So I’m there minding my own business, just checking my feeds and I see a familiar sight. Manji was mentioned on Devlounge as one of the single column themes of choice.

That’s pretty cool actually, seeing as it was designed over 4 years ago and hasn’t really been modified since. What’s interesting to me really is that there does seem a severe lack of super simple themes out there. Super simple is fucking hard to do and make stick - but that’s a topic for another time, which I fully intend on exploring.

Oh and btw, this is officially Broken Kode’s 1500th post.

Earlier this month I moved this blog back over to WordPress in an act of madness. I hated it and did little blogging in that time. In considering why I hated the experience at WordPress so much, I came upon an interesting parallel. Habari is to WordPress what Apple is to Microsoft.

One of the things that can be said about Apple when compared to Microsoft is that Apple provides a more elegant computing experience that has been better thought out. In a similar fashion Habari is by far the more elegant product where the details have been sweated out and the experience has been better considered.

As a simple example when you install WP you get a random password in your email box and then the second you log into the panel you get a message asking you to change your password. Why didn’t you let me choose a password during the installation process?

Meanwhile on Habari, the installation is all done on the same page, you insert your preferred password right there.

As another example once you’ve logged into WordPress you’re bomobarded with this clusterfuck of items - TMI (too much information). Yes, i know you can remove most of that stuff (but this is all feeding into my analogy). These items aren’t necessary, they’re added first and you are asked to remove them. It’s like when you buy yourself a Dell PC and get a whole bunch of crapware installed on it, which you can remove (most of the time).

Habari doesn’t have that shit to begin with. These items have not been added from the outset. These things have been considered. And who else do we know that doesn’t like superflous stuff cluttering your view and generally getting in your way? These are just a couple of examples which I might expand upon, because the above is basically the tip of the iceberg.

These are subtle differences but important I think in the final assessment, afterall the devil is in the details.

After a moment of pure madness, I went back to WordPress, only to find that actually the creature comforts that I had become accustomed to in Habari were not present. It had such a detrimental effect on me that I could even post small links. The bookmarklets didn’t work, the thing felt heavy and I couldn’t wrap my head around the various elements of the code that had passed me by.

I’ll be writing more about Habari in the coming months as there definitely is a lot of work being done, but it just needs a bit of, consolidation of sorts.

If you’re reading this in your feed reader, then have a look at the site, which looks a little bit different, as I’ve also updated to version 9.

What’s the reason for going back to WordPress? Simply the plugins and documentation available to me to actually do what I need to get done. Yes I could called on the Habari community, but I just want to get on with things. Trying to write something like P2 for Habari is definitely out of my scope of knowledge. I’m not a developer. I’m not even a web designer. This is something of a hobby that I enjoy playing around with. But it should get in my way, and unfortunately due to my inadequacies as a developer Habari was getting in my way. I really really hope that in the future I’ll be able to make a proper and permenant jump over to Habari, but now is not the time (I did attempt it for a year, but my site looked more like it was created in 2006 rather than in 2009).

I am more than happy to play around with this and make it work for me, slowly moulding it and shaping it to what I want it to do, but writing this from scratch would be too much of a pain in my ass.

So here it is, comments are back online (for now) and I’m sure there is going to be a load more things to come in the not too distant future.

It’s been nearly 4 1/2 years since comments were officially not part of this site. Back then it was because I couldn’t actually host them on my own site, until of course I moved to WordPress and during the blogging revolution of the early naughties. So what’s changed? Twitter and Facebook. Both of which have brought the internet to the world that hid themselves from it, but they’ve practically killed the blogosphere, or at least how it used to operate.

The funny thing is turning them off was on the cards for a while now. I’ve noticed this downturn for about a year now (probably a few months before I even moved to Habari as my blogging engine of choice).

Does it upset me? I guess it’s a different kind of change. While sometimes I like twitter, there’s too much noise for me on there. Also the fact that everyone only speaks in soundbytes does annoy me. I can’t read people’s thoughts about things because they’re limited and effectively people’s voices on the internet are silenced.

In the meantime I’ll be here writing more than 140 characters and hopefully sharing some good links from around the net. If you want to comment on something, drop me an email or you know…send me reply on twitter (maybe I’ll even integrate that twitter reply thing that Michael is attempting at the moment).

Wordpress users get treated to a whole new administration panel…again. How long has it been since Happy Cog’s redesign (wasn’t that in March)? The design definitely has a ‘jack of all trades, but master of none’ feel to it - hardly what I’d call elegant.

Christian wrote a little post asking why the Habari community was snubbed in the recent Smashing Magazine 10 Weblog Engines Reviewed post.

Why was Habari not included in this list? Well it was included in an honourable list. Instead though they included Joomla and Drupal. All very good applications in their own right, but far too bloated to be considered weblog engines (they’re designed for bigger sites are they not?).

In any case, I feel that the reason why Habari wasn’t included in here is a collection of things, but it is telling. While I wouldn’t go so far and say that Smashing Magazine in the authority of the internet Zeitgeist, I will say that they generally put a lot of effort into their posts and do a certain amount of research, so their not so much dismisal but rather short billing is indicative of where Habari stands right now. The problem is that I don’t think that Habari, the community or software is to blame here; rather I feel it has something to do with the net landscape as we are right now.

You could say that Habari is still pretty young in it’s cycle, however it’s a HELL of a lot more developed than the bit of software called WordPress was when I started using it (version 0.6 I believe). Back then WordPress didn’t have ANY themes. The plugin library was in the single most infant state you could imagine (if you compare it to now). The less we talk about the interface the better (that ship is stll a rudderless pile of shit as they change it more for version 2.7 if the latest betas are to go by, and believe me I don’t care enough to go there anyway). I don’t think the reasons for the lack of credibility can be attributed to the software’s limitations, because if you’re looking for something to post a blog, and enhance your site with any one of the currently available plugins, Habari is a pretty solid foundation that is only moving forward, moving into the future, because honestly all of those other ones that are on the Smashing Magazine post feel like the past.

So what is missing? Blogs are now a standard part of the net landscape. Open source projects are a dime a dozen (hell that list isn’t exhaustive by any stretch of the imagination, since it doesn’t include Habari or Chryp, to name a couple). Blogs are not this new and exciting medium that they were 4 years ago. People know about them and have had one at some point in their lives, even the completely tech neophytes out there will have dabbled. The options to create something online are a lot larger than before.

The other thing is that Habari hasn’t had a catalyst that exploded the scene. There was no Moveable Type changing their license rubbish and now back again (or whatever). That was the push that WordPress needed, initially. Right now, work is being done on WordPress but honestly it feels more like a rudderless titanic. Then you’ve got Textpattern….seriously is the project still alive? A while back I heard of a Textpattern fork, not heard anything else about it since then, but then again I’ve not been actively seeking any information so they could have moved forward?

The thing is that to draw people in there has to be some form of marketing push. What I mean by that is the word of mouth about Habari really has to begin in full steam. The great thing is that people are starting to do this, slowly but surely. Michael is talking more about Habari, as is Owen and Chris. Remember those badges that lived on the side of blogs? Remember the ones for Firefox? The thing with those of course is that the actual image usually pretty distinctive. The firefox logo is extremely iconic. Something akin to this would help spread it out again. It could be a community push that al those actively running their sites on Habari should have the badge to wear proudly.

Clearly there are other things that need to be done, however as with the Habari motto, the word really needs to be spread in a number of ways which can only be a good thing for the software and the community.

After nearly 4 years running the Kode on WordPress, I’m making the jump and going to better pastures. The internet in general is not high on my priority list, however I love the Kode and want the best for it, WordPress has not been the best for it for many many moons, which is probably one of the many reasons that the site got a bit left by the wayside.

Expect a little bit of breakage, maybe even come back later for the new RSS feed (which I think will probably be http://brokenkode.com/atom/1), as I transition over to Habari. See you on the other side.

To the internet. So last week we were offline at casa Khaled. Yes, that’s right, no net access whatsoever. At first I’ve got to admit that I was REALLY angry. Not at anyone but at the situation itself. I mean seriously, my computer felt like it was neutered. I felt completely cut off from the world and all because as it turns out one of the cables coming into the house decided to collapse on itself. Maybe because it finally decided to give up the good fight because of the cold weather? Maybe it was because the workers outside moved it a fraction and it was to frail to deal with it, either way I was cut off.

This has happened before to be honest, however this one I was a bit more composed with the whole thing. I was actually able to deal with a few things that I’ve been meaning to deal with for a while; like do a bit of writing, do a little bit of drawing and generally do a couple of things that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. One thing I did miss was this site. I realised that I need this place for venting, something which i’ve been doing a lot less of in recent times. One of the main reasons I continued to blog was because I liked the cathartic process associated with brain dumping, because after all that ALL I’m doing here. Sometimes I rattled a few cages, sometimes I make a couple of people smile, so I think I’ve found that spark that I need to really start making the words on this site start coming alive. So as of tomorrow, you can expect a lot more ‘Kode action coming your way, daily even.

It’s also time I kicked WordPress like a bad habit. Seriously, this shit takes FOREVER to log in. Once you’re in it’s kind of OK, but honestly SLOW as a fat man in water. Some things in 2.5 are nice, but alas I’m thinking too damn little, too damn late, I guess I will write something about it at some point.

A lot of people have been asking me about what I think about the new WordPress admin that’s coming for version 2.4. No actually I am telling big fat porkie lies. No one has asked me what I think, but I’m not going to let that stop me. Lets talk the new WordPress admin shall we.

Swiped directly from the demo site that can be found at hyper123, this is what the glorious new WordPress admin in version 2.4 is starting to look like. I say starting to look like, because you can see that they’ve got a while to go in sorting out all the breakages everywhere. In fact by Matt’s own addmission, it’s only 10-20% complete, which is why they’ve decided to wait until March to release this version, because obviously they’re not there yet.

Now obviously i’ve got a slight bit of interest in what’s going on in the admin, simply because I (and others, whom I really shouldn’t speak for) gave a year’s worth of our free time (more or less) to the creation of a revamped admin panel for WordPress. The powers that be, (well Matt actually) didn’t like it, which is why it never got included into the core.

So nearly 2 YEARS after the efforts that we did on that particular project, we are now finally getting a new administration panel design. Others seem to have tried and failed as well (the likes of Brian and i believe some other Automattic employee, I’m not into the WP community since they went commercial). Is this the thing that Happy Cogs have produced? I’m not sure.

