Playing with the size and orientation of my mug is now a lot easier. Wish I could alter said mug with this too

I for one am fairly keen on the new in post image editor, I think WP has been needing this for some time and I’m very glad we now have one! It is a little basic, allowing you to crop, rotate or flip your image as well as change it’s size. While true, this does cover the basics I would still like to have seen a few slightly more interesting features.

Whilst on the subject of images I also really like the fact that your posts can now have images assigned to them. This has been possible through plugins for some time but never built in. I like the fact that I can add some extra colour to a post now, having chosen while making the theme where the posts image will go, not sat there tinkering for half an hour with css in the post editor.

From the development blog:

Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you can juggle more types than just post, page, and attachment. (More of this planned for 3.0.)

I really like the sound of this, utterly custom content types could open up a swathe of opportunity for creativity and allow wordpress to be the muscle behind even more types of website – not just your average blog.

This release brings with it far too many new changes for me to simply list here. Suffice to say you seem to be able to do more with WordPress every release and 2.9 brings more great features than I’ve seen added in a while. I’m looking forward to seeing how I can push their new template tags, hooks and filters to create some of the most interesting themes yet.  Now with the ability to create custom themes bundled with plugins, surely the sky is just not a high enough limit!

Looking through the Divine Project website and reading more about it seems to uncover a few pertinant points.

The site itself answers my initial question in its F.A.Q

What is Divine plug-in?

Divine is the program developed for those who know a bit about Photoshop and sites creation but don’t want to waste their time making up a valid website on basis of popular CMS manually. Using this program you are able to easily make up a professional website and upload it promptly to the server through the embedded FTP-client.

Waste time making a valid website? Are they insinuating that valid code is unimportant? Can’t say I agree with that if that is what they mean. The plugin goes so far as to manage the entire themes’ upload and management as well.

I can see this being a very tempting short-cut for a lot of wordpress users.. but not the die-hards. Although in essence the first release of it is beta I still see its shortcomings as pretty important. A full list of the current limitations of the plugin are listed here so I’ll just talk about a few of the most important ones to me.

1. Firstly there is a default layout which currently (they do plan to expand from it) you have to adhere to. Not a huge problem, most WordPress websites are arranged in a similar way. Header, content, sidebar and footer; but not all and I still believe this would curtail creativity.

2. Custom CSS (in the documentation they refer to these as useritems) is limited to a total of 5 entries. Everything else must be accomplished using only existing wordpress generated css. I think of this as being quite similar to the idea behind csszengarden.com. While that works for zengarden I don’t believe it could work for wordpress themes where more often than not a truly stand out theme will feature some clever creations of the developer.

3. This I think is huge. All images created by the plugin are gif format. That to me strikes out any hope of gaining my custom even if I had a copy of Photoshop. Are they mad? Jpg and (for me preferably) png images are where internet design can only be taken with SVG poking it’s resizeable head around the corner. Gif is a format which, for me, is defunct for all but the simplest of web designs. The formats’ only bonus is the fact you can create animations; as brilliantly used in the Retro Theatre design by Eric Rogé.

All in all I like the fact that this plugin has been made, despite my criticisms of it. Not everyone is confident with code and not everyone wants to be. This plugin gives people like that a chance to indulge their creativity and get it online. My worry is that it will be responsible for a deluge of new themes, none of which use valid code. In addition to which the creator would not necessarily have a clue how to deal with problems which might arise. How for example would designs created by this plugin deal with different browsers? The rendering properties of IE, firefox, opera, konqueror etc are problems which still plague developers to this day – has this plugin solved them all? I somehow think not.

Never-the-less I will follow this plugins progress and see what users of it have to say – one of whom is my brother so I shall be getting his feedback too – it may even appear on his site!

But this is all just one man’s opinion – I’d love to know what my other fellow wordpress users think about it?

Autumn is the best time of year!

I’m also starting a little project with my brother; the fruits of which should be a slew of new and sexy wordpress themes.

Watch this space.. and another one soon!

The code behind it is a hugely modified version of the Writers Blog theme by Eric Crooks. I loved his simple yet elegant theme and knew it would be a great starting point. However; there are a few things now I need to do with the theme to finish it that require a rewrite of the basics to accomplish.

I don’t like monolithic programming structures. That is Microsoft’s biggest mistake in my opinion; and the reason Windows gets so slow after even a short period of use. But what I have here is a combination of so many little css hacks and alterations that reviewing my code makes my eyes water.

Bad Benjy.

So, it’s time to stop it and tidy up (fantastic cartoon when I was growing up – anyone else remember it?) With all this colour and panache I’ve lost what I hold dearest in web design: semantic markup + clear and concise CSS = ease of use/adaptation for all.

Once I’m happy with it I can get on with uploading some of the other wordpress themes I’ve been working on.. and everything else I tinker with when I’ve half the chance.

webdesignbooth.com/wordpress-28-and-10-things…

The article covers most of the improvements/updates succinctly so I won’t go into too much detail here but I will say the wordpress team have put ever more work into simplifying many of a blog owners functions and tasks.

The widgets configurations screen is a vast improvement, no fiddly save settings – everything is accomplished through seamless AJAX. I also really like the new html/css editor for your themes; now with functions lookup and syntax highlighting, making editing template files online now much quicker.I tinker with my layout too much for this not to be a great addition.

After all, who can keep all the functions in their head at one time? The wordpress codex has become my most visited site in the last few months according to firefox..

Anyway, to sum up: thumbs up; fantastic new additions to the wp backend and overall productivity within the blog.

After a little discussion and some information about how wordpress.com functions from mesanna I’ve quite quickly made the first demo version of a generated button. And here it is.

So far it’s really just proof of concept, and its code is a little limited but could very easily and quickly be improved, depending on what information you actually wanted to share. The reason I’ve put the date in for now is because it’s the simplest way to show the principle involved here. The date comes from the php function of the same name in this case I used:

date("D jS M - G:i");

What I’m trying to show here is that information available on the server side: databases, xml feeds, _POST and _GET requests, anything; can quite easily be transposed into a graphic without the need for java or anything that is blocked on wordpress.com. The sky is the limit!

The image src (if you look at the code) is actually:

<img src="http://bendavis.me/mintpromo/button.php" alt="Linux Mint Button" width="181" height="60" ⁄>

If you visit ../button.php you will see the png. For now I’ve also added basic functionality to change the statement (the “Taste Mint” bit) to whatever you want. Just bear in mind the picture’s only 181px across and the logo takes up 50px or so of that.

So, if you add “?alt=Your Text” to the end of the above link, the button will change accordingly. Note just for clarity the entire url will then look like:

http://bendavis.me/mintpromo/button.php?alt=Your Text

So, if you were type something like this into your browser:

http://bendavis.me/mintpromo/button.php?alt=Minty%20Linux

You’d get a modified graphic just so.

Obviously, no programmer worth his salt would allow the user so much scope for editing your scripts in a working public version of this, it’s just to illustrate my point.

To further polish this, I’d use my .htaccess file to make an actual img url, something like promo-button.png so it appeared to the casual user that it really was just an image. The next step I think.

Thanks to facade47 on the forums for the font and reverend_nerd for his great button.

What do you think?