and it’s quite a bit nicer looking without all the ugly color combo’s myspace devs liked and most importantly it’s currently glitter graphic free (yay)

I’ve been looking at my dashboard and wanting it to be basically remain the same but in a much smaller/manageable way.

With the recent release of my moo.fx archive plugin (CDC Clean Archives) I thought it would be handy to have the dashboard use the same functions.

This WordPress plugin was written with the ajax like moo.fx libraries found at: moofx.mad4milk.net. In addition to that, the excellent #wordpress channel on freenode irc for any advice/suggestions I got.

It’s not the most technically advanced plugin but I do have other enhancements in mind that will integrate this plugin with 3 or 4 other plugins to really make the dashboard be the nerve central of the wordpress admin section.

Tragically it does require replacing the actual index.php in the wp-admin folder (although you can modify the file yourself for security if you’d like by simply using the included index.php as a template for what needs changed).

Anyways to install this plugin all you need to do is upload the Moodash folder into your plugins folder and then copy the included index.php into your wp-admin folder and then activate the plugin.

Get Moodash now

So I’ve been using the SRG Clean Archives for just about the entire time my site has run on wordpress.

I love it but was noticing that the page was starting to run a little long. Since my recent infatuation with the moo.fx libraries knows no bounds I decided adding a little ajax styling would be just the thing to make my archives hold all the data but not require too much scrolling.

Anyways here’s the link to the plugin and a quick read me on how to get it working.

Download CDC Clean Archives plugin

So after 3 months of putting it off and being overwhelmed with a myriad number of projects, I’ve taken the initiative in creating an internet er I mean upgrading WordPress to version 2.02. I’d expected to need a few hours to do this and check over everything but after following the 4 steps recommended (backing up, disabling plugins, etc) I uploaded the new files and 7 minutes later (hooray for fast ftp speeds) was sitting at my normal happy dashboard :D

Now all I need to do is fix Falbum as well as tweak a few other things and I can relax with the backend of this thing.

Now that I’ve got this done I can start working on the 3 themes I’ve got planned. One will be just for my usuage but the other 2 will go up for grabs. This will bring my custom theme creation number to a whopping 5 (counting the current recycled theme as well as the theme I made for Tamara Weikel).

Other than that I’ve got about 50 other things to get done today including hopefully finally moving the “recent captivations” portion of the sidebar over to the del.icio.us links plugin I forgot the name of and then possibly updating a few other things.

So far I’m absolutely in love with the spiffy AJAX interface for posting although it would be nice to be able to minimize the uploads box since I rarely use that function of WordPress.