Posts filed under "wordpress"
I’ve been thinking about the whole situation and how some people might feel a bit left out of the whole design process with regards to Shuttle. So in order to get some more feedback, and hopefully get a few ideas that we might not have come up with ourselves, I’m going to start writing these WorkShops. Every Workshop we’ll be dealing with the specific aspect of the WordPress Admin section the Shuttle team is currently working on.
In this inaugural edition, as you might have guessed, our attentions is going to be centred on the Dashboard. Currently as it stands, we’re effectively showing exactly what is shown currently in the Dashboard, except we’ve gone and relocacted the various sections (to make them more user centric), given them some colour and generally spiced them up. The question open for discussion is whether or not we’re missing something fundamental that you’ve seen elsewhere or you think the WordPress Dashboard could use.
Just off the top of my head,
- Is there any specific GPL stats plugins that you think would make a fine addition to the dashboard section?
- Would it be useful to be able to pick and choose what feeds are available to you in the WordPress feeds section?
- Any functions that you have running on your dashboard currently that you think should be included in the core?
Concentrating on one specific aspect at a time will enable everyone to take an active role in the development of the WordPress Administration Panel.
Fellow 9ruler Greg over at Airbag Industries has posted about the lack of design in the WordPress Administration User Interface. I thought it prudent to address his concerns while at the same time try get everyone up to speed on the Shuttle project.
Personally I think it’s just wrong to criticize a completely open source project like WordPress as though it owes you something, unless of course you’re prepared to do something about it. WordPress is not the vision of one person, but the collaborative efforts of thousands. The fact of the matter is that when someone doesn’t like how WordPress does something, or know that they can do a better job, it’s well within their right to do just that. It’s not frowned upon, but actually encouraged and aided whenever possible. Greg isn’t saying any new here, countless others have voiced this opinion, except some have chosen to do something about it and help the community by contributing.
It’s very funny that he should mention the fight between the developer and the designer. I experience this every day, only it’s between the engineer and the architect. I will say that most fights/arguements come between the designers on the team rather than from the developers side. Joen, Michael and I are constantly bickering over 2 pixels!!! That’s when the rest of the team keeps quiet as the three geeks go at it, explaining the virtues of keeping things compact or not.
The shuttle project is ALIVE and kicking. In fact it’s hasn’t been this busy since we announced the project back in December of last year. The esteemed Bryan Veloso has also been added to the development team. We’ve recently finished a great milestone in the project after MUCH coming and going between us. Many people ask about showing what the interface is going to look like, and while NOTHING would make me happier than to show EVERYONE what we’re up to, I’ve got to make sure I don’t because the mock ups change on a weekly basis, as we work through things between us. We’re currently on version 27 of the main write up area. Expect several mammoth posts crossing over several blogs when this is done, but until then, know that we’re on top of things. It’s not the fastest process by any stretch of the imagination but it’s getting there.
If you’ve downloaded the latest beta or played around with a blog on WordPress.com then you’ll see a few changes from the current 1.2 install. Subtle things like the blue colour now found in the admin panel, the moveable sections in the sidebar, or the increase/decrease textarea. While these are still not styled properly the fact that they are part of the design is not a mistake, it’s due to the give and take over several months.
Easily the single biggest draw to using WordPress (apart from the price of course, which is priceless didn’t you know), is without a shadow of a doubt the actual community that has gathered around these handful of PHP files. I know I couldn’t do a slew of things as easily as I’m doing them now without the community. Whenever I want to do something, someone’s already taken the time and done it for me.
So you can imagine my shock when I’ve actually come up with a couple of things that I’d like to do that unfortunately haven’t been touched upon, or at least I’m completely ignorant about. If they do exist and you know about them, please tell me, you’d make my day for sure, maybe even my week :)
RSS Control
WordPress provides you with the native ability to provide an rss feed for any category you choose, by adding a /feed at the end of the link (you can read a much more indepth explaination on Phu’s site). Very nice, very simple. Unfortunately this gives the user absolutely no indication of what feed they’re actually subscribing to, unless of course they decides to have a wad through the damn url, and then they’ve got to change the name manually in the aggregator to distinguish between the several feeds from the same site. Ideally what I’d like is a plugin (don’t like hacks very much as they’re usually broken when you upgrade and that’s a complete shag) that helps me control the feeds themselves. Lets me give different category feeds a different name.Download Posts
Now I know Chris is working on this, but he seems to be having a wee bit of trouble implementing the thing. So I’m going to put it out there, maybe someone’s got the answer because they’ve done it already etc. What I’m looking for here is a simple plugin that will download my posts and all associated information (not so bothered about comments although that would be an excellent feature), in a specific order, for a specific period of time. The alternative is to make a theme and download that, which I did, but it doesn’t have the level of control a plugin has, and also it would have to be used with a plugin such as the Custom Query String plugin (which isn’t working 100% for me for some reason) to control how the order the posts are shown.
