The first (and hopefully only) release candidate for the latest K2 is up and about, and it’s a milestone.
Tag Archive for 'wordpress'
I love the engineers behind iPhone OS. They’re head, neck, shoulders and torso ahead of everyone else. It’s kind of scary in a way, as it probably shows just goes to show how far behind everything else is in contrast.
Not to pick on WordPress, I’ve just spent a good deal of time with it over the last few days, and it struck me again yesterday how, as I was testing a slew of role management plugins (argh, by the way), that I would activate a plugin, and subsequently not have the faintest clue where to look for any new UI inserted by it. Some put a single options page under Users, others inserted whole bundles of pages, some put them where I least expected it…
Contrasted with the iPhone, where when you install or update an app, from the phone itself, it will actually exit the app store and take you to the screen where the icon is, and show you that it’s being installed/updated. This usually takes 10 – 20 seconds, and you’re good to go; it’s right there ready for you.
It’s a small thing, and in the cases where you’d prefer to stay in the store it may be mildly annoying, but on a larger scale it means a lot less frustration and searching, even in a system as simple as the iPhone.
I could pull out a plethora of reasons why the media manager in WordPress needs to be the focus of the next major release after WordPress 3.0, but honestly, this particular issue seems to say everything there is to say on the subject.
Seriously now; did anyone even bother testing it? How long has it been like that?
I love WordPress; I actually really do, but you can’t just throw the first media manager that crosses your path into WordPress core and think that’s that… And I’m not just talking about this either. I’ve looked at the code; I’ve reverse-engineered the code. It’s not pretty, but more importantly, it’s symptomatic of a whole heap of problems in WordPress in general.
A Snow Leopard-esque release would do wonders; though I have to wonder if it won’t break the back of those who take it upon themselves to try it?
And thus ends another era in my life. 2010 is turning out to be quite the year.
A complete guide to using Thickbox in the WordPress admin, despite the ingenious traps laid by the developers of the media manager and Thickbox itself. With this guide in hand, you too can shout out ‘Spaaaartaaaaa’ and kick bad code into a big-ass hole in the ground.
While WordPress ships with jQuery, it’s often a few updates behind the latest version. Since jQuery 1.4 is just out, I wanted to use it with K2. That in and of itself is fairly easy, and a simply matter of deregistering the ‘jquery’ script and registering a new one. While looking for a proper solution I came across this rather crude way of going about it quite a lot, and it’s a horribly way of going about this, and will (and has probably) undoubtedly result in old plugins and themes blindly overwriting newer version of jQuery with their own, once new hotness, now old and busted version of jQuery.
Ugh.
This PHP code snippet checks to see if the passed version is later than the one currently registered, and makes sure we’re not in the admin (just to be sure).
If our version is indeed newer than the one currently registered, we go ahead and grab the idol… eh, swap jQuery’s.
/**
* Register a later version of jQuery if it’s later than the one currently in WordPress
*
* @param {String} our_version The version of jQuery we want to upgrade to if needed.
*/
function upgrade_jquery( our_version ) {
// We want to use the latest version of jQuery, but it may break something in
// the admin, so we only load it on the actual site.
global $wp_scripts;
if ( ( version_compare(our_version, $wp_scripts -> registered[jquery] -> ver) == 1 ) && !is_admin() ) :
wp_deregister_script(‘jquery’);
wp_register_script(‘jquery’,
get_bloginfo(‘template_directory’) . ‘/js/jquery.js’,
false, our_version);
endif;
}
add_action( ‘wp_head’, upgrade_jquery( ’1.4.1’ ) );
It sure would be neat if this was built straight into WordPress’ wp_register_script.
I’m lucky enough to have force-fed myself enough roleplaying games and science fiction comics to have picked up English to a level where I’m often more fluent in it, than I am in my mothertongue. And for the purposes of of blogging about those two particular subjects, whatever grammar, puntuation and structure snafus that happen to find their way onto this blog are less a real worry than they merely distracting (and at times embarrassing).
But if one were to take writing more seriously, be it for personal, academic or straight-up professional reasons, a friend of a friend of mine recently started a site that’ll do just that, hassle-free.
I don’t generally plug things on this site unless I truly like them. And until I tried Wordy, I honestly didn’t know what use I could have for it. But listen, Wordy gets it.
It’s on-demand copy-editing, and it’s ultra slick. No hassles, no clutter, no crap. I took it for a test-run on a chapter from a book another friend of mine is writing, and the experience couldn’t have been better. If for nothing else, you should check it out just to marvel at the elegance of how they’ve set up the site and how clear their process and goal is.