Obviously they’ve decided to go away from the colour scheme that was introduced due to the Shuttle project. What you think the blue that you see came from somewhere else? Yeah no. The other thing that has changed, so far, is the dashboard. Last thing that I can see is the comments now have a number at the top to tell you how many comments in moderation or whatever. Apart from that nothing to report really.

For my money however, this is really like putting a bandaid onto a broken leg. Seriously. It’s past the time for this. This would have been bloody relevant several years ago, not now. Now, well it’s completely outdated and anything less of a complete and utter redesign (and that includes rethinking how your menu structure actually works) if you want it to be something relevant, fresh, exciting and ultimately usable by the widest range of people….but in that case you might as well start from the beginning and building something truly new and exciting…oh wait we’re already doing that.

Well it’s been a bit too long coming, but I think I’ve found a theme that I can get to grips with relatively easily. I’m going to be hacking Depo Clean, adding parts of Fauna and some K2 in for good measure. I had a look at Sandbox and I’ve got to say that I was pretty turned off by the function.php file that they’ve added in there. It just makes the markup so much more difficult to understand at first glance which is what made me keep looking for alternatives that just did the job cleanly. In any case Depo Clean probably best resembles what I’m aiming for in the end anyway so it helps that I like the markup as well. The next time I do this I’ll be converting this markup into something that can be used with Habari.

Interesting developments over at Six Apart. Lets dig up some of the things I said back in the day about this shall we. For all those in the dark, MT was the defacto CMS you would choose if you were in the market to get yourself a blog with comments setup on your server back in 2003-2004. Of course what happened was the Six Apart crew got a bit greedy at the time and all this free effort by the community was kind of slapped in their collective faces when they introduced the updated version 3.0 which was built off the backs of the community and sold back to them. The original pricing scheme was a complete farce but they revised it when they got the unexpected (erm yeah) response.

What this did was move all those people who were originally using MT to convert to an alternative. Some went to Textpattern, most went to WordPress.

3 years on, SA are now doing what they should have done way back for version 3 and maybe have kept some form of dominance. Currently however I feel it’s far too little too late. Do I give a shit about MT? Not really. I’m not interested in remembering how to write templates using MT-Tags and other bullshit. I’m not interested in revisiting the past. I will say however that the admin looks nice, and it’s also very cool that the actual engine dealing with that is the same as the one dealing with the blog itself, so I’m definitely going to bring that up with the Habari folk.

Ah yes, Habari, whatever happened to that initiative you might ask? Loads have been happening in the background but nothing massive for me to personally talk about. I’m sure once I get some more free time I’ll return to more active contribution and discussion, but I’ll leave that post for another day.

So I’ve decided on the final design (after something like 19 iterations all of which I will show everyone in due course) but I feel some of the html that I have been using on my site is slightly out dated since to be honest I have definitely not been keeping track of the comings and goings of the wordpress software and a lot of that code was based on practices of version 1.5 and before.

So the question I pose to everyone is what is the most up to date theme that has super simple html markup and most importantly doesn’t try to do too much. What I mean by that is a theme that has not been designed with additional cruft to include for an admin options panel, hooks for widgets that fit within wordpress.com etc. I’m not looking for a mod like K2, although I’ll be sure to have a look at some of the things done on K2 for inspiration. I’m looking for something that I can use and modify myself. The look is completely irrelevant as I’ll be dumping the css file straight away anyway and starting fresh.

Any recommendations ?

I’m currently in Greece for a full 2 weeks. I’ve been looking forward to this break for well over a month now, hell I’ve been looking forward to this break for at least 3 months. I didn’t go anywhere during the summer period, which was probably the worst thing to do for my psyche to be honest. The summer was a very dark time for me with very little bright spots which was clearly reflected in my mood and how I dealt with those around me. Being a traditionally pretty patient person, I noticed myself getting more irate with things and situations that I would normally brush off, or at least see the funny side. Hasn’t been the case for at least 3 months now.

I guess I can attribute this to the situation in Lebanon which seriously hit me very hard. I can probably attribute it to work which has been very far from enjoyable these last few months, or I can attribute it to unfinished business from several areas that kept me down (my list of unfinished projects is pretty extensive). Needless to say, I need a break and a break I shall have. However I’m never happy until I’ve got things off my plate and I’ve been very good at not putting anything new on my plate but actually finishing those projects that I had opened/started/committed to first, after all I’m a finisher, not just an instigator.

Since it’s good to have a list I think I’ll make this list to remind myself what I have to look forward to in getting these monkeys off my back:

Finish the Splash Panel Redesign.

Stathi's and Priya's Websites.

Broken Kode Season One

Broken Kode Prints

Chameleon Theme

Also on a completely different note, I really need to get myself a laptop (any recommendations for small dinky laptops, like the Fujitsu Lifebook or a Vaio would be welcome) as I’m currently using my dad’s windowz install using an ADSL connection that might be a little difficult to sort out on Ubuntu and it’s seriously painful to get anything done (which isn’t helped by the fact that it’s a shitty CRT screen that’s got a tinge of purple going through,…nice), the ‘Kode has never looked this bad.

Seems like the pay for model didn’t work? Can’t really say why the guys over at 21 Degrees have gone the route of giving Symphony away, but having done this blogging thing for a while, I can’t help but remember distinctly the outrage the blogosphere went through when Six Apart went and made the free Moveable Type into a pay for model. This is interesting in that it’s really going in the completely opposite direction. First come out with a pay for model, then give it away. The cynical side of me thinks that this means they’re trying to get people to jump on the Symphony bandwagon and then slap the price tag back on it once people have developed and spread the word about it, and therefore made a connection with it and invested their time into the product because it’s ‘free’.

Don’t get me wrong I think it’s great to give it away (because it really is a beautiful system), however I couldn’t find anywhere on their site the license information about the terms and conditions to downloading and using Symphony 21, and more importantly why and where they think they’re going with this free model. What can I say, the guys are fighting a hard battle and if they want to win the blogger market, they’ve got to be transparent themselves, they’ve got to blog about their system themselves. They’ve got to keep their users informed.

You have to download an installer which is directly linked to your Symphony account (is this a legacy thing from when it wasn’t free?) and then have to go through the motions. I’m quietly wary about where this is all going to be honest with you, simply because we’ve kind of been down this road before and I decided that I wasn’t going to be putting my eggs in one basket that wasn’t open source so I wouldn’t be rammed again.

When it comes to doing things in WordPress, any idea I come up with has usually been implemented several times over, however I think (and I really hope someone has actually done this and I simply can’t find it) but the idea for this plugin came about after talking with several of my friends who ‘read’ the site. A number of them have actually complained that whenever they come to my site, they don’t understand what the hell it is I’m talking about. For example I’d say half of them are completely lost by mentioning WordPress.

Basically it’s a very simple idea, which makes me wonder that I can’t possibly be the first to voice my thoughts about it, and to be honest I can’t see the reason why it can’t be implemented by persons more talented at this than I am. Basically the idea is that you let the user take control of what he views or subscribes from your site. So the person comes to your site goes to a “user preference section” where they choose which categories they would like to subscribe to and then the front page shows posts only from those particular categories (latest being shown on top of course).

That way the user takes control of what they want to read.

Customise the RSS Feeds

It’s all about making sure the type of information you are interested in gets delivered to you in the correct way. It’s an extension of the RSS feed. It’s no longer acceptable to just provide me with an RSS feed. I want to choose the categories I’d like to hear from you, or allow you to choose what you view when you visit my site. That way you’re guaranteed to read things that actually are of some interest to you.

Anyone up for writing a plugin for me? I’ll send you white chocolate.

I definitely noticed spamming coming through, which left me scratching my head (50 in like a few hours). I guess those spammers are seriously getting their ass kicked by Akismet, easily the only ESSENTIAL plugin you want to have as a blogger of any description. Damn, was it really that bad before this plugin? The answer I guess, it was worse, because there was no solution.

The last week has seen some movement on a couple of the open source projects I’ve been involved with in the past couple of years. I’ve already spoken about the first one but now I’m going to talk about the other project that I had such high hopes for which have been washed away and effectively thrown back into the faces of those that actually devoted their time into producing the goods, I am of course talking about Shuttle.

For those in the dark I’ll give a brief history of the WordPress Shuttle project. The idea first came to me after I had just finished my work on the Manji theme. I had so much fun collaborating with people online and producing something that could be used by other people (and thus giving back to the software that runs my site), that I really wanted to get back into the game straight away. I talked to Joshua and the Chris, both of whom I have the greatest amount of respect for, both of which were completely up for the project. By sheer luck Michael was having thoughts about this of his own as well. He was more than happy to join the team and in doing so brought Matt’s (Lead WordPress developer and Automattic head honcho) attention. The endeavour was now considered more than just hot air. In a very shrewd move Michael brought in Joen and thus the initial Shuttle team began work. Because a picture paints a thousand words, this is the screen shot of what we had to work with when we first started:

If you’re interested to see more, you can have a look at a Carthik’s screenshots for WordPress version 1.5.

We started work in earnest and the emails began flying between us. We were talking about everything and anything that came to our minds. We did research of all the existing blogging software tools (and the time those that hadn’t been released yet). We talked about usability, advanced users, novice users how things should work, how things should not work, what areas we should concentrate on. Seeing as we’re all bloggers we decided to give the call out to people to find out what they thought as well:

1. http://www.brokenkode.com/archives/shuttle-development/
2. http://binarybonsai.com/archives/2005/02/01/wordpress-shuttle/
3. http://www.brokenkode.com/archives/shuttle-workshop-01-dashboard/
4. http://www.chrisjdavis.org/2005/01/31/the-cat-she-is-out-of-the-bag/

My initial thinking was heading towards something completely radical to what we had. Just strip the walls down and start implementing things in a completely different way. I don’t know if I can find the very initial mockups I started flirting with but you can check out the image set to show a lot of the initial design development. This is where working in a team is paramount. I remember Joen distinctly pointing out that the fundamental structure of WordPress was fine and that we shouldn’t be rocking the boat for the sake of it but rather finding what works and what doesn’t. Making things simple for the user. I’m completely paraphrasing probably a couple of weeks worth emails beings fired between the ENTIRE design team, which of course included Matt at every step of the way (we didn’t have a mailing list until Matt set one up for us). It was agreed that we wouldn’t move to anything radical unless we felt it served a specific purpose.

I should have seen the writing on the wall to be honest. As the design went forward Matt seemed to implement things he liked and not bother with things he didn’t. So the blue hues made it into the design, as did the pods on the side, but little else. To be fair to him at this stage we really hadn’t moved every single aspect forward as you see it in the final mock ups.