Ok to all you crazy lazy cats out there, thinking that it’ll be ok not to upgrade your wordpress install. You might be ok, but then again you might not be. A couple of hours ago something strange happened here at the Kode, and I effectively lost all my files that are loose in the root directory in the wordpress markup. Yup, EVERYTHING. Strangest damn thing in the world. I was chatting to my bro and he tells me I have no index. WTF? I go in there and sure enough I’ve lost everything.
Now that the security flaw has been exposed every cracker hacker shitfart has decided to give it a go and see what shit they can stir up. Fuck you cracker. So tip to the wise, UPGRADE NOW!!!
On to happier news, BKV4 should go live later on this evening, if not tomorrow morning. I might change my mind, although I’m determined to finish it off tonight.
Right this is the first time I’ve sent an actual question/request to Dreamhost since I started with them a while back. The question was why we don’t have pspell module on the server. One of the things that I would love to have in Shuttle would be the facility to have a spell checker, like the one used by gmail, however as I’ve found out for myself that requires certain things to be installed on your server in order for such things to be feasible.
It’s a crying shame, since it’s freely available and part of php, so I’m perplexed it’s not installed as standard. Now the nice people at Dreamhost have contacted me in less than 12 hours asking me what the modules are and that they should be able to get it up and running, hopefully. Let’s see. It’s really a test for many things. Your web hosting selection goes through a real test when there’s a problem or a question or feature at hand, and how they actually go about it and deal with it is what makes you decide to continue with them or move to greener pastures.
Lack of support issues where what made me leave my previous host. It’s intersting since the DO forums have been playing up big time in the last couple of months with constant down times. MT ain’t so great after all :).
[quickpic image=shuttlelogo.jpg]
I originally thought we’d have completed Shuttle a while back. Alas that has not been the case. I don’t want to say I underestimated the work, but rather, the project itself evolved into so much more than just a tweak to the css file. The reason I thought I’d talk about this is because of the recent releases of two excellent admin beautifications for WordPress. Both SpotPress and the Tiger Admin skins are excellent examples of how the current default admin can be improved upon.
I love the fact that Joe made SpotPress into a plugin, just shows how versatile the WordPress architecture actually is. Steve Smith has kindly jumped into the whole issue and knocked it completely out the park with his Tiger Admin Skin. See if the man had released this 5 months ago, honestly I wouldn’t have bothered with Shuttle and I bet it would have eventually made it into the core WordPress admin, much like Kubrick made it as the default theme for WordPress. The Tiger admin modification has seriously enhanced my WordPress user experience. It’s very subtle and slick all in one.
The thing is though, we’re actually making some progress with Shuttle. It’s not finished, hell the coding hasn’t even started yet (well not exactly, those of you that are on the ball with regards to WordPress development might have picked something new up…). There is a lot of work that still needs to be done, however as some people have come to understand, we’re not just talking about modifying a css file. The project is a great deal more involved than that. This project tackles functionality as well as beauty and when it’s released a few more issues you might be surprised about.
I suppose I wanted to make sure everyone understood that we’re completely and utterly behind this project and while I love Tiger, I can’t wait for the day I start using Shuttle, simply because to me it’s more WordPressy. A natural progression of the WordPress Admin interface.
I must say that the Tiger admin panel definitely pumped me up for tackling the project full on and trying if anything to solve those dead ends we’ve been hitting. It’s been a very busy couple of months for many of us, and as such the project has taken a hit. That’s being rectified. I wish I could give a date when this is going to be released, but I don’t see it happening for a good few months to come. Maybe September sometime might be a good target, really depends on a number of factors.
My god for a second there I thought I’d actually forgotten what it was like to be truely inspired. I draw a lot of inspiration from graphic novels and graphic design in general. The thing is though it’s been a while since I’ve been truely inspired to do some kick ass work in the past week and a bit. I will admit that a lot of it has to do with my current slump I’m in (which is why the updates haven’t been fast and furious as they usually are around these parts).
So I’ve been reading and trying to gain inspiration. It’s not soo much that I don’t have the ideas, or the projects to sick my teeth into, it’s just that right now I’m lacking that drive that motivates me to go for it with absolutely everything I’ve got.
Yesterday I sat down and read Mark Millar and J.G Jones’ Wanted. Now usually I’ll buy a book based on the writer. Seldom do I go for the artist alone. This was not the case say 6 years ago when the artist was everything. The thing is though, that while the writer makes me think, COOL, that was great. It’s the artist that will make my jaw drop, and my imagination race for a while, and there’s this silence in my head, as everything begins to become clear and I know what I was missing all this time.
It’s the spark that’s been missing, and thanks to Jeff Johnson and a pin up he did for Wanted I’m inspired and I can start doing things again. I’ll be updating everyone about the portal we spoke about a while back, as there have been some interesting development in that area. Just need to get my thoughts in place before we get that going.
