Current Projects: UCA SGA
This past month I have been juggling several projects and I haven’t been updating my blog w/ updates like normal. The truth is I have had a lot of open projects here and there that I haven’t been able to wrap up for various reasons out of my control, I hope this week I am able to gain some ground on these daunting tasks. One project that I have probably spent the majority of my time on recently is for the University of Central Arkansas’s Student Government Association.
This project is built on Wordpress 3.0 w/ BuddyPress (MU) and it has some dynamic components and plugins that I have been hacking away at for the past 2 weeks. I finally found some really awesome resources for BuddyPress online and I plan on blogging about those in the very near future as well so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, here’s a screenshot of the UCA SGA project, the site hasn’t launched yet so this is the best I can do for a teaser.
Stay tuned for more information about this project in the coming weeks… BuddyPress is an awesome animal once you get your head around it’s capabilities.
Your Thoughts on Wordpress?
I pretty much develop all of my clients websites these days using wordpress as the backend content management system unless there are some really far out project requirements that I don’t see wordpress as a good fit for. Honestly I don’t hear many project requirements these days that won’t work inside of wordpress, especially given the number of plugins that are available.
In fact, did you know that you can now deploy a plugin that will more or less turn your wordpress installation into an auction website like eBay? I was just testing a plugin for a friend a few days ago that does exactly that, and it’s pretty robust too!
This past week I have been working on a project involving wordpress 3.0 and the studiopress genesis theme framework and I have been amazed at just how much more control the end user, or client, is going to have once this version is released. Granted, there is a slight learning curve for developers when it comes to learning everything that is new w/ 3.0, not to mention how genesis from studiopress operates, but once we all get it, lookout!
For instance, I was wrestling today with a header issue on a client project and ran across Nathan Rice’s Genesis Simple Hooks Plugin, compliments of Brent Passmore, this plugin alone extends wordpress further than it’s ever been pushed by allowing the end user, or client, to input content – both shortcodes and php code, into one of the many hooks located on a websites theme. All of this from inside the user-friendly dashboard of Wordpress. Incredible. There is also the PODS CMS plugin for handling different content types and extending the wordpress custom fields option. Is there really anything you can’t push wordpress to do these days?
I know that I have a lot of developers that read my blog so I thought I would invite everyone in for a discussion on this topic, here are a few starting points:
- Do you currently use wordpress exclusively for projects?
- What are your thoughts on wordpress vs the other open source solutions?
- What content management solutions do you offer your clients?
- How much of a factor is wordpress’ name recognition becoming?
- What are some of your favorite wordpress plugins / themes?
- What are some of your likes / dislikes about wordpress?
Wordcamp Fayetteville #WCFay
I don’t know how this one slipped by me but there is a Wordcamp coming to Fayetteville at the Fayetteville Town Center on May 29th and 30th. I was talking to Brent Passmore tonight on Twitter and he filled me in and I immediately registered online. If you are a wordpress guru in the Central Arkansas area you should definitely think about heading up for the conference. I think registration is like $30 if you signup before May 1st and after that date it goes up to $40. Definitely worth the haul if you are into Wordpress.
There will also be an ‘unconference’ day Sunday at The New Design School. If you are heading that direction be sure to give me a heads up so we can try to hook up and head down to Dixon Street the night before…There are two tracks for the conference, one for developers and the other for bloggers, here’s a little more information:
You can attend any session you want during the seven 45-minute blocks, but you might want to decide which track better serves your educational and developmental goal for the conference.
- Blogger track: We want to teach people who’ve never blogged before, up to intermediate level, how to use this free tool known as WordPress to their advantage. Whether you’re a citizen journalist, a small business owner, educator or nonprofit executive, we can help you learn to get your message out into the Interwebs.
- Developer track: This is for advanced WordPress users, theme designers, plugin creators or those who just like to get dirty with WordPress code. We are our own best resource so lets teach one another.
#RefreshCA Wordpress Code Camp Brainstorm
It’s impossible to attend a meeting of the Central Arkansas Refresh Group and not have someone bring up the topic of Wordpress. I just thought that I was the head cheerleader for wordpress in this area until I started hanging around with some of the #RefreshCA guys, they love it just about as much as I do. A few months back we had Daniel Spillers from UALR’s web team do a presentation on wordpress and it was probably one of our most popular meetings since the group formed. You can see my blog post about Daniel’s presentation here.
Given my fascination with Wordpress and my desire to learn even more about it, I posed a question to the group today on Twitter to see if there was any interest in having some sort of Saturday Code Camp of sorts dedicated only to Wordpress. I am not even quite sure in my head what such an event would look like, but I think it would be an awesome experience if we could pull something like this off.
I know that personally I have already picked up a lot of things from the group by just hanging out with them for an hour or two each month, and I can only imagine how cool it would be to have a code camp type setting where there wasn’t a speaker or presentation type of thing going on, instead it would be more interactive.
