A month ahead of schedule - which may or may not be a good thing - and coming complete with its own video for the youngsters.

What looks very good is the new plugin interface which  divides active and inactive plugins, felt by many to be overdue.

Apparently, and this is only horrible rumour at this stage - the medium-vaunted login system isn’t doing for Firefox 3.0…

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If you’re using WordPress as a CMS and doing some extra coding - for example picking something from an extra db table to display on a certain page, eg page_id=4

$pageVar = $wpdb->get_var(SELECT var FROM my_table WHERE something=’something_else’);

and then you also want to SEO the <title> a little, so in header.php you put:-

<?php if (is_page(’4′)) $extraTitle = ‘» ‘ . $pageVar; ?>

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> <?php wp_title(); ?> <?php echo $extraTitle; ?></title>

It won’t work - $pageVar doesn’t have global scope, because of the method used to get the header on the page.

<?php get_header(); ?>

Instead, one way round this is to use:

<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/header.php’); ?>

and it will work…
This has the nature of a hack - use sparingly and probably not in themes for general release. And stay away from $_GLOBALS

So the dreaded word “framework” creeps into the WordPress discussion

Framework, I venture to suggest, often means a serious overcomplication of code in the holy names of consistency, effective MVC, semantic accuracy and a few other buzzwords. I’ve had to sort out a fair few sites that used a PHP framework, where a couple of classes and a MySQL function wrapper would have done the job much more efficiently. Continue reading »

Poker City is Las Vegas, I guess… Poker City is also a 2 column fixed-width free WordPress theme, with righthand sidebar, enabled for widgets.

The theme is compatible with WordPress 2.3, 2.5 and 2.5.1, and has been tested on Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and Opera 9.
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So we’re up to WordPress 2.6 beta 2 - any sign yet of slimming down the jquery and the editor…? - had a client last week who simply couldn’t get the Write Post page loaded on their machine… admittedly a Mac on dialup, the former of which I’m sure makes no difference whatsoever.

WordPress requires web hosting

…of some sort - so you can either

1. Buy some hosting from someone else,
2. Get some hosting from someone else for free (various alternative exist here… mostly involving someone else’s ads)
3. Or you can do it all yourself - set up a server on your desktop, and run your own WP site, until you switch your computer off… Continue reading »

Well, I never noticed that - having naturally been with Firefox since it was Phoenix and used to explode your machine with great regularity I don’t often need to touch other fine browser products….

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In the the style of what was called for a while in 2006 a tumblog and would do fine for transferring Twitter utterances (if ever deemed worthwhile) Deadsimple is a 1 column fixed width theme, with all the meta info and links tucked away in the enabled for widgets footer.

The theme is compatible with WP 2 upwards, including 2.5 and 2.5.1, and has been tested on Internet Explorer 6,7, Firefox 2 and Opera 9.
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I wonder whether there are any indices yet, as to whether the newish wondrous free Movable Type is making any dent in the supremacy of WP…

The pro nay-sayers, of which I would never consider myself one, have as their convention wisdom that 2.5 was the inevitable disaster - what goes up, must come down - the trickle away will surely become a flood…
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Well, it’s mountains and snow yet again…. Alpen is a 2 column fixed width theme, with a right-hand sidebar, enabled for widgets.

20th Sep 2008 - There’s a 3 column (doubled RHSidebar)  version of Alpen now available…

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