Fish Can't Whistle - Just another WordPress site
Graceful JavaScript degradation
On 08, Feb 2012 | No Comments | In development, hack, javascript, jquery | By fish
jQuery is great and I love it.
Internet Explorer is awful and I hate it.
Unfortunately there are times when I can’t have it all my own way though; sometimes I have to build for IE (6+) and that means finding a way to deal with the lovely feature < IE8 has of deciding not to load JavaScript every now and again for no apparent reason.
Internet Explorer 6 is older than the oldest eMac
On 03, Feb 2012 | No Comments | In development | By fish
Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001. A year later apple released the eMac.
Managing a development environment
On 05, Jan 2012 | No Comments | In General | By fish
Everyone has their own way of developing but for people new to development, how to work with files on a server can be a little confusing. So here’s what I do. 
WordPress Events
On 23, Dec 2011 | No Comments | In FCW WordPress Plugins | By fish
WordPress Events gives you a simple interface for adding events to your site and displays them in a beautiful calendar with pop up details.
Simply add events in an interface you are already used to and display your calendar by adding the shortcode [calendar] to any page of post!
New in 0.2 !
Multiple user calendars! Allow individual users to have their own calendar and display different calendars by specifying a user id in the shortcode. For example [calendar user=2] will display the calendar for the user with an ID of 2.
Built in sharing generates tiny urls that when linked to opens the shared event in a pop up just as if the user had clicked on it.
Google maps integration allows you to add a map of the venue.
Download a pdf user guide from here http://fishcantwhistle.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/wordpress-events-user-guide.pdf
ChimpPress
On 22, Dec 2011 | No Comments | In FCW WordPress Plugins | By fish
*** THIS IS A BETA RELEASE ***
ChimpPress provides an interface for creating and managing your MailChimp campaigns without having to leave your WordPress dashboard.
Current features of ChimpPress
- Create bespoke HTML emails using the intuitive drag and drop editor.
- Add padding and colours to specific cells in your email or to the entire campaign.
- Select from a number of layout templates and then add multiple rows and columns as needed.
- Receive in-depth stats about your campaign.
- Manage your subscribers.
All you need is a MailChimp account and an API key and you can start creating bespoke html emails!
25
Oct
2011
In getshopped
hack
php
WordPress
WordPress 3.0
WordPress Development
WordPress Plugins
wp e-commerce
By fish
Getshopped – Add more details to sales CSV
On 25, Oct 2011 | 2 Comments | In getshopped, hack, php, WordPress, WordPress 3.0, WordPress Development, WordPress Plugins, wp e-commerce | By fish
I have previously showed I added shipping columns to the sales logs page in a getshopped (Wp-Ecommerce) installation. This was fine but now we need that data to show up in the csv download.
Here’s how to do it-
06
Oct
2011
In getshopped
hack
php
WordPress
WordPress 3.0
WordPress Development
WordPress Plugins
wp e-commerce
By fish
GetShopped – Add order without shipping column to sales view
On 06, Oct 2011 | One Comment | In getshopped, hack, php, WordPress, WordPress 3.0, WordPress Development, WordPress Plugins, wp e-commerce | By fish
The sales view in the wp-ecommerce (GetShopped) is great but it will show you the total price of an order rather than the price without shipping, the shipping, and the total.
To introduce this functionality you do have to hack the plugin files, but there is not another way as I can not see any hooks I could make use of. If I have missed one, please do let me know!
New version of WordPress Gallery
On 03, Oct 2011 | No Comments | In WordPress, WordPress 3.0, WordPress Development, WordPress Plugins | By fish
Version 0.6 of WordPress Gallery is now available!
It’s always nice to see my plugin on the front page of WordPress plugins. Even if it is only in the recently updated section!
Two massive new features have been introduced in the latest version-
Is WordPress good enough for my site?