I’ve started compiling information and ideas for what I want to do with Broken Kode. The site is a constant evolution. Everytime I get into one of these I end up knowning that much more about WordPress, PHP, CSS and other web technologies. I also end up knowing and probably contacting various plugin authors around the world asking them why their beautiful plugin does this or the other. It’s how I learn, and I guess that’s why I like to dive into the design and coding of websites. Since this is my playground this is what gets hit first.
Originally I didn’t want to touch the design of the site for at least a year. However the actual site mandate outgrew the design and that was something honestly I didn’t actually think of. So what’s the deal now you ask? Well there are many new ideas I’d like to implement and the whole site shouldn’t take me more than a week to deal with coding-wise (friggin IE will probably take up more time fixing, but I’m more prepared now than I was a version ago so that’s reassuring).
However that’s not what this post is about. In doing my research I decided to see what new functionality I could actually provide to users and to the site in general. Where to start?
Well we’ve got the excellent BlogginPro and WeblogToolsCollection doing a bang up job day in, day put, providing us with the latest information about themes, plugins etc. Scripty Goddess has been very quiet of late, but I’m sure she’ll get back into it sooner or later. How about going to the Wp-plugin repository. Ok, so it’s not the easiest of things to download plugins from. Every file is seperate, and only in some cases do all files come as one whole zip file. What a shag, 15 plugins later and their respective readme files downloaded seperately, placed in their own folders for archiving, and I started thinking to myself… there’s something seriously lacking in the WordPress community.
That something is a well structured, fully searchable, design , coding and interview PORTAL. What I’m talking about is an actual graphical website that provides the latest WordPress information in such a way that makes it appealing. Tutorials and interviews could be active features of the site. The reason behind this is pretty apparent. You have one place to go to for information, articles, tutorials etc.
I would happily contribute the design of the website, and write an article a week for it. I’m sure I could persuade people (under penalty of death ^_^) to contribute stuff to the site as well. Hell we could have a rolling RSS counter on the side that links directly to BlogginPro and WeblogToolsCollection as well.
Ideally speaking that is what the official WordPress website should be all about, alas it’s not my baby and I’m not the one fronting up the cash and time to run it and maintain it so Matt is obviously free to do as he pleases with the site. Just got me thinking is all.
I know people like James, Podz and others would be pretty good for this sort of thing. They’d really enjoy it I think, better sense of community. I dunno, maybe I’m just rambling here.
Structurally I guess it would be something akin to PixelSurgeon or Wired, although I would want more images involved, make it less boring.
I’ve been having some serious WordPress funkiness going on, something to do with mySQL and stuff. Hardly what I want to talk about today but anyway, if you see an error message, it’s not me having a laugh, just so you know.
Every couple of months I jump into a new software package and gut it to try and make it sing for me. I’ve found that this is a way of keeping myself on the learning curve. Always pushing myself, because it’s incredibly easy to reach a comfort zone once you get working, and your brain turns to mush after a while. That’s something I realised early on in life, directly after leaving University, I knew that’s what I had to do to keep my brain sharp.
Last 4 or 5 months I’ve been concentrating on CSS and only dabbling in PHP. My Achilles heal though, is without a doubt my lack of PHP skills. In effect I have none. That however is going to change. I’m determined to change that. WordPress sites run on two languages, CSS to style it and PHP to run it. In order to get things done I can see where the PHP code is coming from, however for some reason I never thought that maybe it would be a good idea to actually try and make sense of the code, by learning the basics, I mean how hard can it possibly be?
Turns out, for me at least it’s not really that difficult, because I’m already very familiar with the concepts surrounding the coding language. I’m an Electrical and Electronic Engineer. I studied C and C++ at University, I know what a function is, an array, an integer, string and what all the operators mean. I never enjoyed it, because I never understood the joy of the C. I still don’t and don’t particularly want to try and find out, as the actual use, is probably lost on me. PHP however is a completely different story.
I scouted the internet and found these incredibly useful tutorials. Go to the tutorials by Melonfire.
By going through the first couple of tutorials, I assure you you’ll have a much better appreciation for how your site works. You’ll realise that things aren’t a black art any more. I feel soo much more comfortable hacking the plugins I’ve got running the site to actually work in the way I want them to. Which basically means a lot more work on my side. I guess it was inevitable for me to dive into PHP, if you’re feeling scared of diving into PHP, seriously I think you shouldn’t worry too much. The hardest step is the first one.
Not that I plan on writing any plugins any time soon, that’ll take at least another year ^_^.
While ‘conversing’ with Phu Ly, I thought that it would be cool to organise a WordPress meetup in London. I mean why should Denmark have a meetup and the UK be left behind in this area? Now for all those of you thinking to yourself, well how good is it actually going to be? I dunno, what I will say however is that I’ve done this online to real meeting endevour once before, for the Designate Online meetup a few months ago. I didn’t know ANYONE, and everyone else seemed to know each other. I got Martina to tag along just in case I had to use her as an excuse to leave.
