I don’t take competition too seriously, you have to do your own thing and not focus on other projects, but where services or features are particularly successful

There is also a very interesting link to the moment when WordPress was created. Very two powerful notions are projected from these:

• Web is forever, it is one of the best archival systems where you will be able to find stuff for a long time, and even track it.
• WordPress is an ideal example of open source movement. You can actually see collaboration between those comments and a common urge to build better software.

It will be really interesting to see where WordPress and WordPress.com head too. I personally feel, somewhere WordPress should look at integration into the enterprise world. However, the challenge here would be to do it without affecting the common WordPress user.

Technorati tags: matt mullenweg, wordpressdotcom, automattic

The problem with such a popular tool is that a lot of users have got too used to the older layout and there will be resistance. Scoble does not like it a lot. I like it! With Akismet working hard I don’t have to deal with spam a lot, so more comments are useful. Of course bloggers like Scoble might have a different story with spam because of the huge amount of traffic. But overall, I prefer this to the older one. Just that there is a slight feeling of nostalgia ;-)

Technorati tags: wordpressdotcom, dashboard

Another story is it has been nicknamed Ronan, for the first WordPress baby, congratulations Ryan.

Technorati tags: release, ronan

Technorati tags: trademark

Six Apart and Google now have to face the competition on multiple fronts – the blogging tool as well as the blogging service.

Technorati tags: wordpressdotcom

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

I believe Dustin is planning to release the 2.0 version of the plugin which might include a plugin, so keep a tab on it. Till then feel free to use my version.

Technorati tags: wordpress widgets, random quotes, random quote widget

I will definitely continue with WordPress. It has achieved the privileged milestone of one million downloads and is coming up with some dynamic features. WordPress.com too has seen massive growth, it hosts 310 thousand blogs on its first birthday. WordPress.com has time and again shown that it is one of the highest quality blogging sites, with lot of high traffic and slashdottable blogs.

I want to dig deeper now, get more control and start some experiments. The new avataar will also host some projects and some personal stuff. After some research I have narrowed down to bluehost.com, dreamhost.com and mediatemple.net for hosting with a bias towards bluehost. Feel free to suggest if you have any information regarding this. I am looking at PHP, Ruby and Python support. Any kind of guidance will be appreciated.

I am trying to evaluate the costs of moving, some are apparent and I am sure some will raise their head later. Right now though, none of the disadvantages are heavy enough to outweigh the basic advantage of being able to do more with self-hosted WordPress for me.

Technorati tags: wordpressdotcom, wordpress.com, hosting, moving blog

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

WordPress, however, is an extensible website content management system that can be used to run magazine-type websites. Here are steps I took to turn this online magazine on Cebu from a blog into its current presentation.

So very right, WordPress is being used as a CMS. You can see sites like The Blog Herald, that are inherently news sites. Supporting multiple authors, roles, scheduled publishing, custom fields, comments, static pages, multilingual support, syndication support are some of the capabilities that make WordPress suitable for this. The feature that takes the lion’s share though, are categories – multiple hierarchical categories. These categories can be used to implement so many features that they have become a must-have feature. The terrific template system along with this can work magic.

Along with the stuff mentioned by Max, WordPress automatically handles the volume and issue management. Being a blogging tool, the posts are archived chronologically, which is usual way for handling issues and volumes. Even if not, WordPress provides mechanisms for retrieving posts for any period, literally any.

WordPress is excellent, however, as a personal publishing tool only. For anything more than that WordPress can be found to be lacking as a CMS. The basic content type it can handle is a post, which can be packaged as an article or news item. For radically different items, say, events, post would not be an apt structure. In case you create a new content type, it will not be completely supported by WordPress, e.g., search will not work for that content type. Additionally, there are certain publication features that are missing:

• customizable and extensible workflow: the default workflow is very two step and limited. Usually, in practice, magazines include multiple roles in the workflow – jouanalists, editors, publishers. Sometimes, different types of articles are to be edited by different editors.
• version control and rollback: maintaining versions of the drafts, and ability to rollback to an older version.
• tracing: tracing actions that can be audited.
• search: the search is partially effective. It neither supports relevancy and does not search across pages, excerpts or custom fields. There are certain solutions, but still not what the industry expects.

Besides these, WordPress is an ideal publishing tool. The best thing about WordPress is it lets you control not just the content, not just the style, but both. Using this combination you can develop a theme that is accessible, usable and supports standards. And it has been used for websites of various types:

• WordPress as CMS for Stanford Community Health Resource Center
• Websits Pushing WordPress Beyond Its Limits
• WordPress as CMs at codex

Technorati tags: magazine, cms, content management system

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda

It is a sore miss for those of us who could not be present there. Fear not, we have Matt Craven, Aaron Brazell and David Krug from The Blog Herald giving live coverage of Wordcamp. Thanks a lot guys! You can see (literally) them live blogging different sessions and contributing too to the barcamp style event. Live blogging is an efficient way to report.

