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Tech Notes, Code Tips, And Musings By Chris Carvey, NYC UI/UX Director

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Looking behind the curtain of WordPress 3.0

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Exploring WordPress 3.0 and development issues raise questions about this important version updateI went to my first WordPress NYC Meetup yesterday, and I was pretty excited about it. It was serendipity that my work load started to ease up when this meetup was scheduled, and I wanted to hear directly from others what they were up to with WordPress. Since I’ve had my head down the last few months fine tuning this blog, I also wanted to know about issues I might run into down the line with the pending release of WordPress 3.0 coming later this year. At the time of this writing it’s currently in its second beta and a lot is still in flux. This topic was a hot one and it was reported 94 souls braved the rain and schlepped it to mid-town NYC to get some insight into what’s coming next for WordPress fans.
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So, how was it?

Many thanks to the presenters Steve Bruner and Boone Gorges (who covered WordPress 3.0 MultiSite functionality) for their time and energy. They kept things moving and hosted a lively discussion. I got the most out of hearing what people were actually doing with WordPress currently and possible answers to their functionality questions. In addition to covering the new standard theme for 3.0 “2010“, how to retrofit old themes for 3.0, the new native parent/child theme functionality, custom taxonomies, custom posts, some minor changes to WordPress semantics, etc. (here’s a full list of announced features of WordPress 3.0), I also left with a short list of plugins I need to look into that might help me with some of my current work.

Do you need to care about WordPress 3.0?

The short answer is “No, not yet.”
To be perfectly honest I’ve been ignoring 3.0 since I heard about it because I haven’t worked on multi-user or a network of sites that require one back-end database, which is one of big selling points of 3.0. My indifference apparently is being rewarded as I heard the unofficial word yesterday that there will be support of WordPress 2.9.x for sometime even after 3.0’s release, while people sort out how their world is changing. As of right now and on the horizon, there is no immediate need to make the jump to the latest beta or new release as in the past (usually for critical security patches) because 2.9 is so stable. As you can see by this project plan 3.0’s release is a little behind, no doubt due to issues that pop up in real world application of the new release.

Laying the ground work for migration and upgrading

I did walk away with some sound advice from the Meetup, which is – there is functionality in the new release that makes your life a lot easier, ESPECIALLY if you’re running multi-user sites and doing advanced tweaks to your templates and themes. However, using a beta on live client sites is inadvisable due to the fact the product is still in beta testing. What you should be doing is copying your live sites in a “sandbox” environment or doing local installs of the beta and seeing how your data interacts with it. This will help you be ahead of the curve when WordPress 3.0 officially drops later this year. This is especially prudent if you have to describe functionality to others or train your clients on new features. You can peek behind the curtain on the WordPress development blog to get on idea of how furiously developers are working to get 3.0 released.

Is this app going to be a beast?

This is one of the questions that came up at the Meetup, and how your Website will scale is definitely a concern that WordPress 3.0 will have people talking about. Using this software certainly comes with the responsibility of understanding the hosting infrastructure you’re installing it on. There are sure to be some hosts that ban or at least discourage installing multi-user site features on their network for fear of them being resource hogs. Come on… who wouldn’t want a potential open faucet that could scale to thousands of users in a matter of months on each hosting account? The politics behind this should be interesting to watch. The first thought I had when this crossed my mind was the possibility of modified version releases or some ability to disable core functionality with tiered license keys so that hosts could feel comfortable that they can control the install base on their network. I’m curious if this will be a serious push to have WP 3.0 sites hosted on “cloud” platforms. It’s probably also likely a lot more Web hosts are going to get into the CDN business in one form or another as a result of WordPress 3.0’s release.

What’s next?

