Front Cover

WordPress Mobile Web Development Beginners Guide on Packt Publishing Website.

Book Contents

Book is split into 10 chapters. First chapter deals with use of plugins to deliver mobile version of a website. Step by step instructions are included for few popular plugins. Second chapter is about using responsive themes that use same theme for mobile and desktop viewing, adjusting layout to different screen size using CSS.

Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 are dedicated to building a responsive theme from setting up media queries for different devices, setting the layout to follow the responsive approach, working with theme elements and optimizing content for smaller screens (images before all). Chapter 8 deals with the detection of the device visiting the page and different method for this.

Chapters 9 and 10 are dedicated to web apps, and methods for building them, and what plugins and tools you can use to enhance the app. Last chapter is about testing the mobile websites without using devices, all through desktop simulators for different platforms.

What could be better

Chapters on web apps are lacking and they are missing the much needed information about different mobile platforms and specific aspects needed for such apps on different devices. There is only a list of websites for different mobile systems and nothing more. testing chapter is also lacking information for more popular mobile environments, most likely due to the fact that only Opera has real testing tools for its mobile browsers.

Verdict

This is very good book. It was written for beginners, and it delivers relevant information for various methods on making mobile friendly website. Step by step tutorials in it are great, easy to follow and understand. There are some things that maybe are not exactly for beginners, but even code and CSS examples are followed by a lot of explanations.

Buy the book

You can get both PDF and print edition of this book from Packt directly, or you can buy print edition from the Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

 Win a free eBook copy of this book 

I would like to say thanks to Packt Publishing for providing me with a copy of this book for this review, and also giving 3 more eBook copies of the book for 3 lucky readers. Starting today, for the next 7 days you have a chance to win this book by sending the tweet about this review. On Monday, December 10 2012 at 11:00 CET I will announce the winners picked randomly from all tweets:

1. You only need to follow us on Twitter.
2. Tweet this:
   

   Packt WordPress Mobile Web Development eBook giveaway: http://d4p.me/25o - for a chance to win, follow @milangd and retweet

3. You can tweet as many times as you want, all tweets will be counted, tweet more to increase your chances to win.

Three Lucky winners will get PDF version WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook from Packt Publishing. I will contact winners via Direct Twitter message, and they have 24 hours to respond, or I will pick someone else.

 Winners List 

Giveaway is now over, and the winners are picked using random number generator website: www.random.org. List of winners:

• Sue Richards: @presentersue
• Jorge Purgly: @purgly
• ionut paraschiv: @ionutparaschiv

I have contacted winners via DirectMessage, and they need to send me emails I will send to PackPublishing so they can get their eBooks. Congratulations to all winners!

WP Plugin Development Cookbook

WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook on Packt Publishing Website.

Book Contents

Book is split into 11 chapters, each one containing recipes. First chapter deals with setup of development environment (under Windows with SVN and using Netbeans for coding). Second chapter introduces basic WordPress framework concepts (hooks, shortcodes…). Third chapter is dealing with plugin settings and administration interface. Next two chapters deal with custom post types and working with page and post templates. Chapter 6 is continue using custom post type to handle user submissions.

Next chapter deals with mySQL tables and working with data from it in the plugin. JavaScript, jQuery and AJAX got one chapter. And Chapter 9 is dedicated to widgets, with Chapter 10 containing recipes on internationalization of the plugin. Last chapter will help you submit your (free) plugin to WordPress.org repository.

What I liked

Each recipe is listing step-by-step instructions what to do and gives you detailed explanation on how it all works, including screenshots when needed. It is really easy to follow and replicate. Chapters 3, 4 and 9 are overall best chapters.

What could be better

First chapter is something this book can do without, and it would be better to have added more WordPress specific recipes than including most of the recipes from first chapter that offer only partial information on things that are not WordPress related. Setting up SVN (or other similar systems) is much bigger topic than it might look from this book.