More interesting stuff is expected to come out of the event. Hopefully we will get to attend the future ones. Or Wordcamp can start webcasts or virtual conferences :-) so that the world-wide user base can attend it. Nevertheless, we will see more coverage and more reports of the event later, till then continue to follow The Blog Herald guys.

Technorati tags: wordcamp

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

Skip Links

Skip Links function as navigators within the web page being described. They are required so that a person can navigate through the structure of the page with minimal clicks. They turn out to be an issue of accessibility for those who cannot scroll or move through the page because of mobility problems. And they are also a usability issue for the users with less than efficient tools for navigation, like mobile users.

An classic demonstration is at the 456 Berea Street site. The topmost links fall in the category of the skip links which can be used by users to skip to a specific part of the page. Since these links become part of the design itself there are various ways of including them, one of which has been discussed by the Accessites article. It discusses a way of hiding the skip links from the normal users but making them available to the screenreaders or on demand. You can try it out on the site as Mike Cherim says:

I use an off-screen method, typically taking an unordered list and sending it a few thousand pixels into the darkness off-left — using the display property none should be avoided to ensure access to screen reader users. Then, one-by-one, employing a:focus (or a:active for IE users) in the CSS, I bring the anchors, not the list items, into view. In the interest of a best practice, I recommend locating them, when viewable, in the upper-left or across the top, giving them a good background and enough positive z-index in the CSS to ensure they stand out. An example of this is available right here on this site. Press Tab a couple of times to see the available skip links in action.

As you can see, on accessites.org the skip links are provided to jump to even different types of information like accessibility information. However, hiding the links falls into the arena of usability which might not approve of it. The article very nicely highlights the importance of skip links and why they should be handled by the developers today to compensate for lack of standardisation in the user agents (browsers).

Whichever way they are included, skip links provide the last mile of accessibility. The fun part is that they are not at all difficult to implement. All they need are anchor names or bookmarks as they are called.

CSS for multiple media

As part of the theme development Cascading Style Sheets should be developed for multiple media – screen, print, aural and other recognized media types.

Alternate High Contrast Theme

Providing a high contrast alternate can make your site more accessible to visually challenged users. Again, using 456 Berea Street as an example, the link in the top right corner – Switch to high contrast layout – does that. For some reason this option is not employed in many sites when this is the most direct and fruitful way of making a site accessible.

Implementation In WordPress

Since WordPress is a popular blogging tool (and one of my favorites), lets use it to see how we can implement the discussed points.

The skip links themselves are nothing but links to specific parts of the page which, as mentioned earlier, can be implemented by using HTML links. They should typically be placed in a location which can be accessed without any additional effort, something like top-level navigation. Once the different parts of the page are identified, mark them up and change the theme to include the links, e.g., header.php can be modified to include the skip links.

WordPress supports CSS to the fullest extent, and supports CSS for media other than the default for screen. It is only a prerogative of the designer to provide it, WordPress does not cause any hindrance.

Switching to the alternate high contrast theme can be provided using the popular theme switcher plugin. The theme switcher temporarily changes the theme using cookies. You can modify the wp_theme_switcher() function to provide link to the alternate high contrast theme. Of course a high contrast theme has to be developed first to be able to implement this. This is something that probably designers should practice, provide a companion high contrast theme along with every theme they develop.

WordPress accessibility has been studied a lot. Here are some good resources:

• Accessibility at codex
• Bruce Lawson’s WordPress Accessibility Hacks
• Accessibility Widget

Technorati tags: accessibility, skip links, high contrast

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

Advanced Search by Weblog Tools Collection

Weblog Tools Collection has a nice plugin (through a hack) for enhancing the search. It provides fuzzy searches and some nicer integration in the WordPress.

However, I have a couple of problems with this plugin:

• Changes WordPress Database Structure: It includes an upgrade script that changes the WordPress database structure. It actually changes the data types of the excerpt and title to FULLTEXT index. This is mainly because the search finesse of this plugin is based on the MySQL FULLTEXT search functions. The biggest disadvatage of this hack is that it will not work if WordPress changes the database structure that will disrupt this upgrade. And it still does not include the custom fields.
• No Boolean Searches:It does not allow boolean searches. Boolean searches are supported inherently by MySQL 4.0.1 onwards. These cannot be used by default since WordPress supports MySQL 3.23.23 version. However the plugin can use the wpdb variable to identify versions and use the inherent capability for version greater than 4.0.1 and David Altherr’s boolean search functions or Boolean Search Plugin by Beau Collins for the lower versions.