WordPress 2.9 is stable and fine for most people right now. WP 3.0 beta introduces functionality fixes, and some changes to UI quibbles users had with previous versions. But I’m really interested in what the WordPress plugin and theme framework developers will do with 3.0. I’ll take my cues from that community, which will most likely push WordPress very far from being known as a “blog platform.” For example, Steve Bruner showed a demo of RoloPress, his version of “Contact Manager” built on WordPress backend at last night’s Meetup. WordPress 2.9 introduced a lot of concepts and GUI goodness that will be in 3.0 final release, but 3.0 kicks it up a notch for 2.9 users with features like the “drag and drop” menu builder. In the past building something equivalent and having the associated admin UI to manage that feature would have to been a code hack or involved searching for a pretty specialized and heavy duty plugin. Doing less code hacks and slimming down on the use of plugins is always good because it simplifies your software upgrade path, giving you easier access to the next latest and greatest thing. Everyone likes that :-)

Notes

Looking forward to Wordcamp NYC later in the year (planning was announced for October or November 2010.) The book I mentioned in the Q&A that covers WordPress basics quite nicely is Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read and having Jeremy Clarke there answering questions was awesome also.

More Thoughts on WordPress 3.0

1. WordPress 3.0 – What Lies Ahead? Awesomeness

2. What’s coming up in WordPress 3.0

3. What’s Coming in WordPress 3.0 (Features)

4. It’s coming! WordPress 3.0 – Pros and Cons

5. How to Enable Multisite in WordPress 3.0

SEO in WordPress themes, duplicate meta description tags

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Look out for this bug in your WordPress theme header.php file and meta tags, increase SEO of your CMS templatesI’m using a theme for my blog called “Journalist”. I wanted something no-nonsense, with a minimalist 2 column layout that I could remix to my taste. Once I read Matt Mullenweg (founder of Automattic) uses it, I was sold. I realized when making this choice, I was using an older theme (optimized for 2.7) and I was aware it didn’t have some of the bells and whistles of some of the more expansive WordPress theme frameworks. This made me mindful to continually review what I was doing, looking out for conflicts with the latest WordPress install, and researching features I needed to add myself. I’m glad I stayed on top of this, because a SEO problem was occurring in my header.php file I didn’t catch originally when I was tweaking the theme.

Turns out my meta description tags were running in place

The problem is an easy one to overlook the first time around. Thanks to Pillar Consulting’s Keywordfriendly SEO tool I caught it. After reviewing the report it generated, I discovered I had multiple meta description tags in the head of my blog pages that were competing against each other. The first one being the standard tagline for the blog, and the second is the content compiled from the fields in All-in-one SEO plugin I installed. As Jeffrey Nichols points out, Google IGNORES the second one, defaulting to the first one it sees. Which confirmed my previous worries that something was off, after examination of my Google Alerts results for the blog. So, I was completely missing out the fruits of my diligent SEO work.

A really smart fix

So after a quick Google search I ran across Nathan Rice’s great post on taking complete control of your meta description tags titled Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – META Descriptions. This is a must read for any theme developer and I was able to apply his code as a quick fix to my problem.

I modified his code to alternate between the blog tagline and plugin generated meta description tags as needed, depending on whether you were on my homepage or not. Originally, his solution alternates between the tagline and your post excerpt (which is very cool).  So the end result is now that the search engines have a better idea of what I’m writing about, and on my terms.

If you’re not using a SEO-optimized WordPress theme, you might want to look into what’s going on in your header.php file(s) as well. SEO is fickle business.

More SEO Resources

1. Check out the Pillar Consulting Website, their blog and their Keywordfriendly tool.

2. Learn more about All-in-one SEO plugin.

3. Dig in with some more SEO tips and tools with Jeffery Nichols SEO Toolbox.

4. Learn more about Nathan Rice and what he does with WordPress.

5. Here’s a great series of tips for tuning your WordPress install for better SEO results.

Read more on ChrisDigital’s Digital Designer Blog:

1. The CMS Power of WordPress

2. WordPress line break bug in posts

The CMS power of WordPress

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Lately Wordpress interface screengrab demonstrates it's CMS powerI’ve been working a lot in WordPress and it has started to dawn on me how powerful the software is. I can only imagine what’s coming in WordPress 3.0. The power I’m referring to specifically is the ability to use custom fields with posts/pages. This basically allows an editor the ability to associate related information with an entry or record into the database. As a simple example, visualize splitting an entry into 3 variations: Full, summary, tease (or large, medium, small) and have every thing encapsulated in the same database record. Here on ChrisDigital’s Digital Designer Blog, I’m using this in the Bookmark links section to grab the “referrer”, “source” and their URLS from each post. This is very cool…

