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WordPress Extend Plugins: I Love Thee
I have to admit, I love WordPress Extend Plugins. My first experience with the service came in April of this year when I released Ajax Edit Comments. I was mainly drawn to the service because of the promise of added publicity and the ease of tracking statistics. My plugin crossing the 10,000 mark is a testament […]

I have to admit, I love WordPress Extend Plugins. My first experience with the service came in April of this year when I released Ajax Edit Comments. I was mainly drawn to the service because of the promise of added publicity and the ease of tracking statistics.

My plugin crossing the 10,000 mark is a testament in itself to how WP Extend (and the WP community) helps promote plugins.

Once you get used to it, WP Extend is an easy and powerful tool for launching (and maintaining) a plugin. Sure the SVN takes a little bit of getting used to, but numerous people have written great tutorials on how to get your plugin listed (Windows, Linux, Mac?).

And since WordPress 2.3, WordPress users are automatically notified when a plugin listed at WP Extend is updated. It can’t get any better than that. Or, can it?

I love you WP Extend Plugins, but I have several suggestions on how to make the service even more enjoyable.

Featured Plugins? Forever?

As much as I love you WP Extend, forever is not in my vocabulary. I can’t remember the last time I saw the featured plugins change. I think there’s some room to shake things up a bit and feature something new from time to time.

I know being listed in the featured section doesn’t guarantee more downloads, but a change in scenery would help keep things fresh.

Please Give the Newer Plugins a Chance for Most Popular

Plugins such as Sidebar Widgets, Google Sitemaps, or Akismet have been around for a while. Could the newer kids on the block have a shot at this popularity contest?

How about showing popularity relative to points in time, such as monthly?

How About Related Plugins?

Another suggestion I have is to show related plugins in addition to the awesome feature of showing what else was downloaded.

For example, for All in One SEO Pack, you can see the other plugins that were downloaded in addition to the SEO plugin. However, looking at the list reveals no related plugins.

In the case of SEO Pack, I think it would be great to see other SEO related plugins as well.

Could I Please Have Sort Options Within Tags?

The post tag currently has the most plugins for any tag. Right now it’s being sorted by most recently updated, which is fine. But I see growing pains as tags become more populated. It would be awesome if there was a sort option for most popular, most highly rated, and perhaps alphabetic.

Since the “most highly rated” suggestion can easily be gamed, I suggest the date of addition, ratings, and downloads be placed into an algorithm that determines the highest rated plugins.

Can I Please Change My Plugin’s Homepage URL?

I’ve run into a situation where my plugin’s homepage changed. I unfortunately cannot change this, not even in the coveted readme file. Could I please have an option in the readme file to specify my plugin’s homepage URL?

And Recommendations for Plugin Authors

WordPress Extend Plugins is a great tool, but only if you use it to its maximum potential. If you happen to have a FAQ, screenshots, installation instructions, or other information, please have this all listed on WP Extend instead of having a link directing users back to another website.

If you take the time to post the screenshots, FAQ, and other information on WP Extend, you’ll get more downloads. I promise. You’ll still get a lot of website traffic, especially if your users need help.

WP Extend Plugins should ideally be self-sustaining, so please make it more convenient for those browsing the directory and have as much information listed as possible so the user can make an educated download decision.

Conclusion

Matt and his Automattic team have done wonders with WP Extend. It’s helped plugins authors like me list their plugins with ease.

Please take my suggestions with a grain of salt as they come solely from my observations over the past year. If WP Extend Plugins implements just one of my suggestions, I will fall over myself in bliss.

If you are a user of WP Extend (plugin author or plugin seeker), please feel free to weigh in on my suggestions and perhaps add some of your own.

Hand-Drawing Style In Modern Web Design

The most valuable and innovative ideas had all been handwritten first. That’s no big news, since designers tend to produce first sketches as paper prototypes anyway; still it’s important, because web design is different from “usual” design. Of course, it also has a personal note and it is hand-made, however users can’t see that. As CSS is “boxy but good”, designs tend to have a rather limited appearance — they are too boxy and too right-angled.

If designers want to achieve a different design, they have to draw their sites by themselves — or at least some parts of it. And in fact, this is done quite often: whether a blog, a shop, an ad, a private page, or some collaborative project — doesn’t matter whether with Flash or (X)HTML. The main purpose of hand-drawn elements lies in their ability to convey a personality and an individual note in times when colorful, sharp and rounded Web 2.0 elements can be found almost everywhere.

How impressive can the results be? And when can the hand-drawing style be used? Let’s take a look at some excellent examples of hand-drawing style in modern web design. All screenshots can be clicked and lead to the sites from which they’ve been taken.