Search Reloaded Plugin by Semiologic

Denis de Bernady’s Search Reloaded Plugin is a more appropriate solution and is an actual plugin. The plugin actually does dynamic indexing. It reindexes whenever a post is edited, saved or published. This is fine, however, it will slow down the response for a heavier database. To be able to support this, indexing has to be carried out separately and probably as a scheduled task. However, it has its own complications and cannot be solved just through a plugin. And even this plugin does not look into other content types like the custom fields.

Latent Semantic Indexing

Elliott points towards Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) for improving the search. It might not be a viable option today, but it might be future of the search industry. Natural Language Processing is already being used in certain search functionalities.

Using Google and Yahoo Search

Another option is using Google and Yahoo Search, something what WordPress.org search does. It is not very difficult to setup. However its problems lie elsewhere. It needs a public web presence, which might not be the case for corporate internal blogs. This has become more possible with the WordPress multiuser version out. Secondly, they will have their own restrictions, and thirdly the dependency on it. This is not going to help WordPress to make it a serious contender in the corporate space.

WordPress is one of the leading CMSs for building blogs. But blogs themselves have transformed into media publications and information management sites. With this happening, search will be a bigger factor to consider. WordPress has to support some solution inherently to be part of improved blogging solutions.

Technorati tags: search, search plugin, boolean search

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

For the uninformed, Movable Type and WordPress are two of the top and popular blogging tools today. Along with the basic functionality both of them provide so many extensions through plugins and customization that they can be used easily for developing solutions. Lot of personal blogs have opted out of Movable Type after Six Apart started a paid edition. This has fueled the WordPress community with more users and more development.

In my opinion, WordPress and Movable Type are neck to neck when they are compared on the features and plugins front. One of the biggest differences between them was the multi-blog/multi-user support. Since WordPressMU, the scenario has changed and WordPress can now bagged one of the most critical factors. While there are some differences like, Movable Type using Perl and WordPress using PHP at its base, I will try to omit them as they might not affect the end user directly. Here is a look at the distinguishers other than pricing:

Philosophy

Movable Type has since long supported the static publishing model. This means that a page is created once and then saved on the disk. It is not generated again unless come core design element changes which ripples through all the pages. This definitely can improve performance as communication with the database is not required for serving the pages. However, if there are thousands of pages (which is the norm), change in the design has be followed up with long and slow regenerating of the static pages. However, the newer versions of Movable Type now support dynamic publishing using PHP, but it does not support a wide array of commonly used plugins.

WordPress is a firm believer of being completely dynamic. All the content is stored in the database, and a page is created on the fly before it is served. A high-traffice website can cause high load on the database and can slow down things as WordPress hasto depend on the database for every serving of the page. However, there are certain plugins available that can cache the system and offer better performance.

Another impact of this is that the pages from Movable Type are available as individual HTML pages and can be downloaded individually as a backup. As against this, WordPress users have to backup the database to backup their posts.

As a user, I will go with WordPress, because I feel the dynamic publishing is more intuitive and requires lesser maintenance than static publishing. As a developer, I believe that solutions should be found in optimizations and better designs for better performance.

Templage Tags

Movable Type supports Smarty like template tags while WordPress uses PHP function calls as tags. The main purpose of tags is that theme developers, who might not be familiar with programming languages, can still develop the templates. The tags can be considered to be a API to access the blogging engine.

I like the Smarty tags and how they can enable reduce the programming knowledge required for theme developers. Note that I am saying minimize, not eliminate. Even if they are just tags, there is still logic required to access data in a particular fashion and display it. Matt Read does quite well in convincing that the PHP functions can be considered and treated as tags.

WordPress not having Smarty like tags is not a show-stopper, but the easily accessible global functions and variables do encourage quick and dirty hacking instead of doing the same thing through plugins. But maybe, this is considered as an advantage by some.

Licensing

WordPress is completely open source, and is licensed under GNU General Public License(GPL), in the sense that it allows developers to modify it and even redistribute it. Movable Type does not. This has led to some resentment, but each of them might be valid in their own place. However, for the end user (and the developer) completely open source is definitely beneficial. Personally, as an open source advocate, I voice my support in favor of WordPress.

Customized Syndication

As far as I know, WordPress has the most customizable syndication available. Movable Type does support full and category based syndication, but still not as flexible as in WordPress.

Pages

This, I think, is an underestimated feature in WordPress. With pages, you can create content that is not part of the posts and archives. As simple as it is, this enables developers to use WordPress like a Content Management System to create even non-blog sites. By support of the page templates, it is easy to create forms for search, feedback or contact us.

Movable Type claims that it does not share the target audience with WordPress. However, WordPress might soon be able to share Movable Type’s audience with its strong and fast development

More reading

• WordPress – The Goods And The Bads
• WordPress Queries Reviewed
• Blog Software Smackdown: The Big 3 Reviewed
• WordPress vs Movable Type
• Movable Type vs WordPress
• Movable Type versus WordPress

Technorati tags: movable type, wordpress, review, static publishing, dynamic publishing

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

Updated this post to reflect Matt’s comments and replace /wp-inst/wp-rss2.php by /feed/.

