I’ll be giving a workshop on extending WordPress as a CMS at function pink() in Raleigh on August 31st.

“In the past few years, WordPress has risen to dominate the blogging arena. But it’s not just for blogging anymore! Since version 2.8, all sorts of goodies have been added to WordPress’s core that let you expand its functionality from mere blogging software to robust CMS. Things that once required a slew of plugins can now be done with a few edits to your functions.php file.

In this talk, you will learn how to make a child theme and extend it with custom post and content types, custom taxonomies, menus, post images, and more. Once you learn these simple techniques, you can start configuring themes to do almost anything, from dynamic image sliders to art galleries. Before you consider another CMS, before you install a complicated plugin, check out what a little WordPress dev can do for you!”

September 17-18th 2011, NC Dev Con: ”Comics and Design: How to tell stories with pictures and words.”

Every site has a story. It’s our job to help translate that story into words and pictures, to hold the attention of  visitors and lead them to the “happy ending,” be that clicking “buy” or filling out a contact form. I used to make comics for a living, and I find that the skills I learned making comics help me tell better stories with my web designs. I’m thrilled to be talking about it at NC Dev Con! I hope I’ll see you there!

I’ll be covering three things:

1. Why security is important (surprisingly, at WordPress meets, people seem more interested in hearing about plugins than securing their sites–this is why hackers don’t feel bad about ruining their digital lives)
2. Simple things your grandpa can do to lock down his WordPress install
3. DIY WordPress security, for more advanced users who aren’t afraid of a little FTP, htaccess files and tweaking their databases.

Come, join me, and we shall make the Internet a safer, less hackable space!

Custom post types vs. Custom post formats

My WordPress menu for managing comics

What is the difference between a custom post format and a custom post type? Actually, it’s a semantic nightmare. “Custom post types” actually should be called “custom content types” or “custom page types” because they aren’t “posts” per se. They behave more like pages, i.e. they don’t have RSS feeds (without tweakery), they don’t organize like blog posts, etc. “Custom post formats” is more like a distinction granted to your posts. They show in your RSS feed, in your blog archives. It’s a less messy, more intrinsic sort of categorization system. For instance, you could have post formats for “quotes” or “asides”.

Currently I’m using custom post types to organize and upload comics. This means that you manage comics through a “comics” menu the same way you manage posts in WordPress. They are separate, distinct entities on the backend.

But, what if it makes more sense to have comics as a post format? That means when you want to post a comic, you’d do it like you were posting a new blog post, just adding the distinction that this post is a comic. The comic post would then appear in your main RSS feed, lumped in with any other blog posts you might be making. Personally, I want to keep my blog posts and my comics feeds separate from each other, but maybe that’s me?

To settle the matter, I sketched out what the information architecture for both these options would look like.

Comics, blog posts and gallery posts structured with custom post formats

Unorganized WordPress Web Comic theme Information Architecture

This is obviously way too unorganized for me. Look at that long tail of sequentially uploaded content. If you tried to read from one end of it to the other, you’d be interrupted all along the way by unrelated content. Gallery post, blog post, comic post, blog post, ad infinitum. Maybe there will be some nifty way to separate those formats into distinct flow-paths, but this is a new feature in WordPress, which means that it will be six months before I can really do any backflips with it. (I had a helluva time just getting get_terms to paginate!)

Comics, blog posts and gallery posts structured with custom post types

(My) organized WordPress Web Comic theme Information Architecture using custom post types

This is an m-shaped information space. Look at how the blog, the gallery and the comics are separate, each with their own RSS feed, their own archives, and separate “flows”. There’s no way for any of the flows to cross paths. There is no archive page where your art, comics and blog posts are vomited up on the page in chronological order, much to the horror and confusion of a would-be reader.

Why does this matter?

Search Engines

When your site is getting crawled, spiders like to “feel” an underlying structure. “Ahh, this is an archive page for a comics series. Oh, here’s the blog. Yes, I see.” A T-shaped or long-tail content structure doesn’t help search engines form these distinctions.

