NASA, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration, has started to churn out quite a few open source projects. Though this doesn’t have any impact on the blogsphere (yet), it’s exciting to see a government agency of this level working in an open source environment, effectively asking its citizens for help with projects, while simultaneously making some outstanding code available for anyone to use.
As an added bonus, the new code site is powered by WordPress.
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Original post by James
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I have hard time understanding the basis of this article but I wanted to link to it because I know many in the WeblogToolsCollection audience are coders themselves and it would be interesting to see the conversation that arises from Andrew’s post. WordPress coders have no class. At least, that’s what Andrew says in his post that discusses object oriented code being used in a non-object oriented environment.
What do I mean by a non-object oriented environment? Well, firstly WordPress still does not require PHP5 for core code so there are limits to how many of the techniques it can use anyway. Secondly, WordPress has been around for a long time and has been developed by many contributors looking to achieve specific things with each patch without having a particular architecture imposed, except by committee.
WordPress developers tend to start as users who learn PHP in fits-and-starts when they need […]
Original post by Jeff Chandler
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The code editor. One for plugins and one for themes. If I were using tracking software, it would register me as rarely venturing into that part of the WordPress administration. I’ve used WordPress for two years and I’ve burned myself enough times by using these code editors that I neglect to use them anymore side from looking but not touching code. The biggest problem I have is that it doesn’t contain any revisions. Also, when you click the save button, it reloads the page and causes the scroll bar in the code window to go back to the top meaning I have to remember which line of code I was editing and also remember the change I implemented so I can remove it if I don’t like the desired effects.
I’ve really come to appreciate using Control Z on my keyboard to undo changes I don’t like. You can’t do […]
Original post by Jeff Chandler
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If you’re a developer and need to know some of the geekier bits coming down the pipe in WordPress 2.9, Joost De Valks article should fit the bill. In it, he lists a number of things that developers should pay attention to such as enhancements to wp_query, upgraded TinyMCE editor, performance updates to the options table and much more.
WordPress 2.9 is currently at beta 1 stage. If you are one of the beta testers for 2.9, let me know how it’s gone for you so far.
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Original post by Jeff Chandler
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During the WordPress development chat today, one of the topics of discussion centered around the suggestion of changing the Hello World post that is seen with every new install of WordPress to something that contained useful WordPress specific information such as links to the release mailing list, the codex and other helpful material. I’d like to break down how this change came about to show how easy it is to contribute to the WordPress project without writing a line of code.
It first started out as a discussion on the WordPress Hackers mailing list concerning the addition of email notifications to the core of WordPress to keep administrators abreast of new versions of WordPress as they were released. The discussion became long winded but a response by Lynne Pope provided one of those why didn’t I think of that moments.
Change the sample data – instead of, “this is a post”, […]
Original post by Jeff Chandler
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Let me start off by saying that this post will not talk about how to get sponsors, how to determine prizes, or how to determine rules for a blog contest. This post will talk about how to tweak your WordPress blog to solve the biggest problem in running a blog contest to gain RSS subscribers.
Problem
The issue here is that there is no easy way to track if each contestant has actually subscribed to your RSS feed. Without the ability to confirm RSS subscription, anybody can just claim that they have subscribed to your feed and get a free entry into the contest.
Solution
A known solution to this problem is to include a special contest code into your RSS feed and not have this code visible on your website. That way each contestant will be forced to grab the code from your feed and submit the code via comments […]
Original post by Thaya
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At approximately 19:38:33 on December 1, 2008 Ryan Boren became the owner of the 10,000th changeset to the WordPress code. This particular code set change was a re-ordering of font families for Windows font selection that was initially patched by Matt Thomas. There has been a discussion taking place within the WP-Testers mailing list that the Bitstream font is horrible and that it needed to be replaced by Verdana. Looks like they received their wish.
By the way, the first Changeset to appear since the WordPress team began using Trac happened on April 1, 2003 (6 years ago). The changeset involved a new respository initialized by cvs2svn and the author is anonymous.
cvs2svn is a program that can be used to migrate a CVS repository to Subversion (otherwise known as “SVN”) or git. Documentation:
A hearty congratulations goes out to not only the core development team, but to all those who have […]
Original post by Jeff Chandler
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Nathan Rice who is a prominent theme author within the WordPress community has published an article that explains an easy way to retrieve the contents of a custom field. Instead of doing things the conventional way, Nathan explains how to simply use a function in order to call the contents of the custom field into a theme. This article should be especially useful to theme authors out there who are looking at providing custom field functionality into their work.
Design Trendsinspiration
Original post by Jeff Chandler
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Richard Hooper of WP Project.com has published an interesting post which explains how to create dynamic sidebars. As it stands, there is no way to assign widgets to only appear on specific pages of your WordPress Powered blog in the back end. Using Richard’s method, you can create your own sidebar.php file and assign various widgets or plugins to only show up on specific sections of your blog. This is great if you want to display a widget on a SINGLE post template versus the front page.
Richard also adds that
Aside from creating a dynamic sidebar, this approach breaks up your sidebar code into smaller, more manageable chunks.
Perhaps we should coax Richard into turning this into a plugin in which normal users can then assign widgets to appear on certain page templates.
Here is a question I have. You can use this method to assign plugins/widgets to appear on page templates, […]
Original post by Jeff Chandler
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The guys and gals at Automattic have published their Google Summer Of Code 2008 Codex Article which highlights various mentors and ideas. For those of you who don’t know what the Google Summer Of Code Project is all about, here is a brief intro.
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with a several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Historically, the program has brought together over 1,500 students with over 130 open source projects to create millions of lines of code. The program, which kicked off in 2005, is now in its fourth year. If are feeling nostalgic or are interested in learning more about the projects we have worked […]
Original post by Jeffro2pt0
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