The most valuable and innovative ideas had all been handwritten first. That’s no big news, since designers tend to produce first sketches as paper prototypes anyway; still it’s important, because web design is different from “usual” design. Of course, it also has a personal note and it is hand-made, however users can’t see that. As CSS is “boxy but good”, designs tend to have a rather limited appearance — they are too boxy and too right-angled.

If designers want to achieve a different design, they have to draw their sites by themselves — or at least some parts of it. And in fact, this is done quite often: whether a blog, a shop, an ad, a private page, or some collaborative project — doesn’t matter whether with Flash or (X)HTML. The main purpose of hand-drawn elements lies in their ability to convey a personality and an individual note in times when colorful, sharp and rounded Web 2.0 elements can be found almost everywhere.

Sometimes designers create whole pages with paper, pencil and/or a tablet PC. More often single layout elements are designed in a special way — curved links, hand-made icons, backgrounds, notes, stickers and fuzzy lines are supposed to give the site a “human touch”. These elements makes a web-page which might not look different from dozens of similar pages, stand out and arise users’ curiosity. Caution: a quickly installed hand-written font can harm more than help (hint: Comic Sans is definitely not the way to go).

How impressive can the results be? And when can the hand-drawing style be used? Let’s take a look at some excellent examples of hand-drawing style in modern web design. All screenshots can be clicked and lead to the sites from which they’ve been taken.

1. Hand-drawing as artistic minimalism

Since hand-drawing is a typical feature of graphic artists, designers and illustrators and is often associated with creativity and inspiration, it is often used in portfolios and showcases.

The interesting thing is that the hand-drawn style is often the only element which is used by designers to present their work on their site. Below some examples of the artistic minimalism at its best.

Caution: Flash! The design is consistent throughout all pages of the site.

Hand-written navigation elements in use. Stylish and trendy. The font size is definitely too small, though.

Mel Kadel draws everything — even herself.

Both start page (top) and internal page (bottom) on this Brazilian site have hand-drawn elements. All internal pages have its own, unique style.

Heather Sloane illustrates with Flash.

Drawn elements complete a classic portfolio design. This design isn’t that minimalistic, but it doesn’t offer that much, neither.

2. The style supports the content

In some cases designers experiment with hand-drawn doodles to support the main content of the site rather than use hand-writing for main design elements. For instance, sketches are sometimes placed on the background of the site. Sometimes it works quite well.

In the design below similar idea is used. However, only 20-30% of the page actually serves the content presentation. This is not what most users are expecting and this is exactly what make this site different. Jakob Nielsen wouldn’t be fascinated about the content presentation on this site.

Also single design elements can be used in the hand-writing style. In the example below only an RSS-button on the right is hand-drawn.

3. The content incorporates the style

This example uses hand-written elements all across the site. It has a hand-written logo, hints, lines and even maps. The hand-drawn map on the start page contains links to single areas of the site.

While this is definitely an interesting and creative design, users might experience problems in finding the information they are looking for. In fact, visitors need to play around with the site to find out what information is actually presented.

The design also includes hand-drawn elements throughout the site, e.g. to display videos a sketch of the TV set is used, and even tables follow this style.

The content also incorporates the style in the HomeworkHouse (wax crayons).

An online-shop with a number of hand-drawn elements.

Simple yet impressive. Caution, Flash.

4. Hand-drawing combined with illustration

Since hand-drawn figures might sometimes lack visual appeal, this shortcoming is often addressed with the use of striking visual elements. The result is sometimes a wild, vivid, colorful — but always innovative design approach.

It’s important to note that such design decisions should be considered very precisely. It’s very easy to make the design more appealing by making it less intuitive at the same time. The design is different — not necessarily simplified or made more difficult to grasp. In fact, how well usability and accessibility issues are mastered depends mostly only on the developer’s skills.

What you see looks like a prototype: Joe Grisham’s site looks authentic, hand-made and uses illustrations.

This design combines hand-drawing style and vivid illustrations (comics). It isn’t supposed to be a Web 2.0 design.

This is a typical Web 2.0 design — with glossy buttons, reflections and (guess what!) hand-drawing style used for navigation, content and footer.

Hand-made style in the advertisement of a Casio-product. Flash in use.

Some designers intertwine the hand-drawing style with illustrations unifying them into a single design element. This produces an artistic, unexpected and intriguing design and motivates visitors to explore the site. Not all visitors will be willing to do that, actually.

Hand-drawing style hidden in details: Spinvox uses curved lines for the hover-effect.

A classic web-site with individual hand-written elements. Actually, it’s a site of a university. More hand-drawn elements can be found across the site.

5. Hand-drawing delivers the message

This aspect becomes more apparent in Web 2.0-designs. Hand-drawing elements are used to make it easier for users to get the idea behind the product and service which is offered. This works pretty well in both web and print design, as it gives the provided explanation a more personal, emotional and informal nature. Take a look at the examples below.

