BuddyPress, for those who don’t know yet, is a plugin for WordPress that turns it into a fully featured social networking platform. And by social network I mean something of the scale of Facebook.
So this all good and interesting but the major draw back of BuddyPress was that it only worked with WordPress Mu. Well fear not because this is changind. The latest release of Buddypress is compatible with the normal version of WordPress. Very interesting indeed, and of course, like other project in the WordPress branch, it is open source and free for all.
Go on, give it a try, it’s awesome!
I know, WordPress 2.9 has only been out for a few weeks but we are already excited about the next release. Version 3.0 is something special though.
First it is a big number and with big number comes responsibility, hum, big features…
The major change is the merge of the MU code base and the normal WordPress. Which means any new WordPress install will have the power of WordPress MU out of the box. Meaning you will be able to install more than one blog at a time on the same install of WordPress.
The second major feature, for me is the new menu system, taken from WooTheme’s awesome menu manager! No more hassle.
I don’t know for you but I am less exited by websites at the moment. Designs seem to be less original and more predictable than they were 2 years ago. Their is of course some exceptions but in general creativity seems to slow down a bit.
Blogs are particularly affected, and I found that many many blogs, web design related, have the same kind of layout. This clean boxed layout very similar to the one I am using at the moment.
But slow down in innovation, learning and other sector that evolve a lot over time is always a good sign. It means we are close to a real bump. Like just before the web2.0 zero wave, when everything was dull and boring. I wonder what’s coming next…
The grungy trend as been around for a while now. You can find a lot of pretty nice portfolio or other sites using a mach up of cuted paper, hand drawn element and various other stuff but it hasn’t been embraced by the e-commerce sector as much.
Their is a good reason for that of course. Grungy doesn’t always inspire trust to the eyes of lambda users and also tend better target young audience, less likely to buy.
With that said I found 10 e-commerce sites that use grungy in a very attractive way. Continue reading “10 Awesome grungy e-commerce sites”
Filters in WordPress are used to add or override the core functions return. Usually filters come at the end on a script just before it returns the result. A filter send a variable to a range of registered functions that will modify it and return the new variable.
The good thing is that you can have more than one function per filter but also that you can add you own function to existing filters very easily. Continue reading “The power of filters in WordPress”
In a previous article about mistakes people do when writing plugin I said one of them was to input css/javascript even on pages where they are not needed.
This started a quick discussion on the comments about the possibility of intercepting plugins wp_head call to remove unnecessary inclusion of stuff in the header.
The first solution should be to contact the plugin creator and ask him to make his plugin. This is open source after all and contributions should drive fix and innovation.
But when you don’t get any reply?
I’ve looked at a few possibilities and the easiest seems to use the remove_filter function to manually remove each hooks one by one. The down side is that you need to know the name of the hook to remove which will have you opening the plugin and looking for the it in the code.
function removePluginHooks(){
remove_filter('wp_head', 'cforms_style');
}
add_action('init','removePluginHooks');Not ideal for people who don’t know anything about code.
Then you would have to manually call the hook on the needed page/post, which again is not easy.
I thought about making a plugin with all the major plugins hook in it and make an admin page to choose where you want to include each hook back. But it is a lot of work and there might be a way to do this more efficiently.
So what do you guys think of this? Anyone has got a better idea?
Loading ...
Comments