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I’ve been using WordPress for over 4 years now.  I also have developed some plugins like Twitter Badge, WP-RIR, WP-PageScroll and I wrote few more thinks about it.

We can say that I’m not the average user but neither I’m a PRO developer for WP. The point is that as user I Love WordPress but from other side as technician sometimes I HATE IT.

I had a few discussions with people about the good and the bad things of WP, of course at the end for me it’s positive, but it bothers me that there’s few known issues that they should take care of and they don’t.

Anyway here’s my list with a short description.

The Love

• Easy, yep WP it’s easy and everybody knows how to use it. Great work on it.
• Community, there’s a huge community of developers and designers that releases their work for free making this software good.
• GPL, free software license, what else do you want?
• Custom, it’s pretty easy for any normal user to install plugins, themes…even change them.
• Upgrades and updates, they are automatically making your life easier, same as 1st point.
• WordCamps, this is a great idea I may say and I love it!

The Hate

• Slow, it maybe fast to you, but for me it’s a really heavy application to be a blog software. Without plugins to cache content you can’t run an instance of WP in a shared hosting….
• Data Base, this is terrible, still uses MySam, now many people will say this is an advantage, come on we are in 2010! relational data bases it’s a must have, and what about normalization?
• Download size, now a days this is no trouble, but how can be over 2MB size?
• Bugs, there’s so many WP installations that some people is trying really hard to hack this software and for instance finding bugs. Thankfully we have a great community that seems to work 24/7.
• Plugins, I love the plugins and the work from the community, but you need to be aware what you install in your WP, I know it’s not the fault of WP, but some how as they do with the themes being picky, should be with plugins testing them even just a little bit.

As conclusion I will say that they should focus to improve performance instead of adding features and more and more features….And as I said before WP it’s my favorite blogging and even CMS tool.

Last words: Thanks to the WP team and the community for the work they have done, this is just a constructive opinion meaning the best intentions.

Image from sitepoint.

First of all, Merry Xmas!!!

Do you remember rir.li this service to prevent you to do image hotlinking?

To make easier the usage of this service, here you have the plugin for WordPress.

Installation:

• Download
• In your WordPress go to admin Dashboard -> Plugins -> Add new->Upload
• Select the downloaded file
• Activate
• Enjoy ;)

Usage:
Once it’s installed, you can use it to copy any images in the service of rir.li like this:

<rir>http://www.turisbot.com/images/maastricht.jpg</rir>

or

[rir]http://www.turisbot.com/images/maastricht.jpg[/rir]

New plugin ;)

Today I’ve made a new plugin to use the Twitter Badge generator easily in your WP.

Features:

• No image or flash for text
• No JavaScript needed
• Link directly to you twitter account!
• You can select background color, text color and your own text

Installation

To install it you can do as any other plugin of WP.

• Upload (you can do it to from the control panel) it to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder and activate it!
• Then you need to configure it
• Check your homepage it will be in the right side

NOTE: Works in Works in FF 3.5, Chromium (No Autoscroll), ie7,ie8, NO IE6.

Download from wordpress.org

Super simple plugin that allow us to know the difference between dates in WP.

What is useful for?

In my case in few blogs I only display advertisements when the post is older than 7 days for example. For this I need to know the difference between dates, in a easy way.

Download

Usage:

To display  something (like an ad) depending on a a expiring date:

if (post_is_expired(7)){
echo "display something";
}

As a param we have number of days, by default is 30. Returns true or false if it’s expired or not.

Date difference for a post:

$p_time=datediff_post("2008-01-12","M");

First parameter, date in YYYY-MM-DD format, second parameter can be “D” day , “M” month or “Y” year.

Returns in the specified second parameter an int with the difference.

Install:

• Download
• Go to your WP Dashboard
• Plugins -> Add New -> Upload -> Select the WP-Datediff.zip file
• Activate plugin
• Now, you may want to edit your single.php file form your theme for example to enable the datediff

As known for almost all of us WodPress may be one of the best Blogging platform, or the best one ;)

But not that many people is using it as CMS, that will bring us the power of WP (Themes, plugins…)

It’s really easy to do and within few minutes you will have it working and in multi location.

Steps:

1. Download the latest version of WP http://wordpress.org/
2. Install it
3. Add new page called for example Blog (optional, only if you want to use blog)
4. Go to Settings -> Reading
5. Here where says “Front page displays” select an static page like the Home, or any other page you have created before
6. “Posts page:” you can leave it blank as I said or select Blog

Done!

Recommendation:

• In Settings->Permalinks, select some friendly URL and not the numbers
• Change the default theme, it’s really easy from Appearance->Add New Theme
• Speed up your WordPress installation by following this steps

You can’t forget to install this plugins !
Continue reading ‘WordPress as CMS multilingual’ »