Fresh

In honor of WordPress week, I’ve collected an assortment of sites that are tickling my fancy in some way or another and oh yeah, they all use WordPress. Hopefully you will find a couple that you haven’t had the pleasure of checking out before.

I Love Typography

This is a blog about all of the intricacies of typography ranging from the basics to super technical jargon-filled goodness. The design is a beautifully simple execution of what they preach.

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In yesterday’s post I hit upon two major developments happening with WordPress this year: the merge of WordPress MU into WordPress, and better support for custom post types.  But there’s more! Here are just a few more advancements in the WordPress world that I’m looking forward to this year.

New 2010 default theme

Kubrick: klassic, but old and krusty. At eROI we’ve discussed creating our own default/starter themes that contain all the basic essential functions for a blog or a non-blog website. Many theme developers just getting started in WordPress (or even those who’ve been at it a while) take the default theme and tweak it to fit their structure/design.  Oftentimes this leads to having extraneous code that isn’t really needed or even code that has been deprecated. Having new default themes with up-to-date functions, heavily commented HTML and CSS, more basic HTML structures and without functions we don’t use often will help new members of our team learn theme creation faster.

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I am a huge WordPress nerd. When Mary asked “If you have a half-hour to kill in between meetings, what do you do?” I promptly replied “Read blogs about WordPress.  Which are written using WordPress.” (it didn’t make the video though, audio problems. Thank goodness. Hah.)  The past few months I’ve been amassing a collection of my favorite blogs about WordPress, and the ones I love reading the most are those that discuss current features being developed, upcoming planned additions to the core and other kinds improvements to WordPress and the WP community. Reading the dev chat summaries from the official WordPress Development blog get me damn near giddy sometimes. I’ve even found myself diving deep into development discussions, where previously I might have skimmed a bit and then gone back to Facebook before my eyes rolled into the back of my head.  But there are just too many cool things happening in the WordPress community right now, I feel like I need to have more and more information.

I’d like to share a few of things I’m excited about right now in the world of WordPress. Some of these are coming up very soon (WordPress 3.0 is on schedule to be released in April) while some might be rolled out over the course of the year, or maybe even next year. But even the fact that discussions are taking place  is very exciting for a WordPress dork like me.

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Although I love WordPress, I always wished it provided a better way to have custom page types with their own custom fields.  The built in “Posts” and “Pages” work great for regular blogs, but for a more complex website they aren’t enough.  What about “Portfolio Items”, “Job Listings”, “Events”?  And for a basic brochure site you don’t even need the “Posts” and its placement in the nav just serves to confuse whoever has to manage the website.  Often I will use a “Post” as a different type of page content – but I always have to explain to clients that they have nothing to do with blog posts, so just ignore the name and ‘imagine’ that it’s called something else.

Last year I saw a demonstration of the Expression Engine CMS presented by Josh Pyles of Pixelmatrix Design.  I drooled over its ability to create different page types with their own custom fields, all presented in a beautiful UI.  I ogled and stared and sighed and wished that WordPress could do the same thing.  One of my favorite plugins, More Fields, could add some of that custom field functionality, but without custom page types and the beautiful UI. (more…)