Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category
Sunday, July 13th, 2008
I was lucky enough to get my hands on a new iPhone while out in California last week, so I've spent the weekend playing with that. Coming from my Blackberry 8200 this has been a long overdue upgrade.
Sadly, the launch of the iPhone Apps store did not include the WordPress iPhone App (Raanan assures me it wasn't for lack of trying). While we wait for the app you can always check out this video of the app in action. Some highlights of the app are:
- Works with both WordPress.com as well as self-hosted blogs
- Write and manage posts.
- Upload pictures from your camera and photo library.
- Preview posts from Safari.
It will be interesting to see if/how the app handles accounts for several different blogs. Having a "favorites" list of sorts that would store login info for multiple sites and allowing for one-click login into a site would be great.
Oh, and not to skip over the fact that I haven't posted here in 3 months, I've neglected this seriously (a product of working on others blogs way more than our own) but will be picking back up on regular posting. Got some really exciting projects in the works now that I can't wait to share.
Update: It's here! Check it out at http://iphone.wordpress.org
Posted in WordPress | Add a Comment »
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
Raanan over at the WordPress Publisher Blog just posted a note about our involvement with the PlayStation Blog (and that it's running WordPress). He specifically references our recent post that took a more in-depth look at the work behind the project.
The Publisher Blog highlights some of the lesser known features of WordPress, interesting plugins and also projects using WordPress (hence the PS feature) so check it out if you’re not already.
Posted in WordPress | Add a Comment »
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
In January of 2007 we were asked by the guys over at Voce if we’d like to work on the development of the official PlayStation Blog. We had to check our calendar, but it just so happened that we had a place where we could squeeze the project in.
Customizing WordPress
The PlayStation Blog is a design by Josh that pulls influences directly from the main Sony PlayStation website.
Customizations on the theme include:
- The home page pulls in the two most recent posts in their entirety (or until the MORE tag is used) and then the next five entries as headline and excerpt.
- The PS Blog requires users to have an account in order to comment on posts. The wp-login.php page was completely re-skinned from the traditional WordPress login to match the site.
- The registration process was customized to include an age gate. In order to comment on the site you must be at least a certain age so we check for that (I can't tell you what age, then you'll just cheat the system).
Plugins We Used
The great thing about WordPress and the community behind it is that in most instances if you want to do something, someone has already created a plugin for that. In our case we have quite a few plugins at work on the PS Blog including:
Plugins We Developed
Sometimes you need something and there isn’t a plugin for it. No problem, you develop a plugin to fill that need. What’s really great is when you have a group like the guys at Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) who want to contribute back to the WordPress community and then release these plugins back for others:
- Image Rotator – Adds the ability to insert a random image rotation panel into a WordPress blog.
- Author Comment Replies – Gives authors the ability to reply directly to a posted comment. Unlike threaded comments only authors can respond, not all visitors.
Maximizing Performance
No matter the amount of traffic every blog can benefit from a caching plugin such as WP Cache or 1 Blog Cacher. A site like the PlayStation Blog receives a constant high volume of traffic and the difference between using one of these caching plugins and not is incredible.
If you manage your own servers and are running WordPress then a session on performance at last year's WordCamp is a worthwhile watch. Barry Abrahamson and Matt Mullenweg give great tips on topics such as opcode caching, WP Cache and HyperDB. Watch it, learn it, and increase your blog's performance.
My WordPress Wish
In my perfect WordPress world, plugin developers will get together with developers of plugins that complement what they’ve created and make them play nice together. This may be happening out there more than I realize, so excuse me if this is, even better, let me know which plugins you're developing that work together. I only bring this up because of two plugins we use on this blog that just don’t play well together. One would be a recent comments plugin, the other would be the comment paging plugin. I’ve already written an extensive post about this once before, so read more on my frustrations there.
Just the Surface
This really just scratches the surface of customizations on this blog. If there’s something specific that you’d like to know more about let me know and I’ll do my best to answer. I hope to do more in-depth looks at some of our other projects here soon… time permitting.
Posted in WordPress | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
OK, so I said we'd been MIA for a bit, busy on projects and whatnot and we're very excited about two coming in for a landing today. I'll touch on that here in just a sec, but first something I've been neglecting to recognize…
WordPress Had Some Work Done
In the midst of the hustle we skipped right over posting about the release of WordPress 2.5. Kudos to Automattic and Happy Cog for the wonderful administration facelift. Expect to see our full thoughts on the upgrade in a future post.
With the upgrade of WordPress the WordPress.org website also received an update. A section of the homepage is dedicated to a rotation of companies with sites powered by WordPress. I’m very excited to say we have several of our projects in the rotation. See below…
That eBay logo is a new one for us… as this week we were able to launch the official eBay Corporate Blog (eBay INK) as well as the eBay Insider Blog (both of which are cnp_studio/Voce joints). The others – PlayStation (PlayStation.Blog) and Yahoo! (Yodel Anecdotal) are previous releases that continue to grow. You can see more about each of those in the portfolio.
