ChrisDigital.com : Digital Designer Blog by Chris Carvey

I went to my first Wordpress NYC Meetup yesterday, and I was pretty excited about it. It was serendipity that my work load started to ease up when this meetup was scheduled, and I wanted to hear directly from others what they were up to with Wordpress. Since I’ve had my head down the last few months fine tuning this blog, I also wanted to know about issues I might run into down the line with the pending release of Wordpress 3.0 coming later this year. At the time of this writing it’s currently in its second beta and a lot is still in flux. This topic was a hot one and it was reported 94 souls braved the rain and schlepped it to mid-town NYC to get some insight into what’s coming next for Wordpress fans….

I’m using a theme for my blog called “Journalist”. I wanted something no-nonsense, with a minimalist 2 column layout that I could remix to my taste. Once I read Matt Mullenweg (founder of Automattic) uses it, I was sold. I realized when making this choice, I was using an older theme (optimized for 2.7) and I was aware it didn’t have some of the bells and whistles of some of the more expansive Wordpress theme frameworks. This made me mindful to continually review what I was doing, looking out for conflicts with the latest Wordpress install, and researching features I needed to add myself. I’m glad I stayed on top of this, because a SEO problem was occurring in my header.php file I didn’t catch originally when I was tweaking the theme…

I’ve been working a lot in Wordpress lately, and it started to dawn on me how powerful the software is. I can only imagine what’s coming in Wordpress 3.0. The power I’m referring to specifically, is the ability to use custom fields with posts/pages. This basically allows an editor the ability to associate related information with a entry or record into the database. As a simple example, visualize splitting an entry into 3 variations: Full, summary, tease (or large, medium, small) and have every thing encapsulated in the same database record. Here on ChrisDigital’s Digital Designer Blog, I’m using this in the Bookmark links section to grab the “referrer”, “source” and their URLS from each post. This is very cool…

Recently I ran into a weird issue in Wordpress as I was remixing an older theme for a friend’s blog. Like most people, I operate under the assumption that Wordpress’ visual editor will work as the name sounds. But sometimes you can run into instances where the visual formatting of the entry/post you see in the control panel, does not match up with the content’s appearance on the blog. Glitches can show up when you hit the publish button, in this case- disappearing line breaks are the culprit. The source of the problem is likely a combination of at least two things…