#wcsea: WordPress at the Command Line

Posted on May 19, 2012 by Daniel Bachhuber

Today, I’ve been invited to give a talk at WordCamp Seattle titled “WordPress at the Command Line: An Introduction to wpshell and wp-cli”.

It’s exactly this — an introduction, because I hope to inspire further exploration of interacting with WordPress through the command line. Similar to Scribu, I’ve found “the keyboard is faster than the mouse” for many tasks, and that developing proficiency with the command line has dramatically increased my effectiveness as a programmer.

So, I hope you take the time to check out wpshell and wp-cli (and ack, for that matter). Think critically about how they can improve your workflow, and let me know what you script up!

#nyc12: Making the Switch to WordPress

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Daniel Bachhuber

Yesterday morning, I gave the last of three CMA NYC sessions I led this week:

Considering making the switch to WordPress? Join Daniel Bachhuber, code wrangler for Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP, to learn how to make open source work for your publication. We’ll discuss whether WordPress is the right fit for you, how to assess other options, and what steps you need to take if you’d like to make the switch.

Most of the people attending had been to at least one of my other sessions, so it was a quicker review of the slides and then more of a general Q&A session. A lot of the questions revolved around the different types of hosting, where you should go for support, etc.

#nyc12: Hacking WordPress in the Newsroom

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Daniel Bachhuber

This morning, I gave the second of three CMA NYC sessions I’m leading this week:

You publish with WordPress, are comfortable with editing theme templates and making basic CSS changes, and you’re ready to take your site to the next level. Join Daniel Bachhuber, code wranger for Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP, to learn what you need to know. We’ll discuss topics like version control, performance and optimization, debugging, and other development best practices. This session will be geared towards the tech-savvy with a practical knowledge of WordPress.

It ended up being a little less ambitious. We started out with (the importance of) setting up a local environment, reviewed what makes a plugin, and introduced a few project ideas. Between a dozen and two dozen students attended; for almost all, the information was completely new.

The most important note on this subject: there are lots of jobs available.

Also, come hit us up with WordPress questions at our Happiness Bar!

Session notes are below the slides.

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#nyc12: I Want to Learn WordPress

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Daniel Bachhuber

This morning, I gave the first of three CMA NYC sessions I’m leading this week:

So, you’ve heard of WordPress before, possibly used it for your personal portfolio, and want to learn everything there is to know about it. Well, everything we can cover in a hour at least Join Daniel Bachhuber, code wrangler for Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP, as we cover the WordPress interface, key concepts like themes, plugins, PHP and MySQL, and how to choose a good web host and design for your site. This session will be geared towards those with limited familiarity who want to learn more.

It was a quick introduction to the WordPress project, key terminology you’d hear, and then a tour through the WordPress admin. The room was packed with maybe 30-40 people which was sweet. Tomorrow is “Hacking WordPress in the Newsroom” and Tuesday is “Making the Switch to WordPress.”

#wcphx: Five tenets to mastering WordPress development

Posted on February 25, 2012 by Daniel Bachhuber

Enlightenment is knowing what your code is doing and why. Thankfully, instead of having to depend on your inner calm, there are a number of tools and strategies you can use to better see what’s going on. We’ll survey a range of topics you should explore to turn your frustration into bliss.

Feeling better already? In this session, we’ll touch on everything from debugging to best practices to coding standards to version control to performance and optimization. You’ll hear the insights WordPress.com VIP shares every day.

Session notes are below the slides.

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Wilson Miner: When We Build

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Daniel Bachhuber

“Design is the choices we make about the world we want to live in.”

#wcpdx: WordPress Multisite

Posted on September 17, 2011 by Daniel Bachhuber

These are my notes from the 4:15 session I did at WordCamp Portland. It’s a quick introduction WordPress multisite, and why you might want to consider using it.

What is it?

WordPress Multisite is a way for using one instance of WordPress to host as many sites as you’d like. Originally known as WordPress MU, the multisite functionality was merged into WordPress in WordPress 3.0.

Disclaimer

Danger, danger, danger! You’re entering the realm of advanced WordPress user and, by editing files, the database, etc. you can potentially break your site so it will cry. Make sure to back everything up before you get started. And know that you’ve been warned.

Why is it useful?

