Extending WordPress

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

A quick look at our portfolio will tell you that we've been working on more and more blog projects. Early on in our development of blogs we used Movable Type, became very familiar with its inner workings and stretched it to do things well outside of traditional blog management. Over time though, Movable Type's quirks mounted (rebuilding pages every time someone posts a comment, especially when you start amassing a lot of comments gets cumbersome to say the least) and we knew it was time for a change.

That's when we gave WordPress a try and never looked back. The nature of our projects has allowed us to test just how customizable it really is. We've scoured the plugins available and implemented quite a few (our favorites include WP-Cache [performance], Akismet [spam], and SEO Title Tag [switches the order of your title tag in your blog to make it more search engine friendly]). The plugins are great and save development time on common components to allow more time for custom tweaks.

Giving Back

We've been developing some custom plugins for projects and I'm excited to say that we will soon be releasing those to the WordPress community. Much more to come soon on these in the next few weeks. We're just buttoning down a few things and finishing up the documentation.

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We’ve Moved!

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

So we've finally moved. Construction finished a couple of weeks ago and the workstations were finally installed this past Friday. That left Monday to get things wired up with electricity, punch down the ethernet connections and then kick on the internet/phones. Well it's all happened and we couldn't be more excited. Check out the photos and feel free to stop by and see it in person. We're still settling in, but always glad to have company.

Mike's Desk

Pete's Desk

Sean's Desk

Nick's Desk

Posted in Who We Are | 3 Comments »

37 Signals It’s a Bad Friday

Saturday, January 19th, 2008

Today was moving day so I was all over the place trying to coordinate network installers, furniture installers as well as Verizon finishing the point to point connection between our two locations (think herding cats). I was able to take free moments and catch up on e-mails/IMs that I had missed and one in particular was from a client trying to upload something to our Basecamp site (OK, so the client was also my sister Alyson).

She said she was getting an error when trying to upload a file which I instantly thought was strange, so I went to check it out. Imagine my surprise when visiting our Basecamp site and seeing this...

Hm, so I guess there is a problem. Well, it was no biggie, we could wait. Here are a few observations on this, though:

• Working in Web development over the years I completely understand the "oh crap" feeling you get when something goes down. That feeling is only compounded by the potential number of people affected by the outage. I'm sure this was beyond "oh crap" and well on it's way to "holy shit."
• 37signals (makers of Basecamp) did a great job of keeping us updated on the situation. Updates were posted regularly, with my favorite definitely being the one coming somewhere near hour two that said "This is not how Fridays are supposed to be.
• They make sure to point out that your data is just fine.
• This sort of thing just doesn't happen a lot with Basecamp (or ever that I can remember). We've been using it for project management for 2+ years now and I can't remember this happening before. I can forgive a little down time every now and then.
• They fessed up. Very admirable. They've also offered to make things right if anyone feels they did not receive the level of service they expect. There is no service level agreement with Basecamp, so that makes their concern in this situation that much more sincere.

These situations are never 100% avoidable. With so many stakeholders involved in their service there are quite a few things that could cause an outage, it's just nice to see it handled so well. I'm putting together a little Ta-da List in case I need to refer back to how to handle this type of situation.

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It’s Moving Day!

Friday, January 18th, 2008

It's a big day (one we thought may never come). cnp_studio is officially moving into our new office. The furniture comes in today so expect to see more pics of the place filled out here very soon. Until then, we'll be in the wide open space giving the remote control helicopter a few last unobstructed flights.

Posted in Who We Are | 1 Comment »

Live Blogging the MacWorld 2008 Keynote

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

So today my lunch was spent tracking Steve's keynote at MacWorld 2008. Since there's no live video stream, that left me keeping up via those who live blogged the event. No problem, if only those sites stayed up. Here are the sites I tried to use and how they worked for me:

• Engadget - My first choice for keeping up. Worked about half of the time and that half when it did work the page would take minutes to load. Super.
• The Unofficial Apple Weblog - My backup plan which sadly worked about as well as Engadget.
• Valleywag via Twitter - Well, let's just say the reliability of Twitter pretty much sealed their fate.
• TechCrunch - TechCrunch really pulled through. Pages loaded quickly and the updates were concise. Hooray TechCrunch.