The days went by and action on Shuttle was sporadic at best. We’d go through these massive bursts of creativity and energy and information sharing. Every once in a while one of us would prod the team to get it’s finger out and continue with this project. You might think it should be easy but people have lives and many things to do get in the way and it’s not like any of us didn’t have other projects on at the time.

Lets make one thing clear here. I am a finisher. I complete the projects I’ve actively put my name down for. I’m not in the business of making a claim for something and not going through with it. I’ve proven this time and time again. Even when things get tough, even when it seems like it’s not even worth it, I will continue to plough forward even if it’s only me, with the hopes that those around me will feel good enough for them to contribute as and when they seem fit. Contributing to Open Source should never feel like a chore. It should be fun, it should be something you actually want to contribute towards.

So in a last attempt before I completely gave up on the project I dived into the designs. For two weeks straight I would come in from work and spend 4-5 hours implementing the designs. I tried hard to keep with EVERYTHING we’d discussed in the past. The dos and dont. I tried to find solutions to design aspects we hadn’t really covered. I’ve not had that massive creative burst of energy in years (and this was done on the back end of creating the FOFRedux redesigned UI). I tried taking into consideration things that although I didn’t agree with I had to make concessions to allow for.

A prime example is the dashboard. We were told not to go too far with this because lots of discussions were going on in the hackers mailing list and it would probably be the one place that we didn’t have much say in. This is all well and good, so I tried to come up with a solution I could at least stomach. It’s easily my least favourite page of the entire design.

Once the mock ups had been completed I left them with the rest of the team for comments to be put on the table for them to change whatever everyone felt worked and didn’t work. We then proceeded to discuss how we were going to implement the designs. Matt was NEVER truly forthcoming about how this was all going to be implemented. We discussed the issue further, but once again he was as elusive as ever. When a response finally came back I didn’t know how to react. Thankfully other members of the team did. The designs were not some chicken to pick and choose at what you like and what you don’t like. They present a certain level of uniformity across the pages. They follow a specific design thought, and a great deal of thought and attention to detail has gone into them.

After we talked about it a bit more, and we were promised by Matt that things would get incorporated into the WordPress core, however it would take some time and it was mainly to make sure that people didn’t get jarred with the changes in one go, this was a solution I could honestly live with. The design wouldn’t be hacked but implemented gradually. So I went forward and released the mockups because they were the culmination of our active involvement in the project as things would now begin to get integrated into the core code. Of course things would change or be tweaked as the design was implemented but by and large it would remain the same.

Any which way you cut it that’s why Shuttle never made it into the design of WordPress. It has nothing to do with us being lazy or that we couldn’t be bothered to do anything but the photoshop files. Joshua had begun implementing the design on his own machine, we were discussing the logistics of how this project would be implemented into the code. However as it turns out there doesn’t seem like there was/is any commitment from the WordPress Dev team to incorporate these designs. If there was a commitment it would take 3 guys 4 weeks TOPS to deal with it all. There are well over 100,000 WordPress users, many of which are pretty capable with both CSS/PHP/JS. Hell there are people out there that are already implementing this off their own backs.

It doesn’t seem like the WordPress development team (and by definition Automattic team) are keeping to their word because the latest addition to the Automattic team is now going back to square one to start over, asking people the same questions we did when we first started the project.

Bryan joined the shuttle team late in the game and in some ways I think he didn’t feel as comfortable jumping into the design. He’s a fine addition to the Automattic team, and more importantly I like the guy, so none of this is aimed at him. He has been given new directions by the powers that be. Strip it down, build it up again from the ground if we have to. Why is it called Shuttle:Atlantis? Maybe because Matt didn’t like the first one? That’s what it boils down to to be honest. The alarm bells started going off when I read the first things to come from Bryan over of the WordPress.com blog.

... see that Shuttle finally makes its debut in whatever form we as a team see fit.

So I’d like to address those that didn’t like the Shuttle mockups. You (the collective you) got 5 people (plus 1) devoting a massive amount of their time to make your blogging experience more enjoyable; more usable; more fun. We didn’t ask for compensation and we didn’t ask for anything in return. We didn’t rush into this and we certainly didn’t hack through the designs. We did this because we believed in the sotfware. We believed in the people behind it and the people using it. None of us on the team are new to open source contribution. Michael’s contribution doesn’t need much introduction (Kubrick and K2), similarly with Chris (whose contributions extend far into the past of WordPress, Persian, plugins galore, K2), Joen does this for a living and has contributed for the admin panel on Zenphoto (including the default theme) and his wordpress theme Fauna. I have given the open source world Manji & Rin and contributed in the redesign of the FOFRedux UI. Joshua has answered enough support questions to make my head dizzy. Bryan has contributed to the world ChaoticSoul.

Open source is great because you can contribute to the source in a positive way, otherwise none of us would be actively giving to it so freely. That however is not the universal truth. At least that doesn’t seem to be the case in the WordPress world. This is a shame because part of WordPress’s success is the people involved with the world it surrounds. I have said many times before that is one of the things that elevates it above other open source initiatives.

It’s a shame really. Has WordPress really gotten so big that those in charge of implementing it no longer care for those that devote their time? As long as you’re creating a theme or a plugin that’s great, just don’t even bother thinking about contributing to the final product in any way. That kind of contribution is obviously not welcomed. There was a time when the Shuttle mockups, created exclusively for making WordPress prettier, would have been taken in with grateful arms. It seems that time for WordPress has passed.

Compare the current admin panel with those presented in the Shuttle mockups. Once you’ve done that go back to the top and compare it with Version 1.5.

Do you see something different. One was designed and thought through. The other is an ad hoc implementation of core ideas. I could go on at length to discuss the design decisions to be honest with you however I tend to allow the work speak for itself.

Ultimately I’m extremely proud of the work we did in TRYING to make the WordPress admin a better looking more usable place. The online friendships I’ve forged with the Shuttle team are thanks enough, even though the work we did was ultimately not appreciated. This is probably the very last time that I talk about Shuttle, unless of course someone implements the design aspects of the work we created as a plugin or in another way.

When the Shuttle images design were released for general consumption I expected a great number of people to jump on board and help out Matt in the implementation of the code. Now I’m not sure how far the WordPress team have got with version 2.1, as I’ve heard some little bits and pieces over the last week or so with Ryan doing what he does best.

However I’d like to point out Mark over at the Sidejob, who’s actually taken the images and made them a reality on his install. This is the sort of thing I like to see. WordPress is a community EFFORT. Not so keen on the yellow background but we can work with that :).

Been meaning to write a proper review about this book for a good long while. Due to many commitments it’s not been possible to really get into the book until now. “Blog Design Solutions” is a book that was released earlier this year (from Friends Of Ed) and was written by 8 guys from around the world; you might recognise a couple of the wee rascles, Chris J Davis, Michael Heilemann, John Oxton, Andy Budd and several others (I appologise I’m not terribly familiar with their work/sites but I’m definitely going to check them out from now on). The common link between these gents is that they’re all bloggers. The difference is that they use different software to run their sites.

There are numerous sites around the place that highlight the differences between the major blogging software packages available to run your blog sites on. What this book does is give a taster, a morsel, a sampler of the major ones. The book is seperated into 7 Chapters. The first two chapters cover general information about blogging and the world of blogging. While the second chapter tackles how to set things up to test and run a blog on you machine locally. It’s a nice reference guide to have to be honest. I personnally use XAMMP, but it would be good at some point when I’ve got a bit more time to set things up in a less lazy manner :).

The next 5 chapters are where things get interesting. Each chapter addresses the ins and outs of a particular blogging engine. Movable Type, WordPress, Expression Engine, TextPattern are all covered. The final chapter is very interesting because it tackles the subject of building your own blogging engine from scratch and how you go about it.

Movable Type is covered (including the history that Mena probably tends to like to forget, ie when MT3.0 was released and there was this massive jump away from the MT solution to the WordPress solution). I was intrigued to read this chapter because honestly I think to myself what the hell is the point of using MT? It seems to me like it’s lagging behind most of the other internet blogging solutions? The answer to two fold I guess. Part of it is the fact that it’s pretty old (in internet terms) and has a loyal base of users; in addition to that it’s also the fact that there is a core base of developers that are accountable to you if in case you want something done, or sorted out. Some users want that level of support, especially if we’re talking about commercial corporate users of some description.

The WordPress chapter is special to me, because it’s the WordPress chapter (in case you didn’t realise the ‘Kode currently runs on WordPress) but more importantly it was written by my two buddies Michael and Chris, so obviously I’ll be paying more attention to this chapter than the rest of the book (hey at least I’m honest about these things). So how did the boys do? Not too bad. What’s great about this particular chapter is that their characters come throughout the entire chapter. Blogging is about interating and reading other people’s thoughts. It’s about communication and expression. They’re the only guys that spend a bit of time telling you about themselves and what their knowledge levels are. It’s a great way to ease the user into a comfort zone. Michael (at the time) was still struggling with php (no problems now I’m sure as he’s decided to take on JS as well), to prove that you didn’t need to know PHP coding in order to design and play around with WP, all you need is the drive, patience and some time.

I’ve got to admit though that the most interesting chapter for me was the final chapter by Richard Rutter. Which walks you through the process of making your own blogging engine. Why is that interesting to me when someone else has already done most (if not all the hard work for me). To be honest it would just be fun to have everything running on something I designed and coded. The thing of course is that I’m not a coder and therefore won’t realistically be able to do something like that. Also the first thing that comes to my mind is how I don’t think I’d be able to deal with Spammers. I can’t do without Akismet to be honest and I don’t understand how other people can manage without this plugin.

The book targets 2 groups of people, those that want to start off blogging and what they’ll need to know; the second group of people are those that have passed that stage and would like to learn how to customising their blogs, and what to look out for. I don’t think I’m really the core target audience, but even I found several nuggets that were really worthwhile. It’s definitely a book I’d recommend giving to the newbie who’s interested but is also a bit overwhelmed by it all, because this book holds his hand in style. For the hardened blogger the book is interesting as an overview of other technologies so as to keep abreast of what’s going on, with a couple of areas that are definitely of interest, but then again that’s not who the book is targeted at, so it’s nice that the editor made sure there was something for that group of people as well.

I’m going to ramble on a bit more about Shuttle, simply because it’s been a pretty big part of my life the last year and loads of things I’ve wanted to talk about on this blog have been waiting for this moment in time. Everytime I would think about something cool to talk about relating this project I always had to keep on the mental shelf until after I got to this stage.