Turned out to be one of the best evenings/days I’ve had in a while. Just a really good bunch of people, talking all sorts of things. Got some pointers about design, talked about topics that ACTUALLY interest me, with people that understand what the IE peekaboo bug is, know what Pixelsurgeon is etc.
This would be slightly different in that most people would know if I mentioned the design in any one of these blogs. Hey I might even bring a print out of a section of what Shuttle is currently looking like.
So if you’re in the UK and you’re interested in making a day event in London, prefereably on a Saturday, add your name and tell everyone else about it as well.
So hopefully rather than ‘conversing’ with each other, we can actually TALK to each other, and generally put faces to names.
I propose the:
30th of April.
Too soon? Too late? What does everyone else think?
I’ve got a backlog of magazines the size of a small mountain and I’m just filing though it over the next couple of days. Today I went through WebDesigner issue 103. Now generally speaking it’s a decent enough magazine. I like some of the tutorials they’ve done (bearing in mind I’ve only bought this mag twice before), this issue had a massive feature about web templates. The last third of the article actually had a decent enough write up of blogging templates and generally explained a lot to the novice about blogs in general.
Our very own ScriptyGoddess got a mention, as did Not (that) Ugly as well. It was really strange seeing these familiar net faces being mentioned in a magazine, but there you have, well deserved Ladies. It’s great to see that WordPress is spoken in the same breathe as Blogger and Moveable Type, hopefully in the coming years it’ll be Blogger, WordPress and then Moveable Type as WP takes over.
Searching for a link to Webdesigner, I’ve got to say for a magazine that is all about the web, that’s an incredibly CRAP online presence they’ve got there. I mean what the hell? Poor, poor showing guys. I expected oh soo much better.
As my magazine subscription to Computer Arts comes close to an end, I’m really thinking about switching over to Digit, as the content in there is more focused on actual reviews and articles, and they provide and really support open source programs. Blender for example was featured in the previous issue, and I found out about Expression via Digit.
I thought I’d give a small update on the progress of this little project as I’ve not spoken or said anything about it since Joen joined the team. It’s been nearly over a month since we started working on this little project in ernest. The first 2 weeks were spent discussing options, thoughts, design issues, and everything else under the sun. Many e-mails were exchanged between us, and then Joen got the ball rolling with the first stab at a sketch. Since then it’s been a pretty cool session of photoshop tennis between Michael, myself, Joen, and even our code-fu guru Chris jumped into it as well.
What’s great is that with every iteration you can see the actual design developing more and more clearly. I flick through the original sketch and what we’re currenly on and I just have a massive smile on my stupid mug, because I can’t wait to be able to start using this interface. Trust me when I say that it’s going to kick some major ass in both the design department and the functionality/usability department.
The thing is good stuff honestly takes time. We’re all exceptionally busy people, and something of this scale takes hours of careful thought. None of us are in a rush to get it done for any reason. When it comes out it will be something beautiful, and will elevate the ‘Press’ from the typewriters. In the meantime if you’re really wanting some colour in your blog check out Not That Ugly for something different for your interface.
So Monsieur Alex King has begun his second annual WordPress Theme design competition. Interesting. Now I remember a few people got really annoyed with the last one of these, and while I really am with Alex on the reason behind the competition I can see where the apprehension can come from.
Will I be entering the competition? Highly unlikely. There is several reasons for this:
- The first being that I’ve got loads of other projects on my plate that take much higher preference.
- The second and in my opinion much more important is the fact that a good template takes a hell of a lot of time and effort. I mean that. It can take months of proper preparation and hours of testing, for all the bugs and kinks to be ironed out. What you think Manji was the way it is the first time it came out? No it wasn’t. That’s why we’re on version 1.1, and gearing up to version 1.11 (hopefully I’ll have some cool news to report on this very soon).
The point I’m trying to make is a template competition can be a good thing, but the judges will have to be able to discard the themes have got some obvious fundamental flaws. Some people might take short cuts, and might not really care about what the CSS looks like or is structured. It took me something like a week to get the structure of the Manji CSS correct and cleaned up in the way it’s presented. I had the luxury of time on my hand. Will the people entering this competition have the same luxury?
Oh don’t get me wrong I don’t claim Manji is perfect for a second, but I think anyone who’s contacted me with regards to a problem I’ve tried to solve it for them straight away, even though I’m not a coder, and generally speaking they’ve not been serious.
Which brings the next point up, what happens to the forums when people start asking questions left right and centre? Are the creators of the themes going to offer support or are they going to be lumped on the poor support forums? When Manji came out I had a forum that killed my site for a day and a half. Sorry that’s not happening again. Until I find a forum system I can trust and update easily I’m not putting another Manji forum up.
So good luck to all those entering the competition, I hope it’s a success, but if you’re thinking about entering be prepared for a lot of work ahead, unless you’re a coding guru ^_^.
