Archive for WordPress
Hello again my faithful readers. Again, I am terribly sorry for the lack of posts recently. I’ve been extremely busy at work with some huge projects.
I work for iThemes doing back-end development for themes and “special projects”. Previously, I never wanted to talk about it much on my blog because we weren’t GPL, and that can cause a lot of commotion. I don’t have to worry about that anymore. As of today, iThemes is GPL.
This is a very exciting move for us. We’ve talked about it internally for a long time. I’m glad that we’ve finally made the change.
If you’d like to know more about the change, please check out the official announcement.
I just started using the Press This feature of WordPress, and I quickly ran into a problem. Each time I’d try to use it, I’d get a 404 error page.
I’m not sure exactly what the issue is, but there is an easy fix that you can find here.
A while back, I posted about how I wanted to find an alternative to DNS Stuff. Since then, I haven’t found much to get excited about. In addition, I continue to get search traffic where people use terms like “free dnsstuff”, “dnsstuff alternative”, or “dnsstuff coupon code”. So, it seems that I’m not the only one that wants a real alternative to DNS Stuff.
Introducing DNS Yogi. My goal is to provide a set of tools that can compete with the quality of DNS Stuff while remaining free. Here is what I plan to launch the site with:
WordPress may at its core be a blogging platform. I know that Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, wants to keep all development of WordPress focused on blogging. I also know that WordPress is and will always be primarily used for blogging. However, as I work more an more with WordPress, I’ve come to see WordPress in a different light.
There are those that want to use WordPress as a full web publishing platform and not just a blogging platform. With the right kind of theme and plugins, using WordPress in this way can produce great results. Again, I see WordPress in an even more abstract view than as just a web publishing platform.
How do I see WordPress then? Frankly, I see it as an incredibly-flexible web application framework that can be used to develop seemingly unlimited type of applications.
After working on a new theme off and on for over a month, I’ve finally settled on a look and decided to update the site.
My old theme was a slight modification of the fSpring theme by Fredrik Fahlstad. I still think that it’s a very nice design, but I decided that it was time for a change.
I’ve been running Woopra stats on this site since August 1, 2008. I got into the beta program really early since I was at WordCamp Dallas, where some of the initial beta codes were given out. I also had the pleasure of meeting John Pozadzides who is the founder of Woopra.
Since I’ve been using Woopra for half a year now, I’d like to give a review of what I like and dislike about it.
About Woopra
For those of you who don’t know anything about Woopra, here’s a bit of info. Woopra is a very new site statistics and visitor analytics tools. It is so new in fact, that it is still very much in beta.
Woopra aims to revolutionize the way we think of stats in relation to our site. Rather than being purely a historical tool, as most of the other stat gathering tools are, Woopra provides the ability to see what is happening on your site in real time. There is a Live tab that will show you visitors that are active on your site, where each visitor is located in the world, how each visitor got to the site, what pages they’ve navigated to, any external links they’ve clicked on, and even gives you the ability to open up a live chat with an individual visitor.
Have you ever wanted to turn WordPress into a more powerful, CMS-style platform? The Pods plugin looks to be the first step toward achieving this goal.
In case you haven’t heard about Pods, here is a snippet from Pods’ site:
WordPress evolved.
Create more than just blog posts and pages. Add new content types with only the fields you need. Customize exactly how each content type’s list and detail pages appear. Automatic pagination, filtering, public forms and more are possible with the Pods CMS plugin.
Continue reading “Pods for WordPress – Content Beyond Posts and Pages”
I didn’t see a lot of fanfare, but the release of the WordPress Video Solution Framework plugin, also called the WordPress.com Video Server, has the potential to be huge.
Some of you may wonder why I was interested in getting FFmpeg installed again. This is the reason why: Auttomatic has released code that makes it possible (with some work and knowhow) to turn a WordPress Mu platform into a video solution.
Features
- Video-Uploader: A program that will load raw video files into the transcoder without making the user wait
- Video-Transcoder
- Takes in raw video from the Uploader
- Transcodes the video into h.264
- Stores the video into an mp4 container
- Creates thumbnails
- Sends the files and meta data to the file server
- Video-FinalTouch
- Receives files and data from the Transcoder
- Copies the files into the source video’s folder
- Updates the database tables with new video information
- Can be customized to replicate or load files into a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
- Video-XML
- Reads in information from the video such as: caption, duration, and format
- Returns this information in XML format
- Caches information to ensure quick performance
- Video-AJAX: Displays the video when the transcoder has not completed processing the raw video data
- Includes a player written in ActionScript 3 that will handle proper display of the video based upon your configuration
Final Thoughts
The notes indicate that at least some work must be done in order to make everything function. Since I have yet to try everything out yet, I don’t know exactly how much work that would be. I’ll be sure to post about my experiences and hopefully have some examples soon.
The notes also indicate that you’ll need to have a working install of FFmpeg and qt-faststart (the readme.txt file says qu-faststart, but it’s actually qt-faststart). To install FFmpeg, see Install FFmpeg and ffmpeg-php on CentOS Easily.
One of the these days I’m going to have to start working with AJAX. To date, I haven’t really had a need, but I’m going to get way behind the curve unless I start working with it now. I recently stumbled on a page in the WordPress Codex called AJAX in Plugins. This will be my starting point for working with AJAX and WordPress. Hopefully I can start cranking out some cool new plugins with AJAX goodness soon. Once I do, I’ll blog with some more details about what hurdles, if any, I faced when developing WordPress plugins with AJAX support.
WordPress 2.6 allows for moving the wp-content folder and the wp-config.php file. Some code guidelines have been published to help developers standardize their plugins with the new changes. The following code will allow code to work with current versions and the upcoming 2.6.