Just extending on Lorelle’s Customozing RSS Feed Links for WordPress.com and WordPress Sidebar Widgets which provides useful suggestions for customizing WordPress feeds, even for searches. Reading that article made me delve into more ways of syndicating specific content. Feed templates can also be modified for more granular control. If feeds are still Greek to you, Introduction to Syndication and WordPress Feeds will bring you up to speed.

Now, more customization for RSS feeds in WordPress! WordPress executes the WordPress Loop and the associated queries for producing the feeds. This implies that rules that apply for creating index, archive, searchor custom queries can be used for creating the feeds. It is kind of single-source publishing, same queries to be used for same content, irrespective of whether it displayed on the web or syndicated via the feed.

Let us see what this means for us. In addition to the default feeds, now we can provide additional partial feeds for posts created using WordPress queries, e.g., posts for last two days or order posts alphabetically or posts by a specific author in a multi-author blog. Say, one of your visitors is interested only in two categories and not all of them. Using this blog as an example, lets create a feed for categories blogging and wordpress.

All the examples given below are relative URLs with respect to the root of the blog, i.e., the URLs displayed below are appended to http://iface.wordpress.com/.

feed/?category_name=blogging
&category_name=wordpress

We have specified the category names as arguments to the file wp-rss2.php which produces the RSS feeds. If you are not afraid of handling IDs, the same result can be obtained using:

feed/?cat=91+33

Here, 91 is the category ID of the category blogging and 33 that of wordpress. This is so convenient for my reader who would otherwise had to subscribe to the entire feed and filter through the posts or subscribe to two feeds, one per category. This would be intolerable if the reader was interested in 10 categories out of 20.

Now consider a case where your visitor is interested in 9 out of 10 categories, that is you want to eliminate posts for one category from the feed. I am trying document all WordPress global variables on this blog, and all of them are filed under the wordpress global variables category. A reader, not interested in the WordPress plugins or theme development, might not interested in the wordpress global variables category posts. Here is how it can be done:

feed/?cat=-80413

will remove the posts under wordpress global variables in this blog.

Techniques mentioned in Alphabetizing Posts can be used on the query, e.g.,

feed/?cat=91+33&orderby=title&order=asc

will result in the feed having alphabetically ordered posts.

feed/?authorname=anadgouda

will produce a feed for posts by me, even if there were more authors writing on this blog.

If it is useful, feeds can also be produced for pages, following are multiple ways:

about/feed

feed/?pagename=about

feed/?page_id=2

While all the above examples can be used for a WordPress.com blog, they are applicable even to an independent blog. As a blog owner, you can probably create such feeds for specific readers of your blog.

WordPress gives you the ability to customize the RSS feeds by letting you run customized queries, this gives the ultimate power to the blog owner and the reader.

Technorati tags: rss, feeds, custom+feeds

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

Well, actually not. The Link Manager has been transformed into Bookmarks. For all practical purposes we can say that a bookmark is our good old link. Managing bookmarks, adding and importing still function the same way. What seems to have disappeared is management of link categories! In Bookmark Management you can still filter the bookmarks by categories, but there is no place for category management!

The link categories are now merged into post categories. You will see them listed in the Manage -> Categories interface. The Manage Categories also shows an additional column for the number of bookmarks in a category.

However, there was some change in behavior too.

• The biggest being that there is no differentiation between a post category and a bookmark category now. In the earlier version, I could choose the sorting and the order of display of bookmarks in the bookmark category properties. There goes by list of popular posts! Their ranks are not being used anywhere, they are being displayed alphabetically. I probably have to start using the text widget for this too, till a popular posts widget is ready. It will be difficult in themes like Regulus and Hemingway which do not support widgets yet.
• Earlier, link categories with invisible bookmarks were not being displayed, now they are being shown empty in the sidebar. If you don’t want those categories to be displayed, delete bookmarks within that category.
• Also, what is missing is the convenience of moving bookmarks from one category to another with just one submit. No way of doing that now!

I am not sure whether this is the final version, but this sure has made me a little uncomfortable.

An unrelated change is that the post categories for a post now link to the category archives instead of the WordPress global tags :-). Hehe, it was short-lived.

Technorati tags: wordpress.com, wordpress+link+manager, bookmarks, link categories

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

Even though a casual look, he makes some very hard-hitting points. Here are the highlights:

There are multiple lessons here:

• No need to put options in database when you can have it serialized on the disk.
• No need to put bulk RSS feed data together with lots of small options – use other table for that.
• Here again, even if putting bulk data together, use indexes for getting proper subset. Anyway, above points are somewhat more important

…

Anyway, major issues:

• Do not use DISTINCT or GROUP BY if you do not have to.
• Use indexes for sorting, row selection and offset retrieval. Create multiple indexes.
• Avoid putting bulk data together with metadata.
• Count and save. Reuse.