But, my biggest negative point is that it only mentions object-oriented approach in one recipe and that continues to use functions only. It would have been much better to use each recipe to build on top of one plugin, and to give it proper files/directories structure, classes for different elements. I guess author wanted to have each recipe presented on its own.

Space given to JavaScript, AJAX and jQuery should be bigger with better examples on how to load JavaScript files and to avoid conflicts with other plugins using JavaScript on admin side. Also, book shows how to use outdated ThickBox control, that is being replaced with other solutions since WordPress 3.4, and it would be better to skip that recipe.

Verdict

I don’t have any other complaints about the content, and I am sure that it would be very useful to beginners or intermediates with development for WordPress. Maybe some future revisions of the book will improve some of the chapters and expand them with more recipes or update them to be more current with the latest version of WordPress.

Overall, this is a very good book and another great addition to Packt WordPress library.

Buy the book

You can get both PDF and print edition of this book from Packt directly, or you can buy print edition from the Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

 Win a free eBook copy of this book 

I would like to say thanks to Packt Publishing for providing me with a copy of this book for this review, and also giving 3 more eBook copies of the book for 3 lucky readers. Starting today, for the next 7 days you have a chance to win this book by sending the tweet about this review. On Friday, November 9 2012 at 11:00 CET I will announce the winners picked randomly from all tweets:

1. You only need to follow us on Twitter.
2. Tweet this:
   

   Packt WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook eBook giveaway: http://d4p.me/24x – for a chance to win, follow @milangd and retweet

3. You can tweet as many times as you want, all tweets will be counted, tweet more to increase your chances to win.

Three Lucky winners will get PDF version WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook from Packt Publishing.

 Winners List 

Giveaway is now over, and the winners are picked using random number generator website: www.random.org. List of winners:

• Ján Bočínec: @johnnypea
• Marco FABBRI: @MFCons
• Empowermentalist: @mpowermentalist (not responded to messages)
• Christopher McGrath: @digitalmcgrath

I have contacted winners via DirectMessage, and they need to send me emails I will send to PackPublishing so they can get their eBooks. Congratulations to all winners!

WordPress 3.4 was released month ago, and it has one minor bug fixing release: WordPress 3.4.1. I decided to wait a bit more before writing the review, wanting to spend more time using the final version on multiple website.

It is a good thing to have improvements in the core, like many added in this version, problem is that you can’t really use any of them in your plugins if you want to maintain compatibility with older versions of WordPress. Writing duplicated code in plugins for new and old WordPress is out of the question, and writing for new WordPress only is equally bad because of the simple truth: only small number of users will upgrade to latest WordPress 3.4 over the next 6 months. I know that millions of downloads counter on WordPress.org does look impressive, but that is still only a small part of WordPress websites upgrading. If you run WordPress business, you need to work with all WordPress versions from 3.0 (at least) and that means that it will be a while until you can use new functions and other things in WP 3.4. What makes things worse, is that old functionalities might be deprecated, and when you debug your code in WP 3.4 you will see deprecation warnings.

Under the hood changes include many improvements to XML-RPC, updated third-party libraries, improvements to WP_Query to speed up complex queries, updates to database schema, added many new functions (for theme API, terms, translations…) and deprecated many old functions, WP_Theme class and much more. To see full list, visit the official release page on WordPress.org. And as you can see, the list is pretty long, and I will not be writing about each of them. I will first go through things I don’t like in WordPress 3.4.

Negative

Theme Customizer

The feature that core developers spent the most time on is the one that is most useless: Theme Customizer – replacement for Theme Preview. For themes that don’t support it you will see only: site title and tagline and selection for the front page. For themes that support it, you can see extra options for background, colors and some layout changes, depending on the theme. While the idea for Theme Customizer is interesting, it is 6 years too late. All themes have own frameworks that include customization screens with tons of settings that can’t possibly fit into the limited space Customizer have and will require massive changes to support. It can be used for some simpler (and limited in number) settings, but nothing more.

