Tag: wordpress

What Themes Get Wrong

I neither create nor review themes. I can fix a theme and edit one and hack one, but I don’t design them because I don’t visualize that way.

But boy do I see a lot of themes doing things in a way I can only describe as wrong.

Packaging and Requiring Plugins

A lot of themes do this, and I can understand why. If you make a theme that’s meant to be a store, then of course you want it to be used with an ecommerce plugin. That makes sense. But then we have to think about the drama of Revslider or TimThumb and we have to question the themes that throw every feature into their code. Part of development is maintenance. This is an accepted responsibility and, in the case of plugins, we’re all used to upgrading them for maintenance. The same isn’t true of themes. People hate upgrading their themes, and it’s the fault of themes themselves, doing things wrong.

Forcing Users to Edit Files

The first week of February I lost my mind at a theme. I had found a user who had run into a mod_security error. They were trying to edit their theme via the WordPress theme editor and hitting save tripped the scanner. Why? The code in the functions.php file was phrased in a way that spooked the scanner. We walked her through SFTP, which worked, and I helped review the security rules to see if we could safely change them. But then I asked her why she was editing the files directly.

She wanted to edit her footer, to remove the ‘powered by WordPress and Theme’ line, and the only way was to edit the file.

That couldn’t be right, I shouted at my screen, but I tested and used the theme and was stunned. Yes. The theme was written in a way that the footer wasn’t editable unless you could code and use a hook to unset the action and make a new one. Even just a simple child theme wouldn’t help because the footer was handled in a function and not footer.php

No wonder users edit themes. But then it got worse.

Forgetting About Cache

The top line in the header.php was a forced setting to create a new PHP session. There are a few problems with this. In many cases, having PHP sessions causes a cache to not serve cached files because the forced session tells it that the particular visitor is meant to have a unique sessions and its trying to honor that. The other common situation is that the first person makes the cache with their unique data, and all subsequent visitors get that cached data. Neither is desirable.

Why do people do it? I presume because when they built their features, they wanted to make sure each user got an individual view. But sessions are a cheap and dirty way about it. Sadly so are cookies, which a cache will either ignore in order to serve cache, or honor and slow a site down.

People remember to test a theme for speed and features, but so often they forget to test for cache.

Un-WordPress Designs

When a theme makes its own custom interface, it’s harder for users to know what to edit and where. It’s the kind of cognitive dissonance that happens when you’re reading a book or watching a tv show and suddenly everything feels wrong. Like if Harry Potter and Dolores Umbridge started dating. Right. That’s how uncomfortable it is to see a theme with its own custom design for the admin pages.

Let WordPress be WordPress.

Accessibility

I don’t meant on the front end. I mean did you know that there are very few themes that, on the back end, are fully accessible to the blind? It’s just not something people think about and it’s the worst thing a theme can do to the world. You may think that only a small part of the world is blind and you may not worry too much about such a small potential user base. But look back to the previous point. The less you design like WordPress the worse it is for users. All users.

What Do You See?

What drives you batty?

18 February, 2015
A Case For Hello Dolly

I like it.

I never use it, but I like it.

I delete it, but I like it.

It’s not professional, it’s not beautiful, and it’s not something that makes WordPress look grown up.

And I think needs to stay in the core download of WordPress.

Let me tell you a story of you. Let me remind you of yourself. Not the you of today who knows all amazing things. Remember the you who was young and inventive but inexperienced. The you who knew how to throw a football but couldn’t throw a spiral. Or you knew how to drive a car and not stick shift. The you who delighted when you learned all those things, like a child with a new toy.

That you was not professional yet. That you needed an example for how to do new things. You had teachers and friends and parents who showed you the ropes.

That’s what “Hello Dolly” is. Hello Dolly is the Hello World of WordPress, and it makes a plugin suddenly seem like a non-insurmountable task. We can all look at that one file and see either inspiration for code we can make, or a sudden lack of terror for what WordPress is. Like I tell people in training classes, WordPress is just files, folks. A plugin can be just that file. And you can take the idea and run with it. More than just a training tool, it’s the epitome of open source. It’s code, freely given, than serves as a first step for people who come to WordPress with no formal education. It’s free. It embraces the goals we want to see in open sourced code.

So it needs to stay in WordPress, because you needed it once. Does it make an annoying extra step for you to delete it when you’re installing WordPress for your clients? Maybe, but for me it makes a moment where I can look back at myself from 2009 and see how far I’ve come from the woman who was too scared to speak at a WordCamp to become a WordPress professional.

I’ll take that one extra step and never forget where I came from.

9 February, 2015
Mailbag: Tools To Keep Consistent

Meg from Ohio (go Ohio!) asks the following:

You blog three times a week about tech. How do you keep doing that?

I schedule posts.