People expected the second coming for some reason. The simple thinking behind joining forces with the likes of Michael, Joen, Chris, Bryan and Joshuas was that by joining forces with these exceptionally talented people, at the top of their game, we would get something that would far exceed anything I could have come up with on my own. Make no mistake about it, without everyone’s contribution we wouldn’t have the mockups you see before you. They would be INFINITELY different and IMHO much weaker.

The problem however with this situation is that INSTANTLY people’s expectations were raised. Some people were expecting the second coming and didn’t get it. To be fair though we never promised you the second coming. We promised we’d do our best to make the WordPress admin beautiful and usable to people of all levels of experience with the programme. Some might forget that we’re not catering just to the power users; we’re catering to the every users. That’s a tough thing to do correctly, and that’s part of why it took as long as it did… but only a small part.

Of course then there are those that feel that the admin didn’t really need to change at all. I obviously disagree with this assessment COMPLETELY, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone down this road in the first place. However this is a VERY important comment to take note of. You see change is feared by a great deal of people. In fact that’s probably (amongst many other reasons) by Matt will be implementing the design incrementally. WordPress got to it’s current popularity based on the fact that the software does what it does, well. Add to that list the community behind it; and finally the simplicity of the UI design.

The Shuttle team obviously saw room for improvement as we belive it’s not the prettiest to look at. Some might then argue and say:

Well hang on, it does the job right?

That there is a programmer’s mentality, not a designer’s. So right from the very start (I remember clearly) Joen tried to push the idea that the overall structure that the interface currently has is not incorrect fundamentally and therefore we shouldn’t be looking to change that just for the sake of it. Michael then kept hammering the ideas (through his comps) that if it’s not needed STRIP IT OUT, keep it simple, keep it clean, keep it clear. On the flip side we had Matt telling us some seriously weird things you guys do when using WordPress so we had to factor a bit of that weirdness in there as well. However don’t try and deviate from what has been established as a core unless there’s a serious reason. Those reasons would then get hammered back and forth, between Denmark, England and the US on a regular basis.

For those that are thinking that this is just a design exercise and won’t get included fast enough, I think you’ll find that if you’re running WordPress 2.0 the integration of Shuttle has already begun! What you think Matt woke up one morning and decided to add the colour blue from the previous grey? Or that those drop-down-draggable menus in the write section appeared on their own? All things that came about from the Shuttle project. Admittedly they’re not as we mocked them up at the time, however we hadn’t progressed to the level we are now at the time those areas were being implemented in the code. I now officially feel like Morpheus in the Matrix after Neo gets his ass whupped in Kung Fu.

Many lessons were learnt during this design process however we’ll keep it at this for now.

To avoid any confusion and answer some questions that have been raised I’ve created this small FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) to dispell any rumours and set the record as straight as I possibly can. If you’ve got any questions put them underneath and I’ll update the post accordingly.

Why isn't there a plugin to download?

However after much back and forth it was decided that this design would be better implemented as part of the core WP install. In many ways it was also impossible to implement this design in any way apart from altering the core code, so a plugin was not an option.

If Matt needs any help or wants some clarity on how certain parts of the design should work the Shuttle team is ready and waiting.

What if I can make this into a plugin?

So you've created the code and Matt's going to drop it into the main code right?

So do you expect the final thing to look like the mockups?

So what exactly did you launch?

Before you read this I suggest you go and have a look at the 20 mockups showing the future of WordPress.

The idea of redesigning the WordPress administration panel began believe it or not in December 2004. For over a year and a half myself, Michael Heilemann, Joen Asmussen, Chris J Davis, Joshua Sigar (later joined by Bryan Veloso) exchanged countless emails and mockups and links and ideas regarding what we thought the WordPress administration panel should be. The project was called the Shuttle Project. I now have the pleasure of presenting what we came up with and explaining the future of the project.

The Shuttle project was without a doubt the single hardest thing I’ve ever been involved with. The only thing that made it easy for me was the fine and exceptional gentlemen on the Shuttle team itself. What made it so difficult is the fact that we were thinking of the thousands of WordPress users all over the world. We were thinking of usability, we were thinking of asthetics, we were thinking of the power user and the novice user. How do you get three headstrong (and passionate) designers to play nice with each other? I swear I have no idea but somehow it all actually worked out in the end. I owe Michael and Joen a great deal of thanks for helping me improve how I think about design.

However the greatest thing that I could have gotten from this project is the sense of collaboration that I felt throughout the project. We were all working towards making something we use on a daily basis that much better, it makes Open Source that much more enjoyable. Although it was tough going through this design process, I think we’ll all instantly forget everything once it’s part of the official install.

When's it coming out?

I can’t wait for the Shuttle designs to be incorporated into the WordPress install, as I do believe that once it’s done there will be only one choice in which platform you should be using.

WordPress Identity | The Colour Blue

So the first major change we made was give WordPress a colour and it’s own distinct identity. We had to make sure that it didn’t mimic any of the other blogging tools out there, so we did a bit of research first. Textpattern has orange, Symphony is green, Moveable Type is grey/green, Expresion Engine is purple. We decided to go for blue. What does blue signify you ask? An easy link (and direct from Wikipedia) is that the colour blue:

...is considered a calming, soothing colour, perhaps related to its association with water and to the sky.

That was what I was hoping we’d get. The colour palette provides an atmosphere that is familiar and not harsh on the eyes. Seeing as a lot of people spend a great deal of time looking at the actual backend of WordPress a great deal throughout the day, it was very important to keep the visual impact of the administration panel to a minimum.

After a great deal of back and forth and loads of mockups and discussion the number of hues of blue was kept to a total of 3. These same blues would be used to distinguish links within the panel itself, as consistency is a major factor in keeping the user comfortable.

System Messages | The Importance of Colour

Join me next time as I talk a bit about usability (or at least try and talk about the subject).

Update: The smaller images now click onto LARGER versions for your viewing pleasure.

For the past year the Shuttle team has been working on the beautification of the WordPress administration panel. The original team was just going to be myself and a couple of coders (Chris and Joshua) who were going to take the designs I came up with and make into a reality. Luckily Michael was having the same thoughts at the time and so he joined our rag tag team. In a cunning move he brought in the inimitable Joen to the fold as well. So now we had enthusiasm (me), flair (Michael) and experience (Joen) along with Chris and Joshua ready to kick some coding ass and take names. That young upstart Veloso joined us half way through the year to add some insight and youthfulness.

Matt caught a whiff of this and though we were forking, which obviously we’d never dream of. So we invited him to oversee where we were going with all of this. Meanwhile Steve was working on his Tiger admin panel half way through our design, and as you can imagine the stakes got raised ever so slightly. Unphased we continued to plow through. Email after email, mockup after mockup.

Version 2.0 was released and the first signs of the work we’d done on Shuttle began to appear. No they weren’t exactly how we mocked them up to be honest (you can blame us for the blue colours and the collapsable tabs on the side though). A year is a long time and we were pretty determinded to finish this off by the end of January. We blew that deadline, but the desire was still there.

As of today we’ve officially completed Wave One of the Shuttle project. I effectively took all the work we’d done so far, all the things we’d talked about and tried to come up with a cohesive solution. Just hammering page after page. I’m not really sure were it all came from, but I guess it was mainly due to the fact that we’d sat on this for so long that is was time we just dealt with it all.

Here are a couple of images for you to have a look. I’m working on a mini-site to show all the work done so far.

Just to stress a few things, these ARE NOT THE FINAL mockups. I have changed a great deal since our last working mockups. The boys now have the psds and will hopefully be tweaking and doing their magic to try and pull everything together. How much of this makes it into the final WordPress install is really dependant on Matt. The boys and I will be talking at length about our design decisions in the near future; we’ve got enough emails to troll through to find hot contested parts etc.

So for all those wondering about the status of this project, that’s where we are right now. I for one see this as a HUGE milestone since we’ve been working on this for over a year now and it’s good to find some form of closure. I know it’s never really over, but at least I believe it’s a step in the right direction.

This posts marks my 500th post for this little site. In the comic book industry this number is a massive one that only a handful of titles have ever achieved. Although not even close to that sort of achievement, it’s nice to attain this milestone in the life of a website, that was only meant to be as an easy method to update the news section of my portfolio site.

The site was originally set up to chronicle the road to getting published in the comic book industry. which is kind of fitting that I can recount the following story at this time:

One of the traditions on a lazy Sunday for me is to go around 3 o’clock to the local newsstand and check out the different design magazines and what not. I’ve not renewed my subscription to Computer Arts, mainly because of the old editor-in-chief who in my view ruined the magazine. I’ll be checking out the magazine now that someone else seems to be at the helm. So I’m checking what’s on offer, and I picked up Practical Web Design. I’ve never picked up this magazine in my life, as I generally tend to gravitate towards Computer Arts, Digit, Digital Creative and Creative Review.

So I started flicking through the magazine, and I get to a featured called ‘Build Quick CSS Templates’. The double page spread had several websites screen shots repeated a few times throughout both pages. As I started looking through the page for inspiration I noticed something very familiar. You can imagine the little girly scream I let out when I saw Broken Kode in there as well! My humble little site has seen print as well now.

Joen, you’ll be pleased to know that Noscope was featured in there as well. Could the guilty party who gave us this little bit of exposure PLEASE STAND UP :).

Project Update

Shuttle

Broken Kode | Season One

What’s been interesting is going through and spell checking everything. My god there are some serious errors in there. I’ve not changed any words in there, just corrected the spelling. There’s a reason for that as well, which will make the final product very different and more than just a collection of blog posts.

Blogging Portal

The best thing I’ve gotten from the 9rules network isn’t the exposure. Sure I’ve gotten some steady exposure from there, however the best thing is the interaction with the other members of the network. I’ve met some seriously cool people, many of which which I’ll be working with in the coming years for sure. I’m hoping that this portal will be able to bring people closer together and enhance their blogging experience.

Super Secret WordPress Project

I’ve been thinking about the whole situation and how some people might feel a bit left out of the whole design process with regards to Shuttle. So in order to get some more feedback, and hopefully get a few ideas that we might not have come up with ourselves, I’m going to start writing these WorkShops. Every Workshop we’ll be dealing with the specific aspect of the WordPress Admin section the Shuttle team is currently working on.