Also, how many users really make changes to the way website look? How many have more than one theme installed? And how many themes support Customizer at all? Not counting TwentyTen and TwentyEleven, that number is zero (for now). So, we have got a very complex feature that new users will play with for a few days, and realize that they want to use some theme other than TwentyTen or Eleven, and they will never start Customizer again.

Same goes for any changes made to the themes selection: endless scroll (makes sense if you run large multisite with 100 themes, most users have 2-3 themes max), themes searching or keyword search for installer. All completely pointless.

Positive

Twitter support in oEmbed

There are many good things in WP 3.4. They are not some big flashy changes, but a small improvements and features that you will immediately like. My favorite feature is Twitter support for oEmbed: Just add URL to the Twitter status, and you will get Tweet displayed in the post, just like with YouTube videos.

If you click on the empty space on the toolbar, it will scroll the page back to the top. This is a great tweak that I use many times ever since it was added during development of WP 3.4. HTML captions support HTML now, and WP_Query is improved. Many small changes to multisite. Blog_ID column is removed from wp_options database table. Improvements to cron locking (hopefully it will be more efficient than before).

Speed (Not really)

With every major release in the past 2 years, I have made a benchmark to compare WordPress in resource usage and speed. For now, I don’t plan such benchmark for WP 3.4. What I can say about it is: WordPress 3.4 uses more resources and it is slower than previous versions. Even there are some enhancements that were meant to improve speed (smaller translation files), they don’t have any effect considering that other features had negative effect on speed and resource usage.

But, there is one thing that is faster: new WP_Query. When you have some complex query and large database, you will notice improvements on both database side and in PHP code. But, this only goes for large websites, I couldn’t measure any improvements for small websites and normal use. Still, I like that query can be optimized further and that I can remove some of my code optimizations made for Dev4Press website.

Should you upgrade?

I am always for upgrading to latest WordPress, and I have upgraded all my websites. There is no downside to upgrading, and you will be able to use some new interesting features. If you don’t plan to use Theme Customizer, you will hardly notice any difference from WordPress 3.3. You should upgrade because of the bugs fixed (always a good thing) and improved security. Standard precautions apply: make sure plugins are working with WP 3.4, make a backup and then upgrade.

That’s it really, WordPress 3.4 is another bland release that is more of a maintenance release than a real upgrade. But, until core development team doesn’t change the way the development is done, and how long development cycles are, I expect seeing at least 2-3 similar releases in the next year. Let’s hope not.

Last week I have published a benchmark of all 4 latest major versions in the 3.x line. I am sorry to say, this is first WordPress major version in 3.x line that is a step back in terms of performance and resource usage. WordPress 3.2.1 remains fastest WordPress among all 3.x.x releases. In some areas, WordPress 3.3.0 is even slower than, year old, WordPress 3.1.4. Over the past week many users after upgrading to WordPress 3.3 noticed slower admin side on their websites. You can find discussions threads on WordPress.org forums, on Twitter and on many websites with some users had trouble upgrading and ended up with broken websites.

Upgrading WordPress problems and slightly lower speed on admin side are not related. This performance drop is not a problem, it is not a caused by a buggy release of WordPress, it is caused by changes made this time, and those changes are mostly UI related. But, before passing final judgment on new WordPress, lets see all the changes and improvements.

Flyout menus

Flyout menus

First thing you will notice when on admin panel, is that menu is not the same. WordPress now uses flyout menus. All top level menus are always collapsed, except for the currently active one. To see contents for collapsed menus, you need to hover over the menu item. So far, community is divided on the new menu design. For me, this is one of the features that was added just of the sake of having new UI feature.

Old menus were working great, this is more a regression considering also accessibility problems for disabled users or users with touch screen devices. Not to mention that you will need more time to get to the panel you need. In any case, it will take some time to get used to it, but in the end, you have to get used to flyouts, I doubt that they will be removed in next version.

