August 4th, 2010

A whole lot of WordPress love, and some plugins too

I Love WordPressI love WordPress. I really do. I love WordPress 3.0 especially. I love the greater control I have over menus straight off the shelf. It means a lot less dropping into code to manage navigation, and it means I can pass more control over to my clients. My clients don’t really care about WordPress all that much, but they do love not having to call me up to make pretty rudimentary changes. I love happy clients, and that’s another reason to love WordPress right there.

I love  WordPress’ simple, functional, well thought-out and elegantly styled interface. I love it’s simple structure of pages and posts. I love its infinite extensibility and massive plug-in repository. I love it’s recently added features like featured images just as much as I love it’s old ones like being able to organise a collection of Links. I love that it’s nearly ideal for SEO right off the shelf, and I love that it’s got powerful built in commenting features and user registration. I love the dedicated team of geniuses (is that the right plural?) that constantly deliver above-expectation improvements in every iteration. And I love the dedicated community of geniuses that put together impressive free and premium themes in every layout configuration that you could possibly consider. I also really love the other dedicated community of geniuses that build powerful extensions like MU and BuddyPress.

I love using WordPress as a core or a component of more complicated projects like simple e-commerce sites, digital download sites, and online magazines. I love that it’s too advanced to be a straight up blogging tool, but neatly understated and lightweight enough to be dismissed as a full blown CMS.

But more than anything I love that I took the time to learn how to use it way back, and that the big investment in understanding how to get the most out of it is, for the most part, over and done with. Ultimately I’m glad that I didn’t go down another route like deploying Joomla or Drupal for clients regularly, both of which are respectively good solutions for different styles of project but at the same time frankly cumbersome, poorly designed and shameful in comparison to WP’s finesse.

I’m about to embark upon a project involving a deployment of Umbraco as a CMS on an asp.net platform. It’s not ideal from a personal point of view but I’m not involved in the development or site integration and using it seems pretty standard so I’m sure it wont be hard to learn. It seems that running a big Microsoft enterprise stack might well be a really solid solution, but it sure does limit your access to open source software. Write off PHP/MySQL integration sitting alongside a transactional site for security, and that limits you to very few low-cost solutions. Still, I’m looking forward to learning some more about Umbraco.

You know what? I’m pretty glad that I don’t have a stack of sites built using legacy platforms that require a lot of project history knowledge before jumping in to update them. Or having a stack of custom code built on a legacy platform that is just too massive to be brought up to date.

No, instead I have a pretty little WP auto-updater that makes sure my clients are well serviced at the core level, making their projects easy to work on when they need additional work completed or a template design freshened up.

I still sometimes work on sites built with static CSS/XHTML pages and some includes / dynamic content brought in with some simple PHP+MySQL, and it feels like I’m back in 1998. It’s like I should be making lozenge style buttons for navigation using Paintshop Pro while I’m at it.

Working with WP now feels like the default – it IS a website for me. When someone asks for a fairly standard site I immediately build it’s deployment into the project cost unless the client has a specific requirement that rules it out, and I discount that deployment pretty heavily because I’m now very accustomed to working with it.

Are you feeling the WordPress love? If so I’d like to hear about some of the projects that you’ve been working on using it, especially anything out of the ordinary. I also want to hear what you’d like Automattic to include in their next major release. I’d like better off the shelf mobile content delivery from WP, but I’m also interested in hearing what you think the future of the platform will be over the coming years.

Not feeling the vibe? Let’s hear why! Rip it to shreds if you like. Let’s get some facts on the table.

Plugin love

For those of you who work with the tool day to day, and for those just starting out, I thought I’d share a list of 6 plug-ins that I use regularly to extend a default WordPress install to bring a whole set of common features into action:

  • StatPress – Almost always my first install, this is a simple visitor stats monitor. I use Google Analytics for the real work, but StatPress provides real-time reporting so it’s useful to watch the direct effect of your social media campaigns, etc, as you run them.
  • Google Analytics for WordPress – Visitor stat work horse. But now without having to add code to your header/footer, etc. Just pop your API key in and link it to your account.
  • Contact Form 7 – Create multiple, easily customised + css styled forms to allow users to collect user submitted data. Incorperates Captcha and Akismet integration too for a solid layer of spam protection.
  • Widget Logic – Use WordPress’ inbuilt Conditional Tags to set rules to determine when sidebar widgets are displayed. I’d like WordPress to include this off the shelf really, but until then this is a good solution.
  • WP-Polls – A super-simple polling widget that lets you setup custom questions with multiple answers and run several polls simultaneously. Even pick which poll is displayed randomly.
  • PHP-Code Widget – Similar to use as the Text widget, this plugin allows PHP code to execute from within sidebar widgets giving you some powerful functionality.

