Category: WordPress

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WordPress site design: elizabethbollwitt.com

elizabethbollwitt.com ElizabethBollwitt.com is a site that I recently designed and launched for my sister and her artistic endeavors as a painter. The site is a few months old, and it’s another site that I’ve been meaning to write about. Every time I attempt to, I found a flaw in the site and wanted to wait until I fixed it.

My sister had a site for a while before I offered my services in terms of design, and I also consulted her on how blogging can help boost her efforts in getting her works, if not name, recognized a little more on the internet. The previous site was built purely on HTML with a 4D WebServer working in the background. Getting into the guts of what that programming can do is powerful, but based on what I’ve learned about WordPress and PHP over the past few years, a switch just seemed to make sense.

The one thing that is difficult about the site is the speed in which it loads. I’m unsure if the site I built has something to do with it, and the server that it resides on is of my doing as well. It’s an Apache server that I configured from the ground up, so there is a chance that I might have setup something wrong in the process. Never doing such things before, it was a tough time getting all the ins and outs of Unix sorted out, but I learned a lot. The connection to the server isn’t the fastest, and it shows when you go to load the site.

The design was intended to be simple but based off the previous design to the site. Being the artist, I let Beth pick out more of those elements while I focused on the function of the site. We are currently using the WP e-Commerce plugin to run the store, and for what it does, it’s a fairly effective element to the site.

The overall goal to the site is to provide a better platform for Beth to display her works online. The purchasing is one thing, but she also does a variety of art shows as well as growing opportunities to display her original paintings in galleries on the east coast of the U.S. With the addition of a blog, visitors to her site can follow along as she creates new works as well as get information about upcoming events where her works can be seen and purchased.

There has already been some small successes in the site in terms of sales and exposure. As with anything you do on the internet, success comes over time, and we’re hoping for the best in 2008.

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Launched a new WordPress site: noboundaries.org

NoBoundaries.org NoBoundaries.org isn’t a new site, nor is this relaunch of this design that new because it was unveiled about a month or so ago. I haven’t gotten around to posting anything about it because I got it put into the public realm while switching to a new day job, so it’s been a hectic last few months in my life.

Speaking of, getting this WordPress design put together was quite the task. NoBoundaries.org is a travelogue by my friend, Andy Stoll. He put his money where his month was and set out on an around the world trip, the intention of seeing as much of it as he can. While in the first legs of the adventure, he contacted me about helping him out with his site. That turned into a redesign, so while in China, we coordinated strictly through email to exchange ideas and critiques as the process went along.

The site is probably not as finished as I might like it to be, but it can get pretty difficult to get the details sorted out when Andy is emailing you from Kazakhstan, when he is able to find some bandwidth to check his email. You also don’t want to make changes that he isn’t overly sure about or informed of, not to mention doing something that will take a lot of explanation through email. Remember, Andy is traveling as I write this, and the last thing I want him to be doing is thinking heavily about his website when he should be cranking out blog posts and videos of his travels.

The one, overall goal of the design was to make it not look like a typical blog. Andy had a lot of great ideas, and I did my best to structure it in the way that he envisioned. Sometimes that is easier said than done, but we came to a common conclusion that what we had was good to go before he ended an extended stay in China. If we had more time, especially before he left on his trip, we might have thought out the site in more detail.

As a side note, I might have pushed a Drupal design for the site if this project would have occurred before his departure from the U.S., but Andy already had a WordPress site established. He wasn’t satisfied with what he had at the time he contacted me, looking to overhaul the theme to his site. Switching him to Drupal would have taken too much to teach when someone is busy trying to travel the world.

If you’d like to see an example of some of the things Andy has been doing on his travels, check out the video below of, “What It’s Like: To Walk Through A House In A Fishing Village In China“.

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Upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1

It’s taken me a while to get this site upgraded to the WordPress 2.3.1, but there are a few other sites that I work with that have been running this latest version. I’ve had some low level interaction with this latest release, and there are a lot of positive things that I’ve experienced. Still, there is one thing that bothers me.

Tags.

Now we exist in a world of tags and categories, and they both do nearly the same thing, at least when they work correctly. Still, it makes my wonder about the whole scheme, more to the effect of what it is that I should or shouldn’t be doing with the way I interact with my WordPress blog.

I’ve read enough to know that the tagging feature was scrapped from the 2.2 release because it was getting rushed, so developers opted to wait until 2.3. Well, it’s here. I’m not so sure that it’s ready to be launched into the grand scheme of things because I really am not sure what I should be doing with tags, even after reading a few things by those close to the development process.

