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I somewhat specialize in Wordpress migrations and figured it would be good to get some discussion about Wordpress going in CoC. I have done a ton of Wordpress sites over the last couple of years and try to develop with it as much as possible. I consider it to be a solid yet lightweight platform. It is not just for blogging - I have used it for some e-commerce type sites as well. There was a Wordpress thread in SH/SC but I think this is a more appropriate place for one. As a developer there are more and more Wordpress jobs out there and I think it is a good skill to have if you want to work in web development. One aspect of Wordpress that provides great performance is caching. There is a nice plugin called WP Super Cache. This caches page requests and makes static files that get served up. Very useful for a front page that gets a lot of traffic but doesn't change much. Another caching plugin I use is Batcache. I use this for saving blocks of html that get created from database information. They killed the WP Cache functions from 2.5 but I have found them to be quite useful so I recommend using a plugin that restores them. I use a plugin called WP Cache Inspect to see the status of the cache and how many requests are made per page. I also recommend the xLanguage plugin if you need to do multilingual work. Finally, I purchased a license for the Shopp plugin. It does a nice job of integrating e-commerce into the Wordpress Admin. I still need to set up a complete shop with it but I like the parts I have used so far. Please share any plugins you like or techniques you use. I'll go over some sites I have built in the near future if there is any interest in Wordpress. I am also looking for someone who can work with me on Wordpress projects. I keep getting more and need someone who can assist me. Ned fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Jul 7, 2009 |
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Jun 29, 2009 06:15
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What's the best way you have come up with for having custom PHP pages in Wordpress? I do not really like my method of creating a page template and then creating a blank page using that page template. edit: to make it clear, I still want it to go through index.php and to have access to all WP functions.
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Jun 30, 2009 03:03
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supster posted:What's the best way you have come up with for having custom PHP pages in Wordpress? I do not really like my method of creating a page template and then creating a blank page using that page template. To me the whole template with a blank page thing is great. Templates give you access to the world of Wordpress while allowing you total control over output. If you have a page that does one specific thing then a template is a great way of setting it up. The hard part you are going to run into is setting up something that handles requests properly. The page to template model takes care of worrying about requests. I guess you could develop a plugin if you want things to be more portable. I don't have much experience with plugins that handle different kinds of requests.
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Jun 30, 2009 15:21
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How has Wordpress changed over the last few years ( I haven't used it in awhile ) that would make me want to use it as a CMS over say, ExpressionEngine or RadiantCMS?
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Jun 30, 2009 20:53
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First Time Caller posted:How has Wordpress changed over the last few years ( I haven't used it in awhile ) that would make me want to use it as a CMS over say, ExpressionEngine or RadiantCMS? I think it has become more of a standard than anything else. I am a big fan of ubiquity when it comes to development platforms and Wordpress is all over the place. That being said, Wordpress is kind of rigid as far as what it wants to do out of the box. Wordpress wants to serve up pages and posts according to a theme and that is about it. The good thing about this is that it forces you to focus on the content. Since I primarily work in the publishing industry the most important aspect of a CMS is making it easy and fast for the authors to put in their content and be happy with the way it looks. With my big project right now they are only going to be dealing with posts. Posts are time based and can be organized into categories and tagged. Pages are hierarchical and can be structured with parent-child relationships and you can also give them a numerical order value to determine how you pull them out. Pages can't be categorized or given tags. They are meant to be accessed primarily by their permalink whereas posts can be displayed in many ways - categories, tags, archives, indexes etc... A lot of people don't do much beyond the simple blogging aspect of Wordpress. Usually this means finding a theme they like and modifying it slightly - changing some colors and images. They'll make an about page and then get to blogging. When I use Wordpress as a CMS I usually spend more time with pages then posts because pages are where you are more likely to organize information. Right now I am working on a site for a philanthropist and he wants to list all of the organizations he works with. I set up a page called Philanthropy and then set up children for each area - Healthcare, Art, Community. Then I made pages for each organization under the appropriate section. Because of the parent-child relationships it is easy to pull information about the children onto the parent page. Because pages allow you to assign templates to them I create a custom template for philanthropy that goes about getting the children and spitting out the content as subsections of pages. You can also get to each child as an individual page so it can be somewhat useful for people linking to specific content. The other thing about Wordpress that is really solid is the various caching mechanisms you have. Wordpress can be set up quite easily to handle massive amounts of traffic. WP Super Cache is really great and you can also use something called batcache to access memcached and store popular content in the system memory. I guess the biggest thing for me personally is the fact that Wordpress is free. I'm all about building assets for clients and to me it makes sense for them to primarily pay for customization than to pay for a piece of software. I'm assuming that the majority of their value comes from having a portable CMS free of license issues that has been tailored to present their content in the way they see fit.