In this inaugural edition, as you might have guessed, our attentions is going to be centred on the Dashboard. Currently as it stands, we’re effectively showing exactly what is shown currently in the Dashboard, except we’ve gone and relocacted the various sections (to make them more user centric), given them some colour and generally spiced them up. The question open for discussion is whether or not we’re missing something fundamental that you’ve seen elsewhere or you think the WordPress Dashboard could use.

Just off the top of my head,

1. Is there any specific GPL stats plugins that you think would make a fine addition to the dashboard section?
2. Would it be useful to be able to pick and choose what feeds are available to you in the WordPress feeds section?
3. Any functions that you have running on your dashboard currently that you think should be included in the core?

Concentrating on one specific aspect at a time will enable everyone to take an active role in the development of the WordPress Administration Panel.

Fellow 9ruler Greg over at Airbag Industries has posted about the lack of design in the WordPress Administration User Interface. I thought it prudent to address his concerns while at the same time try get everyone up to speed on the Shuttle project.

Personally I think it’s just wrong to criticize a completely open source project like WordPress as though it owes you something, unless of course you’re prepared to do something about it. WordPress is not the vision of one person, but the collaborative efforts of thousands. The fact of the matter is that when someone doesn’t like how WordPress does something, or know that they can do a better job, it’s well within their right to do just that. It’s not frowned upon, but actually encouraged and aided whenever possible. Greg isn’t saying any new here, countless others have voiced this opinion, except some have chosen to do something about it and help the community by contributing.

It’s very funny that he should mention the fight between the developer and the designer. I experience this every day, only it’s between the engineer and the architect. I will say that most fights/arguements come between the designers on the team rather than from the developers side. Joen, Michael and I are constantly bickering over 2 pixels!!! That’s when the rest of the team keeps quiet as the three geeks go at it, explaining the virtues of keeping things compact or not.

The shuttle project is ALIVE and kicking. In fact it’s hasn’t been this busy since we announced the project back in December of last year. The esteemed Bryan Veloso has also been added to the development team. We’ve recently finished a great milestone in the project after MUCH coming and going between us. Many people ask about showing what the interface is going to look like, and while NOTHING would make me happier than to show EVERYONE what we’re up to, I’ve got to make sure I don’t because the mock ups change on a weekly basis, as we work through things between us. We’re currently on version 27 of the main write up area. Expect several mammoth posts crossing over several blogs when this is done, but until then, know that we’re on top of things. It’s not the fastest process by any stretch of the imagination but it’s getting there.

If you’ve downloaded the latest beta or played around with a blog on WordPress.com then you’ll see a few changes from the current 1.2 install. Subtle things like the blue colour now found in the admin panel, the moveable sections in the sidebar, or the increase/decrease textarea. While these are still not styled properly the fact that they are part of the design is not a mistake, it’s due to the give and take over several months.

Easily the single biggest draw to using WordPress (apart from the price of course, which is priceless didn’t you know), is without a shadow of a doubt the actual community that has gathered around these handful of PHP files. I know I couldn’t do a slew of things as easily as I’m doing them now without the community. Whenever I want to do something, someone’s already taken the time and done it for me.

So you can imagine my shock when I’ve actually come up with a couple of things that I’d like to do that unfortunately haven’t been touched upon, or at least I’m completely ignorant about. If they do exist and you know about them, please tell me, you’d make my day for sure, maybe even my week :)

1. RSS Control

   WordPress provides you with the native ability to provide an rss feed for any category you choose, by adding a /feed at the end of the link (you can read a much more indepth explaination on Phu's site). Very nice, very simple. Unfortunately this gives the user absolutely no indication of what feed they're actually subscribing to, unless of course they decides to have a wad through the damn url, and then they've got to change the name manually in the aggregator to distinguish between the several feeds from the same site. Ideally what I'd like is a plugin (don't like hacks very much as they're usually broken when you upgrade and that's a complete shag) that helps me control the feeds themselves. Lets me give different category feeds a different name.

<li><h6>Download Posts</h6>

Now I know Chris is working on this, but he seems to be having a wee bit of trouble implementing the thing. So I’m going to put it out there, maybe someone’s got the answer because they’ve done it already etc. What I’m looking for here is a simple plugin that will download my posts and all associated information (not so bothered about comments although that would be an excellent feature), in a specific order, for a specific period of time. The alternative is to make a theme and download that, which I did, but it doesn’t have the level of control a plugin has, and also it would have to be used with a plugin such as the Custom Query String plugin (which isn’t working 100% for me for some reason) to control how the order the posts are shown.

Ok to all you crazy lazy cats out there, thinking that it’ll be ok not to upgrade your wordpress install. You might be ok, but then again you might not be. A couple of hours ago something strange happened here at the Kode, and I effectively lost all my files that are loose in the root directory in the wordpress markup. Yup, EVERYTHING. Strangest damn thing in the world. I was chatting to my bro and he tells me I have no index. WTF? I go in there and sure enough I’ve lost everything.

Now that the security flaw has been exposed every cracker hacker shitfart has decided to give it a go and see what shit they can stir up. Fuck you cracker. So tip to the wise, UPGRADE NOW!!!

On to happier news, BKV4 should go live later on this evening, if not tomorrow morning. I might change my mind, although I’m determined to finish it off tonight.

Right this is the first time I’ve sent an actual question/request to Dreamhost since I started with them a while back. The question was why we don’t have pspell module on the server. One of the things that I would love to have in Shuttle would be the facility to have a spell checker, like the one used by gmail, however as I’ve found out for myself that requires certain things to be installed on your server in order for such things to be feasible.

It’s a crying shame, since it’s freely available and part of php, so I’m perplexed it’s not installed as standard. Now the nice people at Dreamhost have contacted me in less than 12 hours asking me what the modules are and that they should be able to get it up and running, hopefully. Let’s see. It’s really a test for many things. Your web hosting selection goes through a real test when there’s a problem or a question or feature at hand, and how they actually go about it and deal with it is what makes you decide to continue with them or move to greener pastures.

Lack of support issues where what made me leave my previous host. It’s intersting since the DO forums have been playing up big time in the last couple of months with constant down times. MT ain’t so great after all :).

I originally thought we’d have completed Shuttle a while back. Alas that has not been the case. I don’t want to say I underestimated the work, but rather, the project itself evolved into so much more than just a tweak to the css file. The reason I thought I’d talk about this is because of the recent releases of two excellent admin beautifications for WordPress. Both SpotPress and the Tiger Admin skins are excellent examples of how the current default admin can be improved upon.

I love the fact that Joe made SpotPress into a plugin, just shows how versatile the WordPress architecture actually is. Steve Smith has kindly jumped into the whole issue and knocked it completely out the park with his Tiger Admin Skin. See if the man had released this 5 months ago, honestly I wouldn’t have bothered with Shuttle and I bet it would have eventually made it into the core WordPress admin, much like Kubrick made it as the default theme for WordPress. The Tiger admin modification has seriously enhanced my WordPress user experience. It’s very subtle and slick all in one.

The thing is though, we’re actually making some progress with Shuttle. It’s not finished, hell the coding hasn’t even started yet (well not exactly, those of you that are on the ball with regards to WordPress development might have picked something new up…). There is a lot of work that still needs to be done, however as some people have come to understand, we’re not just talking about modifying a css file. The project is a great deal more involved than that. This project tackles functionality as well as beauty and when it’s released a few more issues you might be surprised about.

I suppose I wanted to make sure everyone understood that we’re completely and utterly behind this project and while I love Tiger, I can’t wait for the day I start using Shuttle, simply because to me it’s more WordPressy. A natural progression of the WordPress Admin interface.

I must say that the Tiger admin panel definitely pumped me up for tackling the project full on and trying if anything to solve those dead ends we’ve been hitting. It’s been a very busy couple of months for many of us, and as such the project has taken a hit. That’s being rectified. I wish I could give a date when this is going to be released, but I don’t see it happening for a good few months to come. Maybe September sometime might be a good target, really depends on a number of factors.

My god for a second there I thought I’d actually forgotten what it was like to be truely inspired. I draw a lot of inspiration from graphic novels and graphic design in general. The thing is though it’s been a while since I’ve been truely inspired to do some kick ass work in the past week and a bit. I will admit that a lot of it has to do with my current slump I’m in (which is why the updates haven’t been fast and furious as they usually are around these parts).

So I’ve been reading and trying to gain inspiration. It’s not soo much that I don’t have the ideas, or the projects to sick my teeth into, it’s just that right now I’m lacking that drive that motivates me to go for it with absolutely everything I’ve got.

Yesterday I sat down and read Mark Millar and J.G Jones' Wanted. Now usually I’ll buy a book based on the writer. Seldom do I go for the artist alone. This was not the case say 6 years ago when the artist was everything. The thing is though, that while the writer makes me think, COOL, that was great. It’s the artist that will make my jaw drop, and my imagination race for a while, and there’s this silence in my head, as everything begins to become clear and I know what I was missing all this time.

It’s the spark that’s been missing, and thanks to Jeff Johnson and a pin up he did for Wanted I’m inspired and I can start doing things again. I’ll be updating everyone about the portal we spoke about a while back, as there have been some interesting development in that area. Just need to get my thoughts in place before we get that going.

I’ve started compiling information and ideas for what I want to do with Broken Kode. The site is a constant evolution. Everytime I get into one of these I end up knowning that much more about WordPress, PHP, CSS and other web technologies. I also end up knowing and probably contacting various plugin authors around the world asking them why their beautiful plugin does this or the other. It’s how I learn, and I guess that’s why I like to dive into the design and coding of websites. Since this is my playground this is what gets hit first.

Originally I didn’t want to touch the design of the site for at least a year. However the actual site mandate outgrew the design and that was something honestly I didn’t actually think of. So what’s the deal now you ask? Well there are many new ideas I’d like to implement and the whole site shouldn’t take me more than a week to deal with coding-wise (friggin IE will probably take up more time fixing, but I’m more prepared now than I was a version ago so that’s reassuring).

However that’s not what this post is about. In doing my research I decided to see what new functionality I could actually provide to users and to the site in general. Where to start?

Well we’ve got the excellent BlogginPro and WeblogToolsCollection doing a bang up job day in, day put, providing us with the latest information about themes, plugins etc. Scripty Goddess has been very quiet of late, but I’m sure she’ll get back into it sooner or later. How about going to the Wp-plugin repository. Ok, so it’s not the easiest of things to download plugins from. Every file is seperate, and only in some cases do all files come as one whole zip file. What a shag, 15 plugins later and their respective readme files downloaded seperately, placed in their own folders for archiving, and I started thinking to myself… there’s something seriously lacking in the WordPress community.