Preferably, I would have liked to see one replaced by the other, if tags are indeed going to replace categories like I read into, in one big sweep. For the most part, I’m going to keep ignoring tags for the time being, but that might screw me over in the future.

When it comes down to it, you shouldn’t have to try so hard to understand it. I switched to WordPress from Blogger because I looked at it, and it made sense. Keep it simple, stupid. That’s how I roll, and now I’m the one left scratching my head over what I should be preparing myself for down the line.

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Launched a new Drupal site: knox-church.org

knox-church.org I’ve built a Drupal site for a church that contacted me some time ago about building them a website. The goal, originally, was to make something that would help Knox Church to not only publicize events at the church and provide information about it, but staff wanted a way to easily interact with the site. This meant updating it and getting some sort of events calendar on the site.

The initial creation of the site was in WordPress. I did a lot to separate the site into categories that would manipulate how the page was displayed to those who surfed into the site. The only problem was the training that took place to bring the staff up to speed on how the site operates. WordPress is intuitive, but the average, intermediate to beginner user might have a difficult time grasping the technology. The various plugins I found and used for listing events were effective, but there was a lot more to be desired from what was available at that time.

Since building the first site, I’ve been doing more and more development with Drupal, and the potential has really hit me in the past few months. I have to give a lot of credit to some conversations that I’ve had with Boris Mann about a couple of projects, including this one, that I’ve been working on. Being a guy on the forefront of Drupal development on a global scale, he has really helped to give me ideas on the possible things I can do. Getting from point A to about point G or P takes a little work some times, but when you reach Z, it’s like a lightning bolt hitting you in the face. In other words, yes, Drupal has elements in it that makes changing the world quite possible.

Well, in this case, it’s going to make it easier for Knox Church staff to interact with the site, not to mention an actual events calendar, which is incredibly cool. There is even iCal integration and a slew of other things that I can do that I don’t know about or how to do, but it’s all possible. It’s just a matter of having the time to sort it out.

What I do know is starting to not only make a lot of sense, but it’s going to streamline interaction for those on the site. As events come up, they can be added from any computer from anywhere and at anytime. As information changes, it can be edited and kept up to date on the website. That goes a long way when you make a typo on the church bulletin that forces everyone to show up at the wrong place and/or the wrong time, not to mention an easy way to post cancellations of events.

There is still a learning process to undertake with the staff. You can build all you want and have lots of cool things, but it’s the content that’s key. This is the next step, and the excitement is starting from those who know about the impending transition to a new content management system.

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WP-Cache plugin to help boost page loading time

I’ve installed the WP-Cache NoSymLink plugin to my site for a little experimentation. The goal of this is to cut down on the amount of time it takes to load the various pages and posts within my site, and this plugin is a tweaked version of the original WP-Cache plugin.

If you have a WordPress site that attracts a lot of traffic, this will help speed up page loading by a few seconds. What it does is takes some of the load off your server in terms of generating pages on the fly. With every, single post that you read on any WordPress site, the server it sits on pulls information from a handful of data sources to present you a web page on your browser.

Instead of dragging down server performance and making you wait for all this information to load from a database, the cache stores this data on a temporary basis to get the page to show up on your browser faster. This is really helpful if you have a site with a lot of traffic or host your WordPress blog on a server with a slow connection to the outside world.

Can’t say that I have the worst server or the number of readers that heeds the need for such a plugin, but I’ve noticed a little bit more speed to the load time on my site.

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Crossroads and WordTwit plugins for WordPress

Duane has been cooking up some interesting plugins for WordPress lately. I thought I would install them on my blog and try them out.

WordTwit is the first one, and this is a good one for you Twitter users out there with a WordPress website. Basically, it makes twitter updates for every blog post you make. That way tweets are sent out automatically to alert your followers on Twitter about new blog posts. This post will be my first trial, but I think this is much better than doing it manually.

The other plugin is Crossroads. If you like the Flickr and WordPress like I do, then you should really check this out. It allows you to post an entire set within a blog post as you see below.

This is an old photo set of mine, but it helps demonstrate the function of this plugin. Really useful instead of pointing people to Flickr to see the rest of your pictures for something that you have a bunch of pics about. And let’s be honest, people love looking at pictures just like many folks read the newspaper for the funny pages.

Visit both of the links for those plugins to find out more.

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Missing out on WordCamp

Rebecca and I tried to develop some sort of insane plan to attend WordCamp in San Francisco this weekend. Alas, the income is overshadowed by the expense of such adventures, and there is a wealth of information being shared that I would like to have been apart of.

WordCamp is a 2-day conference for WordPress users and developers. The first day will focus on how to be a better blogger, the second on the development and future of WordPress.