Reportedly, new menus work fine on iPad, but they don’t work at all on any mobile phone browser I tried on the phone with Android. Last time I checked, Android has more mobile devices than iOS, but no one bothered to test new menus there. Now, if you use touch device than is not iPad, you will need multiple clicks and waiting for pages to load needlessly to get to the menu you need.

As with any visual improvement, it comes down to personal preference, and I am sure than many users will hate, and many users will love these new flyouts. Too bad that there is no way now to have both new and old and let users choose.

Context Help

As much as I dislike the flyout menus, I really like new context help tab. It opens into a configurable tabbed navigation panel with sidebar area that is really a nice touch. WordPress has all its context help areas converted, and I have done the same to convert context help for my Pro plugins. Hopefully, more plugins will adopt the new help system and use it. For now, here is the screenshot for the context help in GD Press Tools Pro:

Context Help

Admin Bar is now Toolbar

New adminbar has much more functions than before, it can’t be disabled on the admin side at all, and it is called Toolbar. Toolbar is smaller and darker and it integrates all previous header elements and old admin bar. From developers point of view, there are some new things added to the toolbar, like groups in menus and few more functions for better control and better menu items organization.

Still, after using it for a several weeks now while in beta and stable, I would prefer to have old layout back. WordPress logo button and drop-down are not really useful at all to be always on, stupid Howdy is always there (more on that later) and the fact that it is always on and that it can’t be disabled. Right now, only thing that keeps toolbar needed is user menu with log-out option, everything else is not important. I can confirm that I will be adding new tools to GD Press Tools Pro to deal with at least some of the toolbar annoyances. There are few plugins in the WordPress.org repository to handle new toolbar and move things around. Also, users of Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu will be frustrated to find out that this plugin is broken in new WP due to the toolbar changes. I expect update soon for that, but having always 2 toolbars on, is not good solution.

New toolbar duplicates needlessly too many things from the menu on the left, and if you remove duplicated options, and options that are useless, you will end up with empty toolbar. That’s why it ended on both my pros and cons list for new WordPress.

New Uploader

Uploader and Media Library

WordPress 3.3 brings new uploader that supports drag-n-drop and is not depending on Flash anymore. New uploader is powered by Plupload library (from creators of TinyMCE). drag-n-drop is supported by Firefox, Safari and Chrome browsers and  Opera to get support with next major version. There are some improvements to the handling of media in this version and all these changes are great addition to WordPress, making adding of files more straightforward, since now all files are handled in the same way. On the editor toolbar, only one button is there to open media library.

Of all new features, drag-n-drop uploader is the one worth switching to new WordPress. If you deal with a lot of images, it will be faster to just drag them to the uploader when working on posts or in the library. Creating galleries will be faster, and more natural.

Core changes

While the most of the visual changes I find lacking, I like core changes. Permalinks are improved to allow proper use of slug only in the post links, and this new permalink format now doesn’t have any speed issues (before it required more SQL queries and depending on number of posts you have could cause problems). Now, the new post name only permalink is even recommended for links structure.

WP_Screen API is also improved to make creating admin panels/pages easier and more WordPress like. Best thing is rewritten editor API that allows for more than one rich text editor instance with no hacks to make it work, and it can be used on front end also. New jQuery 1.7.1 is included, as well as full jQueryUI 1.8.16. Post formats are now more prominent than before and they are available in quick edit mode also. I am not a big fan of formats, but I am sure that all users that use formats will welcome this change, it makes the process of changing post formats much easier.

There are more minor changes to functions, filters and actions, JavaScript used, but they are mostly low-level stuff and you can find all that in the changelog (link at the bottom of this review).

Pointers

Pointers, Welcome and About pages

To improve new users experience, WordPress got some interesting features: pointers, welcome and about pages.

Pointer should help with introduction of changes and features. While they look nice, after few days and several test installations, I find them extremely annoying. I expect that when plugins start using pointers it will make a mess on the page after upgrade. And I expect that we will soon get plugins to  always disable pointers.

