Schlagwort-Archive: webdevelopment

web 2.0

Happy with WordPress.

I’m rather happy with the current path the WP community is following – notable cool things in the upcoming months will include

  • create your own post types from within the admin panel (#9674 (Better support for custom post types) – WordPress Trac)
  • BuddyPress will become a feature for standard WP.org installations
  • Custom taxonomies are becoming progressively easier to implement
  • It’s getting progressively easy to work with custom fields.
  • There are two WP Google Summer of Code projects dealing with AJAX inline reordering of pages on the manage post screens.

That said, I’m not sure I really need the media handling improvements now the focus of the WP 2.9 development. But I think it’s a generally a good thing. Now if they only allow easy flickr integration or API searching of pictures from the edit screens and improve the internal linking features, I’d have a hard time to find a lot of thigs I still don’t like about WordPress…

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My WordPress 2.8 wishlist

With the upcoming release of WP 2.7, the software is maturing a lot, and it’s also getting a lot more sexy, and not just visually. But if you know humans – we’re known to have unsatisfiable needs – it won’t surprise you that there are some things I’d like to see in version 2.8 that are not in version 2.7 yet. Here is a short list of the more important ones –

  • nested AJAX sorting of all hierarchical structures in WordPress – pages, categories, possible other taxonomies
  • on-the-fly creation of pages on the page management screen like it’s been done with categories in 2.7
  • easier selecting and managing of categories and tags via AJAX
  • an is_child() function to test if a particular hierarchical element is a direct or indirect child of another element
  • inline editing of post and page contents
  • better media/image handling

Looking beyond 2.8, I’d definitely like to see the creation of new post types and taxonomies to become core features, the latter effectively giving WP the ability to “simulate” a multiblog without really being one.

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web 2.0

Finally a “Wow.” out of the box.
The Visual Design of WordPress 2.7

For the last couple of years, I’ve been using WordPress for a number of blogs and small websites that I have built. One of the first things I changed was the admin user interface. WP has strengths and weaknesses under the hood, but the admin UI that came with it was never nice to look at. The core developers even hired a supposedly expensive web usability consultancy, happy cog, for a redesign of the admin area of WP 2.5, and all they got was an interface for which there were plugins available even before the release of the version itself. So I suppose it wasn’t too big a surprise when, this summer, rumours and then a special branch of WP (“crazyhorse”) appeared that once again radically changed the admin interface. And now, a couple of weeks prior to the prospective release date of WP 2.7, there are the first visuals of what WP 2.7 is really likely to look. Some elements thereof were already apparent to those using the nightly builds of the software, but there are also a lot of changes that, for the first time, give WP a look that doesn’t hurt my eye but instead allows me to say “Wow!” out of the box.

The funny thing is, though, that, apparently – quoting the WP developer blog – the design has mostly been done by Matt Thomas and Andy Peatling (who is otherwise the buddypress guy at automattic) over the course of the last week. Which – for all the excitement – begs the question: why not earlier?

To have a look at some mockup screens and read even more about this, check out the link below.

The Visual Design of 2.7.

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Comparing Apples with… Apples.

In all the years – ok the couple of years – that I’ve been using blog-CMS I’ve not seen a more pointless discussion of the relative merits of the systems Movabletype and WordPress. Still, enjoy the absurdity…

The Multiplicative Hypothesis » God I Hate WordPress

By the way, almostadiary.de was first on Blogger/blogspot, then on MT, then, briefly, on Expression Engine, and now it is on WordPress. All systems have strengths and weaknesses. But they are usually related to the way they are handling content, not the templating. Currently, in my opinion, EE is the most flexible, but also the most complex system and spam protection did not work well. WordPress is less flexible, mostly because it’s a single blog system, but it’s fast, easy to SEO, there’s a hack or plugin for everything, and it’s good on Spam protection.

That’s why I’m using WP at the moment. But the login effect is hardly impossible to overcome. And WP really needs todo something about the admin interface.

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self-referential

Less Common Browsers.

I recently had the opportunity to look at this page with an old NS 4.x browser and – it was not pretty. I checked this page in NS 7 and Opera 7 and there were only minor deviations from the intended look (in IE 6). The share of users with less common browsers is evidently limited, but there are nonetheless quite a few. So if those of you not using any of the above mentioned browsers plus IE 5 get the impression that your screen would prefer to explode instead of displaying this page, I would be grateful if you could send me a screenshot to figure out what the problems are. Thanks in advance.

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