In the days between Christmas and new year I had a job to do. A WordPress site for a family member that I designed quite some time ago wasn’t really doing the trick any more and I had promised to updated it. I decided to use the Flexx theme from iThemes

Before Christmas I had watched a live screencast demonstrating Flexx. I was really impressed with the features. I was lucky enough to be given a free copy and I was close to creating a new blog just so I would have the chance to use it. Luckily (for my schedule at least) a real project came up where I had the chance to use it.

As I was updating an existing site I didn’t want to vary too much from the layout that was there already. With Flexx I was able to choose where to include the main menu in relation to the header, which site the sidebars would be on, even how many sidebars there were, whether to include wigitised areas at the top and bottom of the posts, etc. I was able to do a good job of replicating the layout of the original site very easily.

The next step was updating the header. I used the old image from the site, cropped it a little to size and used the image manager built into Flexx to upload it. Flexx allows for several images to be uploaded and it will fade between them at specified intervals. I didn’t need to use that as I was trying not to move too far from the original design; however, the fact that it is there means I can consider some interesting additions to keep the theme fresh without doing too much work.

Putting the menu together was also pretty easy. I used Mark Jaquith’s Page Links To plugin to create pages linking to categories on the site and then used Flexx’s menu selector to choose which pages I wanted.

If you’ve been reading this site long you will likely know that I am a bit of a code junkie; I tend to like getting stuck in to the code and as a result tend to dismiss things like widgets as a bit of a gimmick; however, in this cases I didn’t need to and I really noticed how easy it can be. The site I was updating used my Fun with Categories plugin to allow posts to be selected based on both Country and type of post (journal entry or photos) and as such had some extra code to output that. I used my Fun with Theme Widgets plugin to convert this to a widget and then attached it to the sidebar.

I am fully aware that I didn’t use the Flexx theme to anything close to its full potential. What I used it for was very simple and could be accomplished with most themes; however, I do think that it would have been more difficult in most cases. Flexx is certainly a very flexible theme. It has a lot more features that I didn’t touch on here and, although I did get a free copy, I would recommend it to anyone.

*Note, the links to Flexx in this post are all affiliate links meaning I get paid if you buy anything. If you do not want to use these you can go direct to http://www.ithemes.com.

I love the debate that Jeff has started over at performancing about URL fields.

It started with this post where Jeff quoted me as saying:

This kind of spam, and in fact all spam, is a symptom of the misguided(IMO) approach to comments that says that a commenter should be ‘rewarded’ with a link that gives google juice.

…

Jeff even went so far to remove the URL field from his own blog: www.jeffro2pt0.com to test the reaction (My reaction was to include my URL in my comment).

Jeff has now following this up with another post asking whether the URL a person enters should even dictate whether to publish a comment, or mark it as spam?

Personally I don’t think it should, but, it can be indicative of what I think really matters, and that is the spirit with which the commenter approaches the blog.

If you comment for no reason other than to get your link there, and I will admit that I have done that myself on (rare) occasions, then I don’t care what you have to say, or what your URL is, you should not bother.

If you are motivated to consider commenting because the link will appear but do actually have something to say on the topic, then I think that is fair enough. I often have something to say but hold back, or decide not to, so if the link helps to break through that and encourage conversation then I am all for it.

The rub is that there is no real way to judge, so we are back with the URL.

My solution (I wrote a plugin to do it) is to add the URL beside the name so visitors can see where it links to exactly, and to make it clicakble using Javascript, for the benefit of my visitors. You could argue that this disavantages the people who comment and join in, but I don’t buy that.

Going back to my original comment, on the first post above, for me search juice is neither a right or a privilege; it exists for the sole purpose of making the search engine more relevant and I simply don’t see what relevance comments on someone else blog have to the value of my website.

My website doesn’t deserve higher placement on a search because I praised your LOLCats! and the same goes for every other site out there.

I’ve been pretty scathing about some aspects of WordPress over the past few weeks both here and in the comments of a few other blogs. That being the case I thought it was about time I wrote about some of the things that I really like about the current development version of WordPress; the version that will become 2.7 in the next few months.

Admin Stuff

There is a new option in each post screen that allows the uselss crap you never use to be removed, leaving only a nice clean interface. The fact that drag and drop is back also means that you can order what’s left to create a start to finish workflow (or should that be WordFlow?). My entire post screen now looks something like this:

It is also now possible to reply to comments from the admin panel. choosing to reply to a comment brings up a nice floating box for your well thought out reply.

It is finally possibly, god knows why this wasn’t always available, to upload files from the media manager instead of having to create a new post.

And lastly a new quick edit option allows some of the core settings of posts and pages to be altered from the manage page. These are settings such as the page title, slug, publication status, whether it can accept comments or trackbacks, as well as categories and tags.

Development Stuff

For a long time I have thought that WordPress was missing functionality when it comes to the site menu. Every theme has one and yet the controls for it are woeful. The new function wp_page_menu() will generate the HTML for the menu including customisable home page text (if you want the home page included), the option to specify a class, change a sort order or to get the result as a string instead of echoing it.

This is a step in a direction, but it is very basic and some might want more from it. As a basic theme template tag it is the right choice though. It fits in with the rest of the WordPress theme template tags in philosophy and output and will remove some of the development burden for theme authors that aren’t really familiar with PHP.

wp_page_menu('show_home=Home&menu_class=menu);

WordPress 2.7 will support threaded comments by default and with that comes a template tag to take the work out of outputing those comments.

wp_list_comments($comment);

This is interesting to me for a few reasons. Firstly it rolls up the default comment HTML into the function, so while you can overide this I think it is likely that it will mean less variation in the way comments are marked-up. Most people tend to copy the default theme anyway but some themes do vary alot. The second reason is that to overide the comment HTML you include a function name to call instead. This means that even if you want to use different HTML it may be best placed in the functions.php file or at least in a separate file that the functions.php calls as an include. Either way it helps to keep the templates cleaner.

I have already written about the plugin uninstall mechanism so I won’t go into that again but it is interesting. Back in the days of 2.3 there was a lot of interest in this, promted by an article on weblog tools collection, and my posts on the subject still recieve a fair degree of attention.

It goes without saying that things could change either a little or a lot before 2.7 comes out, and I am sure there is more to come. In the meantime I would to hear about the things that you are most looking foward to about 2.7. What is your favourite new features?

I came across a well written critique of the future of WordPress from Vladimir Prelovac this evening.

Vladimir says a lot of things that I can agree with.

WordPress out started like Google but now is becoming more and more like Yahoo. It stopped going “far” and started becoming fat (”wide”). It is becoming slow and clumsy.

While some of the points that Vladimir makes may be changed in the right direction, others won’t be. While he doesn’t say it, a few lines in his post make me think of Microsoft Word. For most people it has far more functions than will every be used, often very hard to find, but there are quite a few pople that choose notepad when all they want to do it write something.

I am hearing this opinion more and more these days and I think the time is coming when the core team need to stop and ask which set of users they really want.