Chris Lema doesn’t, bless him. I started with about 10 posts I had in mind, sat down one day and made myself a buffer, and thought that it would be better to space them out to every other day. It actually started as twice a week, but then I bumped it to M-W-F, and since I’m kind of wordy, I’ve been able to keep up with it. Sometimes I write a post because I solved a problem, which happens pretty much every day, and sometimes I toss out a remark on twitter that people want to hear more about.

Much of it comes from listening and reading a lot. But I don’t just schedule posts. I use the plugin Editorial Calendar to keep tabs on what my schedule is, when things are being posts, and at what time, because I actually really hate the posts lists.

Here’s your default posts list:

It’s pretty bare bones and functional, but one of the things that’s always bothered me about the whole post list is how useless it is. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a list of posts, and it does that really well. But with the moving target that is what we use WordPress for, it’s become rather frustratingly bare bones for me and it really does impact my ability to get work done when I have to bounce back and forth between multiple screens just to see what the status is, verify I updated everything, and by the way, where are all my posts.

So, in the grand WordPress Tradition, I enhance it with plugins.

Admin Featured Image shows the featured image in the posts list, which is really good for one site to make sure I did too set an image and what it is.

UI Labs I’ve actually forked. I need to remember to ping John about this, because I took his (great) plugin and modernized it. If you’re interested, that code is up on my github UI-Labs repo. It’s slowly being improved to make things a little easier for me and to work on WP 4.0 and up.

Editorial Calendar, as mentioned before, gives me a great view for what’s scheduled and when:

The drag and drop interface lets me reschedule on a whim.

Speaking of… Schedule Posts Calendar fills a void that has pissed me off for years. Just look at the comparison:

First, there’s the calendar by the month, then there’s the date, and finally the epic button ‘today’ to let me fast fix posts messed up by the WP iOS app.

So how do I keep posting so often? You ask questions, I answer them, and I have some tools to make it simpler for me.

6 February, 2015
Professional Utility
It’s well known I hate themeing. I can’t really design and I don’t know how to change thoughts to form like that. Words are my gift.

A year back, I changed this site to using the Utility Theme by Carrie Dils. Since then, I’ve moved on with another theme, for various reasons, but I still found Utility to be one of the nicest, cleanest, themes out there.

Recently, Carrie came out with Utility Pro and as she’s one of the nicest people out there, offered me a discount. The new theme costs more, starting at $69 and going up to $199 for a professional version with a Gruntified theme and source files. It’s a lot more than the $45 Utility cost, but I went ahead and bought the theme, not having a home for it quite yet.

After fifteen minutes looking at it and the code, I knew I wanted to use it.

What Carrie did “differently” with this theme is she made it mobile first. That means the entire site is designed to look good on a mobile device and the breakpoints are used make it look better are larger devices. This is the opposite of what many themes do, designing for large screens and adjusting for smaller. Her ‘media’ section is surprisingly small because of that, and the site resizes quickly and properly with no adjustments needed.

The next thing she did, and the thing that really was a selling point to me, was she made it accessible. One of the concerns I’ve been struggling with in the last year has been making my content accessible, and in specific my slides. I want everyone to be able to take my content and learn from it, and a theme that considers that means I have to worry less.

Finally, and here’s where she won my heart, she decoupled code from her theme. This is something that many theme devs and I agree on. A theme should theme, but code should be code. Which means that I don’t want my theme to include custom post types for example. But also she removed Font Awesome. I love it and use it, but by having it in the theme meant that every time the font upgraded, she had to upgrade the theme. We’re all used to upgrading plugins regularly, but themes rarely. By separating the two, she’s able to give the theme stability and the feature flexibility.

Am I using the theme? Today, yes.

Looks just fine in mobile (Google’s POV is jaded since I block them from scanning things).

It was the work of a few hours to convert a site from Going Green Pro over to Utility Pro. The only reason it took hours is that I picked up the non-developer version sans Grunt, which meant I had to split out the CSS into my desired sass files, fold in some of my custom functions, and finally fix the problem that had prompted the following comment:
```
/**
    This file has been modified by Mika to fit the needs of this.
    If you use it somewhere else, expect breakage. I hard coded
    some things in. Shut up, future me.
**/
```
Future me read that and sighed a lot. Finally I removed all the full calls, making everything relative or using the proper functions in order to dynamically add paths. Also I had to merge a Wiki, a Yourls Site, and a gallery into the look, and that meant some serious theme juggling. It didn’t help that with the new layout I decided to tidy up some of the sidebar content and optimize layouts.

I’ve done very little to rejigger the code. What I’ve messed with is unrelated to what Carrie’s design choices were and more with how Genesis approaches the few things I don’t fully agree with. I’m not yet using the welcome splash screen, since this site people come to for news first, but I plan to use it for major announcements.

Now, for $69, it’s a well made theme. Would I spend the $199 for the full version with the development tools and the Grunt files and the use on as many sites as I want? If I wasn’t me who liked to play with code and files, yes. If I needed this for clients, most definitely. StudioPress itself charges $59.95 for Genesis, and $399.95 for all themes in their repertoire, so from that aspect, this may seem expensive.