Particularly interesting to some of us, is that they’re working specifically on a WordPress plugin, which should make it even easier to use. They’ve also got a blog (in Danish).
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some K2 code to clean up.
I met up for an interview with the gracious Tina Daunt in Santa Monica (oh wonderful Santa Monica) during our US roadtrip, first slated for the LA Times, before they started firing people left and right, now up at Huffington Post.
The new 2010 theme is slowly starting to take shape, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what that’ll be about. Meanwhile my, until recently, neglected second child, K2—a spiritual followup of sorts to Kubrick — just went 1.0 before the holidays, and we’re well on our way towards a great 1.1 release.
I’ve got a couple of other projects I should have started a long time ago coming in 2010, and I can’t wait to unveil them as we get nearer to summer. Yes, one of them is a new WordPress theme.
It was great, while it lasted, honestly pretty crazy for a while, and I very much enjoyed it; but its retirement is timely, if not overdue.
Kubrick, by the way, was born in the summer of 2004, which makes it almost five six years old this year. I would never have thought it could have lived for this long.
Thanks Stanley. And sorry.
Even though I intended to blog some more over the holidays, I instead spent most of the time glued to the computer working in various capacities on K2.
I feel I squandered the trust of the community, by having been too casual about K2 in the past. K2 has been first with a whole bunch of features and functionality, we had a rather large and very active community and a solid codebase, yet mostly due to me having other priorities it’s atrophied somewhat.
The good news is that we put out our 1.0 and subsequently our 1.0.2 over the holidays.
And the great news is we’re already up to having nine languages1 in our new localization repository which puts us well on our way towards the 1.1 release which is of course geared towards localization. We’ve got some pretty cool ideas in the pipeline for the roadmap after that, but more on that later.
Meanwhile, it’s been a while since I did any web design of significance, and I think I’d forgotten a little bit how fun it is (as long as Internet Explorer isn’t invited to the party that is). This has also meant getting reacquainted with the tools of the trade, old and new, and where I used to use TextMate for pretty much everything, I tried switching to Coda (I had a license, even though I’d hardly ever used it), and I’m now a full convert. Those Panic guys know a thing or two about software.
Cinch is another little app that’s been making my life a lot easier, especially since Chrome for OS X still doesn’t have the same functionality that the Windows version has had for a year or more, and since Apple refuses to acknowledge the need for a maximize button.
Now if only I could find a great app for resizing windows in a sane manner.
It took long enough, but K2 just went 1.0. Oh what a feeling. Now to get the localization effort in a row and ready for 1.1.
K2 has been a fun project for a number of reasons, but most of all I’ve been happily surprised at how the entirely lax and cell-like development process has worked out. I recently picked up the reins again and started going through our bugs, weeding out where I could and organizing what was left, in an effort to get to a 1.0 release as soon as possible. So now’s the time to tell us if something’s broken or missing.
Read more over at the K2 site.
It’s not that I’m embarrassed by my younger self, but… I’d prefer it if my blog continually contained mostly things that feel contemporary to me. Thus, employing government-sanctioned reality distortion field technology, I once again got Brian to do the heavy lifting and build me The Amazing ContemporizerOther names suggested were ‘I was young, I needed the money’, ‘It’s not that I’m embarrassed, but…’ ‘Youthful Folly’ and ‘The Ice Floe’. while I kicked back, drank piña colada’s and cackled at my cat.
The Amazing Contemporizer is a plugin for WordPress which automatically sets posts older than X to private, causing a wave of privacy to flow over your older and perhaps less… refined, past as a blogger.
PS: Backup you blog before using. Seriously. No… Seriously!
It being Kubrick appreciation week, it seems fitting Matt let me know that somebody went ahead and named their dog after Kubrick. Not the man though, but the WordPress theme I did!
Kubrick is named after the default WordPress theme, Kubrick! It’s a really nerdy way of naming our new pup, but my husband wanted to name him with something that’s related to web design and development. #
Spent half an hour recording the first in an impromptu series of screencasts about interface design. This episode takes a look at the WordPress dashboard and why it ought to be discarded immediately. There’s also a short look at the WordPress widget system and why that isn’t entirely up to snuff either.
You can comment on the Viddler page or download the fullsize 374mb quicktime file, if you’re so inclined.
PS: With a face for radio and a voice for TV, I should’ve probably just written it; but hey…
Because WordPress chokes on the comments, I’m referring any further comments on my Die Hard 4.0 review to this entry.