On 03, Aug 2011 | One Comment | In WordPress, WordPress 3.0, WordPress Development, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes | By fish
Quite often I have people asking whether or not WordPress can handle their large site. They have very genuine concerns that WordPress can not handle things like scaling and caching and large visitor loads.
Whether you are performing due diligence or just wondering what WordPress can do, the below should be quite useful to you.
Its always best to lead by example right! So here we go!
A whole bunch of sites with massive user bases use WordPress. Here are a few-
http://tutsplus.com/ – A HUUUGE site with thousands of articles, media and users. Alexa rank 591
http://freelanceswitch.com/ – I use this site a lot! Both the site and the jobs board are powered by WordPress. Alexa rank 5,813
http://mac.appstorm.net/ – Another site with a huge following. Alexa rank 5,856
http://wiki.envato.com/ – The wiki for the ginormous envato market place. Alexa rank 4,101
http://workawesome.com/ – A blog but a large blog nonetheless. Alexa rank 31, 945
http://blog.themeforest.net/ – The blog for themeforest, possibly the largest template site on the net. A huge following. Alexa rank 287
With large sites caching is very important. Querying the database as few times as possible and only doing so when cached content is not available is crutial for a large site. Serving users static html rather than server intensive php powered by goodness knows how many DB queries saves a tonne in terms of server resources and site responsiveness. WordPress already has numerous plugins for this. The best two are WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.
http://codex.wordpress.org/High_Traffic_Tips_For_WordPress is a really good read straight from the WordPress mouth about the capabilities of WordPress. For me, the overriding message from that page is that it is more about the hardware behind the site than the software serving the site.
37 signals (the makers of Basecamp and other very successful web apps) wrote this very honest and wise piece.
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch04_Scale_Later.php
Basecamp is probably the most successful online project management tool out there and they openly admit that precious time is lost worrying about problems that may never occur. And when they do occur it is optimal to fix them and tweak the set up as they happen.
As they say -
In the beginning, make building a solid core product your priority instead of obsessing over scalability and server farms. Create a great app and then worry about what to do once it’s wildly successful. Otherwise you may waste energy, time, and money fixating on something that never even happens.
Another brilliantly honest article from the same guys-
http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/dont_scale_99999_uptime_is_for_walmart.php
Edublogs is one of the most successful education based blogging platforms and they use WordPress MU (multi-user). Here is an in depth (and quite geeky) article on the set up of that system.
http://wpmu.org/scaling-wordpress-wpmu-buddypress-like-edublogs/
Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress made an interesting response to somebody moving their site to drupal from WordPress after getting to 200,000 hits per day. He offers some sound advice-
http://webdevnews.net/2008/12/mullenweg-scale-wordpress-to-20000000-views-per-day-for-100-pmonth/
“Barry” is the “Chief Systems Wrangler” at automattic (the people behind wordpress, askimet, vaultpress and IntenseDebate) and he wrote this article about hyperDB -
http://barry.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/hyperdb-lag-detection/
Essentially what he is saying is that using hyperDB (found here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hyperdb/) enables huge sites to effectively and sparingly use DB queries to further optimise a high traffic volume and user interaction site. Read more from “Barry” on scaling here http://barry.wordpress.com/category/scaling/
The only other thing I will add is that words like “blog”, “theme” and “plugin” are used a lot with WordPress. Do not be put off by them! WordPress started out life as a blogging platform and it has struggled to shift that association. In truth, WordPress is actually an extremely powerful Content Management System with a highly intuitive and extensive API. Plugins are essentially little (or large) packages that add extra functionality to a WordPress install. Themes define the look of your site. They contain all the client side code and it is in themes that a design of a site is held.
Add Links to Pages
On 26, Jul 2011 | 8 Comments | In FCW WordPress Plugins | By fish
Easily display page specific links on any page by quickly adding a link directly from the add/edit page screen.
Delete links by clicking the trashcan next to the link.
Supports adding URL, name, target and description.
