In January 2009 I will be concentrating on themes and themeing.
Got a theme question, or conundrum? Let me know.
Ptah Dunbar has released a very cool Photoshop design framework to handle some of the tasks that commonly arise when you start to layout any design in photoshop.
It’s based around a 960 pixel grid and has both 12 and 16 column layout guides. It also has standard IAB advert sizes and a library of other assets that I haven’t got into yet.
If you design, or are planning on designing, a WordPress theme then you really should check this out.
I have just uploaded a minor update to the Fun with Plugins, Wordpress plugin generator tool, so that it now includes WordPress 2.5 Shortcodes.
Still to come in the near future is support for the new multiple add widgets (once I can get it working consistently) and a lot of more actions and filters.
I’ve just uploaded the newest version of Fun with Plugins, this will be version 0.3
I’ve completely rewritten the logic that runs it so while this is a newer version it is possible that bugs will appear that were not present before.
The changes to this version are:
You can try the newest version at http://www.wp-fun.co.uk/wizzards/fun-with-plugins/.
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?
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.
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.
