Category Archives: WordPress

WordUp Edinburgh 2011: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

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Can you believe it’s been a whole three five weeks now since WordUp Edinburgh took place, it’s amazing how times flies. Well I’ve finally gotten round to writing up the draft post I’d started, and also found the publish button at that; better late than never! :)

It all started quite early on Saturday morning, too early for my sleep pattern, but I had something like 30 minutes to get ready. Taryn Wallis and her husband Allen had kindly agreed to come and pick me up, they also had Martin Young too. I still can’t thank you enough for that! – Next stop was Surgeons’Hall to get setup for the day ahead.

We arrived in plenty of time to get things sorted before registration, so I took the chance to get connected to the WiFi, and charge my phone up too. I’d need some kind of power if I was going to Tweet during the day, not that I ended up saying much anyway.

Before long, people started arriving and taking their seat; I recognised a few faces!

Still don't remember Martin Young taking that picture!

I met some fantastic people throughout the whole day, Mike Little, Kevinjohn Gallagher, Donnacha Mac Gloinn, Michael Kimb Jones and Andy Gilpin, really just to name a few.

Having never attended an event like this, let alone a meet-up, and you can just forget about a WordCamp, you could say I was a little outside my comfort zone to start with!

So what did I think about the WordUp event itself? …

The Good

Without a doubt, the main event of the day was the sessions!

  • Learning CSS Using WordPress
  • WordPress In The Enterprise: Can It Work?
  • WPTRT: How The Theme Review Process Can Benefit Custom Theme Design
  • Panel Discussion: WordPress In The Voluntary Sector
  • How Did You Do That?
  • Managing Large Networks Of WordPress Sites
  • Responsive Design
  • How WordPress Themes Changed The World: Updated

I really liked Kevinjohn’s round-up, he summed my thoughts up nicely. For the first two sessions he did miss, I felt like I learnt something new. CSS is a wonderful thing, that I already knew, it’s quite powerful when you know what you’re doing. When you’re using WordPress in the Enterprise on the other hand, you get a whole new kettle of fish.

Did anyone mention the pizza we had for lunch, it went down a treat! While not all the toppings were right up my street, it was still pretty cool for that time of day. This was in part thanks to all the kind sponsors, of which I was one of them! :)

It was about 5PM before WordUp Edinburgh finished, we headed straight to Brewdog (which was only about a 10 minute walk away if that) for some socialising. I see what everyone says now with regards to this kind of event after, the different topics you talk about and food-for-thought conversations/observations; it’s crazy but in a good way!

The Bad (Improvement/Idea For Next Time)

I’d have liked if we’d went to a restaurant for a meal before hitting Brewdog. While yes we got a bite to eat in the end, it wasn’t exactly my cup of tea. Going somewhere with more of a menu might have been a better idea; maybe something for next time?

The Ugly

Well that’s a good question, but did you see me in the photo above? ;)

Overall I had a blast at WordUp Edinburgh and would jump at the next chance to attend a similar event again. For anyone who’s never been to something like that before, you really need to get yourself along. My first time and I really would recommend it!

The Twenty Eleven Experiment

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With the release of WordPress 3.2 Beta 1 into the wild last week, I decided it was about time I activated the new default theme, Twenty Eleven. If I’m honest, I have been running trunk on here for a while now, and am quite excited with all the performance improvements that have been made. I even feel the new Admin UI refresh helped with that too! – So here we have what I’m calling The Twenty Eleven Experiment, and a slightly different look for the year ahead. Guess you’ll just have to watch this space! ;)

The Fullscreen Visual Editor In WordPress

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While I wrote the previous post in the early hours of the morning, I thought I’d switch over to using the Fullscreen Visual Editor for a little change, and doubt I’ll ever change back when I’m writing anything again? It’ll be interesting using it for the longer posts (there are a few that I’ll have to finish and get published), but I love the fact you’ve not got any other distractions! – Have you ever used it yourself, and feel the same about it as me? :)

WordPress 3.1 Introduces Custom Post Type Archives

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While development on WordPress 3.1 is still ongoing and we’ll probably not see the final release until nearer the end of the year, I thought I’d let you know about a cool new addition to Custom Post Types that Andrew Nacin (Core Developer) worked on!

Little Background Info

Around 5 months ago #13818 was opened requesting an Index/Archive option for Custom Post Types because the way WordPress works meant that /post-type/ would just 404 on you although /post-type/wordpress-rocks/ worked just fine.

Similar could be said about Custom Taxonomies and how they function which I brought up back in February on the WP-Hackers Mailing List – I don’t think I was popular in the community that month for sure? While it’d be a nice addition I know many would like (and shut me up) I have been informed more than once it’ll not happen!

Now For Some Code

If you’re new to Custom Post Types and the register_post_type(); function then make sure to check out an in-depth article Justin Tadlock wrote on the subject, I recommend you read it anyway! :)

In our functions.php file lets setup a basic Projects Post Type with the Archive active.

add_action( 'init', 'mcw_projects_post_type' );

function mcw_projects_post_type() {

	register_post_type( 'projects', array(
		'labels' => array(
			'name' => __('Projects'),
			'singular_name' => __('Project')
			),
		'public' => true,
		'show_ui' => true,
		'rewrite' => array(
			'slug' => 'project',
			'with_front' => false
			),
		'has_archive' => true
	) );

}

We’re looking at the has_archive argument which has been set to true which will turn on the Archive for this particular Custom Post Type, normally it would default to false though! — But we can take that a step further because when it’s set to true it’ll fallback to the value in the slug argument. So here that would make it site.com/project/ which just wouldn’t look quite right!

'has_archive' => 'projects'

All we did was substitute true with projects which therefore shows site.com/projects/ as being home instead. Now we know we can do that, we can do all sorts of things (get creative), we don’t need to keep it in line with our Projects Post Type.

'has_archive' => 'work'

Thinking outside-the-box gives you site.com/work/ which is different, the option is yours!

What Else Might I Need To Know

A new archive-{$post_type}.php template was introduced although it will fallback to archive.php if it can’t find the appropriate template for the job. So for our Projects Post Type, as projects happens to be the value we used for the Custom Post Type, we’d call our template archive-projects.php — Similar to if we used the portfolio value for a Portfolio Post Type we’d end up calling our template archive-portfolio.php and so on.

If you get a 404 error when trying to view the Custom Post Type Archive then simply visit Settings > Permalink which will flush your rewrite rules for you, it’s as simple as that, and there we have it!