Though I know the theory is that everyone loves new shiny things, this insane upgrade schedule that WordPress has set is nuts. Plugins are breaking all over the place (despite the assurances on the 2.5 announcement post that that wouldn’t happen) and people need to know their site is going to WORK. Especially now that WordPress has hit the mainstream and is used for BUSINESS sites.

Some of the plugins my clients depend on haven’t yet caught up to two versions ago. And it isn’t the plugin people’s fault. There have been twelve versions of WordPress released in the last twelve months. We all have other stuff we DO. I’m sure, if the plugin people do this stuff in their spare time, that they are not happy with this situation any more than my clients are. And clients who are luddites and have trouble uploading a file via ftp cannot do these upgrades, and resent that it’s upgrade time again (“Didn’t we just DO this???” they say to me, complaining about that notice in their admin area.) And I’d rather be designing. I hate doing upgrades. Everyone does.

The 2.5 release looks like it’s addressed issues we’ve been yelling about for a long time, and I’m not complaining about what’s been done, it actually looks pretty cool. I hope that once the shakeout happens (WP never seems to be released in TRUE final form, always in what they refuse to call beta even if it is, another gripe I have) that they sit back and work on other stuff for awhile. Like BBPress or something. Or maybe WikiPress. Or AdPress. Or something. Anything other than yet another new version of WordPress which leads to another round of broken plugins and stripped down functionality just to get a site working after the supposedly necessary upgrade.

And someday I might actually get around to upgrading my own installations . . . after I finish a couple hundred client upgrades. Hopefully I’ll be done with this round before the next damn release.

TODAY ONLY!!! Get a KICKASS WEB DESIGN FOR ONE MEASLY DOLLAR! Yes, that is One US Buck. Not $5000, not $500, not $50, not even $5, but for today only get a Kickass Website for ONE US DOLLAR. ACT NOW!!

And if you act in the next five minutes you’ll also get a FREE FLASH ANIMATION for your homepage with the tabloid star of your choice, FREE ECOMMERCE with a preapproved merchant account, a FREE CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM, and a FREE BLOG! A retail value of over $5000 for a single buck.

Still hesitating? Hang onto your hat, bucko!!! . . . For the next two minutes, absolutely FREE we’ll add top NUMBER ONE PLACEMENT IN GOOGLE for 5000 of your chosen keyphrases, submission to 5000 search engine friendly directories, and a complimentary set of Ginzu Knives, a Popeil Pocket Fisherman, the Amazing Pasta Pot, and this EXCLUSIVE CHIA PET THREE TOED SLOTH!!!

ACT NOW!!

Oh, and by the way, Happy April Fool’s Day!

[tags]April Fool’s Day, Crazy Kickass[/tags]

When designing for WordPress as a CMS, it’s important to know how to design a custom homepage Page Template for your WordPress Theme.

Some of the things I’ve done to enhance a Custom Homepage Page template is to add special homepage widget areas to allow featured content to be added to the homepage and edited easily. If you’re going to do this you might want to make sure you have plenty of text widgets available. You can define more in the functions.php file if the stock 9 text widgets aren’t enough. Need to add php into a widget to add some cool frontpage bell or whistle? No problem, there’s a php widget plugin for that.

Another thing you can do is to add a second loop using query posts to call in your blogposts under your homepage text or into a separate featured box. Or you can get really good using the query post call to include different posts from a few of your different categories, or that are tagged differently. RSS widgets can also give you ways to add other content from areas of your site outside wordpress. Have a forum? Use an RSS widget to call in the latest posts. Have a shopping cart? Use an RSS widget to add the featured, on sale, or newest items from your cart into your wordpress homepage.

Bottom line is that between widgets and template tags, you can make your WordPress as a CMS Homepage jump through some pretty amazing hoops.

If you need help creating a unique site with a great custom homepage, using WordPress as a CMS, and you want a quote, please use this form.

[tags]WordPress as a CMS, Custom Homepage Template for WordPress[/tags]

Story on XP End of Life from Computer World says that Mainstream Support will be in place until April 2009, and security patches until April 2014.

This is important when put into the context of the next windows version after Vista, which will be going modular and moving to a subscription model. Which means being nickel dimed for every damn thing you need to make your hardware or programs work.

I just hope that Linux Flavors and Linux Program Devs see this for the opportunity it is, and get their GUI in order for non-geeks before the 2014 deadline. I’m sure I’ll be making a switch before then, with the only question being whether it’ll be to Mac or Linux. Unless by some miracle there is someday a new kid on the block . . .

[tags]End of XP, Linux, Mac[/tags]

In templating for WordPress I’ve really come to appreciate the versatility that WordPress Widgets offer to a website, so much so that I’m wishing there were more than 9 text widgets! Actually, there can be. You simply have to create more. See below.

If, when templating, you create a number of widgetized areas, and name them according to the place where they’ll show, and which template they’ll show in, you can easily create a site that has multiple areas that are editable. This is especially useful with WordPress Page custom templates.

Many plugins these days also offer one or two widgets as part of what they do. For instance, the NextGen Gallery plugin has both a thumbnail widget, which shows random thumbs from your photo galleries, and a slideshow widget, which rotates through all your images in a slideshow type presentation.

If you’re creating a widgetized area that can only take a certain type of content, you can use the functions.php file to dictate what code will be generated. For instance, to create a widget area named TopRight, that doesn’t live in a “list”, you use this in your functions file:


register_sidebar(array('name'=>'TopRight',
'before_widget' => '

',
));


This gives you a widget area, named TopRight, that is wrapped in a div, and which has an h2 header with the class TopRightTitle.

You can also assign a widget to a page, either as a separate widget area or you can add conditionals to your template. For instance, if there are widget areas you want to show conditionally, then this goes in your sidebar:

?>


Now, you’ve found out how versatile widgets can be, you need more than 9 text widgets, huh? That’s simple. Create your own widgets.

[tags]WordPress Widgets, WordPress Theme Design, WordPress Configuration[/tags]