What I Learned About WordPress Last Week #1

What I Learned About WordPress Last Week #1

May 2nd, 2010

Inspired by the supa-talented Portland-based designer Deb Pang Davis‘s recent blog post What I Learned this Week #19 2010, I’ve decided to follow suit with my own list of things I learned, last week, but just about WordPress (otherwise we’d be here all month, as I obviously know very little and each week is a completely new adventure in all areas of my life).

1) The Easiest Way to Add a Thumbnail Photo Gallery to your Posts and Pages

While I’ve always been a big fan of the unbelievable WordPress image gallery plugin NextGen, if I want a simpler (but more limited) solution, the Shadowbox JS plugin is an awesome alternative.

For those of you who don’t know, WordPress gives you the option of creating a thumbnail gallery of images right on your blog post or page. However, the default behavior of this gallery is that upon clicking on each thumbnail, a full-size version of the image appears in your browser’s main window, taking the user away from your post or page. Pretty lame in my opinion.

Shadowbox JS makes it so that upon clicking a thumbnail, a dark but transparent overlay with the full-size version of your image appears. Inside this overlay area are navigation buttons so you can flip through your full-size images very easily. This way users quickly see the full-size version of your image without being taken off of the current page.

Get the plugin here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shadowbox-js/

2) WordPress 3.0′s Custom Post Types Rule.

I’m going to keep this as un-technical as possible, but make a long story short, Custom Post Types allow you to have content on your site that’s not just limited to standard WordPress pages or blog posts. Basically, this makes WordPress a much more powerful and flexible content management system that will also be ultimately much easier for non-technical folks to update.

For example, you could have special movie review pages, photo feature pages, podcast episode pages, etc. Each of these special content types can be on specially-formatted pages separate from your blog posts or pages. And that’s just scraping the tip of the iceberg…

However, setting up custom post types on your WordPress site is likely to take some mucking around with PHP code, so definitely be aware of that.

Here’s the best article on the topic that I’ve seen yet: http://justintadlock.com/archives/2010/04/29/custom-post-types-in-wordpress

3) The Magic Fields Plugin also Rules.

For a long time, this plugin has basically done what the newly-introduced Custom Post Types functionality is doing but using a different technological approach. However what this plugin brings to the table is setting up a much nicer user interface for a non-technical user to update their custom pages and posts.

For example, I am currently working on a project where the client needs to create highly-configurable mini-sites which are not blog posts or pages. In fact, each and every mini-site needs to have its own unique header graphics, page backgrounds, and sidebar content.

Magic Fields allows me to set their site up in a way that the admin section for each mini-site comes complete with an additional form at the bottom of the page that’s super-easy to use, thereby allowing my client to establish a totally custom look and feel for each individual mini-site.

At this time, the developers of Magic Fields are updating the plugin to integrate with WordPress 3.0′s Custom Post Types.

Check out the plugin for yourself here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/magic-fields/

4) I’m Learning Way More Than I Thought

As I write this post, I’m having a difficult time keeping it brief, and also having to leave out a good amount of information. Working full-time as a self-employed WordPress and UI developer forces me to squeeze an insane amount of new information into my brain on a daily basis…and for that I’m very grateful.

Category : Blog & Cool Tools & News and Updates & WordPress