Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: development

  • Make It Pretty

    Make It Pretty

    This one is a visual.

    Here’s what my WordPress toolbar looks like on WP 3.8 on a site where I show Jetpack Stats in the bar:

    badmenu

    And here’s what it looks like on a site where I don’t show the stats:

    goodmenu

    And here’s an even worse menu:

    worsemenu

    So what does this tell you? As a developer, you need to spend some time making sure your menus look nice. I already went to the Jetpack blokes about this, but the real crux here is ‘toolbar menu items get janky.’

    This has always been the case, of course. It’s just a little more prominent in the MP6ified world, and it is getting better, but what needs to happen is plugin and theme developers who add in toolbar menu items take stock of how their items are used.

    The obviously easy fix is to use wp_is_mobile() to check if the device is a mobile one and if so, simply not show the menu item. After all, the odds of someone needing to adjust SEO via the toolbar on a mobile is slim. An exception might be emptying cache for that page, and for them I suggest an alternative. When you really do have a major use-case for a toolbar menu item on mobile, have it degrade via wp_is_mobile() to show just an icon on mobiles. For caching, I’d use [genericon icon=”trash”] (there’s one for Dashicons: dashicons-trash).

    I know this one’s really crazy short, but it’s one of those things that really needs a reminder. You’ve got to test your toolbar additions! WordPress 3.8 is due out three days from this post. Get on it!

  • Changing How We Develop

    Changing How We Develop

    Traditionally in open source land, we come up with an idea for something, we sit in a room and talk about it (it’s kind of like flirting), we make some code, and we test it. Many, many, times we do this in isolation, and we do it in our free time, hoping one day to have the time to make it awesome.

    Post ForkingWhat if we didn’t? What if, instead, we looked at history and remembered that some of our greatest works were brought about by patronage.

    “Artists from Michelangelo to Shakespeare all received support to create the works of art that we know today.”

    Now, finding a patron isn’t easy. It’s harder and harder to find fancy philanthropists who want to fund you for a while to write something awesome. And worse, trying to ‘schedule’ inspiration is hard. But in reality, we do this all the time. The inspiration is there for many of us, we just need the time not doing the other things.

    Aaron Jorbin’s giving this a stab by crowd-raising the money to improve WordPress Post Forking.

    WordPress Post Forking allows users to “fork” or create an alternate version of content to foster a more collaborative approach to WordPress content curation.

    That sounded weird the first time I read it, but let me explain it differently. Have you ever written a post, published it, and then wanted to edit it and have someone else check it before you post the changes? WordPress can’t do that. Once a post is live, you can’t save a change without making that change live too. But what if you could? What if someone could ‘fork’ your post, make edits, and you could review those edits and pull them in? It would be like tracking changes on a Word Doc, only cooler.

    I hope that other developers, who have great ideas, follow this patronage model going forward. After all, I never have a problem with paying for great code. I just have a problem paying for crapy code.

    ETA: It seems fitting I should repost this pic here:

    Aaron Jorbin - Haters Gonna Hate
    Aaron Jorbin – Haters Gonna Hate (by Helen)

  • Plug It In, Plug It In

    vilcus-plug-it-inI am not a great programmer by any means. I can hack around and muddle my way through with the best of the great net scapegraces. I’m not the genius who invents a brand new way of doing things. That said, I do, eventually, get annoyed with things enough that I force myself to learn how to code.

    Yesterday I was pissed off at WordPress because of it’s user management tools, and no plugins really did what I wanted. See, I have open registration. It lets me sync my blog and forum and let people post. But where it fails is that I can’t set users as ‘banned’ in WordPress. This is a simple thing, I feel. A user role that has no rights and is just banned from commenting. They can read all they want, but no comment. I’ve tried just about every tool out there, but they never work. In addition to that, spammers sign up to my blog.

    Since creating a ‘bozo’ user role is outside my ability, I decided what I wanted was a plugin to prevent people from registering if they were on my blacklist, similar to how I can prevent them from commenting on my comment blacklist. At first I was using TimesToCome Stop Bot Registration, which (among other things) uses StopForumSpam’s list of spammers as a stop-gap.

    The problem with TTC is that if you register with a bad email (jane132@gmail.com instead of jane123@gmail.com) and then try to register with the RIGHT email, it notes that the IP is the same and bans both emails and the IP. Which caused a couple people no end of problems on my site. It had to go.

    From there, I tried No Disposable Email, which checks against a list of known baddies. That was nice, but it was a text file list that you had to update by hand. But it got me thinking.

    I quickly converted it into Ban Hammer, which allowed me to update and edit the text file from a submenu inside my admin session. But that wasn’t enough. Why did I have to have two places to keep my jerk list? If someone was on my WordPress Comment Blacklist, I didn’t want them to comment. That implies they’re just not welcome at all. So why don’t I make Ban Hammer pull from that list. Which I did.

    I still have things I want to do to the code, like put in an option to use StopForumSpam’s list, and a way to edit the error message. But for now, Ban Hammer sits by my other plugins, Recently Registered (lists the last 25 registrations) and my bbPress plugin Spoiler Bar (adds in spoiler ‘code’ to bbPress) on my Google Code site. It’s not for ‘public’ release, but it’s there so my friends who have been helping me test out my ideas can easily download. What? I have nerd friends!