There’s a universal hate for Flash amongst many web developers and it has had a bumpy ride over the years and it’s completely understandable given the headaches that is known for causing, but rumours of Flash’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Just because Apple doesn’t support Flash doesn’t mean it’s dying, Adobe are doing great things for HTML5 and CSS3 including changing and adapting Flash to the current state of development.
In the last year and a half there had been a trend of creating single page websites and navigating within the sections of the page using anchor links and some clever Javascript to add in parallax effects and smooth animated scrolling and although the resulting combined effect of a single page layout with clever use of parallax effects does look nice, it is SEO murder. When a search engine comes along to your site they’ll see one massive page stuffed with content and not a site comprised of more than one page. While you can write a clever description for your page and use title tags, alt tags and every other trick out of the SEO handbook a search engine will still be indexing just one page: it’s a relatively fruitless effort.
This is an annoying bug that has plagued WordPress for as long as I can remember, it’s rare that I run into it because I rarely need to have individual parts of a site control the number of posts I need to display with paging. The Problem: I have a custom post type called “project” as well as a blog section which just uses the default “post” post type. For projects I enabled archive support and then created a custom archive file called archive-project.php. I want to limit the number of projects being displayed per page to just 1 without changing the value in the WordPress reading options screen because I need that for the blog section, so naturally you’d expect to be able to do the following before the loop.
When I say popular I mean 17,000 visitors a month which to me is a lot of traffic for a blog I sometimes don’t update for a week or two at a time, I am of course talking about the music blog Kill Hipsters of which I designed and built all by myself and I’m not even a designer. In the space of roughly a year and a half I’ve managed to take Kill Hipsters from just another music blog to something decent without any promotion or effort, just commitment.
A while ago I wrote a blog post comparing Codeigniter with FuelPHP (a framework that was spurn from some popular Codeigniter developers), that article has since become outdated so I thought I would do a follow-up to my original post to see if anything has changed and the gap has been lessened between the two frameworks. Since I wrote that post I’ve used FuelPHP for quite a few personal client projects in place of WordPress. I’ve also used Laravel and even attempted to revisit Kohana which I’ve never been a fan of in the time-frame since writing the original comparison.
It’s no secret that adding in custom fields functionality to a premium theme (if you’re a premium theme developer) is sometimes a pain in the ass, especially if you’re not using some kind of third party custom fields framework. The Advanced Custom Fields plugin for WordPress gives you unrivalled custom fields functionality for an alarmingly low price of $0. There is also the option of buying addons for the plugin which cost $25 each and allow for unlimited use/bundling with a plugin.
WordPress already has an in-built function for determining if the current page is using a particular page template using the function “is_page_template()” while this function definitely serves a purpose. Sometimes in an instance where you are using one loop file as opposed to multiple loop files you want to check if you’re on a page that is using a page template but don’t care what type of page template it is, this is where the function I’ve created below comes in.
WordPress is an amazing free content management system but it is also the target of every single kind of attack you can think of, it’s the Windows of the open source content management world. While it’s impossible to prevent attacks completely, you can mitigate and track bad activity. Not only can you secure your blog but there are a plethora of plugins out there that make your life a whole lot easier instead of reinventing the wheel each time.
So you’ve just installed a shiny new copy of WordPress via command line on your even shinier Linode box and the helpful guides Linode provide for setting up a database and your initial WordPress install went well. If you’re used to installing plugins from within WordPress instead of manually you most likely would have run into the issue of WordPress asking you for FTP connection details to install the plugin.
I can hear the Rails purists slicing open the soft flesh of their vitamin D-less wrists now. Are you crazy? PHP sucks, lets all build applications using Ruby on Rails because it is after all the better language right? This is not a language debate, this isn’t about one language being better than the other. Recently I’ve had this obsession with browsing through various RoR projects on Github and came to a realistion about a week ago. The Codeigniter PHP framework which I am an avid user of (as most of you know) is based on the same kind of structure as Ruby on Rails, so I got to thinking — why not learn other RoR projects?