DavePress » wordpress

WordPress 2.9

Dave — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 18:36:53 +0000

Bit of a late one this, but WordPress 2.9 came out before Christmas. Well worth the upgrade – especially for the image handling stuff and the ease of embedding flash content like YouTube videos.

Possibly related posts:

WP Sauce

Dave — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:51:15 +0000

I threw this together this morning, it’s called WP Sauce:

It simply pulls together the stuff people are bookmarking in Delicious about WordPress.

I have added pretty much zero value to this, however, all the hard work was done by Steph and released by his department for folk to use. The script is called Bookmarklist.

The best way to use the site is to dig down in the results with the tag cloud in the top right of the screen. So, if it is WordPress themes you are after, just click themes in the tag cloud. Likewise with plugins, or maybe tutorial.

Hopefully this will be a useful resource, not least because it will keep itself updated more or less automatically. After all, no-one’s going to stop bookmarking WordPress stuff for a while, are they?

Possibly related posts:

Upgrading WordPress

Dave — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 18:23:49 +0000

With the release of WordPress 2.7.1, I realised it is about time I upgraded this blog to the latest version – not least since having played with it on some other sites I work on, I have realised how awesome it is.

I’ll be following the excellent instructions provided on the WordPress codex.

Things might be screwy round here for a little while as I get everything reconfigured. Bear with me.

Possibly related posts:

Weathering the storm with a blog

Dave — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:26:02 +0000

Looks you don’t have to have an environmentally friendly e-magazine to advise residents and local businesses about how to get through the recession.

Carl Haggerty points to Devon’s Weathering the Storm site. Like Lincoln, they have got something up that’s quick, easy, free and social with WordPress.com.

Good work!

Possibly related posts:

Now, this is nice

Dave — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 15:15:19 +0000

Steph has posted about the work he has been doing getting the Power of Information Taskforce report online for interested folk to comment on it before it gets published. It’s a lovely piece of work:

It is in fact a new theme, not the usual CommentPress which has been lying dormant for quite a while. As Steph says:

I think this is a small step forward from CommentPress and CoComment in terms of accessibility, Javascript independence and browser compatibility. It’s also marginally less laborious and slightly more purpose-built than the approach Ofcom took to their commentable consultations. And hopefully its muted style is slightly more pleasing to aesthetes than tools like CommentOnThis.

Best of all, the theme has been made available for other people to use – you can grab it from here.

This post is clearly about medium rather than message, so I’ll comment on the report itself some other time

Possibly related posts:

WordPress and domains

Dave — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:37:40 +0000

After my posting on WordPress for Good, this page was brought to my attention. It states that:

For various reasons related to our WordPress trademark, we ask if you’re going to start a site about WordPress or related to it that you not use "WordPress" in the domain name. Try using "wp" instead, or another variation. We’re not lawyers, but very good ones tell us we have to do this to preserve our trademark. Also many users have told us they find it confusing.

How utterly lame, and also inconsistent for an open source project. This is one of the few times I feel a bit let down by WordPress.

This reminds me a little of the Firefox logo and name copyright farrago. In my view, you should be open or not. An open source project setting rules on what people can and can’t do with a bunch of letters in a certain order is plain daft, in my view.

I’m leaving WordPress for Good where it is for now.

Possibly related posts:

Making WordPress into a CMS

Dave — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:16:48 +0000

As I mentioned earlier, I am going to be running some workshops at the Social Media Exchange, organised by Sound Delivery next month on the topic of ‘WordPress for good’.

The aim of the sessions will be to demonstrate how you can develop a really strong web presence quickly and cheaply using WP – not just as a blog but also as a CMS, to run a small but more traditional looking website.

This is possible due to WordPress’ ability to have static pages as well as blog posts, but more importantly in its amazing flexibility in terms of themes and plugins.

To try and be as helpful as possible, I am building a site to provide some resources for anyone wanting to build a site for their organisation using WordPress – it’s at http://wordpressforgood.com but there isn’t much there at the moment.

I’d like to make sure that I get as much material up there as I can before the event, so that those attending who get suitably enthused have something to get their teeth into straight away.

I’d really like to know what your favourite WordPress-as-a-CMS themes and plugins are so that I can add them to the site – and give you credit too, of course! There are a number of ways you could do this:

Leave a comment here
Leave a comment on the WordPress For Good blog
Tag stuff in delicious with WP4G
Tweet things, again mentioning WP4G in your tweet

Thanks in advance for any pointers you can provide!

Possibly related posts:

WordPress 2.7 released

Dave — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 08:13:00 +0000

Big day for a WordPress fanboy like me – the latest version of the open source publishing platform has been released, with a much updated administration area amongst other innovations.

Here is a video explaining some of the changes:

I’d better get upgrading…

Possibly related posts:

Another new DavePress look

Dave — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:25:16 +0000

I’ve given DavePress yet another facelift. This one is a lot lighter and hopefully more friendly too.

Personally, I especially like the ‘adverts’ in the top right corner, pimping my social media wares, such as my newsletter, ReadWriteGov and LGSearch.

There is still some tidying up to do, but I’m nearly there…

Possibly related posts:

Akismet now has stats!

Dave — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:56:42 +0000

Akismet is a plugin for WordPress (and a few other platforms) which helps combat the problem of comment spam. That when ne’erdowells come on your blog and post nonsense comments in the hope pick click the links in them to buy some viagra, or invest in a Nigerian lottery winning syndicate.

Dealing with this stuff can be a pain.

(I have often wondered how people who run blogs or forums about the uses of bedroom-performance enhancing drugs, or genuine Nigerian investments, manage their spam. How do you decide what is and isn’t?)

Akismet makes it easy by checking your comments against a central database, which records what everyone who uses the system has marked as spam, and then removes it from view. So, no alerts telling you that you need to deal with a new comment – if Akismet thinks it’s spam, you don’t need to know about it.

You can still check the quarantined list for false-positives though, if you want. Sometimes the service works a little too well.

Anyhow, I upgraded the Akismet plugin today here on WordPress, and was surprised to see a new tab on my admin panel for ‘Akismet Stats’:

And once you click it, it makes pretty interesting reading! There are graphs and tables of data. Well worth the upgrade just to see what causes spikes in your comment spam.