This is the second in my round of reader polls. Last time I asked about knowledge and experience with PHP. This time I am using the WP-Polls plugin and I want to know what interests you about WordPress.

[poll=2]

Lots of people are talking about turning off Akismet for a day to see how much work it actually does. I think that’s mental!

I am inclined to think that it would be better to use an altered version with some kind of logging function so you get the stats without having to spend 24-36 hours de-spamming your comments.

I am considering it though, but for a different reason.

I am quite interested in preventing the spam in the first place, rather than dealing with it once it arrives, and so have been experimenting with ideas for a little while. I am running something experimental at the moment just to see what effect it has. Turning off Akismet would give me a greater challenge, but I’m slightly scared in case it goes wrong.

One thing I have found is that it is particularly difficult to intercept spam before it gets processed by WordPress. For my current experiment I needed to be able to alter the Post variables before they were used by WordPress. I have actually had to change some of the core files to allow this as the only way to deal with it totally via a plugin is to let the comment happen, and then roll it back with it after the fact.

That seems slightly odd to me, so perhaps I have missed something.

I use the do-follow plugin. It seems to me that to decide that comments shouldn’t get any link love is a rather odd decision. It is a little like reducing the freedom of millions in order to prevent the odd terrorist here or there, i.e. it disproportionately tars everyone with the same brush.

There are a few reasons why I don’t like the no-follow attribute.

Firstly, I take the view that if someone contributes towards a subject then they deserve recognition for that contrbution.

There aren’t too many ways that recognition can occur. The link to the site is there for readers to go to if they find the comment interesting. No-following removes the other method of recognition. After all if someone has played a part in the community then their own writing should be more relevent as a result shouldn’t it?

As the search engines are the only real way in which relevence is judged then, by necessity, the comment needs to produce some link love.

Secondly, I think the existence of no-follow just serves to highlight the absense of it in other circumstances.

Easy WordPress has a post about finding blogs that are no-followed in order to concentrate comments on those blogs that don’t employ no-follow.

This seems a tad mercenary to me, surely you either have something to say or you don’t; although, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to decide not to contribute to something where your contribution isn’t given the recognition it deserves.

I’d love to see no-follow removed from WordPress, but I wonder whether there is an intermediate step. A method of voting on comments where those below average get no love.

What do you think? Do you care about no follow when you coment on other blogs, do you have any feelings one way or another about using it on your blog? let me know.

For the first poll of site readers I opted to use Poll Daddy. It was the first one that jumped out at me from the list on Google, and it has a free version, which is what I have reviewed. These are my thoughts on how it fared.

Whenever I first try any new tool I have a few criteria that marks it out as a success. The first is that, at is most basic, it must be immediately obvious how to use it. Poll Daddy meets that with ease. Creating a new poll is easy.

There are effectively three steps: 1. Title it and select the potential answers; 2. Select a style; 3. Copy the code into your page.

As with most services like this, of the standard styles available, most of the styles aren’t not great. Some are better, or more neutral, than others though and so I initially opted for the basic white style. A plain white background with a border.

Other styles feature brighter colours, 3D buttons, and background illustrations.

Once I had the poll in place I explored the styling options a little more and found that the custom styles option is very flexible. You can create your own styles by directly editing the CSS, and even load in the CSS for any of the standard styles as a base to start from.

This makes Poll Daddy a very flexible option if you know what you’re doing with CSS. All I actually did with this option was override a style in my own CSS file that prevented the labels being displayed beside each radio button but the potential is clearly there for more.

Embedding the poll is done by including some Javascript on the page but it is also possible to use a flash version, or directly link to the poll. The custom styles won’t work with the Flash Versions.

If you want to see and interact with the poll you can see it here: Who are you?

Results

Obviously the results are the most important part of any poll and poll daddy presents these in a very easy to use way.

I think this image speaks for itself so I won’t elaborate too much except to say that the results are also presented as a Pie chart.

Conclusion

There are obviously lots more options than I have covered here, but for a quick and simple solution to including polls it is hard to imagine anything better.

Unless your site resembles a third-party-widget farm and you have concerns about adding one more piece of Javascript, or you need something more in-depth, or more integrated, then Poll Daddy seems to be a very good option.

For the next poll I am going to use the WP Poll plugin and see how that compares to Poll Daddy.

A few days ago I realised that a plugin I am developing has already been done. Even worse, the plugin that I seem to be recreating is a masterpiece of functionality offering every option under the sun. How I missed the existing plugin isn’t important; what is important is that in trying to justify to myself why I shouldn’t abandon my work I have realised that I do have a definite philosophy about plugins that I use, and that I develop.

Up until now I have just built what I wanted without much thought to the way I wanted it to appear. My decisions were really a default position.

The end result was likely in line with my philosophy, just not consciously so.

Had I realised that the other plugin existed I may not have started developing my own, but with a stated philosophy to consider it is easy for me to find the parts of the other plugin that don’t fit my ways. Equally, had it already met my philosophy it would have clear that my efforts were not needed.

Over time I intend to give more thought to my philosophy, and publish it on a page here somewhere, but for now here are three points that come easily to mind:

Plugins should fit in, not stand out.

I use WordPress because I like it, so I want Plugins to look and feel like they are part of WordPress. When I develop I don’t consider the admin pages to be a place for me to express my creativity and when I use them I want the experience to be as seamless as possible.

Only as much choice as is necessary

The best plugins are ones that just work. Every choice added is a decision the user has to make and every extra bit of code added to support an edge case adds bloat to the system.

Use as little client side script as possible

I have suffered a fair number of problems with JavaScript in the WordPress admin pages and the more plugins that use it the more potential there is for problems to occur.