Data Manipulation

It’s also easier to manipulate separate content types. You can give a custom content type its own RSS, its own archive page, its own search. If you used a custom post format, you’d have to find a way to separate its RSS, its archives, its search from the others. I find subtractive coding way harder than additive, so I personally prefer to build up rather than tear down.

Usability

I also think that the special comics menu item (shown earlier in this post) will make adding and managing comics easier for users.

Conclusion

In the future, I may eat my own words and custom post formats may turn out to be the more robust, intuitive solution. But right now its too new and too troublesome to restructure. I will be using custom post types for the new theme, believe it.

In the old days, I uploaded comics by hand to my own site, a long and necessarily arduous process. Going forward, I’d like to spend more time making comics, less time fussing with code. WordPress 3.0 was released soon after I decided to use it as my CMS, and it was just in time! 3.0 introduced custom content types on top of custom taxonomies and post images. With these three improvements, I don’t have to use  ComicsPress, a popular WordPress theme for web comics. ComicsPress is great, especially for comickers who don’t build web sites for a living. But I have special archiving needs for multiple comic storylines, and I also don’t like the standard web comic UI, which I will get into later.

Simply put, I think I can do better.

This is the first in a series of posts chronicling building my web comics site, from concept, to reader surveys, to design and completion. I was going to save up all my material and make one big case study with it, but I realized that my dislike of wading through that much information meant that it would most likely rot on my hard drive for all eternity rather than be published online where people might actually make use of it. And believe you me, I’ve dug up some pretty interesting stuff about how people read comics online.

lovemysmartcar.com's logo

Fending off bad viral PR is a lot like surviving grade school. Say you’re in class and you or someone near you farts (it doesn’t matter who actually did the deed). The guy next to you shouts, “Hey everybody! Johnny farted!” and the classroom immediately starts laughing at you. There are two ways to combat this negative publicity. You can insist that you didn’t do it. “No guys! Honestly it wasn’t me! It wasn’t! Honest!” But no one will be listening to you because they’re all too busy laughing. They will believe whatever interests them most, and won’t hear you. Or, you could retaliate with a snappy comeback, “He who smelt it dealt it!”

Now everybody is laughing at your accuser.

When I saw pictures of what was obviously not a smart car in an accident with two trucks, I knew I could either reply to every post and tweet I could find with, “That’s so obviously not a smart car, stupid!” (don’t ever do this), or I could turn the tables on whoever first released the photo as that of a “smart car.” It was important not to attack the intelligence or the cars of the people laughing at the picture and spreading it. Angering them would only cement their dislike for the car and would more likely than not spur them into further spreading the rumor out of spite. I needed to attack the viability of the source and get the people spreading the pictures laughing with me.

A quick trip to Snopes turned up no article about a smart car accident, so I trawled auto forums until I found post where users identified the wheel in the photo as not belonging to a smart car. Additionally I drew upon my own knowledge of Photoshopping pictures and composed a post debunking the fake smart car crash photo. I included smart car crash footage from YouTube to underscore the lack of evidence that the car could have been a smart while increasing the relevance of the post. And lastly, I found out what keywords people would be searching for this photo with, and I optimized the whole post to reflect keywords.

Before my blog was even a month old, before I had even finished its design, Google had my post listed as the number one result for “fake smart car crash”, “fake smart car accident”, “fake smart car photo”, and “fake smart car picture.” I had 1500 unique visitors over the span of a few weeks and 2700 by the end of the month. I posted the link to my article in reply to a few tweets and on one forum. From then on out, people would find my article via search and post links to it in any conversations that arose about the topic. That’s how social media works best. With today’s technology it’s easy to spread lies, but luckily, it’s just as easy to spread the truth.

A week after my post, the photo was posted on Snopes, and is now roundly debunked, not showing up at all in the Twitterverse.

Do I think love my smart car singlehandedly thwarted the viral photo? Not at all. Snopes and the natural cycle of viral birth and decay can take most of that credit. But I can proudly say that for a full week before Snopes debunked the photo, whenever people went looking for “fake smart car crash” or what have you, they at least found my post which discouraged the falsehoods surrounding the picture. If those 2700 people took what I wrote to heart, that’s 2700 people not believing a lie. I’d say that’s a win.