Foundation for a framework

In addition, anybody has access to the source code so you can blow up the whole posts/pages paradigm (by using your own code methodology) and still have access to all the built-in WordPress goodies. I can easily see an advanced developer using this code base as a framework to make a stripped down event booking system, inventory control catalogue or some other database entry system that needs an easy admin user interface for maintenance personnel. They can even change the admin interface for their purposes, or just find a cool admin theme like this one I came across recently.

Why WordPress?

If you’re not familiar with WordPress, check out WordPress.org for some background information. It’s safe to say I really like WordPress, and it reminds me a lot of a CMS that I really liked (despite a few quirks that it had) and used 3 years ago for a project. The CMS I’m referring to is CMS Made Simple. If you find that humorous you should realize that at CMSMS has been downloaded 750,000 times (as of October 2009) and it does have a loyal user base. However, CMS pales in comparison to WordPress’ recent update, 2.9, which has been downloaded 3,999,515 times (as of this writing) and that fact alone gives you an glimpse into why I switched. Nevertheless, my experience with CMSMS was very positive and I barely had to touch the documentation. It just all made sense, and I jumped in with both feet. I was up to my elbows in code, mucking around with templates in no time. I’m pretty much in the same place with WordPress right now.

Back to the powerful magic

As I was working in WordPress recently, I ran into a situation in which I needed to pull specific data out of the database about each page in a WordPress install and then print that information to the homepage for a theme I was tweaking. The answer was integrating custom fields into each entry and adding some minor edits to a few template files. When I finished, I got up from my desk and went to get a latte. I was done.

To get an idea of what you can do with this feature, Smashing magazine has a great roundup of some custom field hacks that can make your theme stand out. And as I mentioned in the intro here’s a great post about hacking the appearance of WordPress custom fields and how they function in the control panel. There’s no doubt in my mind that depending on the scale of your project WordPress makes a flexible CMS.

Jumping into WordPress theme development

Needless to say, you can find guidance for creating your own WordPress theme online. In addition, there are some powerful WordPress theme development frameworks you can experiment with that pretty much push theme development to the next level. Personally, I like to target my tweaks and be the originator of the code changes instead of adding another layer of coding standards/documentation that I will need to deal with.

Can I get a little help?

Half the battle of understanding any software or framework is finding help and figuring out the nomenclature and structural paradigms of folders and files. In this regard, WordPress is impressive; you just need to do a couple of Google searches and you have an answer to whatever is confusing you, ails your current install, or offers the right fix for the piece of code that you’re tweaking.

You can easily pull up resources in your Web browser such as WordPress’ codex, forums, developer community, plug-in architecture, and themes. It’s like this growing unstoppable force.  Check out these video WordPress tutorials for example. This is a sample of how hard devotees work at WordPress evangelism. Eventually, you will be assimilated. You can even test drive it for free on their hosted platform.

Why go through all this trouble?

Why would you want to invest time into bending Wordress to your will? I’ll give you two reasons:

1. For now it’s open source with a reasonable learning curve that gets you up and running quickly.

2. And as mentioned above, WordPress’ admin control panel is pretty easy to use AND explain to your Web design clients for example. Which means they’re not calling you for very easy edits, and you can focus on big ticket changes. No more having to track and bill for minutiae.

More Resources

Here’s a rundown on 5 approaches you can take to get your Web clients familiar with the WordPress admin interface.

If you are looking for other PHP-based CMS’ to consider check out Silverstripe, MODx, Expression Engine, Drupal, Joomla, and I’ve been hearing a lot about Elgg lately.

Here’s a great question and answer thread from LinkedIn.com (account required) that details some plugin favorites by Linkedin members and issues associated with using plugins.

