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A Buddhist Guide to WordPress Development

The video is ready! Here’s the embed from WordPress.tv:

Below are the slides from my WordCamp Montreal 2018 talk A Buddhist Guide to WordPress Development. 

It’s an unusual WordCamp talk for sure, as it is mostly about an ancient religion rather than a state-of-the-art website app, so I hope some can find it valuable.

FWIW if you just want to learn about Buddhism, and don’t care about WordPress, this would probably be useful to you either way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Continue reading “A Buddhist Guide to WordPress Development”

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Global Voices and Amber: Preserving the web and combatting linkrot with free culture and free software

Very happy to share the news that Global Voices has fully implemented Amber, a project from Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University that backs up every site we link to in case it ever goes down ???

It was a big project getting Amber to handle our 100k post archive, but the satisfaction of having a tool like this be part of my job is exactly why I cherish working for GV. It’s a bit of a love note to GV, The Internet Archive, and the whole endeavor of preserving the web both socially and technologically ?

Thanks to Carl Alexander, who works with me on the backend and programming side of Global Voices, together we came up with some great patches for the plugin that we shared back upstream on Github ???

GV is Preserving the Web in Amber and Why That's Great News

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F******k Instant Articles: How do they work?

Watch the video of my talk!


Here’s the slides embedded from Slideshare.

Continue reading “F******k Instant Articles: How do they work?”

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Previewing Local/Dev RSS Feeds on Mac OSX

This post is filed under “I had an obvious need, I searched for it and found nothing, so here comes a blog post for the next searcher.” If you don’t do local web development or don’t know what that means, please watch this video instead, I promise it’s worth your three minutes and sex seconds.

TL;DR: You can preview local RSS feeds on OSX using ViennaRSS, a simple free app.

Continue reading “Previewing Local/Dev RSS Feeds on Mac OSX”

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Slides from my WordCamp Talk: Put A Map On It!

These are the slides for my talk at WordCamp Montreal 2015, about integrating maps and geolocation into your WordPress site with the Geo Mashup plugin. There should be video eventually and I’ll add it here :)

Full talk description

WordPress has built-in support for storing location information on posts, but no real way to make use of it. The Geo Mashup plugin enables deep, powerful geolocation in WordPress, letting you easily add geolocations (coordinates) to almost any content type. It also displays locations on maps you can embed in your theme, posts or widgets, with a dizzying array of options for what to show and how to display it.

This talk will start with the default geolocation system in WordPress and how Geo Mashup integrates with it. We’ll then cover the basics of setup and adding locations on posts, then the different map types and situations where you’d use them. We’ll finish with some dev considerations for displaying maps as elegantly as possible.

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NetBeans Color Scheme: Solarized Dark with PHP Tweaks

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What is Solarized?

solarized logoSolarized is a programming color “palette” designed  by Ethan Schnoonover for use when writing syntax-highlited code. It’s based on color wheel and lightness relationships and it’s all sciencey and stuff, but the essence is that all the colors look good together and have good contrast, so you can use the different colors for different parts of your code (functions, variables, strings etc.) and no matter how you organize it the result should be easy on the eyes. It also has both a “dark” and “light” mode with different background/foreground colors, but most of the colors (red, green, magenta) work the same for both, which is cool.

Here’s a color reference I put together showing the various colors in Solarized Dark along with their RGB and hex codes. It was very useful to have around while working on the NetBeans theme (the Solarized site is strangely lacking a similar reference).

My Solarized Dark theme for NetBeans+PHP

As soon as I heard about Solarized I wanted to try it out with NetBeans, my IDE of choice for PHP/WordPress coding. I’ve spent many an hour tweaking my color schemes in NetBeans (and Smultron, my old text editor before that) and choosing the color relationships was always the hardest part, so having classy choices all laid out for me was very appealing.

The good news was that there is already a NetBeans port of the Solarized colors that worked as advertised. The problem was that IMHO it wasn’t particularly well executed. NetBeans has a lot of options in the color scheme settings, but they are also extremely confusing and often flat-out misleading, so I don’t blame the original author for not getting it perfect. He also may not have been looking at PHP code, in which case it makes sense that the PHP-specific color settings weren’t well organized. Lastly there’s a huge element of personal taste, even within the process of implementing a preset color theme like Solarized, so I recognize that the result is really just my personal opinion of what NetBeans+PHP+Solarized should look like.

All that said, here’s a screenshot of my NetBeans Solarized Dark theme:
Screenshot of my solarized dark theme for Netbeans

I like to think it balances the need to have different parts of the code be different colors and the limitations of doing so using the NetBeans color settings. It should work just as well with procedural and object-oriented code.