Part 2 of this entry will come when I put the finishing touches on the site. I’ll go into more depth about the nifty code I used, the inspiration behind the design, and it’s public reception when I officially launched it.

1. Akismet It comes with WordPress and protects you from a lot of spam. An obvious choice, but I thought I would put it here in case anyone new to WP was wondering if they should activate it or not (answer: YES).
2. AskApache Password Protect Helps improve security and pairs nicely with WP Security Scan (which we shall get to below). Edit: I ran into problems with this plugin and permalinks, which ended up causing my entire admin area to generate 404 errors. Be warned!
3. WordPress Automatic Upgrade Upgrading WordPress is a bit of a pain, to put it mildly, but this plugin takes some of the oof out of Upgrade Day by automating most of your work for you.
4. Chunk Urls for WordPress You know when someone posts a long URL in the comments and it breaks your blogs nice design and plain looks ghastly? This stops that. At last. Thank goodness.
5. WordPress Database Backup WP-DBManager Just in case something breaks, it’s always good to keep a backup of your database on hand. With WordPress, all your content, your entries, settings, etc, is kept in a database. Your site’s template or “theme” and administration files are about the only things that are kept on the server as live files. So backing up your files isn’t good enough to restore an entire site . But this handy plugin can be set to email you a copy of you database every night or every week, depending on your preference. Nice insurance against losing everything your wrote last week because you were twiddling with a new set of plugins. Note: I had trouble getting WP Database Backup to work, but WP-DBManager does backups and optimizes your database and lets you run database queries from the comfort of your administration area. Why settle for several slipshod plugins when you can use just one that works?
6. WP Security Scan After you’ve installed WordPress, there are many things you can do to improve your blog’s security, but you might not know what they are. This little fellow is like having someone hold your hand through the securing process. It will tell you what files need changing and where to find them. Perfect for anyone new to WordPress. There’s even a password tool!
7. WP Super Cache WordPress likes to bog down, but caching can help reduce server load and speed page displays. WP Super Cache is pure gold in that case.
8. FeedBurner FeedSmith I partly considered this a “buzz” plugin, but seriously, WordPress comes with so much lovely RSS support, you might as well make full use of it.
9. RSS Feed Signature Adding a little “this article by so-and-so, for more visit such-and-such.com” at the end of your RSS feed is not only a nice touch, but also helps exercise your copyrights by applying credit where it is due.
10. Lighter Menus This plugin only effects the admin end of things. It helps reduce the number of clicks it takes you to get to where you need to go simply by displaying all the administration submenus in easy to reach drop-down menus. No more clicking around in circles trying to find where the settings for some obscure plugin scampered off to!
11. Maintenance Mode I had to use this quite a bit when setting up this site. It provides a lovely privacy screen that only admins can see behind, politely telling everyone that your blog is down for maintenance and that you shall return at a set time. The page displayed is completely customizable, as well, and you can easily turn it on and off for quick touch ups and testing new plugins.
12. Redirection It lets you redirect pages Great if you like to move things around later, and if you know what you’re doing, it comes in handy for SEO tweaking (like redirecting index.html to index.php–a trick I learned about in this handy article regarding WordPress search engine optimization).
13. Search Excerpt An older plugin that still works remarkably well. It highlights the terms users searched for in their search results. I found out about this and the following plugin from Yoast’s excellent article on improving WordPress’s search results.
14. Search Suggest Are you sure you were searching for wrdpress? Would you like to try searching for WordPress? That’s what this plugin does. Fantastic.
15. TinyMCE Advanced I know how to code my entries by hand. I technically don’t need more options on my toolbar when writing a post. I’m a big girl. But then again, why type all that in HTML view when there are buttons that will do the work for you? TinyMCE Advanced gives you many more option when writing a post.

Do you have any plugins that you recommend for a basic install?