When?
7/21-7/22, 2007
Where?
Swedish American Hall, San Francisco CA – Google Map
Cost?
Twenty-five dollars, with scholarships available.
Why?
To get WordPress users together, learn from each other, figure out the future of publishing on the web, and have a good time. [wordcamp]

Nonetheless, The WordCamp Report is the site to keep up to date with what’s going on at WordCamp over the duration of the event, especially for non-attendees like me. I also heard on The WordPress Podcast that they will be checking in from time to time with updates from the conference, if not giving a nice wrap up in a later episode.

Would have been neat to meet the likes of Matt Mullenweg or Dave Weiner. John Biehler is running amok down there, so I’m sure he’ll have plenty of pictures and things to say about it.

Update: Starting to see a lot of pictures from the event come through on Flickr here.

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It’s a Matt Mullenweg world

I caught this video interview that Matt Mullenweg[wiki], Mr. WordPress founder himself, did with CNet yesterday. It’s really worth watching because you get his insights as to this whole Web 2.0 revolution, of which some say is dead, and other interesting things that he’s been more or less involved with.

I especially like the part about how he developed spam filtering for WordPress because he didn’t want his mom, who suddenly decided that she wanted to start blogging one day, to get bombarded by spam. More so to the fact, Mullenweg didn’t want her getting blasted by the naughty and not so friendly stuff. Akisment was basically born out of that.

One thing that he mentioned was a tool that I was instantly interested in. Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that you can install to have your browser data mirrored between every computer that you need to have synced together. Being that an iMac has been a new addition to our home collection, I have to say that I see why he endorses it. I love being able to switch from my laptop without the headache of not having all the same bookmarks on both machines, and this is far less complicated than importing them between the two. It also works for cookies and all the rest of the data you need and want.

To round out the day, WordPress 2.2 was released last night, up from the most recent version of 2.1.3. There are some decent additions to this edition that makes me pretty interested to really try it out.

  • Atom feeds updated to Atom 1.0
  • Preliminary support for Atom Publishing Protocol
  • Widgets are now supported in core
  • Protection against activating broken plugins
  • “Deactivate All Plugins” button. Sadly, my “Reactivate All Plugins” patch didn’t make it into this release. Hopefully you’ll see it in WP 2.3.
  • Improvements to comment management
  • Code optimizations and speedups
  • Future WYSIWYG support for the Safari browser
  • Post Preview moved into a popup window, rather than an iframe on the Write page
  • WordPress-specific XML-RPC API
  • JQuery support

[gunters]

Dang that Mullenweg. The guy has been busy.

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Security vulnerability: myGallery plugin for WordPress

The other morning, Rebecca told me about some problems with the RadioZoom site. Essentially, it didn’t want to load at all. There was a consistent error with some PHP in the myGallery plugin that I have been using on the site. I don’t use it extensively, and it was mostly to showcase some photos of a soundseeing episode that I did while wandering through Stanley Park.

Mark Ghosh made a post yesterday that answered a lot of my questions about the problem I ran into.

MyGallery Plugin for WordPress If you are using the myGallery plugin for WordPress to display your pictures, please follow the link above and update your plugin to the latest version. A pretty serious remote code execution vulnerability in the plugin has been found and disclosed and there have been scattered reports of hack attempts. [weblogtoolscollection]

I thought it was fairly strange for a plugin to just stop working, and there was a hunch inside of me that was fearing a hacker trying to get into the site, not that there is a whole lot to really get into. This is why I do regular backups to the site, not to mention keeping an archive of all the episodes that are released.

Even though this “error” completely crippled the site, I was able to remove the plugin physically on the server and gain access again. It disallowed me from getting to my dashboard as well. Everything is updated and appears to be running smoothly. If you use it, I would seriously consider upgrading ASAP. I’m fairly sure that my problem was the result of a hacker, so it can happen.

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WordPress 2.1.1 bad, WordPress 2.1.2 good

It’s a little late to be posting this, and my vision is slightly blurry from passing out on the couch. Still, just checked a few sites and some folks are passing this word on. I figure that I should pay it forward as well. Ugh… Did I just use a crappy Hollywood reference?

If you’ve upgraded to the world of WordPress 2.1.1, you are in considerable danger. Nothing life threatening, but before some dude from Turkey cracks into your blog, you need to update your installation to version 2.1.2.

A hacker was able to add a vulnerability to the version of 2.1.1 that was pushed out about a week or so ago, but those still in the world of 2.0.x are fine for now. Essentially, it was a back door that got in by some dude who really, really sucks. So do the right thing and get yourself covered. I’m sure they are trolling for whatever they can get into as you read this.