Over the last five years or so, I’ve worked a lot with WordPress — developing custom plugins as well as piecing together pre-existing components to build (hopefully) really great websites.

But WordPress is more than just a blogging tool, and can be more just a tool for websites.

My most recent WordPress-related endeavour has been in my day job.

I have been looking at taking various bits of information about business processes that thus far have been disparate and disconnected and structuring and centralising that information so it can be more useful.

I’ve been using custom post types in WordPress for different types of information. Custom Field Suite makes describing the metadata we want to store a breeze, and effortlessly provides a beautiful and usable interface for “mere mortals” to input and manipulate the data later in the WP-Admin interface.

I work in an education environment; a simple example of one of these entities is the lunch menu (formerly just a Word document with no meaningful machine-readable structure at all). This was a nice, easy and public entity to start with.

So, we have a:

• Custom post type for a lunch menu
• A Custom Field Suite field group attached to the custom post type
• Members plugin to control read and write access to that custom post type 

The final piece of the puzzle is using the WP REST API to be able to expose this data to other systems.

With a very small amount of code, the REST API can be convinced to enable access to these custom entities — and of course we still retain WordPress’ access control (with a little help from the Members plugin) to ensure we’re not too free with our data!

Now we have somewhere where non-technical users can go to input data and the ability then to export that data through the REST API into any other application. Because we’ve formalised the structure of the information, we have the flexibility to display it in all sorts of different ways that are appropriate for the medium.

So our lunch menu can be:

• Exposed via the web
• Displayed on a screen in public areas
• And more!

The lunch menu design was an exciting proof of concept of the idea. I’m now moving on to slightly more ambitious projects which involve using a little bit of custom ‘glue’ in PowerShell (but whichever programming language is appropriate could be used!) to write data from other external systems into WordPress for later use.

Getting information out of big proprietary information systems using their provided tools that require… shall we say patience… has been a challenge. But, once liberated, this information is now stored, structure, and now can be queried simply and securely for all sorts of uses.

Back in 2011 when I started developing for WordPress with Chris from Van Patten Media, I remember thinking to myself, “yeah, I can probably figure this out”. It perhaps wouldn’t have been so obvious then that building a skill set with a ‘blogging tool’ would prove useful five years later in a quite different context, but this is testament to the versatility of the WordPress platform and what it has become!

I am very excited to be able to announce that Total Slider 2.0 has been released!

Version 2.0 is a significant milestone in the plugin’s history, and brings a very important behind-the-scenes change to the way your slide information is stored. In addition to that, and a lot of cleanup work in the code itself, there is now the capability of having draft slides as well as auto-saving of those drafts, making it much more difficult to lose data!

Being a side project that has to fit in around my day job and other work, this has taken much longer to get out there than I would have liked, but I am very happy with the result. The particular challenge of making sure the data format upgrade goes without a hitch involved some extensive testing, but I’m pretty confident (about as confident as you can be!) that the upgrade process will be very smooth. In the unlikely event there is an issue, you can roll back the plugin to v1.1.5 without any loss of data. Obviously, taking a database backup is a good idea, though! 🙂

With this big infrastructure change out of the way, I’m looking forward to the future of this plugin. I hope we can deliver more graphical goodness (a slider template previewer would be nice!) and a greater variety of templates that ship with the plugin to support the different preferences people have for their sliders.

It’s really exciting to finally get this released to the 1,000+ active users (according to its WordPress plugin page) this software has, and I’m looking forward to making it even better as and when I can!

You can download Total Slider from the WordPress Plugins Directory.

As I move closer to the significant milestone of one decade of having this personal blog, I felt that it was time for a significant overhaul of the look and feel of this site, as well as some of its non-blog post content.

Enter the 5.0 release! 🙂

Responsive and Refined…

Rather than evolving the existing stylesheet and making changes, I actually started over, using a new SASS-based CSS workflow. If you look really hard, you will see bits and pieces of the old CSS hanging around that I have migrated forward for the moment. In the fullness of time, though, any of the old code should be gone!