WordPress Multisite is especially useful for those who have to administer multiples sites. If you meet all of the prereqs, it can make keeping WordPress up to date, installing new functionality, backing your data up, etc. a breeze. Instead of having to manually update each website you’re responsible for managing, you simply update one.

How do I set it up?

There is documentation you can follow in the WordPress.org Codex. Basically, what you need to do is configure DNS if you plan to use subdomains, make a change to your wp-config.php file, change .htaccess values if you’re using Apache, and then run through the guide in the admin. Boom, you’re done.

What should I be aware of?

Converting a single instance of WordPress to WordPress Multisite creates and alters database tables, and isn’t recoverable.

Hosting a lot of websites with WordPress Multisite means you should scale the resources available to WordPress accordingly. Otherwise, all of your sites will be slow.

Plugins and themes are installed once, so any changes you make are incurred for all of the users across your site. For this reason, if you’re using any WordPress.org or premium themes, you should make all modifications to the theme as a child theme (or, better yet, just CSS changes).

You can make some themes available to all sites, and other themes available to just specific sites.

If you plan to install a lot of themes, it would benefit you in advance to establish a scheme for storing them (e.g. setting up /wp-content/themes/woothemes/ and /wp-content/themes/wporg/)

Usernames are unique across the network. If you’ve set up a multisite instance for all of your clients, create usernames as firstnamelastname or similar.

Network activating plugins means they’re activated across all the sites in your network, functionality is available by default, and it’s not possible for the site admin to deactivate it.

WordPress Multisite isn’t magic, it’s technology that makes your life awesome.

What tips do you have for me?

Use a plugin like Restrict Multisite Plugins to make certain plugins conditionally available to sites.

Map custom domains to sites on your network with the domain mapping plugin.

When importing content with embed codes into a site on your WordPress Multisite network, make sure to disable the KSEs filter. As of WordPress 3.2.1, you need to do so with a special filter (which didn’t exist before 3.2).

You may want to disable some of the email notifications that go out.

Keep your users from needing to modify theme template files with the WordPress.com Custom CSS plugin. This is the same code that formerly ran on WordPress.com, is super awesome, and keeps a revision history of all your changes.

Configure your admin bar to include network admin links for super admins so you can easily access management functionality. You can also expose additional functionality for your users (e.g. custom CSS) where it makes sense.

Write your short plugins to customize the admin interface, and put them in /wp-content/mu-plugins/ to have them automatically loaded.

Other useful management plugins:

Term Management Tools – WordPress plugin allowing you to easily move terms between taxonomies, among other things.
Unconfirmed – See a list of invited but unconfirmed network users.
Plugins for Publishers – A list I put together back in April with other plugins I like

What questions do I have for you?

What doesn’t make sense about the network admin UI?

What features or functionality would you like developed as plugins?

What features or functionality would you like included in core?

#wcbos: Plugins Are Blueprints

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Daniel Bachhuber

Marc Lavallee (@lavallee) and Wes Lindamood (@lindamood) are half of the NPR Project Argo team. Both were relatively new to WordPress when they started; today they’ll be talking about the zen of using plugins.

“Each plugin speaks with it’s own voice,” says Wes. Sometimes they can produced cluttered and confused experiences for your users. The framework they’ve chosen as it relates to plugins is use, patch or build.

“Use” means they install the plugin, activate it, and it’s live. They may make minimal modifications with CSS, but it’s generally fine to go out of the box.
“Patch” means they may make minor modifications to the codebase, through hooks or actually changing core, and then try to push the improvements they made back upstream.
“Build” means they take ideas and inspiration from other options in the WordPress plugin directory, and roll their own plugin.

Example: Navis Slideshow

The Argo team decided to build a photo slideshow plugin that leveraged WordPress’ built in gallery functionality, and looked and worked as a standard slideshow.

Their functional starting point was the Slides for WordPress plugin. Wes downloaded and activated the plugin, and made basic presentation tweaks with CSS and Javascript. Unfortunately, there were other behavioral changes they wanted too. They thought about patching but then realized it would too much work. So they went around to rolling their own plugin.

