Following on from our initial announcement, I’m happy to announce we have a new version! We’ve listened to feedback and made many improvements. We’re also making expanding the closed beta! One of the points mentioned in feedback was the potential for extending the plugin, examples including Google Analytics traffic widgets on the overview page etc. The second iteration now comes with… continue reading ⇢
Our Spots for WordPress plugin is designed to make your content management life with WP even easier. Although there are developer notes on the WordPress.org repository, we’ve decided to maintain a page here where we can possibly show a broader range of information in the future, depending on the take-up of the plugin. Template tags Spots provides 2 template tags… continue reading ⇢
Using WordPress in enterprises with old browsers installed can be problematic. Developers whinge about it (and should stop) and staff struggle with it. Well, there’s an answer to both that may surprise you.
I thought I’d share some of the functions that go into most of our custom WordPress themes. If you have your own favourites then get commenting! Removing the auto capitalisation of ‘WordPress’ When version 3.0 was released a fairly simple filter appeared called capital_P_dangit. This was committed to the core by Matt Mullenweg for the purposes of brand reinforcement. Suffice… continue reading ⇢
One thing we talk a lot about is how important it is, for costs, to stick to problems which have already been solved. Get fancy and do something new, and your costs have rocketed away. A developer has just done a nice little piece on spellchecking. In 1984 it was ferociously hard. In fact, if you wanted a decent spellchecker… continue reading ⇢
It’s hard to measure the cost of code. Simple stuff can be ferociously time-consuming to develop, and bad coders often produce reams of poorly structured code. But let’s assume you’re dealing with a typical, decent developer who doesn’t take the long route, or dangerous shortcuts.
I just read an interesting article in A List Apart about how browsers that are forgiving of bad markup and css are bad for the web. And I totally get it. In fact, a failure of how standards apply to web pages is one of the reasons why, until really quite recently, I’d avoided having anything to do with Web… continue reading ⇢
You may find passwords to be an unecessary chore. But they’re important. However, inventing strong passwords is difficult… and they’re hard to remember. So you need to be able to generate passwords on the go and the solution is Password Maker – a great way to have safe, difficult to crack passwords which works beautifully as browser plugins.
Want to know how we keep track of all those websites and bugs? It’s quite simple – we use Mantis Bug Tracker. It’s not as powerful as some, but we’re a three man company – a more heavy solution would probably simply be going over the top with things and would carry a support load that we simply wouldn’t… continue reading ⇢
I was reading through some project management methodology just now (yay! My life is full of joy at last!) and came across the phrase “The Wicked Problem” in this line on Wikipedia: Steve McConnell in Code Complete (a book which criticizes the widespread use of the waterfall model) refers to design as a “wicked problem” – a problem whose requirements… continue reading ⇢
Director
Technical Director
The Administrator
Office Dog / Tripping Hazard
WordPress Developer
WordPress Developer
What We’re Reading© MMXII