One feature I added that isn’t in the original Solarized for Netbeans colors is SVN support. I had to invent them, but my theme has appropriate red, green and blue background colors when viewing a SVN DIFF.

Installing my theme in your NetBeans

Since NetBeans has a configuration import/export system you can install these colors really easily.

  1. Download the .zip file linked below (don’t unzip it, NetBeans wants it as .zip).
  2. Open NetBeans and summon the Preferences window (Options on Windows).
  3. Go to the Fonts & Colors Preference tab.
  4. Click Import at the bottom of the window.
  5. Click Browse and find the .zip file, click OK.

Download netbeans-colors-solarized-dark-jer.zip »

Once you have the theme installed it should show up in the Fonts & Colors preferences as part of the Profile pulldown menu, where it’s identified as Netbeans_Solarized_Dark-jer.

Since I started using this I pretty much never feel the need to use a “light” theme so I haven’t tweaked the Solarized Light colors at all. Sorry if that’s what you would have preferred ;)

Anyway, hope some of you find this useful! I plan to someday get some of my changes added to the official GitHub repo, but wanted to get this out before my Code Faster and Smarter PHP with IDEs Like NetBeans talk tomorrow at WordCamp Montreal.

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A Love Poem in PHP

Wrote this a long time ago but never posted it. Stumbled onto it while cleaning up my email:

<?php
	$me = new Lover;

	$me->partner = $you;

	$me->feelings = array('adore','miss','want','love');

	foreach ($feelings as $feeling) {

		$me->express_feeling($feeling);

		if ($you->feeling_mutual($feeling))
			$me->epic_hugs($you);
	}
?>

Sure, it’s not the most expressive form of writing out there, but like with Haiku I think the limitation and challenge of putting poetry into code form can help push you to create something really fresh and strange without the baggage and cliché feel of regular poetry. I also just love naming variables and methods ;)

Either way, I think my poem is at least more uplifting than this other PHP love poem I found.

It was actually a follow-up to a shorter, twitter-length PHP love poem I wrote around the same time:

<?php
	$things_i_dont_miss_about_you = array();
?>

Submit your coded love poems in the comments, bonus points if it could at least theoretically execute in real life (assuming for example things like the existence of a “Lover” class with an express_feeling() method). If you’ve got the time write us an Epic PHP Poem, including all the needed class definitions :P

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Another year, another exciting WordCamp Montreal

Once again I’m organizing WordCamp Montréal along with a great team of co-organizers. I’m managing the schedule and helping with all the other stuff. We’ve got a lot of great talks lined up as well as some fun summer treats to keep everyone energized and make it a great social event on top of being a place to learn and grow your skills.

I'm going to WordCamp Montreal 2011!

Grab a badge for your blog here.

If you use WordPress and have been meaning to learn more about it you should definitely come. In three years I’ve literally never heard anyone complain that WordCamp is a waste of time, even when they find a million other things to complain about ;)

Tickets are on sale now, so you should register ASAP.

 

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Multilingual content in WordPress, September 2010

Someone emailed me recently to ask about how they should approach the task of setting up a multi-lingual WordPress site (en+fr). My response was long enough that I figured I’d post it here for anyone curious about my thoughts.

We’re looking to update our WordPress website with a multi-language setup […] Would you recommend that we use a multi-lingual plugin, such as WPML, or just create two different wordpress sites?  I’d rather do the former, since once setup it demands much less updating.  I’ve heard in the past that this is very difficult to do, but now with WP 3.0, I’m thinking it must be much easier.  I’d much appreciate your opinion.

Multi-lingual in 3.0

The advent of 3.0 has changed many things but not the frustrating lack of support for multilingualism in WP. The same issues exist now as did in the 2.x days. The main relevant change in 3.0 is that WPMU, a seperate project which let you have multiple sites in one installation, is now part of the main WordPress code. The feature is now referred to as “Multi-site” or “Network” and is fairly easy to activate. This means if you decide to use separate sites it is a bit simpler to have both sites running off the same WP install and sharing themes/plugins. Just set up your main site as mysite.com and the French one as fr.mysite.com.

Plugins can be abandoned

While its true that two sites requires more tedious repetitive work during updates it less likely to involve insane compatibility work that could arise from the plugin acting up or becomming unsupported. Users of the previously-standard Gengo plugin all got fucked around version 2.5 (don’t feel like looking up the exact version) when the plugin stopped working and none of them could update their sites, leaving them susceptible to hackers. An unpatched version of WP is often vulnerable to attack and a site that depends on a plugin that stops working can’t be patched.