About page looks really nice. You can see overview of new features, credits and freedoms tabs. Similar to this, new Welcome message displayed on the dashboard after installing WordPress 3.3 is a nice touch as well:

Welcome Message

There are many minor improvements that I like and that will maybe go unnoticed since they have a natural way about them and they blend into the interface. New toolbar icons and options are really great, new hidden-behind-icon search form on toolbar also. If you are using Tumblr, WordPress has new importer that can transfer data from your Tumblr website to your WP website.

Go away ‘Howdy’!

Removing stupid Howdy greeting from every single page should happened years ago. And yet, it is still here. And, you can’t change it. There are no filters that allow changing this word to something else. There are some complicated methods of replacing whole user item in the admin bar, but I expect that would break something else down the road. A lot of WordPress users hate that little word. It is time to get rid of it. Well, it is too late now, we need to wait yet another major revision for that. Was it that hard to add simple filter that envelops that word? I know it’s not, but some people decided against it. Problem is that now this is forced on front end too, because it is moved to new toolbar and that makes this much worse. Having a serious website on WordPress, with toolbar active, and stupid Howdy greeting your users, it is just wrong.

Plugins compatibility

While we go some new interesting core changes, too bad that they will remain unused for some time. Plugins need to be updated to take advantage of new editor, or new context help and other things. Considering how slow most plugins were updated before, this will take a lot of time. I expect that some plugins will be broken by new jQuery, and some will be broken with new editor. First plugins problems were already surfacing, and I expect more will be found. Good thing is that many developers are releasing updated plugin versions.

My Pros and cons list for WordPress 3.3

Should you upgrade to WordPress 3.3?

Yes, but:

1. Test on the sandbox to make sure that you will have no issues due to plugins or theme
2. Make a backup of whole website, files and database, so you can revert back if things go wrong
3. Try new WordPress locally to see how great new uploader is and to test all the changes
4. Clear the cache in your browser after upgrade
5. Clear the cache on website if you are using cache plugin(s)

I expect that current problems with new WP will be resolved, and I think that we will see 3.3.1 soon. It is important that only small number of users had problems upgrading, there are many factors that can be a problem, and not everything is direct fault of new WordPress. Upgrade problems existed with earlier versions, and will be here with future versions.

More important question is do you need to upgrade at all? Well, that comes to personal preference. There are no security fixes in this version that are discovered from WP 3.2.1 until now, there are no groundbreaking features you must have (except for uploader, but not everyone will need that), so test it and decide for yourself if you need new WP or not.

Useful Links:

• Detailed changelog on WordPress.org: codex.wordpress about Version_3.3
• Support forum on WordPress.org: wordpress.org Support
• WordPress Benchmark – 3.0 vs 3.1 vs 3.2 vs 3.3: dev4press.com Benchmark

Conclusion

My major complaint with new version are UI changes. What was wrong with 3.2 visually? Don’t mention the ‘vertical space’, because it is just a lame excuse. I understand the need to have design changed from 3.0 to get better looking menu with no space on the left, but this version I don’t get. I liked the header we had in 3.2.1, it was small and functional, I liked the fact that admin bar could be disabled. Now, we lost both only to get toolbar with 70% of useless options on it. All the great work done on optimizing WordPress 3.2.1 is undone with this new WordPress and unnecessary UI changes. I would prefer that WP 3.3 had: editor API changes, new context help, uploader and most important core changes.

There are several new things in WordPress 3.3, and many improvements that will be very interesting mainly to developers. Overall, I think that this is an average release, I have updated all my websites to WP 3.3 and I expected that all developers and users closely involved with WordPress will upgrade. But, the fact remains, this is once again mostly design-centric release that makes WordPress a bit different looking without many changes that will make a lot of difference for most people. Major problem with this version is that it lacks wide appeal, and I am afraid that most users will decide against updating. I have written about slow adoption rate of recent WordPress versions couple of weeks ago, and this new version will have same problem as WP 3.1 and WP 3.2 had (at least WP 3.2 was very fast, and even that didn’t help to get widely adopted).