I should probably send Matt Mullenweg a box of chocolates or something because I have a lot to thank this guy for. I’d go so far as to say he’s really changed the face of the net thanks to WordPress’ impressive success. As a tool for users to deploy simple sites and blogs in a hasstle-free way, and that’s not even mentioning the hosted service, it really excels, and is kind of a good stepping stone marking the maturity of the web away from old school crap like Geocities and, (dare I even mention it) Angelfire. WP is obviously less prolific when compared to social networking Facebook and Twitter but it is definitely up there in importance with those guys. It totally shames stuff like Blogger. When you get high profile guys from Google like Matt Cutts actually deploying WordPress for his blog rather than using a proprietary Google service then that’s really saying something.

All the best of luck with your next WordPress project! Enjoy!

Drop a comment if you’d like to recommend a plugin and include a link to your blog, I’d love to check some new ones out.

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November 23rd, 2009

Extensibility a key factor in driving sales for software and electronic devices in 2010?

When Apple announced sales of over 1.5 billion applications including over 65,000 available in the first year of the ‘App Store‘, I’m certain that even they were surprised with the scale of its success. This is pretty solid evidence that at least iPhone users have an appetite for not only consumable digital media like music, video and games, but also for adding new features to their existing device. The Apps Store is a rather incredible library to browse, featuring everything from word processors, spreadsheets, expenses calculators, calorie counters, motivational tools, photo editors, vector drawing tools, real-time train updates, instant messengers, twitter and facebooking integration, lad’s magazine readers, e-book readers… just a seemingly infinite scope of tools and resources! As a single concept the App Store has turned a humble telephone into one of the most important inventions of the last decade.

Build Extensible ResourcesPersonally I am also an ardent lover of Apple’s Safari browser on both Windows and Mac platform, of which at least favoring Win Safari is quite a rarity. This is almost exclusively due to Safari’s clearly superior font rendering capability, hugely improving readability and the visual pleasure the browsing experience. But in a recent conversation with a colleague about our browser preferences we agreed that Firefox had a clear advantage over most for having incorporated ‘Add-ons’ for some years now. At the time of writing, Mozilla have achieved over 1.6 billion downloads for Firefox Add-ons! Win Safari has finally adopted a similar system of Plugins, which has opened the browser up to a similar level of development opportunity – something that I hope will put it on the map within the Windows environment for the future.

Online, WordPress is my blog and CMS tool of choice 9 times out of 10. Putting aside the native advantages of the tool (simple install, small footprint, super-simple control panel, beautiful admin interface, off the shelf SEO optimisation…) this is really something that’s dominated by it’s ‘Plugins’ library too. I standardly run about 10 Plugins on almost all of my installs to improve Search Engine Optimisation, add managed form elements, cut out comment spam, dynamically generate XML site-maps, integrate RSS feeds, display real-time statistics and more. And for all of that, WordPress is leagues ahead.

ex-ten-si-ble [ik-sten-suh-buhl] (adjective)
- Capable of being extended.

It’s the simple concept of building extensibility into an application or a device that quite clearly enables users to pick and choose what they want to run on it. At the end of the day with 65,000 application choices for my iPhone, I can turn the thing into whatever I want, and to an extent I have. It’s part of my everyday life and I really do rely on it for quite a lot – that’s fantastic for me, because for my monthly contract I’m getting some really heavy use across a lot of different aspects in my life – from organisation and efficiency to learning and entertainment, and that means real value for money.

Quite clearly Apple, Mozilla and WordPress have all fostered their respective app, add-on and plugin developers in order to generate such wealthy libraries. I’m sure these things don’t just pop up overnight. It does seem to be an inherent part of certain internet communities currently, that a team ethic amongst developers and amateur tinkerers seems to crop up all over the place with an inherently positive outlook and willingness to help those in need of support (there are forums upon forums of people happy to support WordPress installs out there) and to slowly but surely improve the resources we each have available, whether it’s for an open-source end (Firefox, WordPress) or a commercial end (Apple).

I just really can’t wait to see what’s going to come up for each of these tools over the next couple of years.

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November 20th, 2009

Best resources in social media?

Television and newspaper reports make ‘Social Media‘ and ‘Social Networking‘ buzz words sound like something that’s arrived on the scene in the past couple of years – but at least the basics pre-date the existence of the internet itself. Early BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) existed before anyone had even heard the term ‘internet’, and in concept will probably exist when its moved on from its current form.

My first experiences of the Internet involved struggling to make an Acorn RISC PC (post-Archimedes era RISCOS system) connect to Demon Internet – something I very shortly lost interest with and then attempted again a year or two later using Compuserve as an ISP. At the time this involved a sign-up fee, monthly subscription costs and national rate BT call charges. Compuserve had a built in message board structure as well as IRC (Internet Relay Chat), then later First Class (combining the two, plus rich media) which was adopted by the Open University quite early on – something I got involved in quite heavily as a means of exploring the diverse social aspect of the net. But all of this was heavily limited by both the inherent costs of being online for any significant period of time and the critically slow connection speed of a 56.6kbps modem.

If you’ve been using the internet since as early as 1996 (or even earlier) then your experiences of connecting to other users for social reasons may be very similar, and like me, you’re probably keen to embrace new forms of social networking, especially if they can offer something new.

