WordPress

Trying Gutenberg

Posted on by Patrick
Wood type

Guten­berg is the new big thing com­ing from and for Word­Press. It’s a brand-new, rad­i­cal­ly-dif­fer­ent edi­tor for posts.

It’s slat­ed to be includ­ed in Word­Press ver­sion 5.0.0. Cur­rent­ly, as I write this, Word­Press is at 4.9.7. So it’s com­ing very very soon—possibly as soon as August of this year (ie, 2018).

It’s avail­able as a plu­g­in in advance, so you can try it and see what you think. So far… so far I’m lik­ing it.

Pho­to by Raphael Schaller on Unsplash.


WordPress talk: The Big Move

Posted on by Patrick

Appar­ent­ly my talk from Word­Camp Toron­to Dev has gone online.

in situ on WordCamp.tv

Found via WPDaily.co. (Holy crap, my name shows up on WPDaily.co!)

(Also: I’ve since updat­ed my code to use get_option() and its sib­lings in the Options API, rather than using $wpdb to update the options. In non-nerd words, I’m using The Word­Press Way instead of The Dumb Way.)

Maybe my Win­nipeg one will go live soon too. A boy can dream…

To Do list

Posted on by Patrick

Things I should do in the next while:

  • Make a list
  • Laun­dry
  • Install some project man­age­ment soft­ware and start using it for per­son­al projects
  • Go through the cards I got on my busy week­end and con­nect up
  • New theme for my site
  • Write, write, write
  • Prep for my readings

Addendum

  • Run some numbers

WordCamp Winnipeg

Posted on by Patrick

One great Word­Camp, indeed.

I learned about Ian Stew­art’s jour­ney from utter Word­Press “noob” to mem­ber (lead?) of the Automat­tic Theme Team.

I learned that there are still sev­en or eight things I don’t know about Word­Press, cour­tesy of Sheri Bigelow.

I learned from tri.be’s Peter Chester how to fix Word­Press when it’s slow (Find the slow­est thing; fix it; rinse and repeat).

I taught an intim­i­dat­ing­ly full room of peo­ple that Word­Press Mul­ti­site isn’t real­ly all that scary.

I learned from Reid Peifer about how you should man­age a dis­trib­uted team (final rule: GIVE A CRAP).

And I learned from Dave Pen­sato that while Word­Press is awe­some, it could prob­a­bly be more awe­some still. (Blinky FTW.)

Then I had some snacks and went to vis­it my fam­i­ly. A good day all around.

WordCamp Toronto Dev

Posted on by Patrick

Yes­ter­day I learned about IDEs, debug­ging, geolo­ca­tion, rapid deploy­ment with Capis­tra­no, remote con­trol, all the things I’m doing wrong on Word­Press and how to fix them, and that I appar­ent­ly talk faster when I’m ner­vous. On today’s agen­da: mobile sites, struc­tured data, and oth­er goodies.

Typography

Posted on by Patrick

I was fid­dling with the Evans site this evening — adding a post about dona­tions, etc — and came across this post, which made ref­er­ence to the wp-Typog­ra­phy plu­g­in. I installed it on the Evans site and had a look.  I must say, I’m impressed.

It allows for hyphen­ation, for one thing; it also han­dles wid­ows and orphans, some­thing that I vague­ly under­stand.  More impres­sive­ly — at least to me — it also han­dles “smart” quotes prop­er­ly.  Smart­ly, in fact.

This is a buga­boo of long stand­ing for me; I find it irri­tat­ing to see con­trac­tions like ’tis start­ing with an open­ing sin­gle quote rather than a prop­er apos­tro­phe.  This plu­g­in seems to solve it.  (If “’tis” is spelled right in this post, it’s thanks to the plugin.)

Pedan­tic? It sure is.  But we all have our pet peeves, & for what­ev­er rea­son, improp­er punc­tu­a­tion is one of mine.  And I’m glad to have stum­bled across a tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion to the problem.

Update: I see from the notes on the theme I’m using that wp-Typog­ra­phy is in the Rec­om­mend­ed Plu­g­ins list. I thought sound­ed vague­ly familiar…