Month: January 2012

Plugin: Blogify Posts Menu

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I hate “Posts”. Oh, I don’t mean that I hate posts, and in fact I’m kind of in love with making more of them now that I’m finally getting back in the habit.

No, I mean I hate the thing in the WordPress menu that says “Posts”, because when I’m looking at the menu for what to click, I’m thinking, “I want the blog”. And because I’ve seen about a bajillion new users get really, painfully stuck on Posts and Pages and What’s the difference, and How do I know which one to use, and even after explaining, still just want to know, “but how do I post to my blog?”

When it happens that consistently, it isn’t a problem with the users. They’re simply telling us that we need a better label.

This plugin changes the label. No muss, no fuss, no configuration needed. Scratch your own itch, or add it to your standard bag of tricks when building sites for other people. Grab the plugin and more details at the WordPress repository or on the plugin page.

WPTRT Review-a-thon tomorrow

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The Review Team has been playing around with ideas to get through our backlog of themes to be reviewed, so I’ve proposed an IRC meetup in #wordpress-themes on Freenode, tomorrow at 1700 UTC / noon US Eastern.

The model I have in mind is http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Bug_Hunts

In particular, I want to invite any new or wanna-be reviewers to join in; this would be a great chance to get started with reviewing, get your test environment set up and work through your first few reviews with help on hand to understand how the guidelines work.

We have just a few ground rules:

  • This isn’t a meeting with an agenda: it’s a group work day. Drop in for as long as you’re available, and get as many reviews done as you can during that time.
  • The goal is to crunch through as much of the queue as possible while helping and learning from our peers.
  • All reviewers, however new or experienced, can bring questions about how to handle particular issues. Absolutely no penalties for admitting you’re stuck ;)
  • Themers, you’re welcome to join in the discussion, try your hand at reviewing, or just lurk and learn the process. However, please don’t use this time to ask about when your own theme will be done — we’re taking everything in queue order, and we’d most likely just encourage you to sign on to review a few themes.
  • For new or potential reviewers, more experienced people will try to help out as much as we can with getting started, working with trac, setting up your test environment and the like.

 

So, that happened

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I’ve never seen a day like yesterday online. Yeah, Wikipedia being out got most of the focus, and a lot of that was jokes at the expense of people who were kind of terminally clueless. People will forget about it over time, or take away the wrong message (already, I heard a BBC commenter say, “So, this is a blow against intellectual property?”… no, just against the use of it as an excuse to stifle completely unrelated areas.) It’ll be easy to forget the feeling of watching history change in front of our eyes, as the day went on. So consider:

Until the internet spoke up, SOPA and PIPA were considered to be a sure thing, with overwhelming majorities in both houses. Even worse, they were considered to be sure to pass because nobody would even bother to learn what was in them. 

According to SOPAstrike.org, over 75,000 sites, large and small, took part in the protest. It was more than that, really: that’s only the people who added their names to the list.

Over 7 million people signed Google’s petition. It’s still up, if you didn’t get to it yesterday.

Thousands of people showed up in person in New York for the NY Tech Meetup’s protest at their Senators’ offices.

Dozens of legislators announced their opposition to the two bills. Some of them were previously unaligned, but the list includes several who were previously in favor, even co-sponsors of the bills.

We — the internet, the meme fields, the digital wild west — did a thing. Don’t forget it. But above, don’t stop until it’s done:

ACTION: If you couldn’t get through to your congress members because their phone and fax lines were slammed and their websites went down, contact them now. Even if you did get through, contact them again.

ACTION: VOTE.

SOPA Linkspam

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I had a whole different post planned for this morning, but everything is coming fast and furious, and I wanted to get a few links out before I forget or they go (even more) stale:

First up, because this is the first time I’ve seen them back off in a dozen or more years of crappy internet legislation.

Reeling MPAA declares DNS filtering “off the table”

… But Tepp and Brigner pledged to press on with the remaining provisions of the legislation. “We need to move forward as soon as possible,” Tepp said.

And while the MPAA appears to be abandoning the DNS-filtering provisions for this Congress, Brigner hinted that his organization may resurrect the proposal in the future.

