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: 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 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?

For a while I have been adding tags to my posts. Tags are good. People who tag things are good. I am Web 2.0.

Only thing is they seemed to be going in to the ether, that is to say, users (that is you) had no way to see them or browse them. I was suprised that there aren’t any real options in the Wordpress admin website, and considering they were only introduced in version 2.3 I was suprised I didn’t find more information on the web as to how to make use of them. I had read that WP supports things like tag clounds out of the box, but couldn’t see how to make one for my blog.

I suspected part of the problem was that existing themes hadn’t been updated to make use of them (but it seemed the ‘Default’ theme lacked support for them as well, at least the version on Dreamhost seem to).

Anyways, I found a few things:

• You can create special pages like Archives and Sitemap. I actually found this as a theme I was playing with (Copyblogger) had a link at the top of the page called Archives but it didn’t work. This page on Andy Sylvester’s blog explains how to fix this. You basically create a page (not a post) called ‘archives’ or ’sitemap’ etc, and under ‘Page Template’ (near bottom of the composistion page) you can select templates such as ‘archives’ or ’sitepmap’, these seem to be dependent on your theme. Finally save it blank. He mentions to set the ’slug’, but I can’t couldn’t see an obvious way to do this with the new composistion interface in WP [update: while writing this very post i have just noticed you just have to click on the 'Permalink' underneath the Title].
• I also found this page on Rich Gilchrest website (at the time of writing it wasn’t working and had to use the Google cache copy), which explains how to add code to existing templates. So I’ve added some code to index.php and archives.php for this theme (Greening) - which doesn’t have a ’sitemap’ template, which others seem to.

This is the code I added to archives.php using the theme editor within the admin interface for WP. Note I added a line-height as the larger tags seemed to overlap tags on the lines above, though even with this, there seems to be problems clicking small tags that are directly above larger tags.

<h2>Tags</h2>

<div style="line-height:210%;">

<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=36&'); ?>

</div>

And the code I added to index.php

<?php the_tags("Tags: "); ?><br />

So now I have a tag cloud and archives page here. And you should be able to see (and click on… you know you want to) tags at the bottom of this post.

Of course, as is the law, on finsishing this I find two pages on the wordpress site that for reasons unknown I was incapable of finding before.

Just come across Wordpress WMU. Allows you to manage multiple Wordpress blogs within one installation, and do handy things like allow users to use the same account (with different permissions) across different blogs.

This could well be handy as I’ve recently setup a number of blogs at work for various purposes, all Wordpress, and while quick to install and upgrade, and time to do this starts to add up. Worth checking out.

Aside 1: writing this blog post in flock.
Aside 2: Discovered Wordpress WMU while trying to guess at the url for a blog on the next version of Prism - the web catalogue for the library system from Talis - a blog which probably doesn’t even exist (they have one for their new readinglist system). While trying various guesses for the potential directory name for the (non)blog in question, I got a ‘hey create a new blog with this name’ instead of a 404. nice.

[was clearly being a bit of a retard when I wrote this and failed to copy two letters correctly, it is Wordpress MU - for multiuser - not WU. I only noticed this a few weeks later when googling for Wordpress WU and finding my post as the first hit]

Tags: wordpresswu, talis, flock, blogs