Fresh

Three years ago I began working on websites as a young account coordinator/project manager. I did not understand what CMS (that’s Content Management System for you kids at home) stood for or let alone what the difference was between open source and proprietary software. But, that didn’t matter because clients wanted a way to update their content that didn’t involve them taking classes at community college. Back in those days eROI had three CMS options to offer:

Marqui – A hosted proprietary system, which wasn’t terrible, but definitely was not worth the money and developing for it seemed to be a pain. I averaged 10 calls a month from two sites that had been live for years.

CMS/MS – An open source solution that served the purpose of a basic CMS with the best price around (FREE!). The only problem was that it was difficult to use from an Admin perspective, and was not as flexible for developers to be a truly powerful CMS.

Contribute – A trimmed down version of Dreamweaver by Adobe sold on Amazon and came in a real box. I won’t go into those forgotten nightmares too deeply, but let’s just say the software in the box had about as much value as an old AOL CD. The amount of time wasted trying to get this software to function as it was billed to could have been used to go to Mars by now.

Having had clients on all of these systems made me completely hate CMS systems. (more…)

Who has a phone with a mobile browser? Um…EVERYONE! Yeah, nowadays, people don’t just have cell phones, they have a mini computer in the palm of their hand able to find anything online within seconds.

On the top of everyone’s priority list, in the web world, is how to go mobile. One option is to build a whole new version of your site so that it will look good on a mobile device, but not everyone has the time and/or budget for that. If your site is already in WordPress, then you have another option…plugins!

There are several handy plugins that will make your current site mobile friendly. I’ve been tasked to find a plugin for our blogs here at eROI. After doing my research, I’ve found a few that seem to top the list and do a great job out of the box.
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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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We’ve decided to dedicate this pre-pre-Valentine’s Day week to something which we all love around these parts: WordPress!  Every day this week we’ll be bringing you a kickass post about the blogging platform/content management system we all know and love and share and obsess about.  So put on your Wordcamp T-shirt, pour yourself some coffee in your WordPress Footed Bistro Mug and enjoy.

Nobody WANTS to have their blog hacked.  But without a few basic precautions, you could be practically inviting them in without knowing it.

When you install WordPress, you will automatically have a user account named “admin.”  Everyone who knows WordPress knows this.  And that includes the bad folks who want to get admin access to your site.  Because they know that your site probably has an administrator-level account with the username “admin,” half the work is done.  Then they just need to figure out your password.  One of the most common attacks on WordPress sites is called “brute force” password guessing. A script will keep trying different password combinations until it finds the correct one.  They usually aren’t successful, but sometimes they hit the jackpot – and you don’t want your site to be the lucky winner.**

To defend against this type of attack, there are three fairly basic things you can do:

1. Have a good password
2. Get rid of the “admin” account
3. Ban anyone with too many failed login attempt

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Like most cool technologies, this WordPress plugin was developed out of necessity for a client project. In a nutshell it works very similar to the way sifr works only without involving flash in the process. Instead, the plugin relies on php and the GD graphics library to dynamically replace html tags with images of true type typography.  As it is heavily inspired by the Signwriter drupal module, it is clearly not a novel method, however, in the spirit of open source it seemed natural to port the functionality to WordPress.

In brief, once installed, the plugin will act automatically, relying on CSS classes to target content. Typography styles are defined using a simple rule syntax not at all unlike CSS allowing for versatility and flexability all from within the wordpress dashboard. Since it is a server-side technology, the method is truly cross-platform and allows license-burdened fonts to be secured to prevent download.

Download the plugin here.

I just came across an SEO plugin for WordPress that trumps the tried-and-true All In One SEO Pack that nearly every WP developer at eROI uses for meta taggy and optimized title-y goodness.  Platinum SEO was developed using All In One as its foundation — so it keeps the awesomeness of the original ultimate SEO plugin while adding on even more sweet features.  One of the coolest thing about Platinum SEO is that it will automatically transfer settings from All In One if you already have that plugin installed.

But the absolute BEST thing about Platinum SEO?  It plays well with More Fields for WordPress 2.7.

A couple months ago I gushed about what More Fields does for WP 2.7, and I’m a big More Fields evangelist around the office.  But unfortunately I discovered an incompatability between More Fields and All in One SEO.  If you chose to edit the default page types using More Fields, your All in One SEO box would disappear from the edit screen.  With More Fields you should be able to choose which boxes appear on your edit screen, but for whatever reason, More Fields does not detect that All In One exists.  Other plugin’s edit screen boxes appear in this list, which leads me to believe there is something wrong with the All In One plugin. Bummer! (more…)

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…)