WordPress 3.2 Gershwin Released

Posted on July 4, 2011 by miklb

While most of the United States was barbequing and lighting fireworks, the WordPress team was hard at work getting the final release for 3.2 out the door. It’s not available for download. Of notable features, a full screen mode for writing posts, as well as a newly designed admin interface. As someone who’s been using WordPress since the 1.2 days, I’ve seen every evolution possible, and this one is growing on me. The “big” header is gone, which is the hardest part to get used to. Certainly frees up more room on the screen for actually doing stuff.

Another major note is the change in minimum requirements to run WordPress. Your server now needs to be running PHP 5.2 or greater, and MySQL 5.0 or higher. While making this change, some refactoring under the hood was done to make the admin lighter and faster.

I haven’t had the opportunity to fully explore these changes, but the cursory feedback I’m hearing, it was mission accomplished.

To read the full notes on the release, check the official WordPress 3.2 release announcement.

Moving Time

Posted on June 11, 2011 by miklb

Once again WP Station finds itself moving and finding a new home. This time around it’s on a VPS at Linode. This time around, I’m opting to start with a clean installation of trunk (I still like to live on the edge), rather than migrate a database over that was full of cruft. I joked today that it really didn’t make sense to carry over options for Ultimate Tag Warrior (for those new to WordPress, UTW was a plugin that provided tagging capabilities, something not introduced until 2.0).

I’m really pleased with the responsive design aspects of TwentyEleven, the new default theme, so I’ll be crafting a custom child theme from that. It’s been quite some time since I’ve worked with a default theme, so I’m curious to see the capabilities of customizing in a similar fashion that I’ve become accustomed to with frameworks like Genesis and Thematic.

I work with WordPress full time, but have found I rarely blog myself these days. I think it’s time to eat my own dog food and start chronicling my adventures in WordPress again. I’ve said this at least once a year for the past couple of years, but I think this time around, it will stick. I may also look for guest bloggers, as well as provide a means for devs and theme authors to submit items for review. I’ll get a contact page up soon if you’re interested in either, in the meantime, feel free to leave a comment if you’re interested in either.

WordPress Security Releases – 3.0.2 & 3.0.3

Posted on December 11, 2010 by miklb

In case you’ve been under a rock the last couple of weeks, two security releases have been issued for WordPress, 3.0.2 and a week later, 3.0.3. I (kinda) jokingly explained to my coworkers that these security releases were less “someone left the front door open”, rather, “someone left a small window upstairs open that only the neighbors can see”. Needless to say these are legitimate security issues in some environments, as well as a couple of bug fixes, and all sites should apply them. The 3.0.3 release is specific to sites that enable the XML-RPC, remote publishing option.

What was most impressive is that the the first and larger security release was pushed out 4, yes, four, hours from when the core developers were made aware of the exploit. For a bunch of volunteers spread across multiple time zones, that’s impressive.

Soft Relaunch

Posted on December 11, 2010 by miklb

Well, I said this just over a year, ago, but I’m finally motivated to pull this site out of the mothballs and start blogging here again. I make my living working with WordPress fulltime, but I find I rarely use WordPress, as my personal site runs on Habari. I am perpetually running across cool tidbits as well as my own discoveries of extending features, so I might as well start documenting them here again and eat my own dog food. This will be a work in progress over the next week or so, if you see anything wonky or have any suggestions for something to cover, feel free to leave a comment!

Conditional Tags: Page Templates

Posted on January 15, 2010 by miklb

What’s the old saying, “Learn something new every day?” Working on customizing a theme for a client today, I was running into a bit of a tricky situation. The theme developer, for what ever reason, was using some php conditionals in the header to check to see if a page was the home page or not, and depending on the condition, he was inserting the CSS directly into the header and setting a background image on the container. Now why they didn’t simply use the same conditional and set a class and then use different background images in the style sheet is beyond me, but time and budget didn’t dictate that I rewrite the whole thing to do it properly. So my first stab at resolving the issue was to use the conditional tag that I knew about, is_page();. I also knew that you could specify which page by ID or slug. However, in my situation, I had created several new page templates which didn’t need the background image, as it had a repeating strip for a faux column on a third sidebar. So I took a stab at the docs again on conditional tags, and lo and behold, since WP 2.5, you can now check if it is a page template with, wait for it, if(is_page_template()). Not only that, but you can specify a template by the file name, ie, if(is_page_template('archives.php')). Wait, it gets better! You can also do an array of page templates, if(is_page_template(array('archives.php','about.php','contact.php'))). How awesome is that?