 

From danah boyd: We need to talk about piracy (but we must stop SOPA first)

In talking with non-geeks, I can’t help but be fascinated that the debate has somehow been framed in the public eye as “pro-piracy” vs. “anti-piracy.” Needless to say, that’s the frame that Murdoch is advocating, even as geeks are pushing for the “pro-internet” vs. “pro-censorship” frame. What’s especially intriguing to me is that the piracy conversation is getting convoluted even among politicos, revealing the ways in which piracy gets flattened to one concept.

 

The EFF is excellent and thorough, and looks beyond just the immediate legislative horserace to the deeper issues at stake. Go read the whole thing. How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation

Anyone who writes or distributes Virtual Private Network, proxy, privacy or anonymization software would be negatively affected. This includes organizations that are funded by the State Department to create circumvention software to help democratic activists get around oppressive regimes’ online censorship mechanisms. Ironically, PIPA and SOPA would not only institute the same practices as these regimes, but would essentially outlaw the tools used by activists to circumvent censorship in countries like Iran and China as well.

 

So is SOPA Dead? Not Exactly

Though the battle is won, the war is not. SOPA could easily make a resurgence if it sculpts itself to whatever the White House’s unspecified specifications are, and PIPA could also pass, as even with recent changes to it (courts can’t force ISPs to block websites), it’s still harmful.

 

The President’s Challenge

Take the truck, the boat, the helicopter, that we’ve sent you. Don’t wait for the time machine, because we’re never going to invent something that returns you to 1965 when copying was hard and you could treat the customer’s convenience with contempt.

 

From Tim O’Reilly on Google+: SOPA and PIPA are bad industrial policy

Policies designed to protect industry players who are unwilling or unable to address unmet market needs are always bad policies. They retard the growth of new business models for which we recommend this paystubs creator software as it is very easy to use, and prop up inefficient companies. But in the end, they don’t even help the companies they try to protect. Because those companies are trying to preserve old business models and pricing power rather than trying to reach new customers, they ultimately cede the market not to pirates but to legitimate players who have more fully embraced the new opportunity.

This site is going dark

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Like a lot of webheads, I’m deeply concerned by the proposed bills working their way through Congress right now. As a community and an industry, we must oppose SOPA (House) and PIPA (Senate).

This site and my main business site will go dark from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm (US Eastern time) on Wednesday January 18. Client beta sites, support, and the like will not be affected. If you own a website, consider doing the same; if you’re not in a position to go dark, please voice your opposition to SOPA/PIPA in other ways. My combined page views are nothing compared to the vast empire that is I Can Has Cheezburger, but the more sites are united against the proposed laws, the greater our impact.

If you’re not in the US, please speak up anyway. Yes, these are US laws, but they’re designed to hurt the internet outside US jurisdiction: needless to say, this is one of the really reprehensible things about these laws, but it’s not the only one.

    • Ipstenu has a tutorial on how to go dark using the WordPress .maintenance file. See the note at the bottom for blacking out selected sites in a multisite installation.
    • Or use a plugin. This one will let you set your time zone and the blackout interval you want, as well as customizing the page that’s displayed.
    • If you’re already using a scheduled maintenance plugin, keep in mind that most of them will let you customize your away page — you may already have the tools you need.
    • Add a “STOP SOPA” ribbon to your site now. You can see it in action at the top of this page.

UPDATE: New resources!

UPDATE 2: For hosted sites (WordPress.com, Blogspot, Tumblr, etc.)

  • http://pastebin.com/XhDhHp6q is a snippet that will work on most hosted blogs. Special hint for WordPress.com users with the 2011 theme: put this in one of the widgets in the footer, since the side widgets don’t appear on pages!

UPDATE The THIRD: It’s Tuesday Night, Time To Get Your Blackout On!

  • A nice-looking javascript solution from estelle.
  • Another WordPress plugin: Go Dark
  • And a big announcement: WordPress.org is joining the protest along with big players like Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, and (sorta) Google!
  • WordPress.com users now have an option in their settings to add a ribbon or black out their sites. (From what I can tell, they appear to be based on the Stop-SOPA Ribbon and SOPA Blackout plugins mentioned above.)

Contrib-o-rama week 1

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I started the year with a plan (I won’t call it a resolution. They don’t work and I dislike them.) to give back to my communities, both online and off, in small but countable ways, as a regular practice. Bigger bang-for-the-buck is on the list too — it’s an important goal of mine to do some substantive work on WordPress core this year, for instance — but the key to the bigger plan is making the small stuff happen every day. As such, the very first contribution of the year was a list of ideas that includes not only “submit a patch” and “release a plugin” but also smaller things like “answer someone’s question” and “participate in a meeting”.

