posted on 2013-07-18

categories wordpress

Manchester WordPress User Group July

In a boiling hot room in sunny Manchester, this month Mike forgets his laptop. D'oh! But he prevails :relieved:

WordCamp

WordCamp just happened https://2013.lancaster.wordcamp.org/, great weekend, went down really well.

Quick summary from an attendee "It was very good". Lol!

It so happens that the said attendee was in Mike's beginner class only a year ago and now he's helping people out at WordCamp. Gz dude!

Other perks mentioned about WordCamp; Great value for money, 2 day conference, T-shirt, beer and food. Unfortunately I couldn't make this one, but hopefully next year.

There's also other WordPress events taking place around the world including London, Amsterdam, Rome, Moscow and more.

WordPress News

WordPress 3.6 is getting there, down to the last few bugs.

You can download a release candidate and find out more about it here https://wordpress.org/news/2013/07/wordpress-3-6-release-candidate/.

May be looking at a few more weeks until launch, but can't say for sure.

Easter Egg in Revisions

Following these steps:

Screen Options Tab > Check Revisions to see it
Make some updates to a post
Compare Revisions
New UI makes this much better
Easter Egg = if you try to compare the same revisions then you get a Matrix Easter Egg!

Mike demoed this and although fun, I'd imagine it's quite annoying for a number of people.

I tried it out, but didn't seem to find it, so wonder if it's been taken out, either way, here's a quick video showing the UI.

If you'd like to keep up to date and see what's coming in the latest releases check out https://make.wordpress.org.

Custom Adverts

Although it's possible to setup a WordPress blog and host with WordPress it does have its drawbacks. If you'd like to serve custom adverts for example, self hosting is a better option.

WordPress can help with this https://store.wordpress.com/premium-upgrades/guided-transfer/.

Someone also recommended https://www.zyma.com/ for cheap hosting in the UK that comes with a one click WordPress install.

Plugins

https://wordpress.org/plugins/edit-flow/

Edit Flow was mentioned as someone had an issue setting different user roles and assigning multiple roles.

jQuery

Someone mentioned having an issue with jQuery, Mike added that it may be due to the $ / jQuery issue, that often trips people up.

I wrote a bit about this over at https://365daysofjquery.github.io/Day-003/.

Translation

Mike mentioned he's going to look into a translation plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/codestyling-localization/ allowing you to do translations from within WordPress. Useful if you're dealing with a multilingual site.

Technical News

A JSON api is in the works.

With this you'll have a different url, that returns some JavaScript that can be consumed by a piece of software. So rather than the software having to sift through the whole site, it can get what it's after quicker and more efficiently. This also works the other way, so JSON could also be used to update WordPress.

Mobile / Tablets

Using PHP, it is possible to detect devices with 'detect header' and 'accept header' user-agent string. Unfortunately these aren't always reliable as people can force detects.

Some plugins recommend to check out:

There's also an is_mobile function built into WordPress: https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_is_mobile

Performance

Mike points out to be careful when using minifiers as in certain situations things like @include in CSS and // (single line comments) in JavaScript can cause more harm than good if not executed correctly.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-sass/ is also worth checking out. If you're coding in CSS and haven't looked at any CSS preprocessors, it's well worth taking a look at https://sass-lang.com/.

Also be careful of where you need what. For example if you're only using a slider on the homepage or a contact form on the contact page, why serve the content to every page?

To aid with this you can use https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/is_page to specify the pages that you'd like those files to be served on.

bbPress Complete

:tada: Congratulations :tada: to @rhyswynne who has a book coming out: https://www.packtpub.com/bbpress-complete-comprehensive-guide/book and a book launch to celebrate https://bbpressbooklaunch.eventbrite.co.uk/.

WordPress Dev Books

Other books that people mentioned for learning more about WordPress:

It's also worth following @SiobhanPMcKeown on Twitter and following her blog posts as well as reading over the wonderful https://codex.wordpress.org/.

Local to Live

As mentioned in a previous meetup, https://serverpress.com/ is a service that can aid with working locally, then pushing your local WordPress site live, ready for all the world to see.

Git

Briefly mentioned as well as working locally, git is a great way to version your files whilst working locally. If you're interested in finding out more about git I ran a workshop https://s10wen.com/blog/2013/06/01/manchester-forking-fred-merge-batman/ as part of the events I run for #McrFRED.

Thanks again Mike, hope your dog is alright!