Even though applied to WordPress, these suggestions would apply to any good database design. One very important point I like is not to put the bulk data together with metadata. The metadata (usually, data about data) can be queried more frequently as compared to the actual data. Logically, the metadata can be used as a factor whether bulk data is required to be retrieved or not. This can save substantial amount of processing time.

As a wishlist I will add that maybe WordPress should upgrade to MySQL 5.0 and use stored procedures.

I think more such reviews are required as they can substantially improve the product, eventually benefiting all of us. Ryan Boren has acknowledged this and has said that some of the suggestions have been implemented and some are being tracked. I think some redesign of the database will be required to optimize it.

Update

Matt has specified in the comments that lot of the suggestions are already implemented in WordPress 2.0.

Having said this, WordPress already has pretty good performance. As written earlier, Sitescore gives good marks to performance which is all because of WordPress. But more enhancements are not harmful :-), considering WordPress is being used in innovative ways all around.

Earlier, I have reviewed WordPress from a Content Management System (CMS) perspective. I have registered one more rant about the user interface for writing.

Finally, I think there is a benefit of open source that we see here. Open source approach makes so much talent available!

Technorati tags: wordpress queries, wordpress review, database

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

A Link Category can now be converted into a Text Widget and then arrange it anywhere in the sidebar. The dependency on the name of the link category to position it is eliminated. I had named a link category Adhesive to include my sticky posts so that it would be on top of all the links. Now I have a text widget called Sticky (which is more common and popular) and it is right at the top, even above any of the other navigation tools.

In addition to this, now the text widget can be used to display any message to the reader. The message can be about the website or some help message or some quote. I have found that most of the HTML elements are allowed, except for the form elements. I wish it was allowed, I would have liked to change display of the search form.

I have also used it to make my menu. For some reason all the themes, except Regulus, do not display the pages according to their page order. They are usually sorted in alphabetical order. So, the best way was to use the text widget. Ofcourse this has to be updated manually everytime a page is added, but this will not be a problem unless a new page is added frequently.

Caution

After adding your custom HTML code in a text widget, make sure that you validate, both the CSS and HTML, to make sure that the new webpage still has valid HTML and CSS. A thing to note is that all the content inside a widget is displayed between <li class="widget"></li> tags.

Technorati tags: text widget, wordpress.com, sidebar widgets, link manager

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

However, it breaks XHTML validity. I used the W3C validation service to test mine, here is a screenshot of the error:

This validation was done using the Web Developer Extension for Mozilla Firefox. Optionally you can directly use the W3C Markup Validation Service to validate your web page.

The error is because the style element is included in the sidebar widget. If the Recent Comments widget is removed, the page successfully validates.

Update

I got an immediate reply for my feedback regarding this from Andy Skelton that this will be fixed in an update soon.

Technorati tags: recent comments widget, wordpress, wordpress.com, sidebar widget, invalid xhtml, w3c validation service

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

In spite of this, sometimes, somethings are not very obvious, or somethings are not easily visible. There can be multiple reasons for it – technical reasons, lesser control over the theme (like in case of WordPress.com blogs today). Or sometimes one usability aspect itself can pose itself against another, forcing you to choose a balance. How do you communicate this to your user? How do you explain the theme and concept of your website?

Help

The answer is Help! Provide help to your user. The best form is, ofcourse, online help. But sometimes you might have to provide hard copies of manuals, presentations, demonstrations or training. They are all forms of help, that makes your reader more comfortable with your site.

Help tells the user what to expect from the website, and minimizes the unknown.

As with any other new thing, a new visitor of your website might feel a little alien to it. He/She can take up some time to learn a few things, see what features are available, understand behaviour of your website. This is because he/she does not know what to expect. The learning happens through discovery or experience which can either be the hard way or time consuming. The learning becomes even more important if there is more than reading on the website – like e-commerce or interactivity.

Help is documentation done for the user (visitor, reader, administrator), from his/her perspective to enable better usage of the software.

This Site

I got feedback from some readers who asked questions which I had thought were already answered. Most common was reading posts only of their interest. Some of them were new to a blog, so they were not aware of RSS feeds or categories of posts. This is when I realised that I should provide this information explicitly on the blog itself. I have done this earlier for other projects, why not for this? And so came up the Help & Sitemap page. It is not very exhaustive, but its a start.

To highlight some of my posts, I have used the Link Categories.

• There is a category called Adhesive, which contains posts that I want to make sticky. It is not called sticky because it would then be pushed down as the link categories are displayed in alphabetical order. Adhesive makes sure it comes on top of all the links.
• The most read posts are showin in a category called Best Yet. Again, it could have been called “Popular Posts” or “Top Posts” but the alphabetical order plays its role in the display.
• I have tried to separate the full site feeds and partial feeds, so that the readers realise that both are available.