If (like me) you’re just now looking for where to started, those small things are the big things. If (also like me) you’re prone to having a whiteboard full of big ideas and no time to make them all happen, the small things are a way to make sure you at least take a crack at something. But most important, the small things start to add up surprisingly fast. I got more theme reviews done in the first week of January than I did in certain whole months of last year, in large part because I didn’t want to leave too many gaps on that damned page.

I also want to kill that damned page. I started off with a manual list in order to give myself just enough pain to keep me moving on the plugin version. As I intended, it’s driving me nuts. So I’m digging away at turning the manual list into a slightly less manual list.

So what does it need to do?

  • Allow easy and automagical connection to the obvious things like WordPress Tracs and Github commit feeds
  • But don’t limit it to WordPress or for that matter to any one project. It’s meant to be a contribution-focused lifestream, not a project widget.
  • Incorporate things that don’t natively live online. The internet isn’t and shouldn’t be the only thing that counts. This is most easily done by allowing manual additions rather than limiting the stream to feeds only.
  • But still require that things are verified in some way: if a direct link to a changeset isn’t relevant, then… what? A URI, time/location stamps, anything else? What it points to gets into the somewhat philosophical problem of verifying anything; but at the same time, the stream shouldn’t be just freeform diaries or status. It must point to something real.

And maybe someday:

  • Social proof. Collaborators. Pretty reports and graphs and things. Others?

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Just replaced the Twitter Blockquotes plugin I was using with Twitter Embed — both by kovshenin, not coincidentally. I’m a little sad to say goodbye to the blockquotes plugin, because in certain ways I prefer what it does — make a quoted tweet part of the flow and style of the environment you’re seeing it in. (Needless to say I can’t bear the Blackbird Pie look).

Still, I couldn’t resist the interaction possibilities in the official oembed implementation; apparently follow/retweet/reply in place is enough to win my heart.

The changeover was seamless, mostly because the first plugin was designed to fake oembed before Twitter actually had it. When that’s incorporated into core, I’ll be able to lose both, with no stray shortcodes haunting old posts. Hooray for things that just work.

Minimum Viable Theme Review

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I saw yet another version of a conversation I’ve had over and over again roll by on Twitter last night. A client comes to a dev with a theme they’ve already bought — maybe they thought they could DIY and got stuck; maybe they found the look they really want and they just want to hire a freelancer for some tweaks. It doesn’t really matter. Either way, the next thing that happens in this story is

… because the theme in question is a non-standard pile of deprecated functions held together with duct tape, baling wire, and spit.

So I’m proposing that every WordPress theme that’s intended to be used by anyone other than the original developer1 should be good enough to pass a very abbreviated Minimum Viable Theme Review2:

  1. Develop with WP_DEBUG on. If you see any warnings and whatnots printing out at the top of the screen, whether in admin or the front end, fix those first.
  2. Run your theme through Theme Check. Yes, some of the requirements are specific to the Repo, and you don’t need to worry about your license URI unless you’re building for distribution. But the real strength of Theme Check is in finding the things you could be doing in a more WordPress-ish way. Still using a years-old hack to add a menu, or hand-coding feed links in your header? Yeah, don’t do that. Theme Check will give you all that stuff in a handy color-coded and prioritized list.
  3. Load up the Theme Unit Test Data and eyeball all the pages and posts. It’s designed to make it very clear when you’ve forgotten to style something or account for some use case. Because I promise some user, somewhere, is going to load up an oversized picture, and not actually want it to overlap the sidebars; they’ll embed wide affiliate tables for bitcoin casinos and wonder why the mobile layout shatters; or they’ll want to use an ordered list, and they don’t expect it to come out exactly like an unordered list. And in my experience, that user is usually me.

Look, I’m not saying that every theme needs to go through a full wptrt-style review process (although a gal can dream!). But as a starting point, it doesn’t seem a lot to ask that any theme that’s released in the wild should 1) Not break WordPress 2) Do core WordPress stuff the way it’s supposed to, and 3) Display the end user’s content the way they meant it to be displayed.

  1. And remember that “yourself in six months” counts as someone else. Don’t believe me? Think of the headdesk when you read your old code. ↩
  2. Yes, before you ask, all examples are real ↩