Hopefully, users with WordPress 3.0 or older versions, will decide that it is time to upgrade after skipping some earlier versions. If that doesn’t happen, by the time WordPress 3.4 is released, we will have big fragmentation of WordPress versions on the market, and that is not good from plugins development and support point of view.

What we need in WordPress 3.4?

To stop needless UI changes. To get posts relations. To get usable posts and taxonomies management. To get improved user management. No more UI changes. Seriously, leave UI alone.

What are your experiences with new WordPress? What things you like and what you don’t like? Leave the comment and spread the word about this review.

YOURLS system and plugin are developed by Ozh Richard based on the idea by Lester Chan. I will not go into details about it, it is easy to set up and use, and you can find the link to get it at the end of this review. Main thing here is the other part for this system, plugin to bring the URL shortening to WordPress.

Yourls Service Settings

Plugin is very easy to set up. Install it as any other plugin, and open its settings panel. There are 3 different things you need to set up, and options are well documented. You first need to set the shortening service. You can use public services: bit.ly, tinyURL and is.gd. And you can use your own YOURLS installation. Once you do that, you need to set up the Twitter account. This is also well documented, and it requires setting up the Twitter Application that will be used to sent tweets through. After that, you need to set up the template for tweet message and options to generated short URL’s for different post types. You can set for each post type if the plugin should sent tweet automatically.

Tweet template support number of tags that will be replaced to generate tweet: author (name and all other user data), custom meta fields, category, tags, taxonomies and post elements. When the plugin is active for selected post types, you will get a meta box on the post editor panel where you can see the generated short URL, you can request new short URL and you can see the generated message, and send it manually to Twitter.

Over the past several months I have contributed to the plugin code with support for custom taxonomies, several bugs fixed (including AJAX powered themes like P2 auto tweet problem), made changes in generating hashtags from terms and few other things. Also, GD Custom Posts and Taxonomies Tools Pro has integration support for this plugin, and you can set for each post type different tweet message and control options for generating short URL and sending tweet message.

This plugin is a great solution for generating short URL’s regardless if you use your own installation for YOURLS shortening service, and to send messages to Twitter with control over templates and auto tweeting. I use this plugin on all my websites, I use my own shortening service and I highly recommend you try the plugin for yourself and see how easy it is to use, and how much it will save you time to get short URL’s and to send tweets.

Useful Links

Ozh Richard Home Page: planetozh.com
YOURLS Home Page: yourls.org
Plugin on WordPress.org: wordpress.org
GD Custom Posts and Taxonomies Tools Pro: dev4press.com

Regenerate Thumbnails

When you upload image in Media Library, WordPress will create resized versions of that image based on registered image sizes that include values from Media Settings and from anything registered by theme or plugins. But, if you make changes to these sizes down the road, that will not reflect to already resized images. This plugin will resize images for you according to new set image sizes.

There are 3 ways to do this. First one is to resize all images, and you will do that using newly added panel in Tools menu (image on the right). It will get all images, and resize each one, you will see the progress of the resizing. Also, plugin integrates into the Media Library and each image gets option for regenerating thumbnails. Bulk menu on Media Library also has this new option to perform resizing for selected images.

Plugin keeps all old thumbnails (they may be in use somewhere). But, I would prefer to have an option for this, because in development it would be useful to remove all images due to code changes. Beside that, only other feature I am missing from this plugin is scheduled resizing. But, considering that this operation will not be run very often, it is not really a big deal. Maybe it would be useful for some websites that have large number of images, but that in no way minimizes the usability and power of this plugin.

Regenerate Thumbnails is a free plugin created my Alex Mills, better known to WordPress community as Viper007Bond (or just Viper).

Regenerate Thumbnails
Alex on Twitter

From now on, WordPress requires PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.15. All respectable hosting companies are already up to date with PHP and mySQL (some even running latest PHP 5.3), but you better check to make sure that your hosting company is upgraded, or you will be surprised when after upgrade you end up with broken website. All modern browsers will do fine, and from what I have seen IE7 will work for the most part with some minor problems, IE8 is also fine.

