Of interest to those who use Wordpress (and those who have an opinion on web design).

Had a few hours off this afternoon so have been playing around with Wordpress a bit.

New plugins:

• Google sitemap XML : does what it says, and easy to use
• Theme Test Drive : allows you to preview other themes (on your site) without having to make the switch first. Good plugin, seems to work well, config settings are under the theme menu of WP.
• ‘Twitter for Wordpress‘ : you guessed it, shows one (or more) twitter feeds either as a widget or by calling a function. Works well as a widget (and all config is carried out in the widget area).
• OpenID for Wordpress : allows those leaving comments, and myself as blog author to sign in via OpenID. While it’s been noted that OpenID does have usability issues, it still seems like a good option to have. I’m leaving this active, it does work, though can’t see it being used. You don’t it near the ‘comment’ box on a post, though it is there on the signin page (which people probably would never go to), once signed in to openid (which, if you are like me, requires trying to remember what your URL is) you are actually taken to the WP admin dashboard (which scared me to start with, anyone can do this on my blog!), but the dashboard itself doesn’t reveal anything important and all other areas are locked down. In theory the user could then set up a profile, though comeone this is nostuff, why would you want a profile here? So kudos for a good plugin, though can’t see it being used on this backwater of a blog.
• links to the above can be found here.

Themes

The first browser I used was Netscape 1, possibly 2. By default it would display black text on a grey background. This was good, far easier to read than black on white.

Since then I’ve always had a thing against plain white backgrounds, and have avoided using them for my personal sites: from the mid/late 90s (but then didn’t we all have coloured backgrounds back then!), to static web pages today, and also this very blog.

The theme is Greening, I like it as the shades of green is quite unusual, and yet - for me - quite nice to read.

However, the font is quite small [update: I've increased the default font size in the theme] and I couldn’t help thinking that other themes seem to be easier to read.

I mentioned above that one of the plugins allows you to try out themes without full swapping to a new one. This allows me to do cool things like show you this blog post in three different themes, try these links:

• Greening
• Copyblogger
• Pressrow

The latter two are those I’ve come across that I like the look of. The test is I can read a large post without it being a strain. By coincidence they are both by Chris Pearson.

As you can see above, some of the new plugins I’ve installed work best as widgets. Widgets are blocks in the left/right menu (categories, pages, links, etc) you can add, and order as you wish, independent of theme. This ability to easily configure and customise you’re blog’s sidebar is a powerful feature. So I was keen to move to a theme which supports widgets, there are surprisingly few. To my shame, it was only by accident that it was just now I realised that Greening has supported widgets all along.

For the time being, I’ve increased the font size on my current theme, I think it looks better. Meanwhile I’m pondering moving to one of the themes above. Ironically for all my raving about widgets above, the one which looks better to me is Pressrow, the only one of the three that does not support widgets.

Would be interested in any one’s preferences regarding the three themes above?

Update Oct 2008: Have also added the ‘Subscribe to Comments‘ extension, allows those who comment to tick a box and have any further comments emailed to them.

For a while I’ve wanted a better way to manage my (non Wordpress) webpages. I had been using Dreamweaver, with a local copy of the site and uploading changes, but this limited me to one machine and wasn’t flexible. Editing files by hand can be tedious, and uploading any documents/files/images can be slow and requires an FTP application (again fine if I’m at my own machine).

I’ve always had a soft spot for static pages, with no dynamic content, pure html, no php or server side includes. They are cache and proxy friendly, wih no burden on the webserver and keep-things-simple. I guess my homepage is the ultimate example of this The rest of my pages use a Dreamweaver template. I’ve also had a softspot for non-white background pages, this dates right back to Netscape 2 when the default background colour was grey and not white. I always found pages far easier to ready on a grey background, and that’s why my static pages are grey and my blog is on a fetching shade of green.

I had tried Mambo a few years a go, and had recently tried Drupal. While Drupal gets rave reviews, it appeared to have a steep learning curve and would take some setting up. I also fancied a wysiwyg editor (yes I know, not very geek-like).

Wordpress is actually an excellent CMS, for my needs at least.

• great wysiwyg editor
• works out of the box, no complex setting up
• easy to change themes
• easy to start creating pages.
• Good, simple, friendly URLs

In fact Wordpress my still win out! Though I think I would want to set up a different installation for non-blog pages. As you can see (if you are reading via my site and not via a feed) all the pages I have created in Wordpress are on the left, and there seems little control of how this side of things works.

Anyway, I’m trying out Joomla. Another great one-click install thanks to Dreamhost.

The backend is amazing, and seems easier to get started with than Drupal. The default content is actually very helpful in learning the ropes. The interface is very plesant to use, and surpases many client based apps. This is not a review, but some notes:

• Basic things seem missing, such as linking to files or linking to other pages within the joomla system. These to me seem like basic and key functionality. Uploading pdf/powerpoint/docs in Wordpress is so easy that almost anyone can pick up how. With Joomla, the advice seems to be upload the file using ftp (I’m trying to avoid that!) or use media manage (not available when you are editing a page, i.e. when you want to do it) and then cut and paste the link back in to the article you were originally creating. The alternative is to use an extension, but it is reccommend that you only use this if you will be uploading a lot of documents.
• Linking to other pages within the same site is a basic requirement, but even after (a little) looking around, the only option seems to be to navigate to the page in your browser and copy the full URL and paste it in. This seems awkward. If you could select the page yourself from within Joomla, it could update the link if the page moved or uses a different url. I had a page which I only wanted to appear as  link from another page (it wouldn’t make sense on it’s own), but the only way to get the url for the link was to allow it to appear in various menus and sidebars so I could actually navigate to it and then copy the url.
• To help with this I installed my first plugin linkr, which allows you to link to other pages in your site with a simple button, this was simple to install, and works well.

Conclusion

Joomla looks great, and is clearly very powerful. But I find it confusing that what I take as basic functionality is missing or made complex. Response times do seem a little sluggish (only my perception) and I was disapointed by the fairly ugly URLs (something I get irrational animated about).

I shall carry on using it for the time being, I need to give it a good run before making any real judgement, but for me editng webpages (from a web browser) I’m rather tempted to just use another Wordpress installation.