Since 2005 I have used K2, a really nice minimalistic theme for WordPress. I especially liked the spacing and the fonts used. But alas I had two people tell me that it was hard to read posts on my blog. I set out to find a new theme which was more reader friendly (especially since I am having a few longer posts). I settled with Twenty Eleven.
The Journeyler moving from K2
So in a last adieu. Good bye K2. It has been good knowing you.
I have been a WordPress fan since 2005. I have run several sites using WordPress simultaneously since then. Running WordPress is dead easy. I can wrap my head around it. This past January, a colleague was ecstatic about the release of Drupal 7. I was a bit less ecstatic. (More the I'm glad you are excited, kind of guy.) Then I saw the new admin interface and my interest piqued. So I downloaded a few modules and bam! I saw the power. Amazing. Totally a reckless learning curve but still something beautiful.
My story was much the same as Kevin Dees. [1] Kevin Dees. 9 November 2011. Is WordPress an Anti-Pattern?. http://kevindees.cc/2011/11/is-wordpress-an-anti-pattern . [Accessed: 27 November 2011] [Link] This fall I went to Drupal Camp Austin and was able to wrap my head around a few more things. (Mostly things which showed me there was still a lot to learn.) So from time to time you will see that I will post some things I am learning about Drupal.
While I was at Austin I kept hearing about Drush. Then when I got back home I resized that I needed to download a lot of modules to work on a particular web site. I could do this several times or I could learn to use Drush with Drush Make. Drush is a command line shell and scripting interface for Drupal. Once I found the power of it I started looking for something similar in WordPress. I don't think there is anything exactly like Drush but there are two projects [2] Leo Nelson. 24 October 2011. Drush for WordPress. http://www.leonelson.com/2011/10/24/drush-for-wordpress . [Accessed: 27 November 2011] [Link] worth checking out check out:
However it does not seem that there is a Drush Make for WordPress. Although there has been some thought about how to make Drush Make "cross-platform" and work with other CMSes like WordPress. Wouldn't it be nice if WordPress developers got handed a tool from the Drupal community....
References
| ↑1 | Kevin Dees. 9 November 2011. Is WordPress an Anti-Pattern?. http://kevindees.cc/2011/11/is-wordpress-an-anti-pattern . [Accessed: 27 November 2011] [Link] |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Leo Nelson. 24 October 2011. Drush for WordPress. http://www.leonelson.com/2011/10/24/drush-for-wordpress . [Accessed: 27 November 2011] [Link] |
I have a thing for wanting to know what I have said all in one place… But I would like to be able to see it by location of the comment. So I have thought about bringing my FaceBook comments into my WordPress install. The problem has been that if I bring them in as a post I have to not send them back to FaceBook (Like I do with all my other posts). So I now import them as a custom post type. But my current theme does not support custom post types out of the box. Too bad for K2 (It seems that as a theme K2 is not keeping up with WordPress.). To do this I looked FeedWordPress as recommended here.
I run a website, wycliffe.me, for redirecting traffic (URL redirector). But I need it to have a CRM sort of component to it. So I added some custom fields to the Posts using Just Custom Fields. (I am using Posts, but I could just as well use a custom post type Custom Post Type UI.) But now I want a summary of some of those fields in a special panel on the back-end. So I have collected some links to read and start hacking.
First I need to create an options page in the admin area: http://buildinternet.com/2010/01/create-custom-option-panels-with-wordpress-2-9/.
Next I need a way to collect the data. So I look for a plugin which can search my database and return fields…. sorta like views for Drupal. And wala there is such a plugin: Query Wrangler. (Query Posts might be another option, but I did not try it.) However, this plugin is not powerful enough. I can not search all the fields created by my other plugins, only my custom fields and content types. More power would be ideal.
Next I need to be able to see the widget in my admin area… so I need to widgetize my options panel. Here is where the Reading is a little fuzzy, ’cause I am not sure if many people do this. (Possibly indicating that there is a better way.)
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-create-new-widget-area?replies=5
http://www.webfroze.com/wordpress/creating-multiple-dynamic-widget-areas-in-wordpress/
http://www.themelab.com/2008/04/18/see-how-easy-it-is-to-widgetize-wordpress-themes/
http://wpengineer.com/307/add-wordpress-dashboard-widgets/
http://wpmu.org/how-to-widgetize-a-page-post-header-or-any-other-template-in-wordpress/
Last year I wrote about Selected Works™ & BePress because I was looking at how SIL International might best display the professional abilities of their personnel. This means putting their CV’s and past project activity in an accessible portfolio. I have also been looking at apps like Bibapp, which pulls info from DSpace. Since sil.org is looking at Drupal as a CMS I recently ran across Open Scholar, with an example by harvard.