This is how a typical Web 2.0-site might look like once it’s provided with some additional visual cues.

Videoegg uses artistic elements in the navigation menu.

6. Hand-drawing taken to extreme

Sometimes it’s the designer’s purpose to impress, shock or entice the reader to get noticed and create a lasting impression. While there are a number of ways to achieve this, an unusual design style is definitely one of them; it is also the only style that delivers the artistic side of the design extremely well. Of course, it doesn’t always lead to usable web-sites.

A “sketchy” weblog. Where do you look at when you visit the site at the first time?

A drawn navigation menu at the top of the site also has some cute hover-effects.

Retro lives in this site.

6. Experiments and artistic approaches

Designers are artists, or at least they should try to be. And as such, designers tend to take radical design decisions, exploring their imagination and challenging visitors’ creativity. This doesn’t always work, but sometimes it does.

This Flash-based site literally lets you play with its content.

A portfolio with hand-writing: one more time.

An ultimate solution: Kuba Dabrowsky labels everything manually.

The style of street paintings. Yes, it looks quite trashy. But it is designed like this by purpose.

Kev Adamson: you won’t find any similar WordPress-template.

Maria Grossmann. The screenshot shows only a part of the page (Flash)

A weblog with a pig, curved lines, hand-drawn elements and a unique navigation menu. And, of course, the site also changes your cursor.

Portfolio designed with the the “old paper look” in mind.

Lexical scope to appear in PHP?
I mentioned briefly, in my last post, that Wez Furlong made a patch back in March, that allows a native syntax for creating anonymous functions. This could replace the heinous create_function. Since then, I brought up Wez’ original patch again on the php-internals lists. This has prompted some hefty debate over the last week. The main […]

I mentioned briefly, in my last post, that Wez Furlong made a patch back in March, that allows a native syntax for creating anonymous functions. This could replace the heinous create_function.

Since then, I brought up Wez’ original patch again on the php-internals lists. This has prompted some hefty debate over the last week. The main argument against approving the patch, seems to be, that one would expect static scoping rules to apply to the anonymous function. After all, this is the case in similar languages, which support anonymous functions. One could only assume, that changing PHP to support this, would be a major undertaking.

One would be wrong, it seems.

Today, Christian Seiler posted a patch to allow lexical scope for anonymous functions. There are a few loose ends, but it appears to work in general. Instead of making all variables follow the static scoping rules, a new keyword (lexical) is introduced. It works similar to global, in that it must be explicitly declared, which variables are lexically scoped. This is how it looks in action:

  function getAdder($x) {    return function ($y) {      lexical $x;      return $x + $y;    };  }  $add2 = getAdder(2);  $add2(8); // return 10  

It’s probably a bit early to tell if this will find its way into the language. It’s still just a proposal and it would take some further work to get it right, but at least it appears to be technically possible. We’ll have to wait and see.

Otherwise, there’s just left to wish you all a merry Christmas.

This article provided by sitepoint.com.

Install WordPress Locally 1 Of 2
Welcome to part one of a two part series of articles that will guide you through the process of installing a fresh copy of WordPress or your public WordPress blog to your local machine. The first part of this series will guide you through the installation and configuration of a piece of software called WampServer. […]

Welcome to part one of a two part series of articles that will guide you through the process of installing a fresh copy of WordPress or your public WordPress blog to your local machine. The first part of this series will guide you through the installation and configuration of a piece of software called WampServer. Why would you want to do this you ask? Having your WordPress blog installed on your local machine not only acts as a backup, but it gives you the option of really digging into the inner workings of your blog without having to worry about it breaking and therefor, rendering the thing useless to the public. Not only that, but it’s much faster to play with things on your local machine than it is with a LIVE site on the internet.

For this article, I am using Windows XP Service Pack 2 and something called WampServer. WampServer is a piece of software that installs everything you need to turn your PC into a webserver. This includes Apache, MySQL, PHP, SQLitemanager and PHPMyAdmin. Before we get started, head on over to the official WampServer download page and grab a copy of WampServer 2.

WampServer Installation:

The installation process is pretty simple. After accepting the license agreement and specifying where the WampServer files will be installed to, the installation file will be unpacked, doing all of the heavy work for you. Using a software application such as WampServer to install all of your webserver needs for you automatically, is the easiest way to turn your machine, into a web server. Once the installation is finished, you’ll be prompted to locate your default browser executable file. In my case, I had to direct the install to my FireFox executable file which is usually within the Mozilla folder.

One of the first things you’ll have to configure is the PHP mail parameters. For SMTP, the default value of localhost is correct. As for the email address, you can choose to type one in, or not. This can always be changed later. Once this setting is configured, you’ll be greeted with a confirmation box that tells you the installation of WampServer has been completed. Leave the option “Launch WampServer 2 now” check marked and click the finish button.