In case you’ve missed it there has been some talk around a WordPress manual as proposed by Larry Ayers. This would be a manual of sorts to help out the newcomer etc. Seems that Larry has contacted Matt about this and there wasn’t any else doing something similar, soo Larry thought it best to get going.
Problem is Larry is tackling a subject that Podz, Craig and Carthik (to name only a small few) have been slogging away at for the past year to the best of my knowledge. In that time they’ve amassed an emmense amount of posts on the support forums, have kept the wiki alive and hammered away at the Codex as well. In all that time the guys haven’t been paid anything, and in Podz’s case actually taken a serious hit to make his manuals available online.
I’ve said this before several times, that the only reason I chose WordPress over Textpattern was the community that was built around it. Without this community and the fact that everyone is helping out in ways they think is best, I might as well go to B2evolution or any one of the other open-source alternatives. The number of templates and plugins available for WordPress probably dwarf those of other blogging softwares. All of that work was done by the community, for the community. When I released Manji, I was wondering how Chris was counting the number of downloads, so I sent him and e-mail and asked him. He sent me the plugin, the php script and a walk through of how to bloody implement the thing. That is what the community is about. I wanted to get my links to have alternate colours, Joshua spent 30 minutes hacking some code for me just so that I can do something like that.
I’ve learnt an emmense amount about CSS, HTML and PHP in the past year through the use of WordPress. Hell I don’t need Dreamweaver to do my code anymore, I just use notepad++. The main strength of WordPress over everyone else for me at least is the community. Oh sure the software is good but there are derivatives out there.
So with that out of the way, what does any of this have anything to do with Larry and his book? How does Podz fit into all of this? There are several points I think that need to be raised here.
The first problem was how you approached the situation. Not very diplomatic and it did show a lack of knowledge of the community. Podz is one of the developers of WordPress. He’s got over 2500 posts on the forums. This is what you wrote to podz:
Be more explicit, identify yourself and your site (I’ve visited scores of WordPress sites)…
The point is if you’re going to write a book, the only book about WordPress surely you should know the history of the software, and who the key people involved are.
Larry, you’re an unknown entity. We’ve seen none of your previous work. You’ve been involved with other online sources? I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt here, show me. Give me links to the forums you’ve posted on, the places you’ve left your mark on. The fear here is that you’re not what you say you are. Podz has shown time and time again what he’s capable of in terms of documentation and helping people out. At least for the WP community.
Personally I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch for Podz to think ‘well this guy hasn’t done anything similar that I can see, he’s interested in writing a book on a subject that’s taken me and another x people 1 year to compile information on. Hang on a minute why should I believe he’s saying the truth and that he’s going to be approaching the subject from a fresh plate. He’s got a wealth of information at his fingertips, my information, and he’s proposing on making money off it.’
And you see that in a way goes against the grain of the WordPress community. If you’d taken the time to research the subject you’d have known who Podz is. You could have easily dropped him a line telling him that you’re thinking it would be a good idea to do this. You’ve got the time to devote to this and the contacts. You understand that Podz has devoted soo long on the help forums and the codex and the wiki and his manuals, ask him if he’d like to join you. Having one of the dev team on your side really works wonders for the people who would buy your book. You’d be surprised how many hours people devote to bettering WordPress every day.
It’s a community, where the final product is a lot more important than the individual ego. Perfect example is Shuttle. 3 designers, 3 coders (Matt is over seeing what we’re doing). One goal. Better the software and enhance blogging in general.
It would take a lot longer than 1 week to find out what most users aren’t capable of doing or understanding. It would take a lot longer than 1 week to find out what the most common problems are. It would take a lot longer than 1 week to go through the 450 plugins that are available and constantly being updated for the WordPress software. Podz has spent the past 8 months learning these things, which is why he made the manuals in the first place. To stop answering the same question again and again.
By the time you’ve finished your book, we’ll have just released Shuttle. You going to put the logo in the book as well? What if we decide to call the final thing something else?
Larry it’s a matter of perspective. You say you’ve done this before. I think having someone who’s done this before is great, and I would be the first to appologise to you for ever doubting your PHP Fu skills. Unfortunately I’ve seen NOTHING that proves the contrary to this. I’ve currently only got your word to go on, and since I don’t know you, it’s not a very strong word.
Welcome to the WordPress community ^_^.
Oh dear, that’s really not good. Podzy seems to be a bit unhappy about what’s going on with people using his guides to make money. Podz has spends HOURS on the forums helping people out whenever he can. He’s also responsible for both writing up and hosting the WP guides, which for many people (myself included) have been an invaluable resourse of information. I just tried to access the things, and got my IP banned as he’s password protected the guides. For example when I was moving my host over the guy (and macmanx) both came to reassure me that everything was going to be ok, and that I wasn’t going to loose all my posts. As far as I can tell a certain Larry on the forums said he was going to make a WordPress manual, which he was going to write from scratch. Yeah well if you need information about the ins and outs of WordPress you either check the Codex or the Forums or the Manuals. Guess who’s name comes across the board on all these things? Yup Podz. So understandably the man is a bit miffed, that’s not how this particular community has worked so far.