Chris Lema and I have some strong opinions on the cost of a WordPress theme. When you consider all the things you’re paying for, all the work of testing on mobile devices, accessibility, colors (which are also accessible), compatibility, plus a year of updates and support, that $200 is an amazing price to use on (say) a dozen websites out there.

I think it’s well worth the price to have this handy in my back pocket for anything I might need it for. And it’s a testament to Carrie how rapidly I realized I did need this and didn’t even know yet.

Check out Utility Pro. You won’t regret it.
4 February, 2015
Mailbag: Trash the Blog Slug

If you only knew how many times I got this one…

When I made my multisite, it changed all the URLs on my main site from example.com/postname to example.com/blog/postname ! How do I change that!?

This is because you picked Subfolders for your network.

Now before you get into this, ranting that it’s wrong, please actually read all of https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/12002 first. The initial ticket was that if you used subdomains, you were also locked into using /blog/. We’ve obviously fixed that, but it brought up a bigger issue.

Why do we keep it? To prevent conflicts. If you use /blog/%postname% and have a post named “humperdink” and another subsite named the same, it would cause a mess of problems. It’s one thing to search all your pages for possible conflicts (remember, your pages will still show up as example.com/pagename), most people only have a few pages. But once you factor in the hundreds of posts, it gets really crazy. If you have an open Multisite, where anyone can register any site, you have no way to doublecheck the URLs.

So we’re making sure we don’t conflict with posts and sites, which is pretty impossible to do without a massive DB query every time you post, as well as pages and sites (less massive). I think that we should have some slug in there for those reasons.

Or as Nacin put it when he detailed out a potential roadmap for Multisite:

Dealing with URL Conflicts

Perhaps the greatest change will be addressing the issue of the main site gaining a /blog prefix. This is ostensibly to avoid top-level pages on the main site from clashing with sub-sites. With arbitrary domain support (via domain mapping primarily, and secondarily via secondary networks), any site with path / can clash with any other site with the same domain but a different path. With multiple path segments (nested sites), any site with path /X/ can have pages that clash with site /X/Y/.

Ultimately, this requires two-way blacklisting. Before a site is created, it must be checked against top-level URLs of the possibly conflicting site. And, before a page is created, it must be checked against sub-sites that already exist. If an /about/ page already exists on example.com/, an /about/ site cannot be created. But if an example.com/blog/ site already exists, a /blog/ page cannot be created on example.com. This gets complicated quickly, and is a very strong argument for only supporting one path segment in core by default, and allowing plugins to handle these potential conflicts on their own. In most cases, simply ignoring the potential conflicts is going to be sufficient.

You see the headache? But hey, if you’re sure it won’t be a problem, you can do this yourself.

Edit the site via network admin -> sites

Click on settings and scroll till you find the permalink settings:

Remove blog and save. Done.

Now bear in mind, should you ever change permalinks on the main site, you will have to go back and do that again. This is because on the permalinks page, it’s hardcoded in:

Also some plugins will refresh permalinks and accidentally put it back in, so you need to be very careful. Someone wrote a cron job to re-write that value every hour in the DB.

30 January, 2015
Gallery Columns Zero
I have a site where I love using galleries but I hate having to define their width. That’s something I hate about WordPress’ Gallery shortcode, you have to define a width, otherwise it’s all one column. Ugly ugly.

The way that WordPress handles these columns also sucks. It puts in clear breaks:
```
<br style="clear: both" />
```
And frankly I hate that too.

But I don’t do that with this other software I use. In fact, I have it all nicely coded in to show all my images, and then toss one final clear break at the bottom, to … clear the breaks. And what that does for me is gives me an adaptive width gallery that will expand and contract with my content.

So how can I do that with WordPress?

The easy part is something I already do in EDD, and that’s to use a fake column value of zero: gallery columns="0"

That gives me a handy new column class: gallery-columns-0

And that is very easy for me to style, by overriding the width from 100% to auto (the !important is dreadful), and set up the padding I want.
```
/* Gallery */

.gallery-columns-0 dl.gallery-item {
	width: auto!important;
	padding: 0;
	margin: 0 10px 0 0;
}
```
But what about the ‘break’ afterwards? If you only need to support IE 8 and up, then it’s as simple as this CSS:
```
.gallery-columns-0:after {
	content: "";
	display: table;
	clear: both;
	padding-bottom: 10px;
}
```
The padding on the bottom is to make it match my site, adjust as needed. I’m sure I could use the post_gallery filter hook and the same code from the gallery_shortcode function but with my br modification, but 0.017% of people visit this site using IE 7 or less, and at that percentage, so much of the site will look terrible anyway.

The only real downside is that I have to manually enter the shortcode in text mode, since I can’t select ‘0’ as an option from the dropdown.
26 January, 2015