Configuring WampServer Files:

One important piece of information I have to mention. The webserver acts on port 80 which is the port responsible for HTTP traffic. If you are running Skype with it’s default configuration, you’ll notice that your Webserver is offline once you start the program. This is because by default, Skype uses port 80 and 443 for incoming connections. You can either change the port that Skype uses or you can close, then re open Skype after your Webserver is online, forcing Skype to use a different port. In essence, make sure port 80 is clear before you launch WampServer or else the Apache web service will not run.

I’ve also been informed by ayusli that will you also need to disable IIS if that is running on your system. If you don’t, you may not be able to access localhost.

Once your WampServer is online, you’ll need to edit a few files to change the configuration to allow for larger databases to be imported. These changes will take place within the PHP.ini file. The PHP.ini file is a text file that contains the configuration for the PHP programming language. The first thing you’ll need to change is the upload_max_filesize attribute. By default, this is set to 2Megabytes. This is too small of a value, so increase this to 50 or 100megs. It doesn’t need to have a specific value so long as it is larger than the size of the database file you will be importing later on in this guide. The other setting you’ll need to change is post_max_size. By default this is set to 8Megabytes. Change this to the same value as the upload_max_filesize limit. After you make this change, left click on the WampServer icon and restart all of the services. This will ensure the changes you made to the php.ini file take effect.

End Of Part 1:

If you plan on doing a fresh install of WordPress, you won’t have to worry about making any changes to the PHP.ini file after you install WampServer. However, if you plan on taking a copy of your public blog and transferring it to your local machine, the changes described above need to happen or else you will likely run into problems such as your database file being too large to import.

Part 2 of this series will go into details on how to install a fresh copy of WordPress as well as how to transfer your existing WordPress blog on the internet onto your local machine. It’s not as easy as transferring the database and then extracting a backup of files into a folder. There are a few more required tricks that need to be performed before a public blog can be successfully transferred. Look for these tips in part two which should be published in the next few days.

Coming Soon: Changes to the CSS Working Group?
In a previous post I reported on the crisis within the web standards community, and in particular the controversy surrounding the W3C CSS Working Group. It seems the criticism levelled by Andy Clarke and others has not fallen on deaf ears, because a movement for change is now being led from within the […]

In a previous post I reported on the crisis within the web standards community, and in particular the controversy surrounding the W3C CSS Working Group. It seems the criticism levelled by Andy Clarke and others has not fallen on deaf ears, because a movement for change is now being led from within the Working Group.

On December 14th, one of the key members of the CSS Working Group, L. David Baron of the Mozilla Corporation made an announcement:

“I’ve informed the CSS working group that I am no longer participating in member-only mailing lists or meetings. I believe the member-confidential nature of the group hurts the future development of CSS by making the group:

• fail to accept the contributions of many who would like to contribute to CSS and
• get mired in debates and stalling tactics that companies would not be comfortable using in public.

“I still intend to participate in any discussions that take place on www-style, public-css-testsuite, and other public forums.

“I support rechartering the CSS working group as a public group.”

Although there have been few public follow-ups, representatives of Microsoft and Google expressed their support. It seems like change within the CSS Working Group is coming, but like everything the Group does, it may not happen quickly.

This article provided by sitepoint.com.

Howdy Stranger
It seems as though the word Howdy, is not liked by many people in many places. I’ve been monitoring an ongoing discussion taking place in the WordPress hackers mailing-list about the subject of the word Howdy being used in all instances of WordPress, despite the locality of the end user. The discussions have ranged from […]

It seems as though the word Howdy, is not liked by many people in many places. I’ve been monitoring an ongoing discussion taking place in the WordPress hackers mailing-list about the subject of the word Howdy being used in all instances of WordPress, despite the locality of the end user. The discussions have ranged from “Not everyone greets each other by saying Howdy” to “Whats the big deal about the word Howdy anyways, it’s not like it breaks WordPress”. The good news is, because WordPress is open source, there is generally someone out there who has the skill and know how to put together a solution for even the most mundane problems.

This brings me to the “No Howdy Plugin” created by Ozh. No Howdy provides you with the opportunity to change the text in that area of the WordPress administration panel, or you can completely remove the text from appearing in the first place.

To use this plugin, copy the text from the link above and paste it into Notepad or your favorite code editor such as Dreamweaver. Save the file as no_howdy_plugin.php and then upload the file to your plugins directory. Activate the plugin from within your administration panel and you’re all set. In order to customize the plugin, edit the plugin file by changing the word (Bonjour) to the text that you would like to have displayed.

Addendum from Ozh: the word “howdy” is localized, so for instance in the fr_FR translation it becomes “Bienvenue”.