WordPress line break bug in posts

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distressed WordPress logo marking a persistent line break bug in the visual editorRecently I ran into a weird issue in WordPress as I was remixing an older theme for a friend’s blog. Like most people, I operate under the assumption that WordPress’ visual editor will work as the name sounds. But sometimes you can run into instances where the visual formatting of the entry/post you see in the control panel, does not match up with the content’s appearance on the blog. Glitches can show up when you hit the publish button, in this case- disappearing line breaks are the culprit. The source of the problem is likely a combination of at least two things…

Issue 1. CSS Styling in theme doesn’t provide spacing for line breaks

The theme you’re using probably doesn’t have a CSS style to address breathing room under <p> tags. This is assuming you know enough about HTML and CSS to try to manually format your post… (look for class tags like “.post_content” or “.entry-content” or something similar in your theme css code to edit.)

Why is that?

Some theme designers “zero out” all margin and padding settings on every page element GLOBALLY (eliminating browser defaults) and then manually put it back in various css styles or html tags (to their own taste) in their code as they develop their theme. Adding a padding adjustment to address this issue to your stylesheet is what’s needed here.

Tweaking or building a WordPress theme is a process that has a lot of moving parts, it’s no surprise this got overlooked until you started posting. It’s always a good idea to thoroughly preview a theme before you invest time in it, or pop some “dummy content” into your database so you can see how your aesthetic work is developing as you go.

Issue 2. It’s a bug

Let’s just make sure we’re running the latest WordPress upgrade. Sometimes that’s a magic elixir for a bug. In rare cases, it’s not an option to immediately upgrade your install – so keep reading.

There are notorious TinyMCE bug(s) in certain browsers. To be fair TinyMCE operates with JavaScript (which means it’s at the mercy of your browsers’ implementation of JavaScript standards.)

These issues have been around for a while, not recognizing visual line breaks or not supplying the underlying tags to display posts properly in HTML was just another one.

At least, that’s what I thought before I did some more digging….

No, It’s a feature

Turns out, this seems to be a “feature” of TinyMCE, to strip <br/> and <p> tags from posts at “save” (for XHTML compliance reasons and consistent behavior across browsers.)

Whatever the cause, it’s a source of pain for blog editors when it rears it’s ugly head. You can see a discussion here with several attempts at a work-around in WordPress forums.

My Solution:

I took the alignment advice of forum poster “dandelph” (towards the bottom of the above discussion) in combination with an edit to my “style.css” file:

Step 1. Style it

I added a case to address this in my style.css file: .post_content p {padding-bottom:10px;} //adds 10px of padding under each tag

Step 2. Give TinyMCE a reason to keep the tag

I added the post as usual via typing or cutting and pasting it from plain text in Visual Editor mode. Set up my line breaks as desired, then I highlighted it all and hit the left align button in the visual editor tool bar (behind the scenes this wraps all the paragraphs in <p style=”text-align: left;”></p> tags) You can verify quickly by toggling over to HTML mode in the editor. The reason this works apparently is the editor understands the tags are necessary to force left alignment and leaves them alone. Go figure.

Step 3. Stick the landing

Hit “Save/Publish” button and you should be all good.

Extra Credit: Plugins and hack fixes

The WordPress plugin developer community is definitely on top of this, and those of you out there that like to muck around in code can look up how to hack the TinyMCE build that shipped with WordPress.

Here’s a post over at WP Garage that covers WordPress/Tiny MCE plugins and hacks pretty well.

WP Garage mentions a plugin that “upgrades” WordPress’ native WYSIWYG Editor to TinyMCE-Advanced. This plugin provides a suite of tweaks to TinyMCE including access to your visual editor controls. Once you activate TinyMCE-Advanced, you should see a checkbox in WordPress settings you can use to toggle the code stripping feature on or off. You also end up with a wider variety of options for your visual editor tool bar, and the editor should start behaving more like you expected.

Read more on ChrisDigital’s Digital Designer Blog:

1. The CMS Power of WordPress

2. SEO in WordPress themes, duplicate meta description tags

3. Exploring web fonts, moving beyond Arial and Verdana