My biggest gripe is that sites like Engadget and TUAW gave no consideration to the fact that thousands of people would be sitting on one page and hitting the refresh button every 15 seconds. By this I mean that the usual images/backgrounds/navigation/styles were all there as normal. Is it really necessary that all of this is loaded? As I and thousands of others sit and hit refresh do we care about other "Breaking News" or "Featured Stories"? No. I understand that the ads need to load so they can pay the bills, but everything else should be low frills.

After the fact, Engadget recognized the problems, which was appreciated. Let's hope next MacWorld will be different.

Oh, and I'm absolutely lusting after that MacBook Air.

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MacWorld 2008 - Be Back Later

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Steve Jobs will be giving his keynote at the MacWorld 2008 Conference & Expo today at 12PM EST. Lucky for us that's lunch time. We may be tied up a little after the keynote buying any of the new goodies announced today (come on Macbook Air!) so you'll understand if we're a little late back from lunch, right?

Follow along

Plenty of people live blogging this, so keep up over at my favorite, Engadget, or for you Twitter fans out there, Valleywag is planning on live blogging via Twitter, so you can follow it there.

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New Site: Yahoo!’s Corporate Blog, Yodel Anecdotal

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

Friday was a fun day spent at the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, CA launching the updated Yodel Anecdotal. Myself along with Mike and Josh from Voce Communications got together with Nicki Dugan (Yodel's Editor) to add some more cowbell.

Things started with a meeting on the redesign back in late July 2007 and led to what you see today. Some of the updates included in the upgrade are:

• Updated Design: A completely new look was created and a big thanks to Jeremy for yet another great one. This helped to allow for now more room within the post body as well as a wider sidebar. We feel that it gives things more room to breathe.
• E-mail Subscription: In addition to the RSS feed available an e-mail based subscription to post updates is available
• Tagging: Tagging has been added to help better identify content. Now Nicki has the fun responsibility of going back and adding tags to previous posts on Yodel. Fun!

Pete and Sean took care of all CSS as well as WordPress integration. Mike developed the Image Rotator plugin that you see at work in the header of the new blog (more on that coming soon).

Here's some shots of the old site as well as the new for comparison. As always, you can also check the portfolio for more info on the project.

Old Yodel

New Hotness

Posted in Design, Development, New Site, Social Media, WordPress | Add a Comment »

Construction is Finished! Where are the Desks?

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

Construction is finished on the space. Furniture comes a week from Friday (Jan 18). Move-in scheduled for the following week. Very excited.

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Upgrades All Around to WordPress 2.3.2. What Happened to WordPress 2.4?

Monday, January 7th, 2008

It doesn't seem that long ago that we upgraded everything to WordPress 2.3.1 and here we are updating to WordPress 2.3.2. Some important security vulnerabilities were fixed in this release, so if you haven't, I'd recommend an upgrade. From the WordPress blog:

WordPress 2.3.2 is an urgent security release that fixes a bug that can be used to expose your draft posts. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations.

Anxiously Awaiting WordPress 2.4

Well, I'll have to wait longer than anticipated, especially since the release of WordPress 2.4 has been totally scrapped and now the focus is on WordPress 2.5. From the update sent to the wp-hackers distribution list...

In light of the big changes happening in the codebase and admin section, we're going to push back the next release to be aimed for early March.

This is the timeframe when 2.5 was originally schedule for, so we're treating the originally planned 2.4 in December as a skipped release, as a result of both the holidays and the large changes which we weren't able to start on until late October.

There's some good stuff in the oven, and we don't want to rush it.

According to the WordPress release roadmap, the original release estimate was January 24, 2008 for 2.4. This states early March for the 2.5 release even though the roadmap has it as April 1, 2008 for the release [insert April Fools Joke here]. Personally I can't wait for the updated admin interface and widget-based dashboard.

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