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Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

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

# ¿ Jun 29, 2009 06:15

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 01:24

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

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.

edit: to make it clear, I still want it to go through index.php and to have access to all WP functions.

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.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2009 15:21

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

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'll go ahead and say that I don't have experience with EE. I think I used it slightly a while back but it wasn't really my thing.

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.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2009 21:37

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

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.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2009 00:02

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

Kitsch Ersatz posted:

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.

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.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2009 16:05

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

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.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2009 18:15

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

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.

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?

How are you calling the css file with your template? It should usually be

code:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" />

Your stylesheet should be named style.css and have the appropriate crap at the top to make Wordpress happy:

code:

/*
Theme Name: My Theme Name
*/

If you need further help post a URL here and I'll figure it out for you.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2009 20:48

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

jink posted:

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?

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:

wp_enqueue_script('jquery');
wp_enqueue_script('ew_blogjs', get_bloginfo('stylesheet_directory') . '/js/blog.js', array('jquery'), '' );

Put this in your header.php sometime before you call wp_head();

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:

<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/js/blog.js"></script>

# ¿ Jul 7, 2009 02:04

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

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.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2009 21:58

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

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.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2009 21:03

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

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.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2009 02:44

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

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.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2009 03:58

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

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.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2009 20:01

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

jink posted:

This blew my mind. The company I work for is investigating how to do this with Drupal. I am wondering if WordPress would be a better solution, especially with WordPress MU.

Drupal just isn't as friendly as Wordpress. Most organizations need sites that encourage them to publish things and Wordpress is friendliest to those who like to write.

Wordpress MU is a useful solution if you want to set up a bunch of sites that various editors have access to. I prefer regular Wordpress because I feel like it gives me slightly more control over the end product. If you want to do a lot of different sites within one system you can't go wrong with MU though.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2009 03:09

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

Follow this model and I'll put together some tutorials for organizing information and using template pages to pull information from their children.

If you aren't concerned about blogging then I'd make various work experiences into posts so you can tag them with skills you used.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2009 05:13

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

Bubblegum Wishes posted:

I have another question. This one is unrelated to the project I've been working on. Is there a way for phpbb and wordpress to use the same users?

I have a client with a site that runs phpbb. The forums are the only part that work, the rest of it is garbage and needs to be rewritten. From everything I've seen wordpress would be great for the rest of it.

This is certainly possible. I think this is what you want. Mind you this should make it so the comments come from phpbb threads and all the users are in there.

Your Wordpress publishing will probably remain a Wordpress specific account.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2009 19:25

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

Google Float Tutorial. Also use a reset.css. These questions are better for the Web Design and Development thread.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2009 15:19

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

You probably want to set up a template that has the appropriate code in it and then set that as a page called home and assign it to be the page that exists as the home.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2009 15:55

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

I also created http://siegelgale.com/ with Wordpress.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2009 15:37

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

supster posted:

I just noticed that pages under services are sending a bunch of requests (for images) resulting in a 404s that is slowing down the load a lot (4s+).

I just set up the model. The place I was working for while I was building that was run by a cokehead rear end in a top hat who went insane and fired me for the stupidest reason.

So they yanked the services pages from the old site and improperly put them into the system. You can see the old version here.

You can see how I built things at http://sg2.1080d.com/ - http://sg.1080d.com/ was their old site.

The Work section is kind of funny. It is flash that reads from an xml file. I parsed that file with php and then had it make pages for each client and then add in meta field info with the images. I have that set up on http://sg2.1080d.com/work/ but they ended up going back to the flash one because I didn't tack on the fancy navigation before being fired. I just have an inner slide going there.

Anyhoo - everything is essentially Wordpress.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2009 15:56

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

You probably want to look into clickmap tracking or something like that. There is nothing internal to Wordpress for keeping track of what elements people click on.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2009 18:50

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

Based on your requirements I think you'll want to install Postie.

I was looking at qTranslate the other day. I like the way it has the multiple slots for each language. I think that is easier for splitting up content on each page. With xLanguage you end up putting spans around each language. This can be a bit easier on pages where you have lots of images mixed with the text and don't want to redo your images for each language.

Either way the multilingual aspects of Wordpress are in good shape. I'm trying to put together a model for websites with Japanese and English content that displays to computers, Japanese cell phones, and iPhones. One of our tasks will be figuring out the best way to enter in a restaurant menu.