The result is a site that is truly responsive — it is designed for small screens first, then it scales up to larger displays, rather than having a full-size only layout, but removing content for display on smaller screens. I did have a retro-fitted responsive system before, but this approach is much cleaner and delivers a more consistent result.

A Font First!

Adding to the use of Colaborate for headings from my last design refresh, this design actually débuts my first experiment with editing fonts.

Thanks to the GPLv3 licensing terms of Colaborate, I was able to take it into TypeTool, and tone down its rather characterful lowercase ‘t’ for use as body text. The result is a custom font that, while it has its imperfections with kerning and missing ligatures, is an exciting first experiment for me — putting my interest type design to some practical use. I hope I will look back upon this first experiment with embarrassment later on when I have learned so much more, but for the moment it is very gratifying to have something to say “I did this” about!

You can download my source files for this font. This font, as it is based on Colaborate, is also licensed under the GPLv3 with font exception.

A More Modern Portfolio

The content on my Portfolio page had definitely aged, and was long overdue an overhaul. It now focuses on four main areas — Devops and Automation, Systems Administration, Web Development and Software Development.

More to Come!

As mentioned, this is a big change, but that doesn’t mean I am done! There are various other places where older content and design still might be evident, and I hope to get to more in the coming weeks.

I’ve been fortunate this week to have a little time to work on Total Slider, my (and Van Patten Media’s) open source WordPress plugin for making those neat little slideshow things, like so:

I have been meaning to get to this project again for a while, so it is great to get a moment or two to give it the love and attention it deserves.

My focus thus far has been on a complete overhaul of Total Slider’s data storage format — away from using wp_option records and using a custom post type.

This change is not only the right thing to do to clean things up and follow best practices, but it opens doors to other neat features that will make Total Slider feel like it fits into the WordPress Way even more. Without making undeliverable promises, I’d love to see automatic saving of slide drafts make it into 2.0! 😉

One of the things I have found that is pleasing is that much of the code I have already written is sufficiently abstracted that ripping out the fundamentals of the data format has been a lot less painful than it could have been!

It is nice as well to use this blog for one of its original purposes, to give updates on the projects I am working on. 🙂

You can follow progress in the unstable branch on the project’s GitHub page.

I’m really pleased to announce that the WordPress plugin I have been working on with Van Patten Media, Total Slider, has now been released!

Total Slider is a plugin for WordPress from Van Patten Media that will transform your experience with sliders forever. Build your own templates in PHP and CSS, then preview the output in a beautiful WYSIWYG interface designed to blend seamlessly with the WordPress core.

Total Slider is released under the GNU GPL version 2 or later. We’d love your feedback, ideas, bug reports, translations and more.

Here is a quick 2-minute video introduction:

You can find out more and download Total Slider from the WordPress plugin directory.

It has been quite a while since this bit of software was updated, but please welcome WPGet 1.0.

As well as the milestone of reaching version 1.0, this version now sports a host of new changes, including:

• Switched over to Perl regular expressions for better forwards compatibility
• Ability to show only posts in a specified date range in WPGet&#8217s output
• Ability to show only posts that match a specific search term in WPGet’s output.
• Support for stripping links out of WPGet’s output.
• Drops support for PHP 4

The best way to install WPGet if you’re setting up a new installation is to use the hosted WPGet Installer. Existing users can upgrade their installations by running only Step 1 (‘set up for the first time’) of the installer and uploading the updated wpget.php file that will be generated.

Alternatively, you may download the installer to run yourself from the WPGet project page (or even perform a manual install if you are proficient in PHP).

The new release is also available at the PHP Classes page for WPGet and at HotScripts.

Just a quick note to say that I’ve updated my personal blog here to WordPress 2.7.

This is also an excuse to test out the new QuickPress feature on the dashboard to write a post really really quickly.

It’s taken me a little while to do some testing and making sure everything is all good – but my personal blog is now upgraded to WordPress 2.3.

WPGet is also upgraded to 0.7 as well – so I’m now actually using the latest version of my own software too!