Author Archives: Michael Muzzie

WordPress 3.3 is (almost) here

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Update: We have planned the Word­Press 3.3.1 upgrade for the morn­ing of Tues­day, Jan­u­ary 24, so that the stu­dents fin­ish­ing up fall semes­ter course­work on the sys­tem are not dis­tracted by the new interface.

Word­Press 3.3 saw its final release on Mon­day, Decem­ber 12. Word­Press upgrades are usu­ally some­what pain­less, but we will be delay­ing the upgrade of our mul­ti­site net­work for a few weeks. This will give us time to test com­pat­i­bil­ity with the 75+ third-party plu­g­ins on the net­work. We will also update our quick­start guide. Look for the update after the hol­i­days, the first week of January.

WordPress 3.3 feature pointer

In the mean­time, WPCandy has a great run­down of the new fea­tures, “Every­thing we know about the newly released Word­Press 3.3.” Check out the new admin bar (now called the Tool­bar), wel­come screen, fly­out Dash­board menus, fea­ture point­ers, and the brand new drag-and-drop media uploader.

Also, if you first log into lynda.princeton.edu with your Prince­ton netID, the Word­Press 3 Essen­tial Train­ing course has added a chap­ter to the Intro­duc­tion, “Dif­fer­ences in the Word­Press 3.3 interface.”

A Chat About Open Source with the Founders of Drupal and WordPress

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On Octo­ber 7 at Schip­ul­Con 2011 in Hous­ton, Matt Mul­len­weg, founder of Word­Press, and Dries Buy­taert, founder of Dru­pal, shared the stage for a fas­ci­nat­ing ques­tion and answer ses­sion about their CMS plat­forms, their ecosys­tems, and open source in general.

Both founders are pas­sion­ate about their soft­ware, pas­sion­ate about their com­mu­ni­ties, and pas­sion­ate about open source — not just as a way to write soft­ware, but as a way of life. In this hon­est exchange, Matt and Dries reveal the dif­fer­ent ori­gins and philoso­phies behind Dru­pal and Word­Press that influ­ence their strengths and weak­nesses, and the two inno­va­tors explain how the plat­forms com­ple­ment each other.

Prob­lems with micro­phones mar the first four min­utes of audio; the other fifty min­utes are fine. Tran­scripts of a few of their answers are on the Schipul blog.

Outstanding Issues 9/30

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We are work­ing hard to have every­thing work­ing smoothly, and while Word­Press may have infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties, the time and per­son­nel to imple­ment them is finite. Below are some of the more both­er­some issues we are tracking:

  • Guest Account Pro­vi­sion­ing accounts are not able to authen­ti­cate on any of the blogs in the net­work. The prob­lem has to do with the @ signs in the user­names. Cur­rently, only nor­mal Prince­ton netIDs can log in.
  • We do not yet have a sim­ple solu­tion for adding videos that use the PUVOD Flash stream­ing server.
  • We have some doc­u­men­ta­tion, but not nearly as much as we would like.
  • Https works just fine, but forc­ing https by redi­rect­ing from http to https causes our load bal­ancer to infi­nitely loop the redirect.
  • Our Mov­able Type users will have to suf­fer with that aging plat­form just a lit­tle while longer as we migrate dozens of sites.
  • There is not a sep­a­rate server for stag­ing con­tent or a mul­ti­stage work­flow as with Roxen CMS. Posts and pages are either unpub­lished (draft) or pub­lished, and you can revert to any pre­vi­ously saved version.
  • The Shar­ing but­tons at the end of posts and pages do not have a Google Plus option.

Custom CSS

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Edit CSS menu optionAlthough there are thou­sands of Word­Press themes out in the wild, we will be ini­tially mak­ing avail­able only a small col­lec­tion of “curated” themes. These themes will have a small amount of Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity brand­ing. Most will be min­i­mal­ist, with neu­tral col­ors, and some will have con­fig­urable options. As the ser­vice grows, so will our theme offerings.

How­ever, site own­ers some­times want to devi­ate from the default appear­ance of the themes, or they might (for some inex­plic­a­ble rea­son) want to elim­i­nate all traces of orange and black. Sites in our Roxen CMS envi­ron­ment have the custom.css file, and we wanted to offer a sim­i­lar option with WordPress.

For­tu­nately, Automat­tic, the com­mer­cial entity behind WordPress.com, cre­ated a plu­gin that pro­vides this fea­ture. Site admins will find an “Edit CSS” menu under the Appear­ance sec­tion in the left nav­i­ga­tion of wp-admin.

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WordPress.tv: Top 12 Features You Aren’t Using

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In this Word­Camp San Fran­cisco 2011 pre­sen­ta­tion, Sheri Bigelow talks about the “Top 10 12 Fea­tures You Aren’t Using – But Should Be!” (27:24).

This is an excel­lent pre­sen­ta­tion for new Word­Press users, but it includes a few things that Word­Press vet­er­ans may not know about, like the Post Revi­sions Easter egg at 18:30.

WordPress.tv: 5 Ways to Break your Blog

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The travel funds aren’t always avail­able to go to con­fer­ences, but at least most of the ses­sions from the regional and national Word­Press con­fer­ences (aka Word­Camps) are posted online. I will occa­sion­ally repost some of the ger­mane ones here. Pre­sen­ta­tion slides are after the break.

The first four min­utes do not apply to a mul­ti­site blog, so you can skip ahead.

In this first one, Hanni Ross from Automat­tic talks about the “Top 5 Ways to Break Your Blog – and Fix It” (21:32)

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