I'm not too concerned about trying to shoehorn everything into Wordpress. Most clients and websites need a customer facing area where they can easily add new content and change existing content. I feel Wordpress is the easiest way for most people to do this. I also think Wordpress is constantly improving and will become a great asset in the future. Since the model is very simple it is not hard to do different things within that model. The templates also allow you to go off and do things that Wordpress wouldn't normally do without messing around with the guts of Wordpress.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2009 15:53

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

pipebomb posted:

code:
<a href="http://www.instapaper.com/b?v=4&k=USER_KEY&u=<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink()); ?>">read later</a>
Anyone want to see if they can make this work using the info above? I wasted hours on it yesterday and cant get a response from the developer (which is cool, it's not his problem).

Can you shove the post id into get_permalink()?

# ¿ Aug 4, 2009 17:17

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

Your issue is probably the fact that your content comes out with p tags. In order to shove it into the actual content you'd have to apply a filter that appends the image right after the first p tag opens so that the text wraps around the image inside of the p.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2009 03:59

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

There is also BuddyPress for WordPress MU and Intense Debate. But I think bbPress is probably the best solution because I think forums are best for community. Comments are better for reaction.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2009 16:02

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

thematic_header() is in /library/header_extensions.php

I don't know if it is a good idea to try and develop a new theme based on thematic until you understand what thematic actually does. It is probably easier to start building off of the kubrick theme.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2009 19:02

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

Manny posted:

Thanks. I decided I was going all about it the wrong way anyway. Doing a proper mockup in PS now, then I'll make it in HTML, then I'll pick apart the default theme and get things working in mine.

That is usually the process I use. Just try to keep your markup for the post related stuff the same way the default theme likes to spit things out and you will be in good shape.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2009 22:32

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

According to the function reference it needs to be sanitized.

code:

$metakey = "Harriet's Adages";
$metavalue = "WordPress' database interface is like Sunday Morning: Easy.";

$wpdb->query( $wpdb->prepare( "
	INSERT INTO $wpdb->postmeta
	( post_id, meta_key, meta_value )
	VALUES ( %d, %s, %s )", 
        10, $metakey, $metavalue ) );

I looked at your code and you do have a prepare in there so I guess things should be fine. Just check a couple of the ones where you insert everything from $p.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2009 21:49

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

Do you have access to your db? You need to go into the options table and update the location of your Wordpress install to http://www.blog.daneilcouper.com/. There should be two settings in the options table that deal with the url of where your blog is. If you change them you should be set.

However, https://www.blog is a very lame subdomain.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2009 03:49

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

Probably a shortcode issue. Which plugin are you using?

# ¿ Sep 1, 2009 15:32

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

You can't - wordpress.com strips out Javascript inside of posts. You'd have to use a custom theme for that functionality.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2009 02:34

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

You'd have to host it elsewhere. There are a ton of themes built around adsense.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2009 03:26

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

Go with Lithium Hosting. I host all of my stuff there and DarkLotus is the best SysAdmin around.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2009 04:39

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

Can you link to the site so I can get an idea of what you actually want to do? It isn't hard to pull old content from a category.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2009 15:10

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

I suggest looking for another plugin. That thing is pretty poo poo.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2009 02:39

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

Basically you just need to set up a get_posts loop where you hardcode the category and order by date posted.

code:

 <?php
 $postslist = get_posts('category=your_category_id&numberposts=10&order=DESC&orderby=date');
 foreach ($postslist as $post) : 
    setup_postdata($post);
 ?> 
 <div>
 <?php the_date(); ?>
 <br />
 <?php the_title(); ?>   
 <?php the_excerpt(); ?>
 </div>
 <?php endforeach; ?>

# ¿ Sep 8, 2009 16:15

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

Make sure your .htaccess can be written to by the server and then go save your permalink settings.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2009 16:42

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

Alfalfa posted:

How do I check all of this? It's hosted on hostgator if that helps and it didn't have this problem when it was under a different sub-domain.

Connect to the ftp server and check the root of your html directory. There should be a .htaccess file in there. Get info on it and change the permissions. If you need me to take a quick look I can help you out.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2009 17:31

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

kontona posted:

Really glad I found this thread. I've had an on again/off again relationship with wp. Recently did an install and was amazed at how streamlined it us compared to when I last used it. (about 1 and a half years.)

At any rate, starting up a personal blog and wondered if there were any plugins you guys would recommend. So far I am using wp super cache, sociable, snazzy archives, smart ads and lightbox2. Looking for something to handle my seo at the moment. Any recommendations?

There are two plugins that a guy used on a site I built in order to mess with the SEO. Headspace2 and the Robots Meta plugin.

Wordpress is pretty SEO friendly straight out of the box. Google seems to like Wordpress sites.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2009 15:40

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 01:24

Ned: May 23, 2002; by Hand Knit

Can you do it with a page/template combination? A template probably won't send out headers unless you tell it to do so.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2009 19:47

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Wordpress - Development, Themes, Plugins.

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