I don’t feel it should be avoided at all costs, but equally I don’t think it should be used unless there is a clear value. There is nothing wrong with page refreshes in my book.

These are some of my philosophies but what are yours? When you use a plugin, or produce one, what do you want of it? and what would make you choose not to use it even if it does do what it says on the tin?

The best plugins are often the simplest. Classy Amp is no different.

Classy Amp is a quick and easy plugin that wraps ampersands in span tags so they can be styled using CSS. Nice!!

I started this blog to get involved in WordPress. I needed a place to publish my thoughts on it, and I like the idea that I can give something back to the WordPress community that has helped me so much in putting my blogs together.

One thing that matters to me particularly is that I want to provide something useful for anyone kind enough to follow what I do. It’s all well and good me writing about what I like, and what I think, but if that doesn’t provide something for you then I won’t achieve that.

In order to make this as useful as I can I need to know a little about you, the people that read what I write, so over the next few weeks I intend to carry out a few polls to get a flavour on who you are and what you want.

To add a little extra value to this process I intend to use a different polling method for each question and to review each one. Hopefully there will be plenty of plugins available but I will also look at third party websites as well. Any thoughts on which ones I should look at are most welcome.

The first question is below, and the first review will be available fairly shortly.

A simple question, but one I suspect has many answers: Which do you prefer, an early release which may not be quite ready, or a later release which should be ready?

When you develop plugins there is a real temptation to get it working and throw it out there for use. You have done the work and you think it is finished, having tested it on as many setups as you have available, and you know you can release it as a point (0.1-0.9) release which lets users know there may be bugs.

The other temptation is to hold off; to make sure you have covered all the angles and it can’t possibly go wrong. Use it yourself, or rope in a few willing subjects to test it, and release it only when you are satisfied.

The more important question though is what the users want, and expect.

As an open platform that is easy to develop for WordPress encourages quick and early release. I am not a trained developer, nor are, I suspect, many of the plugin authors, so I don’t work to any formal methods. I code and release. Should users expect this, or should they expect a completed, professional grade, product?

As a user I am often a little annoyed when something I think will be great just doesn’t work, but I understand. There are many different setups out there, and so I will allow plugin authors that extra bit of breathing room. After all I didn’t pay for it.

What do you think? would you prefer to get a plugin early, with the risk that it may not work? Does the potential to feedback problems earlier in the development process make this worth while? Or do you think that it shouldn’t be offered until it is in a finished state?

As a footnote to this I should mention that this is more than a philosophical question. I have a new plugin that I am testing on this blog at the moment. I like it and it seems to work well. But it may well have flaws I haven’t discovered yet. Should I release it and let everyone find the flaws, or wait until I have run it for a few weeks?

Since I started working my way back into WordPress, and the community, I have noticed a number of blogs talking about ‘Premium’ themes. I have no idea what that means, so I decided to find out.

Premium has always seemed to me to be one of those annoyingly meaningless marketing words designed to separate normal, from not as good as it should be. Perhaps I am just a cynic, but does the existence of ‘Premium’ themes mean themers are deliberately hobbling their non-‘Premium’ themes? or is it just a reference to cost?

Nathan Rice takes the view that Premium Themes are those of “higher quality and customization potential”. Although he doesn’t explain exactly what he means his post makes it clear that in his view part of the role of a premium Theme is to extend the potential of WordPress. More of a feature set than a theme by itself.

That’s the kind of concept I can buy into, unfortunately while that view seems to be repeated regularly on theme sites, and blogs, it often precededs a host of surprisingly ordinary themes (although they are sometimes very nice looking and possibly worth the money on that alone).

It isn’t even the fact that a lot of these paid-for themes are calling themselves premium while seeming to deliver very little extra. While searching for Premium Themes I have found free premium themes that don’t deliver very much either, and free premium themes that do deliver.

It seems to me that the label is being used differently by different people. Some use it to refer to the features of a theme, some use it to refer to the cost, and some use it to refer to the effort involved, either way it isn’t really a useful label any more for someone who is looking to buy, if it ever was.

My conclusion, or at least my feeling about it, is that a premium theme should be something special. It should be something like News Pixel, News Theme, Revolution, or Showcase. It should give you the tools to redefine your blog, not just pretty it up a bit.

A premium theme should give you so much scope that you never need another theme again. It shouldn’t hold you back, but equally shouldn’t be something you can easily throw away. That may not be a useful definition, but I’ll stick to that in future.

PHP 5 has been around for a long time now but it still isn’t getting the takeup that you would expect from the newest version of one of the most popular languages around. There has been some debate about WordPress and PHP 5 over the past 6 months, and I couldn’t go as far as some of them and suggest ignoring PHP 4, but that’s not to say the advantages in PHP 5 should be ignored either.

PHP 5 offers some advantages over PHP4: Better database support, better xml support, better object support not to mention that PHP 6 is not massively distant and will not be as backward compatible as version 5 so any step in the right direction must be a good thing, right? The changes will need to happen eventually.

Because of this, and the fact that I quite like PHP 5, I would quite like to see a PHP 5 only version to run along side the current version.

The benefit of this approach is that, as it is already PHP 5 compatible, nothing needs to change just yet. Just be separate.

I think there would be benefits in freeing up developers who want to work in PHP5 to offer additional (core or otherwise) functionality for that version only. They would be free then to optimise for 5, rather than just being compatible with 5, and to produce plugins that worked on that version alone.

Part of me likes to think that if these developers hit on a seriously good piece of funcationality that this would help drive migration to PHP5 as self-hosters looked for hosts with the appropriate installations but that might well be wishful thinking on my part.

What do you think? do you care? is it too much effor for too little gain? is it a good idea? let me know.