I have tried to document all this in the Help & Sitemap page. It also contains a sitemap, not truly a sitemap, but different ways of navigation, in one place.

For WordPress.com

It makes more sense if your site is on shared hosting, like WordPress.com. You don’t have control over the entire theme. The visual aspect of your website that your readers see is controlled by the theme, each having its own widgets and features. Is it not important to let your readers know about it?

This is also profitable for you as website/blog owners – more comfortable your users get, more of your website will be read.

Related Posts

• Incorporating Usability
• Documentation Is Not Optional

Technorati tags: help, usability, website, blog, wordpress.com, navigation, theme

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

A brand new blogging engine with a ‘keep it simple’ philosophy. Designed from the ground-up to be fully buzzword compliant (AJAX, RSS, Web 2.0 – it’s all there), logahead lets you effortlessly do what blogs were invented for: Put your words on the web. Just blog.

It is no way in a stage of comparison with WordPress. I was impressed with just one feature – no it is not inherent AJAX support – it is the feature of letting the user add/edit a post from the front-end. IMHO, users will feel more comfortable with this.

Most of the other features are already included in WordPress 2.0. I don’t subscribe to AJAX entirely, it brings down compatibility with browsers. Logahead is still not compatible with all the browsers. Even in the Web 2.0 era there is a duty of software developers to be backward compatible with older browsers.

There is a Logahead Demo available that you can try. I feel there should be more technical information available about Logahead, like how is the search done, how is the design done. It will be in a better position to compare it with other blogging tools then.

Technorati tags: logahead, wordpress, blogging engine, blogging, logahead features, ajax

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

Two Different Interfaces

In WordPress today, there are two different interfaces for a user. The front end – mostly for reading and commenting, and the admin – for writing and administration of the blog.

In practice, most of the times the users who read on the blog are also the ones who write,. especially in multi-author blogs which is one of the advanced features of WordPress. The same user hence has to use both these interfaces on the same website. The default frontend and admin themes are so different that it will not be surprise if novice web users feel that they are being redirected to a completely different website. Not only can this make the users uncomfortable but they have to also learn and get used to this different layout and theme.

Since the theme engine is different, none of the attributes of the theme are carried over – the header, the masthead image (if you will), the formatting or the layout. While there is a facility to change the styling of the admin theme, to change header or footer a hack in the admin theme is required.

Is it possible to have a common theme for the frontend and the admin end? Even if not to a full extent, can writing be brought in the frontend interface?

Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpress theme, admin, css

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

The contexts for a tag and category can be different. A tag is for everyone, whether outside or inside the blog. Lets consider an example of a blog about car test drives. I will want a person looking for “four wheeler reviews” in tagging services to know about the reviews on my blog. So, I will include a tag called “four wheelers”. But once someone is already inside the blog, they know it is about car test drives, it becomes redundant to have a category called four wheelers. The categories can cater to the reader who is already inside the blog to lead him to finer details of the cars. So, I might need to have some tags in addition to the categories I have. For example, for this post, I might want to include test drive as a tag, but I will not like to have it as a category.

Secondly, I consider multiple heirarchical categories in WordPress as one of its best features. Why? Consider our earlier example blog about car test drives. Each blog post will be a car’s test drive. Even if implemented as a blog post, it will still be a test drive in concept. The different aspects of the test drive I can consider are type of car (sedan, hatchback, SUV, …), make of car, type of engine (petrol, diesel, …), size of the car and there will probably be many more. Even if we consider these three, my readers might want to read by car type, car make, or type of the engine. One of the ways of implementation is to have these three as top-level categories – By Type, By Make and By Engine Type. Within these I can create child categories of actual types, makes and engine types. These top-level categories are now more of indexes rather than tags to the posts. The actual text of the categories will more depend on the content classification and the user profiles. WordPress categories being so flexible, don’t pose any restrictions to the user. If all the categories will be used as tags, then their text will be affected by this.

In essence, only the categories cannot be enough as tags and all the categories cannot be tags, it will change from case to case. This is not a restriction, but a flexibility for me as a developer. If categories are used as tags, I would like an option to select if some category should be used as a tag or not.

I have written earlier about using something like this in one of the article management systems done using WordPress.

What do you think?

Technorati tags: wordpress, tags, tagging, categories, blogging, catetories as tags

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.

You can subscribe to the WordPress Global Variables feed to receive updates on the global variables.