The last couple of weeks I have been working on applying the Zachman's framework for enterprise architecture to two projects. I have been struggling through the first row and then skipped around a bit. I think I have found the part of the project (any project) I am most passionate about.... Working with Human Interface Architecture and explaining it as a designer to the builder of the Presentation Architecture. In my mind this level needs to be closely related to the Business Process Model and to the List of Business Goals/Strategies. [1] John Zachman. 2008. Diagram of: A framework for enterprise architecture. http://zachmaninternational.com/2/Zachman_Framework.asp. [Accessed: 2 December 2011] [PDF] [Link]
Where do I see myself most helpful in the large project...
This is part of what I learned at Drupal Camp Austin 2011.
Image from http://twitpic.com/3pvrmw/full.
I like my URLs to be semantic, it helps with SEO and it helps users to know what a page is about based on the URL. Today I was looking over one of my old posts and found that the TM is added to the URL. In the admin UI the title looks like this:
Title in the Admin UI
Notice that I have used the & in html in the tiled. This is stripped out by the automatic URL generating engine of WordPress. However the ™ as a unicode character is not removed. Some languages with non-roman scripts need Unicode in the titles, so not all unicode characters should be disallowed in the titles. In fact, all Unicode characters should be allowed in the title field. Sometimes unicode in the URL is allowed, however it is not always best practice (unicode above the ASCII range). I in this case it should not be allowed by WordPress. I have my permalink settings set to custom. I do /%year%/%postname%/.
permalink settings
https://hugh.thejourneyler.org/2010/selected-works™-bepress/ .https://hugh.thejourneyler.org/2010/selected-works%E2%84%A2-bepress/ .
One solution might be for authors to use the following HTML markup in the title:
™™But this is not user intuitive or presenting a “thoughtless process for end users/authors”.
I have been looking for a decent coding application for OS X. I don’t do it fulltime. And I want something intuitive to use, simple to discover the workflows in, and has syntax highlighting. I do CSS, xHtml and am getting into some PHP. I don’t favor Aquamacs‘ command-line-like interface when saving documents.
I have had a few recommended to me:
I have been looking at developing some plugins/themes for Drupal (modules) and for WordPress. Being at DrupalCamp Austin 2011.
I have a reason to use WordPress as a front end and Google Spreadsheet as a backend. I have been looking high and low for a plugin which would allow me to pull content from the spreadsheet and then edit it in the WordPress interface, save it back to the Google Spreadsheet. The advantage to this would be that as record in my spreadsheet would go into a single row, that I could then spice up the UI a bit to make things logical for users. – No luck.
Many people maintain dynamic content on Google Documents or hold volatile data on Google Spreadsheets. These change when collaborators save an update or users submit a form. Occasionally, one may wish to embed the contents of one’s Google Documents or Spreadsheets in a post or page to reflect the latest updates on one’s blog. This plugin seeks to provide this functionality without using an <iframe>. In addition, it caches contents of the Google Documents or Spreadsheets to speed up page loading.
First of all it can allow you to easily convert a link to a document so that it uses Google Docs as the viewer. Secondly, it provides a method of embedding certain document types directly into your post or page.
Fetches a published Google Spreadsheet using a [gdoc key=""] WordPress shortcode, then renders it as an HTML table, embedded in your blog post or page. The only required parameter is key, which specifies the document you’d like to retrieve. Optionally, you can also strip a certain number of rows (e.g., strip=”3″ omits the top 3 rows of the spreadsheet) and you can supply a table summary,
None of these things did what I really wanted. So, I kept looking. Eventually I found this Publishing Google docs to your blog, which talks about taking a GoogleDocs Writer document and letting it be the data for your post. But I wanted Spread sheet stuff.
Then I found HOW TO: USE GOOGLE SPREADSHEETS AS A DATA SOURCE IN WORDPRESS from 2008 (part 2). That is like a century ago. I am not sure there were even WP Custom Posts around then. But this source only tells one how to get data out of Google Spread Sheets (and I think that Google Spread Sheets have updated since then too).
There was one hopeful solution. That is PhpGrid and the phpGrid Lite WordPress Plugin (on Extend). I think I could take my whole data model and apply it inside of PhpGrid and not need Google Spread sheet.
phpGrid Lite WordPress Plugin is based on phpGrid Lite, a free version of phpGrid. phpGrid is a simple and fully customizable PHP control for generating data-bound, AJAX, PHP datagrid.
Grid-based editing, create, read, update and delete (CRUD), are the most common operations for web developers. With phpGrid web-based data editing is easy. Even with little programming background, one can develop professional looking, AJAX-enabled PHP datagrids in just a few minutes.
Finally, I did find out about GoogleDoc’s Data APIby reading Saving Form Data to Google Spreadsheets Using PHP and the Google Docs API by far IN space WEB+, but I just want to plug something in and it to work. So this solution got pushed no further. (And they were using an older, depreciated version of the API).
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