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Jun 30, 2009 21:37
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This is probably a good place to ask, does anyone want to take over the (infamous) Wordpress-CLI theme (http://code.google.com/p/wordpress-cli)? I just don't have time or interest anymore but there's a buttload of users out there and it's always bugged me that I never got it to work with Safari (though a list member recently posted a possible patch). I thought I had handed it over to some guy, but he's let it die completely.
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Jul 1, 2009 02:33
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I adore Wordpress. I've used it for maybe half a dozen personal sites, and half a dozen client sites. Like Ned said, out of the box it is definitely somewhat limited, so you have to be comfortable loading in plugins or updating snippets of code in their PHP files to get it to do what you need to do. I've always been tempted to check out Expression Engine, if only because some of the larger clients I've spoken to are hesitant about Wordpress because they think of it just as a blogging platform. I recently had a client call up and spend a half hour asking if Wordpress could do about 25 different things, and the answer was yes to 24 of them (though probably about 15 required hacks or plugins).
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Jul 1, 2009 18:53
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I used this plugin today to take care of some paging issues. Originally I had some content in posts that didn't make sense for it to be there so I turned them into child pages of the page that was originally pulling out the content and then used the next_page_not_post functions to go back and forth.
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Jul 5, 2009 00:02
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Is it possible to restore a Wordpress blog to: 1. A fresh Wordpress install (used Fantastico) 2. I have all the Wordpress files stored i.e. wp-content, wp-admin, wp-includes, etc. I basically saved them through FTP. 3. No backed database file, but a new database created by Fantastico. Thanks guys.
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Jul 6, 2009 03:38
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Kitsch Ersatz posted:Why didn't you save the database?
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Jul 6, 2009 15:07
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Kitsch Ersatz posted:Is it possible to restore a Wordpress blog to: You can just create a new database and modify wp-config.php and point it to the new database and Wordpress will create the table structure and admin account. The wordpress install is quite simple so I think Fantastico just takes out the uploading and db creation steps out the the equation.
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Jul 6, 2009 16:05
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csammis posted:Why didn't you save the database? Because I'm stupid and naive, honestly - never thought I would lose my content and the host wouldn't have a backup. I've got backup methods now thankfully. Ned posted:You can just create a new database and modify wp-config.php and point it to the new database and Wordpress will create the table structure and admin account. The wordpress install is quite simple so I think Fantastico just takes out the uploading and db creation steps out the the equation. Yep, this is what I did. Google cached post of my posts all well so I've got everything mostly back to normal. Thanks guys!
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Jul 6, 2009 18:04
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If you use specific pages with templates you should probably back up the entire DB but if you are just using Wordpress for posts and normal pages then you can get away with doing an export of the content inside of Wordpress. If your site dies then you will need to create a new base install but all of the content should populate once you import it.
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Jul 6, 2009 18:15
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This thread could not have come at a better time. I am building my band a new web site and I am trying to hack together a theme so that the blog/news/showlistings (using a WP show plugin) looks the same as the rest of our website. I used the default theme as a starting point and just sort of slapped things together. Here is my problem: When I open up the CSS and idnexphp in dreamweaver, it looks right. When I upload the theme and try to preview it, it is not. There is no styling at all, it is just all the text after another. I looked around a few design templates but I couldn't find anything related to this problem. Any thoughts?
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Jul 6, 2009 20:11
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Walldo posted:This thread could not have come at a better time. I am building my band a new web site and I am trying to hack together a theme so that the blog/news/showlistings (using a WP show plugin) looks the same as the rest of our website. How are you calling the css file with your template? It should usually be code:code:
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Jul 6, 2009 20:48
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Walldo posted:fixed my problem You are a golden god
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Jul 7, 2009 00:26
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How do you recommend including custom javascript? I understand WordPress has built in library loading, how do you link to custom javascript 'correctly'? A designer and I had trouble getting a clear answer to this via google, so we put the custom javascript in the root of his site and linked to the javascript in his skin to the root. Not optimal, but it worked. Is there an official way?