Here’s kind of what I was thinking, please add to the list…
- Plugin Discussions: we could each discuss what plugins we actively use on projects and learn ways to tweak or better utilize their functionality.
- Plugin Development: We could also discuss plugin development and what all is involved with authoring your own plugin, more here on plugin development. I have had a small role in a few plugin projects in the past and I know that there are probably a few others and we can probably dive pretty deep into this topic.
- Core Hacking: we could discuss ways to further extend wordpress beyond what’s available through the use of plugins, etc. Here’s an example of a recent hack that I had to implement for a client.
- Theme Development: we could also discuss theme development, and what goes into designing a theme for wordpress. We could also touch on some of the design generation tools that are on the market as well, such as Artisteer.
- Performance: another good topic of discussion could revolve around performance related issues with wordpress such as caching.
- Enterprise / Multi-User Applications: possibly a member of our group has some experience with wordpress MU or enterprise and can give us some input on that end of the spectrum.
These are just a few areas that I am throwing out there, if you have some additional wordpress related topics you think would be interesting, please feel free to comment them out so we can have a list to work from when we are finally able to put something like this together.
The possibility that something specialized like this could spawn from our Central Arkansas Refresh group is kind of cool to think about because there are potentially several other specialized applications like Drupal, Joomla and MODx that could spawn out of it as well. Darren Huckey is currently working on setting up a Drupal user group for Central Arkansas right now and as soon as he has the details on that I will be sure to share that on here as well.
Not that there is anything wrong with our existing format for the Central Arkansas Refresh Group meetings, I love the presentation / question and answer format and really enjoy the fellowship, but I think a specialized code camp type of setting could really be awesome.
Another thought, for this meeting we would probably need to find a good location that’s free from distractions and has a strong enough signal for all of us to be online at the same time. Since this is a specialized type meeting, different from the broader scoped Refresh meetings, we will likely have a smaller turnout so a smaller venue might work well. Thought’s, anyone?? Hit me back and let me know what you think…
WordPress MU 2.6 beta 1
I have been playing around with the idea of setting up Wordpress MU on two different in-house projects that my partners and I have been working on lately but keep talking myself out of it. This morning I found out that MU had just been released in v2.6 beta 1. They went ahead and caught the version numbers up with the basic Wordpress build to avoid confusion.
If you are not familiar with Wordpress MU, it’s basically a multi-user version of Wordpress with a few differences. The good part about MU is that while it’ a different solution altogether, it still allows you to use your basic templates and plugins. The release candidate is now online. Here’s the forum thread on it. Grab the zip file to test!
WordPress MU 2.6 beta 1 is now available. WordPress 2.6 is due for release shortly and it’s already on it’s third beta so it’s times for WordPress MU to be updated.
This release has many new features as well as a few security fixes. In his beta 1, beta 2 and beta 3 posts Ryan listed some of the main features, including post revisioning, gears support for faster loading, theme previews, better SSL support and much much more.
WordPress MU specific changes include:
- The version number is being bumped to 2.6 rather than 1.6 because of version confusion. Minor MU versions will probably append a letter to the version.
- Signup page now has a nonce to help defeat spammers.
- Plugins in wp-content/plugins/ are version checked like in WordPress. mu-plugins isn’t covered just yet.
- Major object cache changes.
- And many more bug fixes. Check the timeline for a list of changes.
Download wordpress-mu-2.6-beta1.zip
WordPress(MU) Multi-User
I have spent some time the past few evenings researching Wordpress MU for a project that I have had in mind for quite some time and just like everything the guys at Automattic and Wordpress put out, I have to say that I am very impressed. My concentration into this software started a few days ago when Ben Fisher of Techpad Agency showed me a project that he has been working on at: http://blogging.thegamereviews.com/ via Twitter.
If you aren’t familiar w/ Wordpress Multi-user, like is used on various television network sites where anchors and correspondents maintain their own blogs seperate from the main site. This of course is only one use of this software, there are many others, here are some other examples: La Monde, Harvard, Edublog.
Here is a good explanation of Wordpress Multi-User from the Wordpress team:
With WordPress we took blogging to the next level by creating powerful self-hosted software that anyone could install and have a blog within minutes.
Now with MU we’re making it as easy to create a thousand blogs as it was to create a single blog with WordPress 3 years ago. By building on the base of WordPress and syncing development, we get the benefit of the huge ecosystem in plugins and themes that has developed around the project.
Development on MU is spearheaded by Automattic, since they use MU to power WordPress.com a great deal of the companies resources are poured into improving the code, and it all goes back into the open source world via MU.
If you’d like some background on the WordPress project, check out its about page. Since WordPress and WordPress MU share 99% of the same codebase, the features and development on one also benefit another. As WordPress is used by everyone from Yahoo to the New York Times, it isn’t going anywhere.
If you are interested in checking out Wordpress MU for your project, check out their Readme files from the trunk: http://trac.mu.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/README.txt