In my scenario, I simply wanted to check if it was any template besides the default template, so I was able to use if(!is_page_template('page.php')) and boom!, none of my page templates would get the faux column background.

Thinking about it, now I’m glad the theme designer took the backwards approach to the background image so that I could learn a new trick for the toolbox.

Kitchen Chefs Theme

Posted on December 21, 2009 by miklb

While doing a little volunteering at the WP support forums, someone came across a theme they liked but found it was broken. Seems the site is using some kind of script to generate the zip file. Unfortunately, the script is b0rked, and was appending the parent directory and a forward slash to each template and image. The user didn’t seem too familiar with WP themes, so I decided to use a little Mac utility, Name Mangler to clean up the files and figured here was as a good a place as any to allow them to download it from.

The theme’s original home requires registration to comment, otherwise I’d have added a link there.

Anyone else looking for the theme can download it here.

Perhaps, Finally an Identity

Posted on November 16, 2009 by miklb

Header 2006 Maybe not an identity exactly, but four years in, I think I’ve come up with a logo idea that doesn’t quite suck. One of my original theme’s header used a subway station of sorts, and that’s always been the general idea I wanted to convey, that WP Station was just a stop along the WordPress network. At the time, there weren’t many sites that focused on WordPress. I can only recall Weblog Tools Collection, and at the time, it wasn’t even WordPress specific. I had only been using WP for a few months when I started the site, heck, I’d only discovered the world of blogging the year before. I was beginning to collect links to themes and plugins, as well as keep up with updates and development – this was long before wordpress.org/extend – and decided it might be useful to the community to share what I was finding.

Over time, more sites started popping up doing the same, concentrating on getting subscribers, gaining in popularity, to the point I felt what I was doing was no longer useful. Eventually, the official plugins section was added to wp.org, as well as the updates directly via the admin plugins page, making my type of posts moot.

logo Couple all of that with the explosion of development in the WP community, and I simply could not commit the time necessary to continue blogging in the same manner as before. Life also began to get in the way, and the site slowly drifted into stagnation. The reality though was by that point the site was generating enough money via various ads that I couldn’t pull the plug. I was still using WP for work, and would occasionally post something I’d stumble across, thinking that I would start back blogging about WordPress. However, my spare time was moving towards other interests. Still, the revenue was enough to pay for those interests, so I kept the sign on.

Now that I’ve begun working with WPMU, and taking on a roll developing blog networks, I’m beginning to have a clearer vision of where I’m headed professionally, and where I’d like to take this blog. So once again, hopefully, WP Station will be a destination that WordPress travelers will find it to be a useful stop in their travels.

Yet Another List of Free Themes

Posted on November 15, 2009 by miklb

In case you’re not one of the quarter of a million people who subscribe to Smashing Magazine, they recently published a list of 40 high quality free WordPress themes. I don’t mean to disparage the work of the theme developers listed in the post, but defining “high quality” seems a bit subjective. And like most top (insert random number here) lists on the web these days, little effort is put into saying exactly why the author thinks the item is included. Rather, a short blurb simply describing the item is given. I’ve looked at many, many WP themes that aesthetically look nice, but one glance under the hood, and I run for the hills.

That said, as the author points out, finding free, modern, attractively designed WordPress themes these days is becoming more and more difficult with the inundation of premium themes. Which begets the ongoing, and sometimes heated debate of WordPress, GPL, and themes, which is the subject of another post for another day.

I did find a theme that potentially could be the base for a new look for this site, ZinePress. I say a base, as the color scheme isn’t what I envision for this site, nor am I enamored with the the opacity of the footer background over the body background image, but as I point out in the intro, that’s a subjective opinion, not meant to take away from the overall quality of the design. It also brings out the point that I’ve always thought that by using a “free” WordPress theme, it’s meant to be a starting point for a user to customize for their site, to their tastes, not something that you should necessarily use stock. The whole “why recreate the wheel” thing.

EDIT – heh, I looked closer at the post for ZinePress, and it was released over a year ago, so the list isn’t necessarily of recently released themes it seems. Again, not to diminish the contributions of the theme authors who’ve generously shared their work.

WordPress Station Now on Twitter

Posted on November 12, 2009 by miklb

A little late to the party, but I’ve set up WP Station on Twitter. Not too active yet, however, but I’ll be working on following more WP devs and users, as I also work on a redesign and resurrection of WP Station.

If anyone is bored and wants to work up a logo for WP Station, I might find some way of repaying you, albeit my budget is limited. Certainly links and what not would be included.

WP Station

A WordPress powered blog about, WordPress

Author Archives: miklb