Two improvements worth mentioning are conditionally loading images and Javascript. For the first, the problem to solve is reporters that like 60+ image photo galleries. If you load all of these images on page load, it increases your bandwidth costs and load time for end users. The solution is to reference the image URLs in a storage div, and then only load them when the user is getting close to viewing them. For the second, there’s a global variable on every page load for marking whether a WordPress gallery was included in the post. If so, the Javascript gets added to the footer.

Improvements included reducing the footprint of the plugin from 39k/895 lines to 8k/244 lines.

Example: Jiffy Posts

To make their content more engaging, Argo wanted it to make it easy for their reporters to embed rich media. Initially, this looked like Embedly or oEmbed but they didn’t want to cede control of what was embedded to the content provider.

Solution: A custom post type called Jiffy Posts. Reporters could create a new post with a title, short comment, link to the referenced media, and can include source attribution. Doing it this way, instead of having reporters embed rich media in the post, ensures there’s presentation consistency from post to post and content type to content type.

Ultimate takeaway: The decisions and opinions of plugin authors can directly impact the user experience of your website. Think about this more holistically, beyond just reviewing whether the code is clean.

The slides from the presentation are available on Slideshare and download as a PDF.

#wcbos: Enterprise Publishing on WordPress.com VIP

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Daniel Bachhuber

WordPress.com is an “awesome blogging platform,” according to Chris Murray of Oomph. WordPress.com is “get started writing or blogging”, not “get started worrying about technology.” WordPress.org requires downloading the software, installing, and configuring. This gives you more flexibility, but it also means it’s more complex. Entreprise customers are somewhat in a lurch choosing between standard WordPress.com and WordPress.org because the former isn’t flexible enough and the latter has the potential of too many headaches.

WordPress.com VIP is the “best of both worlds.” Customers don’t have to worry about keeping servers up, but they have more of the flexibility that comes with installing new plugins, etc.

WordPress.com VIP clients include:

CNN
Dice.com
RIM
NBC Sports
VentureBeat

To think about the different types of hosting offerings, a typical basic dedicated server includes hardware, network connectivity, and electricity. Managed services include all of that, plus take care of your basic LAMP stack. WordPress.com VIP cares about everything plus WordPress, including caching, load balancing, upgrades and functionality.

When working with WordPress.com VIP, the process is probably a little different:

Any custom code needs to happen in the theme layer.
You need a great developer to work with (in-house or third-party).
Highly collaborative approach. As a developer, you can actually interact with folks at WordPress.com. You can pitch ideas and ask for feedback on the best way to do it.
Theme submission is a process with WordPress.com VIP. All code is reviewed line by line for best standards, security, and performance. Once the theme is approved, they’ll set up a Subversion repository for your theme.
Deployments are done with the WordPress.com VIP team.

Code is a little different too:

When you’re writing code for the WordPress.com VIP environment, someone is always reviewing. It makes you think more about whether you’re doing it the right way. The focus is on beautiful code.
Need to follow WordPress Coding Standards.
Plugins are included in your theme’s functions.php file.
Security and performance is the number one concern with the WordPress.com VIP team, things like sanitizing input fields and ensuring database queries are performant.

When it comes down to it, the biggest different between WordPress.com VIP and self-hosted: you (have to|get to|learn how to) do it right.

Q&A

Q: How do you do staging?

Chris: Often we’ll have a staging server in-house that’s client facing and/or use one of our five sites with the standard package as the pre-production site.

Q: Could you explain more about the lack of network admin?

Chris: WordPress.com is a multisite network in itself, so they don’t give you super admin access. If you want to set up a new blog, it’s a more involved process including requesting the site, configuring everything, submitting a theme for review, etc.

Q: Is customer code required to be licensed under the GPL?

Chris: I’m not sure. Licensing is definitely something to be discussed.

Q: What types of things does VIP support?

Chris: VIP support offers lots of support including theme reviews, plugin reviews, data migration. They don’t write code for you however. Any custom development should be done in-house or with a contracter.

Chris: “Working with the VIP team has added tons and tons of knowledge to my team.”

Edit Flow presentation for Hacks/Hackers NYC meetup

Gallery

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Daniel Bachhuber

This gallery contains 12 photos.

In an hour, I’ll be presenting Edit Flow for tonight’s Hacks/Hackers Demo Night at New Work City. Edit Flow is a WordPress plugin to supercharge your editorial workflow within WordPress. All too often a news organization uses a combination of … Continue reading →

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