So it took me all of 10 seconds, seriously, to offer to help out Podz make an offical book of sorts using his pages already. It would be a long hard road, but one that’s ultimately pretty gratifying. Ahh, but I’m not a publisher you say? No, I’m not but I’ve got CafePress at my fingertips if I want. He’s decided not to help anymore, which seems a bit rash, hopefully he’ll reconsider. My offer to pull the book together still stands, he can sort out the content of the book and the cafepress site ^_^.
What’s CafePress you ask? Well it’s a way for anyone to set up a store online selling personalised merchandise revolving around whatever it is they’re website is about. This has beenmainly T-shirts, mugs, etc. Recently (i.e 8 months ago) they added books in there as well. They come in a different range of bindings (saddle-stitch, ring binder and perfect bound), have a flat rate per type and then additional cost per page. Soo the idea is you have to price a 100 page perfect bound book at $10, because that’s how much they’re charging, and then you add whatever you want as a mark-up.
I’ve toyed around with the idea a lot, but it only allows black and white content. That’s why I personally find it slightly limiting for my comic book work, however I might actually use it for a sketchbook. As time goes by I’m collecting more and more sketches.
Oh sure they’re not the cheapest thing in the world, and it’s not as easy to have a look at what you’re getting before you buy it, but it’s one method. In that thread I was pointed to another service, which seems like a good idea. It’s called BlogBinders and converts your blog into a book in the same 3 formats as provided by CafePress.
From my point of view, I think it would be great to collect my posts as a book for myself. Hey I might be online a lot but I’m a complete book junkie. I’ve only started thinking about this, but I’d need to edit everything to show the links in full, and I’d probably have to delete or not include a few of the earlier posts as they were pretty rubbish (or do I include them to see how rubbish they actually where?).
What started off as one became two. Now there are three. I’ve got the honour to announce the third designer for the Shuttle. Joen Asmussen, has joined the Shuttle Development Team. I think we’ll all agree that his work speaks for itself.
And no before anyone starts cracking some joke, we’re not letting EVERYONE join the Shuttle team but I mean c’mon, HOW could you possibly say no to Joen? ^_^.
What’s funny is that in our little research posts, people who have commented have actually linked back to Joen’s site where he’s talked about this extensively, from a design POV. Michael got talking to Joen, one thing led to another and here we are.
There are 6 people involved in this project now. Yes, 6. We’ve got 3 designers, 2 coders and Matt Mullenweg will also be looking over our shoulders making sure we don’t go completely mental, and pointing out why we shouldn’t be doing something, or going down a particular route for whatever reason, which he might have learnt about the hard way.
We’re out to make WordPress a thing of undisputed beauty, in every possible way, both on the inside and the outside.
Just to clarify something, this “Shuttle” is NOT a fork. We’re not planning on releasing Shuttle as an alternative to Wordpress. It’s just something that can replace the existing Wordpress admin interface to be more asthetically pleasing. Are we going to add functionality? Well it kind of makes sense. Soo many things are available from the Wordpress community that people would love to use. Obviously we’ll only include things that we think are essential and should be included. That’s why we’re asking people what they think, what they’d like to see, what they use, etc. There might be something we’re missing out on completely.
Everyone on the team LOVE Wordpress and the community and want to bring something fresh and exciting to the software, that will basically elevate it above the rest. There won’t be a reason not to use Wordpress when we’re through with it, because the code is soo good and it’s such a powerful system. Hopefully we’ll enhance the usability aspect of it, make it slightly more fun and attractive to use.
This is taken from the post I announced this idea, I’m reproducing the relavant parts:
So what is it I’m talking about you ask? The tentative title of the project (and most of you know that I’m pretty bad when coming up with names), is Shuttle. What is Shuttle? Simply, it’s going to be a brand new spanking interface for the Wordpress Admin Control Panel. I’m sorry Matt, I love you, but the Wordpress interface is something to me that is sorely lacking in style and sometimes functionality. I don’t think there are that many people (except if they’re serious coders and really don’t care what it looks like) that really love the aesthetics of the Wordpress Control Panel. I’m going to admit something, and that’s the fact that I nearly didn’t go for Wordpress over Textpattern due to the weak interface. What can I say I’m a shallow designer, who places a lot on the actual appearance. What actually kept me was the fact that the Wordpress community was absolutely buzzing. I just had one look at the boards, and knew that if there was a question I needed it would be answered, and that was reassuring, however I’ve never liked the Control Panel, and well I don’t think it’s really on Ryan’s or Matt’s minds right now, so it’s up to the rest of the community to sort it out. That’s where the Shuttle Team come into play. What’s the ETA on this? Don’t ask silly questions, you won’t get silly answers. To be fair I think it will be at least 2 months down the line, hopefully less, but I’m being realistic about all of this. So why mention all of this now you ask? Well as this is something that is effectively user based I’d really like to hear which plugins, functions whatever you use, used to use or whatever from other blogging systems (just name them) or whatever that you think would be perfectly suited to the admin panel.