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Jul 7, 2009 01:24
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jink posted:How do you recommend including custom javascript? I learned this a couple of weeks ago. The answer is wp_enqueue_script(). Usually you want to associate the script with the theme so put it somewhere inside the theme directory. I use /js for my javascript files. code:Since I use jQuery I include it first. As you can see in the link I posted they have a lot of libraries that you can access easily. The second one adds my /js/blog.js file and gives it a name in case anything else requires it to exist. The second parameter is the path to the file - use get_bloginfo() instead of bloginfo() because you aren't echoing it out. The third parameter is an array of scripts that it needs to be able to run. The final parameter is for the version. If you leave it blank it defaults to the current version of wordpress you are running. You can be slack and just do this if you want but there is the possibility of running into conflicts if you have plugins that want to include javascript libraries. code:
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Jul 7, 2009 02:04
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It's actually best practice to include Javascript at the end of your body when possible so I tend to avoid the wp_enqueue_script method and just manually put a script tag at the end of the body using something like the following.code:supster fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Jul 7, 2009 |
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Jul 7, 2009 02:38
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Thank you for the wonderful replies! You have answered my questions expertly. This thread is making me contemplate using WordPress on my site. I've been wary of it due to what seemed like a complicated structure. Ned posted:I learned this a couple of weeks ago. The answer is wp_enqueue_script(). Usually you want to associate the script with the theme so put it somewhere inside the theme directory. I use /js for my javascript files. Do you have any links to wordpress sites you have created? I would love to see what you have come up with. The designer I worked with has this WP Blog: Visual Craftsman (Regular Site) supster posted:It's actually best practice to include Javascript at the end of your body when possible so I tend to avoid the wp_enqueue_script method and just manually put a script tag at the end of the body using something like the following. I agree with this 100%. I have been reading a ton on YUI best practices. Not only am I completely bonkers for minifying javascript, I am also a big proponent for putting javascript at the bottom. I understand that 'enque' is recommended since it reduces conflicts by using a 'name'. Would there be a case of duplicate javascript running when manually inserting it at the bottom of a theme? I don't think you can nest a theme inside a theme? (not sure why this could cause conflicts)
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Jul 7, 2009 20:09
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Yeah, /js/ exists inside of my theme. It is a fun folder! Currently I am setting up 10 blogs for ew.com - 2 of them are new and 8 are migrations from typepad.com. Because Time Inc doesn't have any internal PHP servers they are using wordpress.com hosting. These launch in a couple of weeks but you can see the main site we are testing at http://ewwatchingtv.wordpress.com/ Initially I just put in the Javascript normally but if you are logged into wordpress.com you get a menubar added to the top that caused jQuery conflicts so I used wp_enqueue_script in order to make sure that doesn't happen. I've probably done about 50 Wordpress sites now. I set them up at BET.com and then maintained and modified the blogs for mtv.com for a while. I also built a series of 12 blogs for a project for P&G called swaggerizeme.com which got people to fill out a form on a flash site and then it would create fake blog posts to fill up those 12 blogs and it would buy a google ad in that person's name and then point the ad to one of the blog posts. I just launched moulicohen.com and I have two more sites I am currently working on. I also built This is Historic Times for Deep Hurting and a site for a wallpaper designer named Aimee Wilder. Aimee Wilder is kind of a neat site because it has a traditional blog in there with a different style from the pages that we use to show off her work. Personally I'm not a fan of putting javascript at the bottom of a page. While I can see benefits to doing it in terms of pure speed I just doubt it makes enough of a difference to require a different development paradigm. I like the idea of looking at the head to see all the goodies in a page. A lot of the sites I do are stuck using document.write in the middle of the page anyway for ads so that is going to be the true bottleneck.
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Jul 7, 2009 21:58
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Very cool to see that even Time uses Wordpress. I'll have to remember that next time I'm trying to convince a client that Wordpress is a viable option. I just spoke with a client today who has tons of content they want migrated into Wordpress. Unfortunately I've found content migration into Wordpress always a bit lacking. They're specifically looking to migrate from the Typo3 CMS. Any experience moving data over from that? I did find a few Google results which might prove promising.
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Jul 8, 2009 20:35
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These are the major Wordpress sites used by Time Inc http://edition.cnn.com/exchange/blogs/index.html http://stylenews.peoplestylewatch.com/ Time.com has 9 blogs http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/ http://china.blogs.time.com/ http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/ http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/ http://lookingaround.blogs.time.com/ http://realclearpolitics.blogs.time.com/ http://mideast.blogs.time.com/ http://nerdworld.blogs.time.com/ I think there are a few more titles that use Wordpress. The main sites are usually Vignette based and then the blogs get subdomains. This site seems to have code for doing Typo3 to Wordpress Migration. If you need any assistance I'd be happy to help out.
