kevinleary.net

CSS3: Rotations, Shadows, Rounded Edges & Animations RSS

After attend­ing an Event Apart Boston I’ve started to really see the poten­tial of CSS 3.0 that can be used today. A few things that stood out through­out the 2-day con­fer­ence have been out­lined below.

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First Flutter, Now Magic Fields RSS

Flut­ter has been a great plu­gin for Word­Press, allow­ing CMS devel­op­ers to lever­age cus­tom post types and write pan­els through an easy to use GUI. Unfor­tu­nately over the past year or so devel­op­ment has slowed down some, and has even forked into other projects.

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The Future of More Fields & WordPress 3.0 RSS

It looks like the devel­op­ers who cre­ated More Fields have been hard at work in order to accom­mo­date the upcom­ing release of Word­Press 3.0. They’ve updated to more Fields Plu­gin to 1.5, adding some much needed bug fixes. Beyond that they have branched the More Fields project into a series of “More” CMS plugins.

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What to expect in WordPress 3.0 RSS

Word­Press 3.0 is expected to release some­time this may, and with it will come an array of new fea­tures to bring it closer to offi­cially being a CMS. Some of these fea­tures include:

  1. Cus­tom Post Types
  2. Menu Man­age­ment
  3. Cus­tom Taxonomies
  4. New Default Theme: “Twentyten”
  5. Multi-site
  6. Author Tem­plates
  7. Select User­name and Pass­word Dur­ing Installation

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From Dreamhost to Media Temple DV RSS

Recently I made the switch from Dreamhost shared host­ing to vir­tual ded­i­cated Media Tem­ple setup. So far I’ve been happy with Medi­aTem­ple, though the ease of web­site man­age­ment isn’t quite as good as Dreamhost in my opinion.

The speed increase has been very notice­able, and I think that have the abil­ity to cus­tomize apache to suite the needs of Word­Press will be a huge benefit.

I apol­o­gize if any­one has noticed unre­li­able down-time with the site recently, the A-record switch was lit­tle rough due to a few unavoid­able hic­cups. Every­thing should be back online now.

Thanks for reading!

6 WordPress CMS Plugins You Can’t Afford to Miss RSS

cms tools diagram overlay 300x227 6 WordPress CMS Plugins You Cant Afford to MissThe Word­Press WYSIWYG/TinyMCE edi­tor is great but can’t ful­fill the needs of a robust CMS. When cre­at­ing a CMS with Word­Press you often find your­self need­ing to man­age detailed areas and mod­ules, and the cur­rent cus­tom field edi­tor doesn’t cut it in terms of usabil­ity for clients. Using the fol­low­ing plu­g­ins you can allow your clients to man­age con­tent using:

  • Sin­gle line text
  • Para­graph textarea
  • Inline image uploader
  • File attach­ments
  • Date picker
  • Dropdown/select fields
  • Yes/no/multiple choice with radios or checkbooks
  • Man­ag­ing slideshows
  • Using more than one rich con­tent area (WYSIWYG)

I’ve writ­ten posts about this in the past, but things in the Word­Press world move fast. Below is my new evolved tool­box of go-to plu­g­ins I rec­om­mend using for your cus­tomized Word­Press CMS setup.

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Creating a Better WordPress Search Solution RSS

It’s great that Word­Press has a search fea­ture built in, but it’s not the most pow­er­ful engine and has var­i­ous usabil­ity issues. Here’s a few sug­gested improve­ments you can do to improve your Word­Press sites searchability.

Sort results by rel­e­vance instead of date

The pre-packaged Word­Press search will order it’s results by date rather than rel­e­vance. Nor­mal search engines sort their results by rel­e­vance, as you would expect. To change this I rec­om­mend using one of fol­low­ing plugins:

  • Rel­e­vanssi replaces the Word­Press search with a partial-match search that sorts the results based on rel­e­vance instead of date. It is a par­tial match search, so if user inputs sev­eral search terms, the search will find all doc­u­ments that match even one term, rank­ing high­est those doc­u­ments that match all search terms. All in all this is a very smart search enhance­ment to use, and one that I choose to use on all CMS installs I build.
  • Search Unleashed by Urban Giraffe is a more advanced search algo­rithm tool allow­ing for more cus­tomiza­tion in how your search engine works. It extends the stan­dard Word­Press search with cus­tomiz­able search algo­rithms, includ­ing MySQL’s full text and Zend’s Lucene. It includes a word high­light­ing fea­ture along with the abil­ity to search across posts, pages, com­ments, titles, URLs, and meta-data.
  • Search Reloaded by Semi­o­logic, as sug­gested by Yoast, will let you use Yahoo! to power your site’s search engine.
  • Google Cus­tom Search will use Google to power your Word­Press search engine. The down­side to this approach is the lack of design con­trol you have over the out­put of results.
  • Sphider for Word­Press will use an entirely new search engine within Word­Press. Sphider is a light­weight PHP/MySQL search engine / spi­der tool. Sphider sup­ports all stan­dard search options, but also includes a plethora of advanced fea­tures such as word auto-completion, spelling sug­ges­tions etc.

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