That something is a well structured, fully searchable, design , coding and interview PORTAL. What I’m talking about is an actual graphical website that provides the latest WordPress information in such a way that makes it appealing. Tutorials and interviews could be active features of the site. The reason behind this is pretty apparent. You have one place to go to for information, articles, tutorials etc.

I would happily contribute the design of the website, and write an article a week for it. I’m sure I could persuade people (under penalty of death ^_^) to contribute stuff to the site as well. Hell we could have a rolling RSS counter on the side that links directly to BlogginPro and WeblogToolsCollection as well.

Ideally speaking that is what the official WordPress website should be all about, alas it’s not my baby and I’m not the one fronting up the cash and time to run it and maintain it so Matt is obviously free to do as he pleases with the site. Just got me thinking is all.

I know people like James, Podz and others would be pretty good for this sort of thing. They’d really enjoy it I think, better sense of community. I dunno, maybe I’m just rambling here.

Structurally I guess it would be something akin to PixelSurgeon or Wired, although I would want more images involved, make it less boring.

I’ve been having some serious WordPress funkiness going on, something to do with mySQL and stuff. Hardly what I want to talk about today but anyway, if you see an error message, it’s not me having a laugh, just so you know.

Every couple of months I jump into a new software package and gut it to try and make it sing for me. I’ve found that this is a way of keeping myself on the learning curve. Always pushing myself, because it’s incredibly easy to reach a comfort zone once you get working, and your brain turns to mush after a while. That’s something I realised early on in life, directly after leaving University, I knew that’s what I had to do to keep my brain sharp.

Last 4 or 5 months I’ve been concentrating on CSS and only dabbling in PHP. My Achilles heal though, is without a doubt my lack of PHP skills. In effect I have none. That however is going to change. I’m determined to change that. WordPress sites run on two languages, CSS to style it and PHP to run it. In order to get things done I can see where the PHP code is coming from, however for some reason I never thought that maybe it would be a good idea to actually try and make sense of the code, by learning the basics, I mean how hard can it possibly be?

Turns out, for me at least it’s not really that difficult, because I’m already very familiar with the concepts surrounding the coding language. I’m an Electrical and Electronic Engineer. I studied C and C++ at University, I know what a function is, an array, an integer, string and what all the operators mean. I never enjoyed it, because I never understood the joy of the C. I still don’t and don’t particularly want to try and find out, as the actual use, is probably lost on me. PHP however is a completely different story.

I scouted the internet and found these incredibly useful tutorials. Go to the tutorials by Melonfire.

By going through the first couple of tutorials, I assure you you’ll have a much better appreciation for how your site works. You’ll realise that things aren’t a black art any more. I feel soo much more comfortable hacking the plugins I’ve got running the site to actually work in the way I want them to. Which basically means a lot more work on my side. I guess it was inevitable for me to dive into PHP, if you’re feeling scared of diving into PHP, seriously I think you shouldn’t worry too much. The hardest step is the first one.

Not that I plan on writing any plugins any time soon, that’ll take at least another year ^_^.

While ‘conversing’ with Phu Ly, I thought that it would be cool to organise a WordPress meetup in London. I mean why should Denmark have a meetup and the UK be left behind in this area? Now for all those of you thinking to yourself, well how good is it actually going to be? I dunno, what I will say however is that I’ve done this online to real meeting endevour once before, for the Designate Online meetup a few months ago. I didn’t know ANYONE, and everyone else seemed to know each other. I got Martina to tag along just in case I had to use her as an excuse to leave.

Turned out to be one of the best evenings/days I’ve had in a while. Just a really good bunch of people, talking all sorts of things. Got some pointers about design, talked about topics that ACTUALLY interest me, with people that understand what the IE peekaboo bug is, know what Pixelsurgeon is etc.

This would be slightly different in that most people would know if I mentioned the design in any one of these blogs. Hey I might even bring a print out of a section of what Shuttle is currently looking like.

So if you’re in the UK and you’re interested in making a day event in London, prefereably on a Saturday, add your name and tell everyone else about it as well.

So hopefully rather than ‘conversing’ with each other, we can actually TALK to each other, and generally put faces to names.

I propose the:

30th of April.

Too soon? Too late? What does everyone else think?

I’ve got a backlog of magazines the size of a small mountain and I’m just filing though it over the next couple of days. Today I went through WebDesigner issue 103. Now generally speaking it’s a decent enough magazine. I like some of the tutorials they’ve done (bearing in mind I’ve only bought this mag twice before), this issue had a massive feature about web templates. The last third of the article actually had a decent enough write up of blogging templates and generally explained a lot to the novice about blogs in general.

Our very own ScriptyGoddess got a mention, as did Not (that) Ugly as well. It was really strange seeing these familiar net faces being mentioned in a magazine, but there you have, well deserved Ladies. It’s great to see that WordPress is spoken in the same breathe as Blogger and Moveable Type, hopefully in the coming years it’ll be Blogger, WordPress and then Moveable Type as WP takes over.

Searching for a link to Webdesigner, I’ve got to say for a magazine that is all about the web, that’s an incredibly CRAP online presence they’ve got there. I mean what the hell? Poor, poor showing guys. I expected oh soo much better.

As my magazine subscription to Computer Arts comes close to an end, I’m really thinking about switching over to Digit, as the content in there is more focused on actual reviews and articles, and they provide and really support open source programs. Blender for example was featured in the previous issue, and I found out about Expression via Digit.

I thought I’d give a small update on the progress of this little project as I’ve not spoken or said anything about it since Joen joined the team. It’s been nearly over a month since we started working on this little project in ernest. The first 2 weeks were spent discussing options, thoughts, design issues, and everything else under the sun. Many e-mails were exchanged between us, and then Joen got the ball rolling with the first stab at a sketch. Since then it’s been a pretty cool session of photoshop tennis between Michael, myself, Joen, and even our code-fu guru Chris jumped into it as well.

What’s great is that with every iteration you can see the actual design developing more and more clearly. I flick through the original sketch and what we’re currenly on and I just have a massive smile on my stupid mug, because I can’t wait to be able to start using this interface. Trust me when I say that it’s going to kick some major ass in both the design department and the functionality/usability department.

The thing is good stuff honestly takes time. We’re all exceptionally busy people, and something of this scale takes hours of careful thought. None of us are in a rush to get it done for any reason. When it comes out it will be something beautiful, and will elevate the ‘Press’ from the typewriters. In the meantime if you’re really wanting some colour in your blog check out Not That Ugly for something different for your interface.

So Monsieur Alex King has begun his second annual WordPress Theme design competition. Interesting. Now I remember a few people got really annoyed with the last one of these, and while I really am with Alex on the reason behind the competition I can see where the apprehension can come from.

Will I be entering the competition? Highly unlikely. There is several reasons for this:

1. The first being that I've got loads of other projects on my plate that take much higher preference.
2. The second and in my opinion much more important is the fact that a good template takes a hell of a lot of time and effort. I mean that. It can take months of proper preparation and hours of testing, for all the bugs and kinks to be ironed out. What you think Manji was the way it is the first time it came out? No it wasn't. That's why we're on version 1.1, and gearing up to version 1.11 (hopefully I'll have some cool news to report on this very soon).

The point I’m trying to make is a template competition can be a good thing, but the judges will have to be able to discard the themes have got some obvious fundamental flaws. Some people might take short cuts, and might not really care about what the CSS looks like or is structured. It took me something like a week to get the structure of the Manji CSS correct and cleaned up in the way it’s presented. I had the luxury of time on my hand. Will the people entering this competition have the same luxury?

Oh don’t get me wrong I don’t claim Manji is perfect for a second, but I think anyone who’s contacted me with regards to a problem I’ve tried to solve it for them straight away, even though I’m not a coder, and generally speaking they’ve not been serious.

Which brings the next point up, what happens to the forums when people start asking questions left right and centre? Are the creators of the themes going to offer support or are they going to be lumped on the poor support forums? When Manji came out I had a forum that killed my site for a day and a half. Sorry that’s not happening again. Until I find a forum system I can trust and update easily I’m not putting another Manji forum up.

So good luck to all those entering the competition, I hope it’s a success, but if you’re thinking about entering be prepared for a lot of work ahead, unless you’re a coding guru ^_^.

In case you’ve missed it there has been some talk around a WordPress manual as proposed by Larry Ayers. This would be a manual of sorts to help out the newcomer etc. Seems that Larry has contacted Matt about this and there wasn’t any else doing something similar, soo Larry thought it best to get going.

Problem is Larry is tackling a subject that Podz, Craig and Carthik (to name only a small few) have been slogging away at for the past year to the best of my knowledge. In that time they’ve amassed an emmense amount of posts on the support forums, have kept the wiki alive and hammered away at the Codex as well. In all that time the guys haven’t been paid anything, and in Podz’s case actually taken a serious hit to make his manuals available online.

I’ve said this before several times, that the only reason I chose WordPress over Textpattern was the community that was built around it. Without this community and the fact that everyone is helping out in ways they think is best, I might as well go to B2evolution or any one of the other open-source alternatives. The number of templates and plugins available for WordPress probably dwarf those of other blogging softwares. All of that work was done by the community, for the community.

When I released Manji, I was wondering how Chris was counting the number of downloads, so I sent him and e-mail and asked him. He sent me the plugin, the php script and a walk through of how to bloody implement the thing. That is what the community is about. I wanted to get my links to have alternate colours, Joshua spent 30 minutes hacking some code for me just so that I can do something like that.

I’ve learnt an emmense amount about CSS, HTML and PHP in the past year through the use of WordPress. Hell I don’t need Dreamweaver to do my code anymore, I just use notepad++. The main strength of WordPress over everyone else for me at least is the community. Oh sure the software is good but there are derivatives out there.

So with that out of the way, what does any of this have anything to do with Larry and his book? How does Podz fit into all of this? There are several points I think that need to be raised here.

The first problem was how you approached the situation. Not very diplomatic and it did show a lack of knowledge of the community. Podz is one of the developers of WordPress. He’s got over 2500 posts on the forums. This is what you wrote to podz:

Be more explicit, identify yourself and your site (I've visited scores of WordPress sites)...

The point is if you’re going to write a book, the only book about WordPress surely you should know the history of the software, and who the key people involved are.

Larry, you’re an unknown entity. We’ve seen none of your previous work. You’ve been involved with other online sources? I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt here, show me. Give me links to the forums you’ve posted on, the places you’ve left your mark on. The fear here is that you’re not what you say you are. Podz has shown time and time again what he’s capable of in terms of documentation and helping people out. At least for the WP community.