This post will be continuously updated:

• $admin_page_hooks
• $ajax_results
• $all_links
• $allowedposttags
• $allowedtags
• $authordata
• $bgcolor
• $cache_categories
• $cache_lastcommentmodified
• $cache_lastpostdate
• $cache_lastpostmodified
• $cache_userdata
• $category_cache
• $class
• $comment
• $comment_cache
• $comment_count_cache
• $commentdata
• $current_user
• $day
• $debug
• $descriptions
• $error
• $feeds
• $id
• $is_apache
• $is_IIS
• $is_macIE
• $is_winIE
• $l10n
• $locale
• $link
• $m
• $map
• $max_num_pages
• $menu
• $mode
• $month
• $month_abbrev
• $monthnum
• $more
• $multipage
• $names
• $newday
• $numpages
• $page
• $page_cache
• $paged
• $pagenow
• $pages
• $parent_file
• $preview
• $previousday
• $previousweekday
• $plugin_page
• $post
• $post_cache
• $post_default_category
• $post_default_title
• $post_meta_cache
• $postc
• $postdata
• $posts
• $posts_per_page
• $previousday
• $request
• $result
• $richedit
• $single
• $submenu
• $table_prefix
• $targets
• $timedifference
• $timestart
• $timeend
• $updated_timestamp
• $urls
• $user_ID
• $user_email
• $user_identity
• $user_level
• $user_login
• $user_pass_md5
• $user_url
• $weekday
• $weekday_abbrev
• $weekday_initial
• $withcomments
• $wp
• $wp_broken_themes
• $wp_db_version
• $wp_did_header
• $wp_did_template_redirect
• $wp_file_description
• $wp_filter
• $wp_importers
• $wp_plugins
• $wp_themes
• $wp_object_cache
• $wp_query
• $wp_queries
• $wp_rewrite
• $wp_roles
• $wp_similiesreplace
• $wp_smiliessearch
• $wp_version
• $wpcommentspopupfile
• $wpcommentsjavascript
• $wpdb

Technorati tags: wordpress, global variables, plugins

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda

Word Statistics Plugin

The primary purpose of this plugin is to show readability statistics about the post currently being edited. It does this by modifying the post editing screen to show a brief line of statistics beneath the quicktags bar.

Word statistics plugin performs readability analysis. Readability analysis is an attempt to show how difficult a text is to read. It uses two most popular methods to do so:

• Flesch and Flesch-Kincaid methods.
• Gunning-Fog tests

Flesch methods give a percentage score – higher the value, better readability. Whereas Gunning-Fog test gives a numerical score that is the number of years of education the reader must have completed to understand the text.

WP-Quotes

WP-Quotes picks up random quotes from a repository and lets you display anywhere in your template. The quotes are stored in a database and a polished admin interface is provided to handle the quotes. It provides features like disabling certain quotes without deleting them and displaying the quote using CSS, so you can control it completely. In addition to this you can pick up specific quotes or all the quotes.

Angsuman’s Authenticated WordPress Plugin

This plugin will make your blog accessible only to logged in users.

This means that all the users will have to login to read your blog, including the searchbots! So Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will be really affected by it. I wonder if a middle path can be created where excerpts are visible to everyone but full posts require logins.

Google Sitemap Generator

This plugin generates a Google Sitemaps compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.

Google Sitemaps is a guide for the Google searchbot to navigate and crawl our website. This plugin provides extreme customizability by letting you choose each and every aspect of the sitemap generation, right from the frequency to priority of posts depending on their comments to creating compressed sitemaps.

Audio Player Plugin

Once installed, this plugin allows you to insert mp3 audio files into your posts and pages. Use the following syntax:

Download:

It inserts a flash player and loads the specified MP3 file. A good enabler for podcasting through WordPress.

There are probably many more, but that will be another post!

Technorati tags: wordpress, plugins, word statistics, flesch, flesch kincaid, readability, wp quotes, random, google sitemap, google sitemap generator, audio player, flash, mp3, podcasting

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda

FeedTree brings news feed updates to users, instead of the other way around. FeedTree users work together to share the latest Web feed updates. News arrives immediately, instead of on a polling schedule, making RSS as instantaneous as e-mail.

FeedTree uses distributed bandwidth to push news to the readers to enable collaborative micronews delivery. It is a push model rather than a pull model. The RSS news is distributed using peer-to-peer multicast. To make it secure, FeedTree enables the publishers to push digitally signed updates to news feeds.

FeedTree For Users: This illustration shows how it works for the users. Users can download FeedTree Client. Because of peer-to-peer multicast, you get to see an update along with any other subscriber. It does not depend on the ability of your newsreader’s polling.

FeedTree For Publishers: The push model saves bandwidth for the publisher, as every subscriber does not keep on polling the server. And peer-to-peer multicast ensures faster and guaranteed delivery of updates.

Technical Information

FeedTree is a research project at Rice University in Houston, Texas, USA.