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Jul 8, 2009 21:03
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My experience with wordpress is confined to inheriting two blog networks, one was done in wordpress and one in movabletype. Both were built years ago. The wordpress one eventually morphed into the current incarnation of the the production site and was phased out and replaced with ektron. Remnants of it laid around that people refused to part with. There are still templates that take down the production site (like horrible asp.net error pages type take down) if the server cant find them. Getting legacy spaghetti poo poo piled on top of you takes it tole. I wont even begin to describe the horror of having to move these things from a linux server that it was built to run on to server 08. God I'm giving myself flashbacks now. Anyway, I'm not with that company anymore. But what I do have is a client that wants me to put in a way they can edit their "About Us" and "Bio" pages. I guess my question is this: How different is the current release of wordpress from what I got at that company? And how friendly is deployment in this scenario? After what I went through with it my instincts tell me to just write some slick asp.net back end for their site from scratch but logic tells me that other people have created wordpress and other stuff that is more than capable.
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Jul 9, 2009 02:08
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Any idea what version of Wordpress they had before? The newer versions are really sweet. Upgrades for Wordpress and Plugins are very simple now - you just put your ftp information into a form and everything else is taken care of. I worked at a company that was an Ektron partner and Ektron felt like more of a marketing company than a competent CMS vendor. Their platform is huge and eSync caused a ton of problems. I'm more than willing to blame a lovely developer on our side for a lot of the issues but there wasn't a single aspect of their product that impressed me and their licensing is a bunch of crap. I suggest going with Wordpress but I am very biased. Deployment is dead simple. I have developed a bunch of sites as subdomains on my server and to move them I just copy over the database file and theme and change two fields in the options table to let Wordpress know the new domain. I think a lot of the issues you had were probably based on the fact that a .Net shop was using Wordpress on their windows servers. That just makes things way more complicated than they need to be. Just buy some 10 dollar a year hosting and you are good to go. The problem with writing your own app for a client means you are always going to be making annoying changes for every little feature they want and you aren't going to be able to pawn them off to some other shop because no one wants to inherit a pissed off client with code from another shop. If you build something for them with Wordpress it will become an asset that grows along with their company.
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Jul 9, 2009 02:44
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Ned posted:Yeah, /js/ exists inside of my theme. It is a fun folder! Ned posted:Currently I am setting up 10 blogs for ew.com - 2 of them are new and 8 are migrations from typepad.com. Because Time Inc doesn't have any internal PHP servers they are using wordpress.com hosting. These launch in a couple of weeks but you can see the main site we are testing at http://ewwatchingtv.wordpress.com/ Incredible sites man, I love the look of every one of them! You do great work.  Ned posted:Personally I'm not a fan of putting javascript at the bottom of a page. While I can see benefits to doing it in terms of pure speed I just doubt it makes enough of a difference to require a different development paradigm. I like the idea of looking at the head to see all the goodies in a page. A lot of the sites I do are stuck using document.write in the middle of the page anyway for ads so that is going to be the true bottleneck. I just found a WordPress javascript/css minifyer: http://omninoggin.com/projects/wordpress-plugins/wp-minify-wordpress-plugin/ It finds all js/css files in the head and joins and minifies. This is the best of all worlds, and wonderful for me! You have convinced me to try out WordPress. I have it installed and am creating a theme. It was incredibly easy to install. The plugins are ample, and I am loving how everything works so far. Once I get further along I'll post a link.
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Jul 10, 2009 23:27
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My WordPress effort https://www.thefragfile.com in less than 2 days, with some generous help from Ned. I am to the point where I'm basically done with formatting and whatnot. I want change the top image eventually. I got approved for Adsense and I'm wondering what the best widget would be for that. Searching brings up a lot of options, all recommended for one reason or another. thanks.
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Jul 15, 2009 02:56
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I started putting together a plugin today to make it easy to pull in vodpod videos into Wordpress. I like the idea of being able to embed all sorts of online video into blogs using the same shortcodes. Makes it a lot easier to bring in the flash videos with swfobject. I'm looking for people who do video & wordpress who'd like to test it out and help me improve the interface.
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Jul 15, 2009 03:58
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Guy LeDouche posted:My WordPress effort https://www.thefragfile.com in less than 2 days, with some generous help from Ned. Wow! Great looking site, good amount of content. I love the columns. I am not sure the colors match up to the 'frag file', I didn't think about video games or fragging when I saw it. I thought of peaceful blogging. 