Personally I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch for Podz to think ‘well this guy hasn’t done anything similar that I can see, he’s interested in writing a book on a subject that’s taken me and another x people 1 year to compile information on. Hang on a minute why should I believe he’s saying the truth and that he’s going to be approaching the subject from a fresh plate. He’s got a wealth of information at his fingertips, my information, and he’s proposing on making money off it.’

And you see that in a way goes against the grain of the WordPress community. If you’d taken the time to research the subject you’d have known who Podz is. You could have easily dropped him a line telling him that you’re thinking it would be a good idea to do this. You’ve got the time to devote to this and the contacts. You understand that Podz has devoted soo long on the help forums and the codex and the wiki and his manuals, ask him if he’d like to join you. Having one of the dev team on your side really works wonders for the people who would buy your book. You’d be surprised how many hours people devote to bettering WordPress every day.

It’s a community, where the final product is a lot more important than the individual ego. Perfect example is Shuttle. 3 designers, 3 coders (Matt is over seeing what we’re doing). One goal. Better the software and enhance blogging in general.

It would take a lot longer than 1 week to find out what most users aren’t capable of doing or understanding. It would take a lot longer than 1 week to find out what the most common problems are. It would take a lot longer than 1 week to go through the 450 plugins that are available and constantly being updated for the WordPress software. Podz has spent the past 8 months learning these things, which is why he made the manuals in the first place. To stop answering the same question again and again.

By the time you’ve finished your book, we’ll have just released Shuttle. You going to put the logo in the book as well? What if we decide to call the final thing something else?

Larry it’s a matter of perspective. You say you’ve done this before. I think having someone who’s done this before is great, and I would be the first to appologise to you for ever doubting your PHP Fu skills. Unfortunately I’ve seen NOTHING that proves the contrary to this. I’ve currently only got your word to go on, and since I don’t know you, it’s not a very strong word.

Welcome to the WordPress community ^_^.

Oh dear, that’s really not good. Podzy seems to be a bit unhappy about what’s going on with people using his guides to make money. Podz has spends HOURS on the forums helping people out whenever he can. He’s also responsible for both writing up and hosting the WP guides, which for many people (myself included) have been an invaluable resourse of information. I just tried to access the things, and got my IP banned as he’s password protected the guides. For example when I was moving my host over the guy (and macmanx) both came to reassure me that everything was going to be ok, and that I wasn’t going to loose all my posts.

As far as I can tell a certain Larry on the forums said he was going to make a WordPress manual, which he was going to write from scratch. Yeah well if you need information about the ins and outs of WordPress you either check the Codex or the Forums or the Manuals. Guess who’s name comes across the board on all these things? Yup Podz. So understandably the man is a bit miffed, that’s not how this particular community has worked so far.

So it took me all of 10 seconds, seriously, to offer to help out Podz make an offical book of sorts using his pages already. It would be a long hard road, but one that’s ultimately pretty gratifying. Ahh, but I’m not a publisher you say? No, I’m not but I’ve got CafePress at my fingertips if I want. He’s decided not to help anymore, which seems a bit rash, hopefully he’ll reconsider. My offer to pull the book together still stands, he can sort out the content of the book and the cafepress site ^_^.

What’s CafePress you ask? Well it’s a way for anyone to set up a store online selling personalised merchandise revolving around whatever it is they’re website is about. This has beenmainly T-shirts, mugs, etc. Recently (i.e 8 months ago) they added books in there as well. They come in a different range of bindings (saddle-stitch, ring binder and perfect bound), have a flat rate per type and then additional cost per page. Soo the idea is you have to price a 100 page perfect bound book at $10, because that’s how much they’re charging, and then you add whatever you want as a mark-up.

I’ve toyed around with the idea a lot, but it only allows black and white content. That’s why I personally find it slightly limiting for my comic book work, however I might actually use it for a sketchbook. As time goes by I’m collecting more and more sketches.

Oh sure they’re not the cheapest thing in the world, and it’s not as easy to have a look at what you’re getting before you buy it, but it’s one method. In that thread I was pointed to another service, which seems like a good idea. It’s called BlogBinders and converts your blog into a book in the same 3 formats as provided by CafePress.

From my point of view, I think it would be great to collect my posts as a book for myself. Hey I might be online a lot but I’m a complete book junkie. I’ve only started thinking about this, but I’d need to edit everything to show the links in full, and I’d probably have to delete or not include a few of the earlier posts as they were pretty rubbish (or do I include them to see how rubbish they actually where?).

And no before anyone starts cracking some joke, we’re not letting EVERYONE join the Shuttle team but I mean c’mon, HOW could you possibly say no to Joen? ^_^.

What’s funny is that in our little research posts, people who have commented have actually linked back to Joen’s site where he’s talked about this extensively, from a design POV. Michael got talking to Joen, one thing led to another and here we are.

There are 6 people involved in this project now. Yes, 6. We’ve got 3 designers, 2 coders and Matt Mullenweg will also be looking over our shoulders making sure we don’t go completely mental, and pointing out why we shouldn’t be doing something, or going down a particular route for whatever reason, which he might have learnt about the hard way.

We’re out to make WordPress a thing of undisputed beauty, in every possible way, both on the inside and the outside.

Just to clarify something, this “Shuttle” is NOT a fork. We’re not planning on releasing Shuttle as an alternative to Wordpress. It’s just something that can replace the existing Wordpress admin interface to be more asthetically pleasing. Are we going to add functionality? Well it kind of makes sense. Soo many things are available from the Wordpress community that people would love to use. Obviously we’ll only include things that we think are essential and should be included. That’s why we’re asking people what they think, what they’d like to see, what they use, etc. There might be something we’re missing out on completely.

Everyone on the team LOVE Wordpress and the community and want to bring something fresh and exciting to the software, that will basically elevate it above the rest. There won’t be a reason not to use Wordpress when we’re through with it, because the code is soo good and it’s such a powerful system. Hopefully we’ll enhance the usability aspect of it, make it slightly more fun and attractive to use.

This is taken from the post I announced this idea, I’m reproducing the relavant parts:

So what is it I’m talking about you ask? The tentative title of the project (and most of you know that I’m pretty bad when coming up with names), is Shuttle. What is Shuttle? Simply, it’s going to be a brand new spanking interface for the Wordpress Admin Control Panel. I’m sorry Matt, I love you, but the Wordpress interface is something to me that is sorely lacking in style and sometimes functionality. I don’t think there are that many people (except if they’re serious coders and really don’t care what it looks like) that really love the aesthetics of the Wordpress Control Panel.

I’m going to admit something, and that’s the fact that I nearly didn’t go for Wordpress over Textpattern due to the weak interface. What can I say I’m a shallow designer, who places a lot on the actual appearance. What actually kept me was the fact that the Wordpress community was absolutely buzzing. I just had one look at the boards, and knew that if there was a question I needed it would be answered, and that was reassuring, however I’ve never liked the Control Panel, and well I don’t think it’s really on Ryan’s or Matt’s minds right now, so it’s up to the rest of the community to sort it out. That’s where the Shuttle Team come into play.

What’s the ETA on this? Don’t ask silly questions, you won’t get silly answers. To be fair I think it will be at least 2 months down the line, hopefully less, but I’m being realistic about all of this. So why mention all of this now you ask? Well as this is something that is effectively user based I’d really like to hear which plugins, functions whatever you use, used to use or whatever from other blogging systems (just name them) or whatever that you think would be perfectly suited to the admin panel.

If Matt and the rest of the team like what we’ve done, and agree with some of the changes we’ve made, it would be great to get it integrated into the proper Wordpress releases, if that doesn’t happen, that’s not a bad thing. You’ll still be able to download it from any one of out four sites, much like the 400 plus plugins, and the 40 or so themes. (ie downloading them from their respective creators).

We’re all doing this because we all feel that WP needs to be one step above the rest. The backend is one aspect which the program is somewhat lacking. Rather than bitch and moan about it, and complain, we’re being proactive and doing something we feel is right. That’s what open source projects are about. That’s why wordpress is better than the rest, the community around it is passionate about it’s use, and there are people, hunderds of people devoting hours to make it better to use.

Okay, so a couple of days ago I contacted a certain somebody (Michael) to see if they wanted to join in the development of ‘Shuttle’ after I saw this post. It took a couple of days but I can proudly announce the addition of one Michael Heilemann to the Shuttle Development Team. So the team is Chris, Joshua, Michael and myself. That’s 2 designers and 2 coders.

So what does this mean? It means several things. It means the development will actually run more smoothly and probably a lot faster, as a team of 4 people in COMPLETELY different countries work on a project. It means the design and code will be the sum of many, as all open source code is.

This is what I love about the Wordpress community. It’s an actual community, that are trying to make the blogging experience that much better. That’s what open source is all about after all, people sharing and contributing to something bigger and better.

This also means that the name Shuttle and everything else might/probably will change. Hey I’m completely flexible when it comes to this sort of thing, nothing I do in terms of graphics goes to waste, I always find some way to use them. It’ll be an interesting experience if nothing else, because we’re going to make the backend of WP the best blogging backend currently available. There will be no reason why anyone shouldn’t fall over themselves to try and have Wordpress as their standard software of choice.

Bold words? Maybe, it’s just I know who’s got my back.

In the meantime research is in order. I’ll ask the regulars over here, to say what they think about the current backend of wordpress, what they like and what they don’t. The guys will probably do the same thing on their blogs.

Hmm, ok after I wrote my previous post I strolled over to this link over at podz’s website. For those in the dark, Podz is an incredibly helpful chap. He’s always online answering questions on the wordpress forums and should be given a medal. He was going to help out with Manji as well which was nice, but he got a bit busy which is completely understandable.

After I read through his post and really started thinking about things, the following dawned upon me, Manji doesn’t belong to me. Wordpress doesn’t belong to Matt Mullenweg, and Persian doesn’t belong to Chris J Davis. Wordpress was a derivative of B2 which was originally on a GPL license morphed into Wordpress, does anyone know who the lead designer on B2 was? No, I know it’s easy to find out, but off the top of your head does anyone know? Unless you were using B2 probably not.

GPL basically means NOBODY has copyright of that particular bit of code. It’s there out in the open for everyone to play around with and create something better and bigger.