If Matt and the rest of the team like what we’ve done, and agree with some of the changes we’ve made, it would be great to get it integrated into the proper Wordpress releases, if that doesn’t happen, that’s not a bad thing. You’ll still be able to download it from any one of out four sites, much like the 400 plus plugins, and the 40 or so themes. (ie downloading them from their respective creators).
We’re all doing this because we all feel that WP needs to be one step above the rest. The backend is one aspect which the program is somewhat lacking. Rather than bitch and moan about it, and complain, we’re being proactive and doing something we feel is right. That’s what open source projects are about. That’s why wordpress is better than the rest, the community around it is passionate about it’s use, and there are people, hunderds of people devoting hours to make it better to use.
Okay, so a couple of days ago I contacted a certain somebody (Michael) to see if they wanted to join in the development of ‘Shuttle’ after I saw this post. It took a couple of days but I can proudly announce the addition of one Michael Heilemann to the Shuttle Development Team. So the team is Chris, Joshua, Michael and myself. That’s 2 designers and 2 coders.
So what does this mean? It means several things. It means the development will actually run more smoothly and probably a lot faster, as a team of 4 people in COMPLETELY different countries work on a project. It means the design and code will be the sum of many, as all open source code is.
This is what I love about the Wordpress community. It’s an actual community, that are trying to make the blogging experience that much better. That’s what open source is all about after all, people sharing and contributing to something bigger and better.
This also means that the name Shuttle and everything else might/probably will change. Hey I’m completely flexible when it comes to this sort of thing, nothing I do in terms of graphics goes to waste, I always find some way to use them. It’ll be an interesting experience if nothing else, because we’re going to make the backend of WP the best blogging backend currently available. There will be no reason why anyone shouldn’t fall over themselves to try and have Wordpress as their standard software of choice.
Bold words? Maybe, it’s just I know who’s got my back.
In the meantime research is in order. I’ll ask the regulars over here, to say what they think about the current backend of wordpress, what they like and what they don’t. The guys will probably do the same thing on their blogs.
Hmm, ok after I wrote my previous post I strolled over to this link over at podz’s website. For those in the dark, Podz is an incredibly helpful chap. He’s always online answering questions on the wordpress forums and should be given a medal. He was going to help out with Manji as well which was nice, but he got a bit busy which is completely understandable.
After I read through his post and really started thinking about things, the following dawned upon me, Manji doesn’t belong to me. Wordpress doesn’t belong to Matt Mullenweg, and Persian doesn’t belong to Chris J Davis. Wordpress was a derivative of B2 which was originally on a GPL license morphed into Wordpress, does anyone know who the lead designer on B2 was? No, I know it’s easy to find out, but off the top of your head does anyone know? Unless you were using B2 probably not.
GPL basically means NOBODY has copyright of that particular bit of code. It’s there out in the open for everyone to play around with and create something better and bigger.
So when Michael asked people to credit him in the Kubrick code (download kubrick and read the readme file), he effectively had no right to do that, simply because HE made the decision to release Kubrick under a GPL license. People could do that if they were so inclined and wanted to thank him for it. But they have NO OBLIGATION. They can then take that code alter it and release it under a completely different name, without even thinking about including his name or whatever. Not even in the CSS. The only stipulation I see that you can’t do is alter the license. Nothing you do after that make it copyright of you. You don’t own the copyright of the code, and neither does the originator. In fact making people feel like they have to credit you kind of goes against Open Source code. You don’t see php.net in the bottom there, or apache.org anywhere on the site (except now of course). And yet this site wouldn’t be here for you to see without these open source codes.
This seems to be standard practice for most code we all use. Who’s the lead designer for Apache? What about MySQL? PHP? Some projects have a lead developer, since it does take a lot of time and knowledge and resources to keep something like Wordpress going. Matt’s doing a great job, but he could decide to stop tomorrow, he has after all turned 21, (Happy Birthday dude), does that mean the end of Wordpress? Well maybe, but the code might live on with someone else who would probably rename it and not include Matt’s name in there. Then again he might, but that would be a courtesy thing.
Which basically means that if you put the code in the bottom with a link back to where it was downloaded from, well that’s just a courtesy thing really. Nothing in the code stipulates that you have to link back to this site. So what I’m saying about Manji is that, by me releasing it under a GPL license, you’re effectively free to do whatever you want with it. You want to keep a link to my site in there, go right ahead, I thank you kindly and appreciate all your love. If you don’t want, take it out. What you can’t do is then say that the design is YOUR copyright, because no matter what you do with it, it will NEVER be your copyright. It’s out there in cyberspace to live or die. I will continue to work on Manji, tweaking and fixing bugs, because it means a lot to me. Wordpress is a community and in the same way that I have taken so much from it this was one way of giving something back.