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Jul 15, 2009 07:24
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jink posted:Wow! Great looking site, good amount of content. I love the columns. My design approach to blogs has always been that its job is to sell your blog for exactly a few minutes until they subscribe to it with rss and never look at it again. This blog makes we want to curl up with a nice cup of tea to read about fragging after a long day of fragging. Edit: Speaking of which, where is my subscribe button? Edit2: This is unrelated. Wordpress needs MySQL? Theres no way to get it to use a SQL server? Bubblegum Wishes fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Jul 15, 2009 |
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Jul 15, 2009 15:45
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Bubblegum Wishes posted:My design approach to blogs has always been that its job is to sell your blog for exactly a few minutes until they subscribe to it with rss and never look at it again. Well, that's certainly a compliment I've never heard before. haha how do I add a subscribe button? I could probably search and find something, but it might not be the most recommended option. e: I got the writers section filled out more, and I'm adding more previews/reviews/media links to help even out the three columns. I'm glad someone likes the aesthetics as-is. I was going to change it and make it a little "darker" to parallel the whole "fragging" thing, but the default one is growing on me. The white background and sparse graphics contrast nicely. Scott Forstall fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Jul 15, 2009 |
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Jul 15, 2009 18:08
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Bubblegum Wishes posted:Edit2: This is unrelated. Wordpress needs MySQL? Theres no way to get it to use a SQL server? Thanks to the great design of PHP, unless you use some sort of database abstractor (almost nobody does) the database functions in PHP are actually named mysql_query, pg_execute, mssql_execute and the like. I'm glad this is here, I've been looking at CMS type systems and finally settled on Wordpress because it's interface is so clean and it seems quite developer friendly, but it takes a while to figure out how to do things the Wordpress way. Like if you know Ruby but going to Rails is way different, or if you know Python and going to Django there's things that you need to learn.
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Jul 15, 2009 18:13
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Found a good subscribe plugin. Thoughts? https://www.thefragfile.com
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Jul 15, 2009 18:35
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Guy LeDouche posted:Found a good subscribe plugin. Thoughts? https://www.thefragfile.com
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Jul 15, 2009 19:20
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Bubblegum Wishes posted:Edit2: This is unrelated. Wordpress needs MySQL? Theres no way to get it to use a SQL server? Wordpress is very simple so it doesn't need a crazy RDBMS to support it. Essentially it has 10 tables and does a lot of caching of data. MySQL is more than enough for Wordpress and way cheaper than SQL server.
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Jul 15, 2009 20:01
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supster posted:I generally prefer AddThis with a normal RSS link somewhere (with bloginfo('rss_url')). got addthis. look better? how do you add the RSS link? I'm new at coding. I'd like to have just the single RSS square up in the top right, to the left of the Home link. possible? got wp super cache. should help things too. e: addthis made my site go all crazy for some reason. loading crawled, stalled. decided to delete it for now. RSS is fine for now. Scott Forstall fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Jul 15, 2009 |
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Jul 15, 2009 20:09
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Ned posted:Wordpress is very simple so it doesn't need a crazy RDBMS to support it. Essentially it has 10 tables and does a lot of caching of data. MySQL is more than enough for Wordpress and way cheaper than SQL server. Oh I'm a huge fan of MySQL over having to deploy an SQL server any day. Its just that my client already has an SQL server and the IT shop they outsource everything to is being somewhat difficult to work with. It would have just saved me the headache of having to explain why I need MySQL when SQL is already there. I would much rather pick 15 extra hours of work to make something work than 15 extra hours of sitting on the phone with some rear end in a top hat. Also Guy LeDouche, it looks great.
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Jul 15, 2009 20:23
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Guy LeDouche posted:got addthis. look better? how do you add the RSS link? I'm new at coding. I'd like to have just the single RSS square up in the top right, to the left of the Home link. possible? code:edit: you should probably use rss2_url.
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Jul 15, 2009 20:24
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Ok, I have a few sort of general questions. Yall have convinced me to use wordpress for the one client I keep talking about. 1) Is there anything I can't do in a wordpress template that I can do with pure html/css? I mean form a site layout perspective. 2) I have several things the client needs to be able to update and several that they do not. Stuff they need to update include their bio's (there's like 4 total), a blog, and an "about us" page. Theres some other pages with directions and stuff that never need to change. In order to build this thing am I better off making each of the bios and stuff a page? I'm reading over all of the wordpress template documentation now so I'm not sure if I'm approaching it correctly yet.
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Jul 15, 2009 23:38
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Bubblegum Wishes posted:This blog makes we want to curl up with a nice cup of tea to read about fragging after a long day of fragging. This quote is too funny to not put up on my site. I hope you don't mind
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Jul 16, 2009 00:09
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