Posted in New Site, Social Media, Who We Are, WordPress | Add a Comment »
Friday, March 28th, 2008
Posting has been a bit light here lately. We’ve had a jam-packed last several weeks and the exciting thing is that some big sites are in the home stretch. Can't wait to share.
We've been doing even more with WordPress and as a result are finishing a few posts on the topics of security, performance and scaling. All three seem to be a recurring theme lately so it seems fitting. Speaking of WordPress, WordCamp is this weekend out in Dallas. I won't be making it, but they say they’ll make the videos available online a week or two after the fact. In the mean time I'll watch the trackbacks on the schedule pages for anyone blogging the sessions.
We'll get the posting back to normal here soon. Lots to talk about.
Posted in Who We Are, WordPress | Add a Comment »
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.
Posted in WordPress | Add a Comment »
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 »
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.
Posted in WordPress | Add a Comment »
Friday, December 7th, 2007
A recent upgrade of a project to WordPress 2.3.1 brought about a few other new upgrades. It's one of those things where you figure, "while we're in here we might as well fix up a few things." So among the upgrades being made was the addition of the Paged Comments plugin on the blog. A small bit of styling and we were good to go with paging. No real issues to speak of until we tested the recent comments we were pulling into the sidebar on the site.
Prior to any of the upgrades there was a box in the right sidebar of the site that pulled in five recent comments courtesy of the Simple Recent Comments plugin. No issues to speak of with this plugin. Recent comments pulled in reliably.
So back to where we combined the paging comments with the sidebar. The recent comments plugin will pull the 5 most recent comments along with the permalink to that particular comment, such as:
http://cnpstudio.com/blog/2007/12/04/new-site-girl-scouts-of-west-
central-florida/#comment-97
But then what happens to that permalink once I add paging? Well, any comments on the default page of the post would still work
http://cnpstudio.com/blog/2007/12/04/new-site-girl-scouts-of-west-
central-florida/
But what if that comment is now on page 2 of the comments? Simple recent comments has no way of knowing this. Hence we start getting broken permalinks to comments because the actual permalink may now need to be:
http://cnpstudio.com/blog/2007/12/04/new-site-girl-scouts-of-west-
central-florida/comment-page-2/#comment-97
Granted, the simple recent comments and paged comments plugins were made by two separate developers and never intended to interface together. However, it's not unreasonable to think that the Paged Comments plugin would come with a way to dynamically derive comment permalinks from pages other than the actual post page. Currently, the plugin only includes the logic to dynamically create the permalink on the actual comments page, but nowhere else. Frustrating.
That left us to do some custom work on our end to dynamically derive the permalinks in the sidebar. It wasn't our ideal solution. In a perfect world, this would have already been addressed somewhere in the WordPress community, but that didn't seem to be the case. Should we have used a different plugin altogether? Was the solution available on this plugin and we just went about this the hard way? With the amount of time we dedicated to solving the problem I don't think so, but anything is possible.
Our solution fixed our one instance, but it was not a solution for all situations and therefore not something we'd release to the entire community. Anyone heard of a pre-existing solution to this before we spend the time creating it?
Posted in WordPress | 3 Comments »
Thursday, October 18th, 2007
Is it my birthday? As a matter of fact it almost is and it was so nice of Matt Mullenweg (that wonderful guy who brought us WordPress) and his company Automattic to acquire Gravatar.
Gravatar is really a great idea. You create an account using your e-mail address as the key, and upload your avatar. Then, any time you use your e-mail address on a site supporting Gravatars, your picture is brought in for the world to see. There was just one problem: Gravatar was plagued by some poor performance issues.
Luckily the Gravatar plugin for WordPress has caching and when that is mixed with wp-cache you can alleviate most of the performance problems (at least on subsequent page loads, but not that first one). Still, when creating/supporting a blog such as the PlayStation Blog, even the smallest of inefficiencies can become big headaches. Just load up a post with 895 comments and you'll know what I'm talking about.
Seems like my frustrations are already on the way to being a thing of the past as Automattic has already made changes, but most importantly this one:
Avatar serving is now more than three times as fast, and works every time.
Wow. It's been one day and look at that progress. Here's a few more highlights on the upcoming changes:
- Move the gravatar serving to a Content Delivery Network so not only will they be fast, it’ll be low latency and not slow down a page load.
- Develop a new API that has cleaner URLs and allows Gravatars to be addressed by things like URL in addition to (or instead of) email addresses.
- Rewrite the application itself (site.gravatar.com) to fit directly into our WordPress.com grid, for internet-scale performance and reliability
Can't wait for these updates.
Posted in WordPress | Add a Comment »
andrew:
hey mike -- thanks for the reply, let me clarify what i mean.... I know that PHP fu...
nick:
Hi Jeff, Thanks for the heads up on the link. It's all fixed now and you should...
Jeff:
I would love to try your plugin, but the download link appears to be dead again. Ca...
mike:
@Denise: 1. The image is selected randomly each time the code is run. So normally ...
andrew:
hey -- great plugin and would like to use on several different pages, not just the ...