Delicious WordPress

I always just assume most new web apps are mostly used by little guys. Take Twitter for example. Out of the gate it just seems like a way to post your status to the web and interact with your friends. Nothing big. Well, until the celebs and branding experts realized the potential… (more…)

Stupid WordPress Tricks

To totally bang home my love for WordPress I wanted to share a nice page that breaks down a lot of useful expansions on the basic WP functionality: Stupid WordPress Tricks

There’s a lot there, in fact there are 76 tricks to peruse. Most of it is somewhat technical as far as how to implement it, but I wanted to share because sometimes examples of what you can do with a tool gives you that “Aha!” moment to really add on some cool stuff to your own projects.

So peruse that list. Find some cool stuff to do, and know it can be done so you can ask for it.

One thing I think I may do with that list is show examples of how to use that added functionality in your own project. First up Meta Descriptions without a plugin. This is a pretty easy one, and you can see it in action on the LegalOut.com site that I set up in WordPress. Outside of just the meta description we set up several custom fields to display different content on different pages.

I’m definitely looking forward to pulling a lot of added functionality ideas from this list.

Theme Options

The latest project launch has been another quality WP site with a cool new feature I learned just for the occasion.

Theme Options

Yeah it’s been around for a bit, and it’s probably just a baby step to writing full blown plugins, but I’m excited.

Mainly it gives me a way to extend a theme outside of the page/post level of things and get specific functionality available in the admin. My first foray on my latest project (from the killer design by Winters Interactive) is on the new incarnation of the  Ask a Bachelor site. In the header is a teaser for a question and answer article. Since this teaser didn’t necessarily coincide with a new blog post it needed to be somewhat removed from the post interface in the admin.

Enter theme options.

Theme options gave me a way to set up a new form that housed the data to be displayed in the header. It removed it from the post itself so gave the admin a little more control over what was displayed and how it was linked. Basically a form that had the three fields of the title, question, and link. All managed through the admin panel in WP. Pretty cool!

I found the handy how-to at NomeTech.com and can’t wait to work it in on more projects and expand the functionality a little bit as well.

WordPress Checklist

Just rolled across this Theme Development Checklist. Looks to be extremely useful.

Just off the top it looks like a great check list to roll through to make sure all the files are there to handle the different ways a site will be displayed. From readying it for plugins and widgets to just basics like comments and gravatars.

Oh and this is probably a good resource for you designers out there to make sure your vision is ready for the dynamic world of the web ;)

WordPress continues to rock my face off

I can honestly admit that I’m late to a lot of parties when it comes to web development. I definitely keep my ears open for new and exciting stuff, but rarely jump on board until I can see that whatever it is is here to stay and worth the time investment on my part.

WordPress was one of those. When I first jumped on the bandwagon I felt like I was forcing a square peg when I used it as a back end CMS for a site that didn’t even have a blog. But now, wow, now WordPress doesn’t even blink at the stuff I try to do with it. It’s almost a challenge to find something that it can’t do. And on top of that, I keep finding new and better ways to do the stuff I already know it can do.

So I’m never bored using it, which is great. But then I got wind of WordPress MU. Multi-user WordPress! Sure it’s been around and available for a bit, hey I said I’m usually late to the party, but man how powerful. MU takes regular old WP to the next level and lets you host as many sites/blogs as you want under one WPMU installation. Think about that. It looks to be the perfect solution for franchise brands that need a little more control over their franchisee Web sites, but still want to let them manage it themselves. Schools that could use separate sites for separate groups or activities. The list goes on and on.

And the best part is development time hardly goes up at all. It’s like tripling the value without even touching the cost!

So even though I’m late to this party, I’m happy to be showing up while the keg is still full.