WPML.org is probably your best bet for a plugin

WPML seems like it has serious and dedicated professional developers, and has a LOT of features that are very useful, so its a decent bet that as a translation system it will continue working for a long time. Especially if you don’t have a ton of content it is a pretty good choice (because you can always copy/paste the content into a second site some day if the plugin stops working). Using it will require some heavy modifications to your theme if you want the language chooser etc. to actually make sense. My experience with WPML has lead me to believe that the devs aren’t particularly great UI designers compared to their programming skills.

Multiple sites keeps your posts database clean and logical

I personally like the two-site approach because it keeps your content and databases clean as a tradeoff for the deeper linkage between translations you could otherwise get from a plugin. It’s extra hassle to edit the content on both sites all the time but IMHO the bigger hassle is actually translating and keeping content fully synchronized which is nearly impossible regardless of your translation infrastructure.

On Global Voices we have a custom solution we call Lingua

I don’t have any real experience with WPML or qTranslate (the other big name in WP translation) because on Global Voices (the site I run) I’ve coded a custom translation plugin that we call Lingua. It uses separate sites but keeps a database that links translations across the sites (see http://fr.globalvoicesonline.org/2010/09/02/43270/ for an example of the output). IMHO this is the best model for running translations because if the plugin stops working all you lose is the links to other versions. Each translation site can continue to work independently without knowledge of the others, so you can work on the update issues seperately while still being secure. Unfortunately the plugin isn’t even close to being public-friendly, but I’m hoping the model gets used someday. I added it to the list of potential plugin types on the Codex page about multilingual WordPress.

Maybe one day it will be easy

Good luck to anyone trying to build multi-lingual WordPress sites. It’s a nightmare but none of the other CMS options are actually much easier, and all the other benefits of  WP make it hard to turn down. Here’s hoping that one day the core development team is willing to pick up the problem and commit to a standardized solution (vote for built-in multilingualism on the WordPress “Ideas forum”).

EDIT (Sep 11, 2010): I should also mention the Worldwide Lexicon project and their WWL translation plugin for WordPress. It has an intense approach that combines machine translation with human editing to make your site quickly translated and let you improve it incrementally as time goes on. I haven’t used their plugin myself because older dev versions I tried were very buggy and hard to understand. If you’re just starting now the new versions are worth a try and may be a good solution if the combination of machine and human translation is desirable to you.

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WordPress Admin Header Redesign: Light or Dark?

WARNING: Intense discussion of the open-source design of the WordPress website software lies ahead. I will literally discuss shades of grey. People uninterested in WordPress and its future should probably learn more about snuggies instead.

I updated my WordPress SVN Trunk installation today and noticed a huge change to the admin screens that had just been committed. The header and footer of the admin section had been switched from basically black to a very light grey color. This change was committed as a work in progress, so people would see it and work towards a final solution.

Fig 1. Old admin header color on top, current SVN version below.

Old WordPress header color and temporary new on in SVN

Overall I support this change and think it looks better, but the exact shade of grey in the background didn’t match the gradients in similar UI elements (the dashboard sections and screen options buttons) so I worked out a different light-grey graphic to use as a background that would match. Here is a screenshot of how it should look if this light grey is used in the final WP 3.0 release, I think it is pretty solid and shouldn’t make anyone cry.

Fig 2. WP-Admin with darker but still light-grey heading and footer. Pretty okay.

Screenshot of wp admin with light grey header and footer
Click to view full size

I remembered a conversation on the WP UI dev blog where another middle-grey option was proposed but didn’t get a lot of attention. I really liked the darker grey version in JohnONolan‘s original mockup so I worked out a full page screenshot using the darker shade of grey that I thought worked better and added them to the trac ticket about the header change.

Here’s the one I think would work the best, dark grey to match the active heading in the sidebar (in this case the “Dashboard” section heading).

Fig 3. Nice dark WordPress Admin screen, how it should be.

Screenshot of my proposed WP admin colorsClick to view full size

Here is one giant image with both of them so you can compare. Instead of images like this I like to open two versions in seperate tabs in my browser than jump back and forth to decide which I prefer.

Fig 4. Side-by-Side comparison of light and dark grey proposals for admin header and footer.

Side by side comparison of light and dark optionsClick to view full size.

I’m hoping the dark one can get implemented because it has a lot of nice features that the lighter version lacks:

  • It is not a big change from the old version, so people will be inherently less upset about it.
  • It brackets the whole UI nicely and preserves the high-contrast from the old design.
  • It avoids a page where 90% of the chrome matches each other pefectly. I think the dark grey is important to keeping the look neat, and having only one element in the page with that color (the active sidebar heading) make it look unbalanced.

Feedback welcome, what do you think? If you want to support/flame me the trac ticket about it is probably the best place, so that your input affects the final decision.