So if you want disregard the below post, I could ask you to put the link, but NOTHING in the license I release with Manji says you have to. I include the link as a default, but as with everything else in that file, you’re free to do with as you please.
Free as in FREEDOM.
It’s amazing what a day does, after you’ve thought about things a little.
Man I decided to do a few tweaks to the damn site, 5 hours later I sorted out the slight mods to the css file. This is ridiculous. I’ve seriously got to sort it out so and streamline the damn thing. Make it tight and get it right.
I’ve been looking at various blogs around the place, such as Dunstan’s blog, and noticed that a decent looking blog is all down to the actual details. It’s the attention to detail that elevates a blog or website to the next level and makes it a complete and utter pro job. The thing is though that BrokenKode is barely 3 months old. My computer has finally given up on me of sorts, and I’ve been stuck on a dialup connection for the past 2 and a bit weeks. Fare enough I’ve been busy with a slew of other projects but I do need to try and make an effort to sort out the css on this puppy.
The only way to go about this is to actually try and break it down from the very start and work my way through it all. Taking notes as to what I modified and commenting the code correctly. That way I’ll know what is what straight away.
Along the way I’m going to be installing a slew of new plugins. It’s a task and a half, but I think I’ll thank myself later on when Wordpress 1.3 comes along and I’ll have the nightmare job of upgrading.
Hahahahahaha. I’m in love with my site at the moment. It’s been a complete labour of love but I’ve finally got it to the stage that I had in my mind at the very beginning when I began this crazy Wordpress adventure.
The icing on the cake is the ‘Broken Stats’ section which you can find in the control panel. Click on Auspices at the top there and you’ll be transported to the bottom. It’s a small addition but it marks the end of what I had in mind for the site from the begining. I’m probably going to start a sticky post and keep adding to it, which will be the nexus section as I think updating that manually is such a waste of time.
The good news is now I just have a few bits and pieces and cleaning of the code before all is sorted and I can fully concentrate on something else right now. Damn that feels amazing.
Just updated the site with this very excellent little plugin, it’s a funky idea, in that I get to put any font I want as the main title bar and everyone can see it, which is nice. Information on this plugin can be found right here at Joel Bennet’s site, Huddled Masses.
I mean honestly if I hadn’t moved over to the supreme Wordpress I’d still be stuck with some pretty lackluster html pages, created in Moveable Type, without the absolute SHEER POWER of PHP. So the moral of the story is screw Moveable Type, get with the program, and free your blogging experience.
Update: I think I’ll probably update something every week till I get the final version sorted. I’ve got the control panel to give a bit of a touch up, and the CSS code needs to be cleaned, and of course I’ve got to begin sorting out my nexus section as well. Still a bit of work to go really, but hey it’s getting there, at least it’s fully functional at this moment in time.
Man that was really painful actually. To eventually get this site and blog to where I wanted has taken more out of me than I care to admitt. It’s brilliant since it’s something I love, and will no doubt constantly tweak and fiddle with, as is always the case with most internet based projects I get involved with, but damn it’s been a long journey. Hours spent well in the end I think. Place can only get better from here on in.
So officially welcome to Makeshift Ver0.1 and chronicles Ver0.1 . Go on click at the top to find out more.
I will eventually put a plug to all the sites and people that helped me sort this thing out on the wordpress forums.
So why only 90% still you ask? Well about 3% can be attributed to the contact page and starting adding reviews to the nexus section, while the rest is cleaning up the index code and my css file, make it nice and sweet. I know kinda perfectionist and all but KODE IS POETRY as the Wordpress website proudly proclaims.
Update: Just completed all the static pages, and essentially my site, as a running version 0.1, I’ll be doing tweaks for ever but it’s cool to have the first step done and a running blog all sorted out.
Let’s see if this works. I’ve got 3 hours before I go to bed. I have one final area of this site I need to use that will finish it off in a capacity. Can I do it while dynamically updating this post to see if indeed I’m hitting my deadline.
I’ve go the below post that claims it will tell me how to make Static WP pages the easy way, shall we see hmm,…yes I think we shall. TechGnome’s World ? Static WP Pages made easy
Update one: Got preoccupied and watched the end half of a documentary of the problems Shell are having. As for the site, well the makeshift are has been updated, although the CSS is not completely there, I’ll try and sort it out before I go bedy bies.
Update two: Pretty pathetic, I’m soo tired. I’ve managed to get the ‘static pages’ to work, which is a major load off my back to be honest, but they don’t have the look I want. Not sure which exact CSS I should be using for this little thing here, so I’ll have to wait till tomorrow, but to be honest that means that sometime during the weekend, my blog design and all is pretty much done, which is pretty scary, took what 1 month and a half to get here, but it’s been one hell of an adventure.
http://www.brokenkode.com/techgnomes-world-static-wp-pages-made-easy