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Without a doubt one of the most interesting additions to WordPress in recent memory is the custom post type. Developers have built out all sorts of plugins and features using custom post types since they were made available to the community. In fact, I’m willing to bet a number of you folks are using them, and likely in large number.
When you vote in the poll, it would be great if you also jumped into the comments and told us about the post types you’re using (or not using) on your websites.
If you are having trouble with your WordPress website, or if you ever have a problem with it in the future, you should first check the number of plugins you are running. If it’s a big number then you’ve likely found your problem. You should trim down your number of active plugins immediately.
The best thing you can do in the future is keep that active plugin count as small as possible.
Except it’s not.
None of what I just said is true, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone follow that advice. This sort of advice is both misleading to users and contrary to the spirit of WordPress, yet a growing number of voices within the community are encouraging users to limit the number of plugins they run. It’s a bit sad, because plugins are arguably the best part of WordPress. To convey that they are dangerous in large numbers is to do a disservice to the community itself.
In reality the number of active WordPress plugins you run isn’t important, and the only thing that number can tell anyone is just how much you love plugins.
EDIT: The premise of this post is to specifically call attention to the nefarious practice of using base64_ and other php methods to hide links to 3rd party sites in a theme file. The average user has no idea what is going on: a base64_ function in a footer.php or sidebar.php file is a very very strong indicator that their theme designer is up to no good. It is only an indicator though. When in doubt contact your host or the theme designer and ask them to explain what’s going on. – strebel
We see a lot of themes at Page.ly. We see good themes and we see bad themes.
From our vantage point, hosting thousands of WordPress sites, we literally see everything.
MoPappy will host anything under the sun and could care less what app is running or what it is doing. At Page.ly we only manage WordPress, and we have a keen interest in the performance aspect of WordPress at scale.
Stop the
base64_shit. You are a douchebag if you don’t.
A two hundred character string of HTML in order to encode and hide two backlinks is 75k. That is a relatively big file, and also adds overhead to the PHP process when it is decoded every time the page loads.
I would like to take a moment to tell all theme designers, everywhere: stop the base64_encode shit. You are a douchebag if you do this.
There are more WordPress themes now than ever before, including commercial themes. More and more developers are spending their time and their talents to develop WordPress themes to sell to customers. These are great things.
But a trend that picked up steam, and doesn’t seem to be letting up, is the custom theme options screen. Instead of using the standard WordPress user interface for a given options screen, a number of developers have gone their own direction, creating custom screens with their own design and their own techniques.
This stuff needs to stop.
After recording the WPCandy Podcast last night with Ryan, we had a bit of an after the show show open discussion. I brought up something I remembered hearing a while back on a 5by5 podcast where I believe a guest of Jeffrey Zeldman’s said that WordPress couldn’t handle a website like IMDB, the popular Internet Movie Database.
I wrote down the comment to remember for later, because I had a feeling it was a bit presumptuous. Justin Tadlock, a very well respected WordPress developer, happened to be around the after the show show and was the perfect person to ask about my IMDB WordPress challenge.
One of the best things about working on the internet is being able to engage in open dialog about your business. Recently one of our ThemeForest authors, the very talented Mike McAlister, weighed in with a thought provoking post here on WPCandy. From the rate at which comments flew in, it was obvious this is an important discussion to be having.
WPCandy have very kindly allowed me to write an editorial in response to the post and the comments. I hope I can add a little more to this important conversation!
This editorial was contributed by WordPress theme developer Mike McAlister, whose themes are available on ThemeForest. You can read more about him in his author profile below the editorial.
Your site has those fancy drop-down menus you always see around the web. Not just the one that drops down, but the one that drops down and then out, and down and out with the really slick fading transitions. It took you zero hours to code.
Your homepage features a really unique display of your portfolio items, sliding and zooming them in and out with a custom effect (designated in a custom theme options panel, of course). Adding your portfolio items was as easy as sending an email.
Your site also has 20+ custom page templates, 50+ layout and styling shortcodes, color options, video support, custom twitter widgets and working contact forms. Not to mention it is professionally designed, coded, validated and supported by some of the best talent on the web.
Your site is absolutely amazing and it cost you a total of $35. Less than an oil change, especially if you have a coupon.
Today’s editorial has been contributed by Joshua Strebel, co-founder of Page.ly, the Managed WordPress Hosting company.
Yes, this post title is filled will juicy controversy. Intentionally so. However consider it from the following point of view.
In the rare cases someones cancels their service at Page.ly we ask them to share with us a reason why. The following is real feedback from a recent corporate customer that is part of the Viacom media conglomerate.
…[We] just want a blog we can easily theme and post to, not [run] a site primary off it. WordPress is over-complicated over-kill for this, Tumblr works fine and is much easier to deal with…
Wow.
Jetpack is being celebrated as a cool new tool that brings features of WordPress.com in to WordPress.org. That’s true. But I think recognizing it as this, solely, is burying the lede 1. Jetpack is also a bold new business move for Automattic, one which deserves some further unpacking.
Jetpack is now a direct line in to WordPress.org Dashboards for Automattic. When (not if) Automattic releases a new software as a service, a simple update to Jetpack will bring that news in front of a serious number of WordPress.org users. This is a big step for Automattic, since up to now their reach has been mostly within the walls of WordPress.com. Now Jetpack is not only available for anyone to use 2, but it will come preinstalled with one-click installs of WordPress with a number of hosting providers.
That means big numbers.
So far most of the criticism towards the post formats feature in WordPress 3.1 has been about the formats being a standardized list that cannot be customized. But from the perspectives of portability and usability, I would say a mere standardized list doesn’t go far enough.
The argument for sticking with a standard set of post formats is that a user should be able to switch themes without losing the formatting of their posts. There are nine new formats and these do seem to cover most uses: aside, gallery, link, image, quote, status, video, audio, and chat.
