Wordpress

CleanFolio

I’ve been working on my profesionnal portfolio these days, and I’m thinking about releasing the theme. It’s a very clean and white design, with a jQuery carousel to present my past work. You can see a demo on Jonathan Foucher’s portfolio. So, should I release it? Do you like it?

Sorting

UPDATE : A post sort plugin already exists, take a look at this one.

You’ve probably noticed that there is no option to sort posts any other way than by date in Wordpress. I’ve had several requests to be able to sort post from the oldest to the newest, which Wordpress cannot do with a simple one button option.

I think I can hear the critics already : “What, but that is sacrilegious! It’s not a blog anymore then!” but maybe these users do not want a blog per se, but only an easy to maintain, good looking and accessible website, for whatever purpose. If you had written a novel and wanted to publish it in installments, it would only be logical to start with the first chapter, right? And if you wanted a glossary, the only viable option is to have it sorted alphabetically.

So, what about a plugin that allows you to sort in date order, reverse date order, and alphabetically? Should it have the ability to sort posts on other criteria? Does something like this already exists?

I’ll await some feedback before starting work on this, so don’t hesitate to post a comment.

Beta Testing: me too, me too!

The Feedly-like theme for Wordpress has reached the beta stages. I would like to do a limited round of testing before releasing this theme. Feedly changes so quickly that I’m having trouble keeping up! Only today, I noticed they added the date in a little box on the left hand side, I must admit it’s quite useful to see at a glance when the posts were published. I implemented it straight away on WP-feedly, of course!

Below is a video showing how window size changes are handled, using adaptive CSS with Javascript. I  think this is quite useful for users with smaller screen, or for people who do not use their browser full screen. For mobile users, however, this might not be the best solution.

The official page for WP-Feedly: More information on WP-Feedly. To sign up for the limited private beta, go there, thanks!

I  really like feedly, which I use to read my feeds in Firefox. The appearance and the functionnality are great. It’s a pity it’s only available for Firefox, as I tend to use Chromium more often now.

Anyway, I decided I could make a Wordpress theme that would mimic the looks and functionality of Feedly.  I think I’m getting there, I’d say I’m at about 70% of what I want to achieve. Of course, not all the features of feedly will be available, as some, such as the ability to mark an item read, to not make sense for a blog. Others will come little by little in future release, as I don’t think they are that important to usability, such as the popup boxes when posting to Twitter or delicious, for example.

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of what I have at the moment, so please tell me what you think !

EDIT: It’s ready ! Download it now

Feedly Wordpress Theme

I just wrote a simple plugin to auto tag new posts. It sends the content to tagthe.net and yahoo and gets back related tags. I must say these
work quite well and can be left on auto pilot if you’re like me and not a big fan of tagging your posts…

I use it on Renewable Energies from the Web, and it seems to be doing quite well.

Download

While looking for posts in the series, this plugin makes two database queries for each post in the series : one to find out if the post is published, and another to get the part number in the series. So if you have 30 posts in the series, you will get 60 queries from this plugin alone on each post belonging to that series. I found this very wasteful, and rewrote one function so that it only uses one database query, no matter what the number of posts in the series. I think the author should be interested…

Basically, in the file series-utility.php, replace the function
function get_series_order($posts, $postid = 0, $skip = TRUE)
by the following one :

<?php
function get_series_order($posts, $postid = 0, $skip = TRUE) {
global $wpdb;
if (!isset($posts)) return false; //don’t have the posts array so can’t do anything.

if ( !is_array( $posts )
$posts = array($posts);

$series_posts = array();
$key = 0;

foreach ($posts as $spost) {
if (array_key_exists(‘object_id’, $posts)) {
if ($key!=0){
$spost_id .= “,”.$spost['object_id'];
}else{
$spost_id .= $spost['object_id'];
}
} else {
if ($key!=0){
$spost_id .= “,”.$spost;
}else{
$spost_id .= $spost;
}
}
$key++;
}

//Optimized : 1 SQL query instead of 2* number ofposts in series//
$results=$wpdb->get_results(“SELECT $wpdb->posts.ID, $wpdb->postmeta.meta_value
FROM $wpdb->posts LEFT JOIN $wpdb->postmeta
ON($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->postmeta.post_id)
WHERE post_status = ‘publish’ AND $wpdb->posts.ID
IN (“.$spost_id.”) AND ener_postmeta.meta_key=’”.SERIES_PART_KEY.”‘”);
/* 208 – fix by Matt Porter – to make sure unpublished posts are not made part of a series */
foreach ($results as $num=>$result) {
//echo “<h1>resultat”.$result->ID.$result->meta_value.”</h1>”;
$series_posts[$num]['id'] =$result->ID;
$series_posts[$num]['part'] = $result->meta_value;
}

if (count($series_posts) > 1)
usort( $series_posts, ‘_usort_series_by_part’ );

return $series_posts;
}
?>

And there you go, a faster blog…

Hello all,
After quite a few years out of the wordpress world, I’m back using this great CMS, and of course, I had to rewrite one of my old plugins to work with the widget interface.

Well, the Amazon wishlist plugin was the one I like best, and found really useful, although no-one ever bought me a book ;( (hint hint !)

It does not work through the normal API, but just pulls the wishlist page with curl and parses it. I did that because the amazon API does not allow priority sorting, which I find more than useful. You will need curl for that, though…

The widget is configurable, as you can see from the image on the right.
You can see it in action on this site about renewable energy

Download it!