Instant messenger clients like MSN, AIM and ICQ proceeded Internet Relay Chat use and existed way before any of the current social networking sites came into play. They’re still very popular, although the media still seem to be stuck in the mindset that IM’s are still ‘chat rooms‘ and lead to children being duped into strangers’ cars.

10 years of Social NetworkingMySpace seemed to be the first Social Networking site to get mainstream news coverage and therefore mass popularisation, but its novelty seemed to be centred around having the highest friend count out there. It suffered from grotesquely heavy amounts of spam, and now seems to be almost entirely left for dead by its user base. Has anyone asked you “are you on MySpace?” in the last year and a half? Despite its flaws however, MySpace does seem to still be the default option for Bands on a self-promotion tip. To an extent it’s probably still one of the best options as the site is still very well trusted, and it’s big advantage is how heavily it can be customised – ideal for bands and labels who want their artwork to be fully integrated online. Somehow it does seem ironic though that the default MySpace music player re-encodes mp3′s to a noticeably poor bitrate. I’d say MySpace’s days are probably numbered and without re-inventing themselves or taking better advantage of their music profiling niche, then at some point in the next 5 years it may well find itself at the online graveyard with Geocities.

Facebook is quite clearly where all the former MySpace users ended up, plus some. With a clean interface, relatively good spam controls, and a much more rigid structure – it’s ideal for the kind of talk that most internet users want to engage in. Unlike MySpace though it’s much more focused on limiting your online friends to people you actually know, or have known in the past. No more mass friend adding! This exclusive culture has probably been directly influenced by Facebook’s history as a resource intended for / strictly limited to University students. But in the long term it will probably do the community proud in making spam much more difficult to spread.

Twitter is the tool that’s quite clearly enjoying the fastest rate of expansion amongst social networking sites in recent months if the media are to be believed. With an angle quite the opposite to Facebook, it’s really all about following users who you don’t directly know. Although I do chat to a few ‘real-life’ friends on Twitter, the real benefit comes from reading the goings on in the lives of those who I respect most. Usually that’s musicians, artists, marketers, developers, photographers and so on. Celebrity following is probably what Twitter is best known for (Ashton Kutcher famously beat CNN News to 1 million followers), but I find that following smaller musicians and artists to be really engaging, simply because they have a lot of genuinely useful information to impart – and there’s a much higher chance of being able to engage in conversation with them. There’s a wealth of information resource available in real-time from prominent individuals involved in industries like marketing, SEO, web development, and graphic design – so I would guess this would be extended to lots of other fields too. Equally, following photographers who shoot for Getty Images for example, or for prominent journalists, you’ll find yourself getting news updates up to 30 minutes before mainstream news channels get a wind of the story.

But despite the popularity of these resources, it’s the slightly smaller ones that I get the best use from. My current favourite is Last.FM – a site I’ve been using for years and years (earlier as Audioscrobbler), and has been analysing my musical taste ever since. It’s an ideal tool for getting new music recommendations and for linking up with people who have similar tastes. In fact, it’s quite scary to use its ‘Neighbours’ feature that lists users with the most similar tastes (and I have some quite obscure ones, musically). Last.FM is just one of those tools that will happily and unobtrusively sit in the background of your PC or Mac for years without you touching it, but have some real gems ready for you when you do.

Flickr, in a similar way is not something I use day to day, but instead something I revisit for a few years every 6 months to throw new photos onto. I don’t use it to publish hundreds of shots, instead I pick a select few. But it is fantastic to have a super-clean / minimal looking site to present photographic work with, and receive feedback from a plethora of super-talented artists. Recently upgrading to a Pro account has also given me a few kicks from being able to read stats on the site, which were surprisingly high for only having 20-30 shots on rotation.

Last but not least – Spotify I’m sure you’ll know to be really ground breaking in the music industry right now. The site is not directly a social media app, but it’s playlist function really does open a world of possibilities in sharing music with friends, but also for opening up higher profile lists like Pitchfork’s Top 100 for example – again making finding new tracks infinitely easy and convenient!

Then there’s WordPress – just simply the ultimate tool for Blogging. Self hosted or hosted at wordpress.com, blogging just doesn’t get easier than this right now, and with its quite advanced commenting system you can add elements of social networking directly to your site. In fact I often use WordPress as the basis for sites I construct for clients, regardless of whether the site’s focus is a blog or not – it’s just a very advanced tool to deploy as a CMS, and simple to use too, making it ideal for non-technical client use.

For some social media sites it’s very clear to see the undeniable power of an invite-only system as a free marketing tool. Google the term ‘Ffffound‘ (one of my favourite sites) and you’ll find page upon page of requests on forums for an invite. Similarly over the past few weeks, you’ll find the same for Google Wave invites, even though media coverage for the tool has been relatively minimal and quite few people can actually tell me what the tool does. There’s definitely an element of desire acting heavily on this – people just don’t want to be left out, regardless of whether a site or tool is directly useful to them.

I’ve missed some in that list like YouTube, Blogger, and torrent sites for example, which all have great social elements, but I’m not a big user or fan of any and this really is primarily a personal list. It’s going to be really interesting to see quite what’s next on the social media front!

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