Today’s release of WordPress 3.0 brings some exciting enhancements and new features that strengthen the software’s position in the realm of content management systems. For developers such as us, two sets of features in particular should prove invaluable in implementing WordPress-based solutions for our clients.
First, version 3 expands WordPress beyond the traditional blogging constructs of posts and pages by allowing users to specify custom post types. These custom types can function either like posts, organized linearly, or like pages, having a hierarchical structure. This feature builds on the custom taxonomies introduced in WordPress 2.9, which let users expand the organizational options for content beyond just categories and tags. Now, combining custom post types with custom taxonomies, users have complete control over how content is organized and displayed.
Custom post types don’t just let users segregate press releases from product pages, for example, but also simplify the addition of fields specific to each post type. A product post type could include pricing and availability, whereas a press release could hold media contact information. Following this example, separate taxonomies can be assigned to each, reaffirming a clear organization of content.
Continue reading Introducing WordPress 3, Featuring Custom Post Types, A Native Menu Editor, and More
Ask any front end web developer to describe common challenges involved in converting (or “cutting”) a design. Ask a designer who’s savvy about front end web technology what the biggest creative limitation of the web “canvas” is. In both instances, you’d likely hear an earful about fonts.
For the front end web developer, it’s all about taking someone else’s creative – often designed on a highly controlled and extremely flexible canvas like Adobe Photoshop – and implementing it in the much less controlled and much less flexible world of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Sometimes, a design that look great as a static image or storyboard just doesn’t translate well into web code, especially when not-so-design-sophisticated clients have to maintain the content and some of the imagery.
Fonts have long been a classic example. A storyboard designer can use any font they have installed on their own computer to make a beautiful design, but hacks aside, web browsers have only been able to render text with fonts installed on the visitors’ computers. Since there are only a handful of fonts that are more or less guaranteed to be on all modern computers (think Arial and Times New Roman), websites have been limited to a handful of uninteresting choices.
Continue reading Typekit: the font solution we’ve been waiting for?
Our third post on Smashing Magazine was published on Monday, December 14th. Part two of Advanced Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers offers techniques for customizing content administration. On the day of publication, it made it up to #2 on the Delicious hot list.
On Wednesday, December 16th, WordPress Tavern published their interview with Jake Goldman, Director of Client Services at C. Murray Consulting. You can listen to the latest episode on their website, or on November 25th, 2009 in Content Management Systems and Featured and Programming and WordPress Tips. 0 Comments
C. Murray Consulting’s second post on Smashing Magazine, Advanced Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers, was published on the morning of November 25, 2009.
The original article covered 4 over-arching topics, and was so lengthy that the editors decided to split it into two parts! Part two – which focuses on customizing the administrative experience – will be published in two weeks.
Advanced Power Tips, part one, covers techniques for multi-block page / post content and digs deeper into methods for associating page content with post categories.
Continue reading Smashing Mag Redux: Advanced Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers
It doesn’t look much different than it did a month ago, but under the hood the most prominent website in U.S. government is now running the open source Drupal content management system. This apparently replaces an unknown proprietary CMS that was implemented during the Bush Administration.
On the heels of the high-profile Recovery.gov Drupal site launched earlier in the year, this is another big win for the Open Source community and an important stamp of approval for the Drupal system. Seeing a site with this level of prominence leverage Open Source technology will be noticed by governments and corporations around the world where Open Source has traditionally been looked at as not polished enough and not secure enough for mission critical operations. For direct web communications with the U.S. people, WhiteHouse.gov is about as mission critical as it gets.
Having worked through dozens of projects on Open Source content management systems, the government’s Drupal choice is not at all surprising. The evolution of the platform from it’s political roots during the Dean Campaign in 2004 is just extraordinary. Today, there is not much you can’t do on the platform with it’s robust developer API and with the thousands of modules contributed to the project by the community.
Although we don’t have access to all the specific Drupal modules in place (I’d love to see it), we did notice a few interesting tidbits via a look at the page source:
- Related blog posts appear to be handled by the Views module (no surprise there)
- The popular AddThis link sharing service is being used
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WebTrends is keeping track of your visits (Sorry, Google Analytics)
- The beautiful slideshow on the homepage is built with jQuery
- Contributed module Galleria is getting some use in the Photo Galleries
- And in case you were wondering, yes, the robots.txt file is still only two lines long, slightly shorter than 2,400 present during the prior Administration
Have you uncovered more details? Let us know in the comments. It’ll be interesting to see how this site evolves in the coming months and years knowing that Drupal is under the hood.
Update 10/26/2009 – More Open Source in government. The SEC’s Investor.gov site launched a few days ago on WordPress, our other favorite platform.
CMS Wire and Water & Stone released their on September 22nd, 2009 in Featured and Strategy. 9 Comments
On September 23, Google released , an add-on for Internet Explorer (IE) 6-8. Chrome Frame allows websites to request that IE visitors use the rendering engine behind Google’s speedy Chrome web browser instead of IE’s native engine. A TechCrunch synopsis and the provide further explanation. This article offers strategic insight into why Google is aggressively pushing their own browser technology, whether Chrome Frame will succeed, and how Chrome Frame should be seen by web development clients.
Ask any web developer what they think of Internet Explorer 6 and you’ll hear an earful. The 8 year old web browser still commands nearly 20% of the browser market and is woefully inadequate at supporting modern standards, incurring millions of dollars for legacy support every year. IE 7 and 8 were big improvements, but as we’ve opined on before, even IE8 fails to support forward looking techniques supported by the competition.
In the 6 month since IE8’s release, competitors Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and even Opera, have all seen major updates. All of them introduced performance upgrades, in particular to their JavaScript engines. JavaScript is increasingly the engine for dynamic content on websites, from animations to on the fly content loading without page reloads (via AJAX). Google’s browser, , positioned itself from day one as focused on performance, JavaScript performance in particular. At least in theoretical tests, it more than delivers on its promise.
Continue reading Google Chrome Frame: Why they did it and why it probably won’t work
On July 2nd, a post by Jake Goldman that was originally published here on the C. Murray Consulting Blog was enhanced and republished on Smashing Magazine. The post began as five quick tips for implementing WordPress as a Content Management System and grew into an in-depth, essential guide for leveraging WordPress as a full-featured website CMS.
Read the full post on Smashing Magazine
The post highlights real-life examples from some of our recent WordPress implementations:
Congratulations to Jake for creating such valuable tips and making them available to the open source community. Thanks also to Smashing Magazine for distributing the article.