FeedTree is built using Java atop the self-organizing Pastry overlay network. It uses the Scribe group communication system to efficiently multicast updates to RSS and Atom feeds

FeedTree WordPress Plugin

A FeedTree WordPress plugin is available. It adds necessary FeedTreePublisher security information to all your WordPress 2.0+ RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds. By augmenting your feeds with information about your signing certificate, users of the FeedTreeProxy will be able to verify the authenticity of your signed feed entries.

Technorati tags: feedtree, feeds, rss, atom, newsreader, feedtreepublisher, feedtreeproxy, p2p, peer to peer, multicast, micronews, pastry, scribe, java, wordpress, plugin, rice university

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda

The good thing about WordPress is that it gives you complete control of the theme – which includes

• Structure of the page
• Content is to be shown
• Formatting of the page

The only restriction that WordPress enforces is the template names in the template heirarchy – index.php, single.php, page.php, category.php and likes. The heirarchy itself is a very powerful feature using which one can design a theme with just one template file – index.php. WordPress gives two pre-packaged themes with the installation.

Anatomy of the Default Theme

The default theme structure contains following components in the page display:

• header
• main area
• sidebar
• footer

The main area is controlled by the corresponding template:

• index.php
• single.php
• page.php
• category.php
• archives.php
• 404.php

The components follow modular design, header.php contains everything about header (masthead image, html head, logos), sidebar.php for sidebar and similarly footer.php for the footer. All or most of the templates include these components by functions like get_header(), get_sidebar() and get_footer(). If you want to add a copyright notice to your website, just go and add it to the footer and it will be reflected everywhere.

Components of your Theme

For your theme though, you can decide what components you want. It is in no way dependent on the default theme or other aspects of WordPress. For example, if you want a three column layout, instead of just a sidebar, you can have a left sidebar and a right sidebar. If you want top-level navigation, then you can choose to have a component for it. Or a component for breadcrumbs. Structure of your theme is completely your choice.

So, in addition to the files mentioned above, you can have navigation.php and leftsidebar.php. And then you can include them in whichever templates you want to include them into. You can do what get_header, get_footer and get_sidebar do yourself by using

<?php include('navigation.php'); ?>
<?php include('leftsidebar.php'); ?>

This code should be placed where you want the navigation and left sidebar to appear.

Components and Template Files

Once the components and layout of your theme is decided, its time to implement in WordPress templates. This also depends on which content you want to show where. For example, if navigation is going to included in all the files, it might make sense to just include it in the header component. Consider this scenario:

This is a question I have come across sometimes. Typically a post becomes long and the meta data or related information about the post is put in the bottom. Would it be more usable if I can put it in the sidebar?

So the next question is, how do I access the current post’s information in the sidebar? The way it is included in the default theme, it is not supported. The reason is that usually the sidebar is included outside the loop in a template. Just include it within the loop and all the template functions will be available there. Using this you can not only show categories of the post, but also author information, related articles, or any custom field of the post. The sample code will look like this:

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
  <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
  <?php get_sidebar(); ?>
  <div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">


In the sidebar you can then use any number of template functions you want to use, e.g., the_author() for displaying the author name or use wp_getpostcats() to get categories associated to a post. All the information related to the post being displayed id available. If you look at the loop

Instead of get_sidebar() you can include any specific file you have for the component.

There is a way of getting the current post information in the sidebar outside the loop too, but I would categorize it under hacking. $posts is a global variable used by WordPress, when a post is being displayed, $posts[0] always contains the post being displayed. You can then use $posts[0]->post_author to get the author name and other information. But this falls under hacking because $posts is not part of the plugin API. Later, WordPress team can choose to change the name of this variable for various reasons and your theme will break because of this.

There are innumerable number of combinations you can do with the freedom you have with WordPress templates, it is all upto your imagination.

Layout and Style

Layout of your webpage can be completely controlled in the CSS. CSS in WordPress let you control two aspects of your design – layout and the style. Whether you want to show the sidebar in the left or right can be switched just by changing float: left; to float: right; in the CSS ID associated with the sidebar.

WordPress lets you control not only the attributes in the CSS classes or IDs, but also the CSS class and ID names themselves. You yourself can create the templates where you can specify the CSS class and ID names and then specify attributes for them in the CSS.

Separate Syle From Layout

As mentioned earlier, CSS in WordPress controls both – layout and the style. If these two are physically separated then you can later choose to change just the style (e.g., colors) and keep the layout same. This also applies a discipline to the editing of CSS, as the changes required for layout and style are in different files. The only restriction WordPress puts is on name of CSS file it uses, it is called style.css. You can very well create your own CSS files, e.g., layout.css and formatting.css and then import them in style.css using:
@import url('layout.css');
@import url('formatting.css');

Site Search tags: wordpress, theme, default theme, template, template heirarchy, header, sidebar, footer, get_header. get_sidebar, get_footer, current+post, author, layout, style, css, theme design, custom fields

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda