Custom Fields in WordPress

20+ Tutorials and Resources for Working with Custom Fields in WordPress | Vandelay Design Blog.

In the Lynda.com video tutorial on Self-Hosting a WordPress Site, the section on Comparing Content Creation Options mentions the Custom Field option as being one main difference in WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress.org content creation interfaces. She then goes on to state she has never used a custom field in 4 years, causing me to question how useful this tutorial will be for me. I believe that custom fields offer a powerful option for those of us looking to use WordPress as a CMS rather than just a blogging platform alone, as reading any one of these tutorials on working with custom fields should demonstrate.

Digging into WordPress

Digging into WordPress is a great new WordPress site by Chris Coyier (from CSS-Tricks) and Jeff Starr (from Perishable Press), two of my favorite web design bloggers and writers. They have teamed up to write a book on WordPress, which will be online here. This is the blog that goes with it.

So far so awesome!

Copyright Violation

I just found a blog that copied part of a page out of my Backyard Birding site and posted it as their own without asking or giving credit! I would have been happy to have gotten credit for it and have them link to my site, but to just copy it, including the photos (one of which retained the copyright and my name in the caption – I guess they missed that one, which is how I found the site) is not okay. I could find no way to post a comment or contact the owner of the blog to let them know – they haven’t updated since June, so maybe someone else caught them first. I have my page copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which means it’s totally okay to copy it, as long as you give me credit. No credit was given for the post (only the one photograph, as far as I could tell).

Any ideas about what to do about this?

The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress

The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress from Noupe, one of my favorite web design sites, is a real find. It is a “an attempt to show off a number of WordPress features, tips, tutorials, hacks, plugins and best practices from the World’s Leading WordPress web-developers.” The series includes the following:

• Part One: Professional Tips for Improving WordPress’s Performance for a powerful CMS: how to make your WordPress CMS even better with some simple bits of code and great techniques.
• Part Two: 25+ Great Websites Using WordPress as CMS: a showcase of some of the best Websites powered by WordPress with creative approaches and attention to details; hopefully you’ll find new ideas you can develop further on your own.
• Part Three: 40 Exceptional “CMS Enabling” WordPress Plugins:  focus on WordPress Plugins that we might need to expand the functionality of WordPress.
• Part Four: The Big Contest – Winning 10 Premium WordPress Themes: Lastly, there will be a really big contest for Noupe readers to put their hands on the best WordPress Premium themes for Free! Ten Leaders in the Premium Theme Industry are offering to give away free copies of their recently-released themes just for you guys.

The last two in the series don’t have links on the original post – I’ll do a search and find if they they have been published and never got linked back to the summary. The first post alone is enough, though – lots of great tips and tricks and links to other great resources.

[...later...] Aha! I found part 3 and linked it above, and I also found another series that sounds useful: The Powerful Guide to Master Your WordPress Blog, which includes the following:

• Part One: Mastering Your Theme Hacks and Techniques: some of the best WordPress tips and techniques to make your dream WordPress theme.
• Part Two: 45+ Must See WordPress themes: the best WordPress themes with a user-friendly interface that you might be willing to use for your next project.
• Part Three: Powerful List of WordPress Lifesavers Plugins: WordPress Plugins that we (Really) need : Better Administration, security, fighting splogs, commenters, backups, coding, etc…
• Part Four: Elegant and WordPress Designs- Best Practices: excellent blog designs which impress with creative approaches and attention to details; hopefully you’ll find new ideas you can develop further on your own.

There are many useful resources on Noupe, not only for WordPress, but also tutorials for Photoshop, CSS, JavaScript/Ajax and more. Here is a link for the WordPress Category: http://www.noupe.com/category/wordpress

Learning WordPress

I am choosing WordPress for my CMS for a few reasons:

1. I am at least a little familiar with it – know of several great web design sites who use it and regularly write about it, so I feel I have a bit of a community for resources already,
2. It will be fun to go to WordCamp someday
3. I like that it aims to be standards compliant,
4. Even though it started as a blogging platform, I think it will work great as a cms for smaller websites, which is all that I can see doing right now – it seems intuitive and easy to use for the clients to do their own updating, which many (especially small businesses and non-profits) want, and
5. I do like blogging, too, and maybe someday I’ll consolidate all my own attempts at blogging to one WP site!

For my project I will work on a website for which I am doing a redesign as a small free-lance job for a non-profit. They can’t really afford professional rates, so I am charging a student rate, discounted for a non-profit – ha. I like the organization, and so this should be fun. Their current site is small, done in tables (ick), has a photo gallery and a calendar (both with some usability issues) and their big request is to get their newsletters online. They are very excited about the possibility of being able to add their own events rather than send them to a webmaster.

I look forward to playing with it!

WordPress as a CMS

WordPress as a CMS

Introduction to using WordPress as a CMS – showing the “CMSey” features and how to set them up. This is another great screencast from Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks – I really like Chris. He is such a nice, “regular guy” and so knowledgeable, and a good teacher. Watching his screencasts is like having your buddy, who also happens to be an amazing web designer, come over and show you something cool on your computer. I’d like to have a beer with him someday!

There are also some useful comments on this screencast – one about a glitch with themes that may “save lives” if you have the same issue.

An Event Apart San Francisco 2009

I can’t wait – I think I may get to go to this one! I wanted to go to last year’s Event Apart in San Francisco so badly – I watched people’s tweets about it and bookmarked liveblogging from people who were there, and Jeremy Keith (who is awesome) had some of the best summaries of the presentations.

Zeldman really knows how to throw a party! (er, conference…)

Hosting

I went with HostGator for my site, partly for the low price, and partly because it has decent reviews online and I’ve heard of it before, and also because it specifically supports WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, all three CMSes we can learn (although I know I have to pick only one), AND it has Fantastico, which I’ve also read about, making installing those a one click experience, apparently. Also it has unlimited databases for the basic account.

So far, I’m not finding the interface all that intuitive, though, and kind of wish I’d gone with Elaine’s suggestion of the much cleaner Site5 Hosting. I did finally figure out how to set up my ftp protocol, though – it was easy and right there in the “getting started” info, but I skimmed a little to quickly the first time and missed it, leading to a search through help forums, which didn’t impress me.  In all the other sites I’ve had ftp access for, it was a matter of quickly getting that info and getting access immediately.

I registered my domain name (naturallygeeky.net) with them, and the DNS populated very quickly, so it should be up (with nothing but a placeholder at the moment, however).

So far what I don’t like is their control panel is a little busy, but I guess I can customize it. I’m not sure how much I will use it, anyway – I’m used to hand-coding or using Dreamweaver and editing sites that way.

Time and experience will tell if I chose wisely!

Before Beginning

A pause to reflect upon my goals, my worries, and my expectations for learning PHP Site Management and Theming this semester…

I’m not as focused (read “obsessed”) or energized about this class as I have been for past classes, even though  very much want to learn to use CMSes for web design, and even though I have a website redesign job coming up, and even though I really like the teacher. This is likely because of my more recent obsession with remodeling and landscaping our new house, training (read “playing with”) our new dog, and the nice weather making is so I’d rather be outside playing. But also a bit of worry that this will be too hard for me – I didn’t finish the PHP class last spring, though I was doing well up to the time I dropped (fairly late in the class, with an A). I dropped because life intervened, and though I probably could have (maybe should have) struggled to finish, I really wanted to learn it, and couldn’t put the requisite energy into study and practice. To sum up what happened, within the space of one week, we moved into our new house, I had a biopsy, and my mom passed away. I’m doing fine now, but just got focused on other priorities in the meanwhile.

I’m learning already: This is my first time setting up web hosting, so it is a good experience, since it’s likely something I’ll have to do for clients and has been a pretty big gap in my experience.

I hope this class gives me real inspiration to get more freelance work in web design, sharpen my skills, and get excited about it again! My goal is to a) finish the class, and b) learn enough to create professional sites for clients that they can maintain.

I’m looking forward to it!