So when Michael asked people to credit him in the Kubrick code (download kubrick and read the readme file), he effectively had no right to do that, simply because HE made the decision to release Kubrick under a GPL license. People could do that if they were so inclined and wanted to thank him for it. But they have NO OBLIGATION. They can then take that code alter it and release it under a completely different name, without even thinking about including his name or whatever. Not even in the CSS. The only stipulation I see that you can’t do is alter the license. Nothing you do after that make it copyright of you. You don’t own the copyright of the code, and neither does the originator. In fact making people feel like they have to credit you kind of goes against Open Source code. You don’t see php.net in the bottom there, or apache.org anywhere on the site (except now of course). And yet this site wouldn’t be here for you to see without these open source codes.

This seems to be standard practice for most code we all use. Who’s the lead designer for Apache? What about MySQL? PHP? Some projects have a lead developer, since it does take a lot of time and knowledge and resources to keep something like Wordpress going. Matt’s doing a great job, but he could decide to stop tomorrow, he has after all turned 21, (Happy Birthday dude), does that mean the end of Wordpress? Well maybe, but the code might live on with someone else who would probably rename it and not include Matt’s name in there. Then again he might, but that would be a courtesy thing.

Which basically means that if you put the code in the bottom with a link back to where it was downloaded from, well that’s just a courtesy thing really. Nothing in the code stipulates that you have to link back to this site. So what I’m saying about Manji is that, by me releasing it under a GPL license, you’re effectively free to do whatever you want with it. You want to keep a link to my site in there, go right ahead, I thank you kindly and appreciate all your love. If you don’t want, take it out. What you can’t do is then say that the design is YOUR copyright, because no matter what you do with it, it will NEVER be your copyright. It’s out there in cyberspace to live or die. I will continue to work on Manji, tweaking and fixing bugs, because it means a lot to me. Wordpress is a community and in the same way that I have taken so much from it this was one way of giving something back.

So if you want disregard the below post, I could ask you to put the link, but NOTHING in the license I release with Manji says you have to. I include the link as a default, but as with everything else in that file, you’re free to do with as you please.

Free as in FREEDOM.

It’s amazing what a day does, after you’ve thought about things a little.

For the previously mentioned Shuttle Project.

Man I decided to do a few tweaks to the damn site, 5 hours later I sorted out the slight mods to the css file. This is ridiculous. I’ve seriously got to sort it out so and streamline the damn thing. Make it tight and get it right.

I’ve been looking at various blogs around the place, such as Dunstan’s blog, and noticed that a decent looking blog is all down to the actual details. It’s the attention to detail that elevates a blog or website to the next level and makes it a complete and utter pro job. The thing is though that BrokenKode is barely 3 months old. My computer has finally given up on me of sorts, and I’ve been stuck on a dialup connection for the past 2 and a bit weeks. Fare enough I’ve been busy with a slew of other projects but I do need to try and make an effort to sort out the css on this puppy.

The only way to go about this is to actually try and break it down from the very start and work my way through it all. Taking notes as to what I modified and commenting the code correctly. That way I’ll know what is what straight away.

Along the way I’m going to be installing a slew of new plugins. It’s a task and a half, but I think I’ll thank myself later on when Wordpress 1.3 comes along and I’ll have the nightmare job of upgrading.

Hahahahahaha. I’m in love with my site at the moment. It’s been a complete labour of love but I’ve finally got it to the stage that I had in my mind at the very beginning when I began this crazy Wordpress adventure.

The icing on the cake is the ‘Broken Stats’ section which you can find in the control panel. Click on Auspices at the top there and you’ll be transported to the bottom. It’s a small addition but it marks the end of what I had in mind for the site from the begining. I’m probably going to start a sticky post and keep adding to it, which will be the nexus section as I think updating that manually is such a waste of time.

The good news is now I just have a few bits and pieces and cleaning of the code before all is sorted and I can fully concentrate on something else right now. Damn that feels amazing.

Just updated the site with this very excellent little plugin, it’s a funky idea, in that I get to put any font I want as the main title bar and everyone can see it, which is nice. Information on this plugin can be found right here at Joel Bennet’s site, Huddled Masses.

I mean honestly if I hadn’t moved over to the supreme Wordpress I’d still be stuck with some pretty lackluster html pages, created in Moveable Type, without the absolute SHEER POWER of PHP. So the moral of the story is screw Moveable Type, get with the program, and free your blogging experience.

Update: I think I’ll probably update something every week till I get the final version sorted. I’ve got the control panel to give a bit of a touch up, and the CSS code needs to be cleaned, and of course I’ve got to begin sorting out my nexus section as well. Still a bit of work to go really, but hey it’s getting there, at least it’s fully functional at this moment in time.

Man that was really painful actually. To eventually get this site and blog to where I wanted has taken more out of me than I care to admitt. It’s brilliant since it’s something I love, and will no doubt constantly tweak and fiddle with, as is always the case with most internet based projects I get involved with, but damn it’s been a long journey. Hours spent well in the end I think. Place can only get better from here on in.

So officially welcome to Makeshift Ver0.1 and chronicles Ver0.1 . Go on click at the top to find out more.

I will eventually put a plug to all the sites and people that helped me sort this thing out on the wordpress forums.

So why only 90% still you ask? Well about 3% can be attributed to the contact page and starting adding reviews to the nexus section, while the rest is cleaning up the index code and my css file, make it nice and sweet. I know kinda perfectionist and all but KODE IS POETRY as the Wordpress website proudly proclaims.

Update: Just completed all the static pages, and essentially my site, as a running version 0.1, I’ll be doing tweaks for ever but it’s cool to have the first step done and a running blog all sorted out.

Let’s see if this works. I’ve got 3 hours before I go to bed. I have one final area of this site I need to use that will finish it off in a capacity. Can I do it while dynamically updating this post to see if indeed I’m hitting my deadline.

I’ve go the below post that claims it will tell me how to make Static WP pages the easy way, shall we see hmm,…yes I think we shall. TechGnome’s World ? Static WP Pages made easy

Update one: Got preoccupied and watched the end half of a documentary of the problems Shell are having. As for the site, well the makeshift are has been updated, although the CSS is not completely there, I’ll try and sort it out before I go bedy bies.

Update two: Pretty pathetic, I’m soo tired. I’ve managed to get the ‘static pages’ to work, which is a major load off my back to be honest, but they don’t have the look I want. Not sure which exact CSS I should be using for this little thing here, so I’ll have to wait till tomorrow, but to be honest that means that sometime during the weekend, my blog design and all is pretty much done, which is pretty scary, took what 1 month and a half to get here, but it’s been one hell of an adventure.

Well I’ve finally sorted out the server part, and it is pretty easy really. Once you’ve got XAMPP installed, you’re down to two buttons one to start Apache, Mysql and php while the other is to terminate the actions. Once you’re running the actual server online, then you can start playing around. The files should go within the XAMPP folder in your root directory, ie C/apachefriends/xampp/htdocs/…. whatever you want after that is fail game really. This all really does come into it’s own when you install wordpress as you would install it normally on your actual ftp server, and you can see you tweaks and what not straight away,…which is nice. Configuring and Using the Apache HTTP Web Server on a Windows XP PC

Well this does article does seem to go into a bit of detail in terms of how to configure everything, but it pretty simple to follow, which should help us understand what we’re doing with XAMPP.

As detailed in my previous post about this specific topic I’m learning php. What this has done is opened my eyes to what the web can be. So I’m going to document what I do on my journey to learn php, primarily to sort out my blog. I know it seems like such an ardous task to have a simple blog. The problem here is I’m not one for having anything simple. I like a challenge and to be honest this is one hell of a challenge. A great deal of the work has been done for me to be honest, all I have to do is learn how to actually work through everything. I’m going to be writing these posts as if it’s a tutorial. I will be updating it and tweaking it as time goes by till I get the absolute perfect blog, at least in my eyes alone. The added bonus is that I can then add something else to the list of things I know how to deal with, and in addition, any new aspects that Wordpress brings out, I’ll be able to deal with, since I feel I’ll be doing this blog thing for a while, I’m pretty lucky to have gotten out of the MT mold pretty sharpish and found something that much more powerful.

Right so what do we know about php?

1. Well it’s a pretty powerful little language.
2. It resides and does stuff on the server side for a website, and is where all the dynamic content happens as it were.
3. You embed it into html tags, so it’s html embedded.
4. It’s an open source language that’s freely available from this website here, php.net.

Now why should we care for Wordpress? Well as far as I can tell, it’s possible to actually set up a server on your local machine, regardless of what your actual machine is or what platform you’re using.

Well you’ve got php but all the other gumph that makes up your server also needs to be downloaded. The good thing is that you can download an installer that does all the setup for you and then you can go ahead and customise it to your hearts content. There are a great many installers out there. Personnaly I’ve gone for XAMPP, you can find it right here, XAMPP

After running the exe for this fantastic bit of software, you go to your route directory and you can actually run the server by clicking on the exe from there, remember not to close it but use the stop xampp button for that action.

Right so far so good, to help you along you can even download the documentation for php as well, it’s all there and you can even download it as a windows help file of sort which is very sweet I thought, get it from here, download docs .

And bang you’re now running a server on you machine. So how does this help me exactly with my Wordpress customisation exactly? Well now you can set up your site on your machine and see if things are working without actually upsetting your installation on your site. You check everything, tweak, whatever and then just upload those files, no fuss, knowing full well everything works exactly the way you want it.

Just collecting links here and there that I think will help me implement the features I want in this site. It will take a while to get to grips with php, it will take a while to get to grips with Wordpress, but eventually I think it will be something I can be proud of.

Wordpress Hacks: WordPress Wiki - my-hacks.php

Getting started with php: Getting Started with PHP

An introduction to php: An Introduction to PHP

Well I decided nearly 2 weeks ago to move away from moveable type. Now while this was something of a drastic move, I knew that sooner or later I would have to do this, since no development was happening past 2.64a that didn’t cost an extortionate amount. So having scoped out all the alternatives as explained in this post here I now needed to learn how to use Wordpress tags, and php. Playing just a bit with it all I’ve learnt a great deal in a very small amount of time. So what I’m writing now my journey through the world of php and wordpress. The idea is to get a resource for all newbies like myself that have to wade through hundreds of post trying to know where to start. I’ll be able to make ‘in hindsight’ type comments and hopefully new people to Wordpress will have a point of reference.

So a new category is created, and a new learning resource is about to be built one brick at a time. Hopefully I’ll have a semblance of mastering php by the end of this ordeal that could very well take 3 months, but then again I’m not really in that much of a hurry.