WP Realm

WordPress news, community news, reviews and more from all over the world

Technical

Find the Words to Match Your Code Poetry

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A few weeks ago, 200+ WordPress enthusiasts geeked out at WordCamp Vancouver and then attended the first ever BuddyCamp. For me, the highlight of the weekend was listening to John James Jacoby’s (AKA JJJ) presentation about proper documentation. His talk reminded me, that last year at WordCamp Toronto, Chip Bennett also gave a great presentation discussing documentation, and over in Montreal, Joey Kudish discussed the merits of becoming a better developer by writing better code. Weird how you need to hear the same thing three times to finally actually “hear it”. Well after WordCamp Vancouver, I finally started and I’m now documenting my themes properly.

I don’t know about you, but back in 2004 when I started working with WordPress, I didn’t pay much attention to standards, documentation, or the proper way to do things. But now, it seems as though the entire WordPress community is now working towards adopting the same standards. [Read more…] about Find the Words to Match Your Code Poetry

The Ten Commandments of WordPress Development

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About a year ago I made an inventory of all the WordPress websites I created together with my colleagues over the past few years. I found out that we used a lot of different approaches. It lacked standardization. What we needed was a uniform approach to development and, of course, a philosophy. At first I was a little flabbergasted, I really did not know where to start. Of course we all knew about the Codex, the forums and tutorial websites, but we did not have any contact with the WordPress community at all. [Read more…] about The Ten Commandments of WordPress Development

Building a Multilingual Website? These are the Questions to Ask.

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Throughout the years I have created several multilingual websites using WordPress, and I have tried different methods to achieve my goals. As you might know, WordPress does not offer a simple solution for creating multilingual websites. Yet since you can create virtually everything using WordPress, just a little effort is needed to achieve your goals. There are several ways to create a multilingual website. [Read more…] about Building a Multilingual Website? These are the Questions to Ask.

Closing the Cookie Jar

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On June 5 2012, the new Dutch Telecommunications Act came in force. This act is a direct result of a recent EU ‘Cookie’ Directive regarding websites storing information on your computer. For the most part the directive is about the use of cookies, but other examples are “HTML5 local storage” and “local shared objects“. This EU Directive (officially known as the EU Directive 2002/58 on Privacy and Electronic Communications, otherwise known as the E-Privacy Directive) states in Article 5(3) the following:

Member States shall ensure that the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned has given his or her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information… about the purposes of the processing.

There are already a lot of sites discussing and explaining the European directive like Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and All About Cookies. You can find tons of information on them like the difference between session- and persistent cookies. Apart from the distinction between session and persistent cookies, cookies can also be separated into functional and non-functional cookies. Functional cookies are cookies that are required for the basic operation of your application – most of the time these are also session cookies. Non-functional cookies however are not required for your application to work properly, they are additional and most of the time they only provide an added value for the applications owner. It’s on these last kind of cookies the directive applies. The EU Member States all have their own legislations derived from the EU Directive, they all are slightly divergent amongst themselves.

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Making the Transition from HTML to WordPress. Where do you Begin?

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A few weeks ago at our local WordPress Meetup, we were having a round table discussion and someone asked

“How do I start? I currently have an HTML site and would like to convert it to WordPress, but I don’t know where to begin.”

That question took me a few years back when I was first dipped my toe into WordPress theming.

I had been designing websites for years, had just learned CSS and ditched my tables, I had a blog, but I was looking at my other pages and thought how do I integrate this other content with my WordPress site?

Thinking of Content Differently

When learning web design, you first learn that CSS allows you to separate presentation from content. WordPress takes that concept even further by separating the HTML from the content and storing all content in the database.

Once you’ve grasped that concept, you also need to know the difference between the various WordPress content types.

  • Posts – are displayed on your blog and appear in reverse chronological order, i.e. the latest posts are at the top. Your blog posts can be categorized in a series of ways and thus can be used for news, press releases, events, reviews, articles, whatever you wish.
  • Pages – on the other hand are for your static content. Contact information, about page, services, etc…
  • Comments – these can be turned on or off and are also stored in your database and associated with your blog posts.
  • Media – any document, file or photo that you upload in your WordPress site is uploaded in the uploads directory and it’s information is also stored in the database.
  • Links – Should you wish to use your blogroll, this other WordPress content type is there for you.

When you plan your WordPress site, the first thing you’ll want to do is simply upload your content. Create your pages, decide if you want a blog or not and make sure you’ve got everything in place.

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Introducing the WP Realm Technical Writing Team

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As a site about WordPress, you’d expect us to have just a little bit of technical content. After all, I heard a rumour that there are these things called PHP and MySQL that have something to do with WordPress, although I’m not sure what – something mystical and magical no doubt. To help out with writing regular  content I’ve gathered a team of experts who’ll be writing regular posts about the technical aspects of WordPress; writing code, plugins and themes, contributing to core, getting the PHP right, playing with your database, and all that good stuff that technical folks who use WordPress like to do. Let’s meet them. [Read more…] about Introducing the WP Realm Technical Writing Team