Image below shows the new WordPress admin dashboard. New interface uses space on the page a bit better and widgets and other elements are looking more compact and cleaner. For the most part I like the new look, with exception of the top header section, I think old one was better. On the image here you can see pretty much standard dashboard content with addition of GD Press Tools Pro widget and execution stats in the footer.

WordPress 3.2: Dashboard

Interface changes also include improvements to post editor that now supports new full screen Just Write mode. Editor expands to the full browser window with toolbar on top. Once you start writing, all controls will be gone leaving only empty space with no distraction. I am not going to use it much, but I am sure that many users will welcome this clean and simple approach.

WordPress 3.2: Just Write Editor

New theme replaces TwentyTen, and its called TwentyEleven. Theme is HTML5/CSS3 based, and its faster than earlier one, but I don’t like it very much to be honest. I think that it would be better to improve on TwentyTen than go with new theme, but here it is.

Admin bar is improved with more options and menus added. It would be nice to have some extra control over what is in the admin bar, but plugins will take care of that. Next GD Press Tools Pro will have more options for admin bar control. Other changes are many minor visual improvements: login form changes, new links in the footer and more. jQuery is updated to 1.6.1 with jQueryUI to 1.8.2.

But, the most important change in this version is performance improvement. WP 3.2 is faster than previous versions (especially 3.1), and you will feel this difference as soon you upgrade. Better JavaScript code make loading of pages faster, and this is most noticeable if you use fast browsers like Opera or Chrome. All upgrades will be faster (especially if you use FTP for uploading upgrades, that was very slow before). Other optimizations include improved functions, partial cleanup of PHP4 specific code and more. During next week you can expect 2 posts with benchmarks of WordPress 3.0.4, 3.1.4 and 3.2 for both admin and front end side.

WordPress 3.2: Post Editor in blue

But, as with any new WordPress there are some downsides. Many of the updates will for sure break many plugins and themes that use jQuery due to changes in jQuery 1.6. I hope that plugin and theme developers are going to check everything and fix potential problems. I have tested my plugins and they are all OK, with some Lite versions coming next week to make sure everything is OK. Some users I talked to recently expressed their disapproval of new interface, but that is expected with any interface change. For me, I like the new WP look (for most part).

What’s next for WordPress? Now that requirements are sorted out, and interface improved, there are still several areas where WordPress is lacking. Most important problem is content management. I have said it before 2.9 and 3.0 and 3.1, and I am saying again, WordPress is not equipped to work with large amount of content. If you have few hundred posts and 20 categories, it’s not bad, but for large websites that use custom post types and custom taxonomies, this is a real problem. Changing taxonomies for large number of posts in the same time is slow using current batch approach, and still impractical. We need better, and easier to use drag and drop interface for handling posts and taxonomies with AJAX filters and pagination. I really hope that this will be one of the things we can expect in 3.3, and I will try to push the suggestions once the WP 3.3 gets in development.

For now, WP 3.2 is great upgrade to the platform, and I strongly recommend that you switch to it as soon it is released. Speed of the new WP alone is reason enough. Add better interface and other minor changes and WP 3.2 is the version to use. All core developers and contributors deserve big thanks from the growing WordPress community for all the work to make this new version.

I am developing WordPress plugins for about 4 years, and most plugins I made are created because I didn’t like the alternatives (free or commercial). And for a while, I planned to make a forms plugin, because several I tried over the years were not very well made and I always had to work on them to get the features I need. But, things had change, and now we have Gravity Forms that is getting better with each new version, and I finally can scratch my plans to make forms plugin. Trust me, Gravity Forms is amazing.

List of Forms

With Gravity Forms you can add as many forms as you want. For each form you can see number of entries submitted and you can control each from notifications and fields in the layout. All submitted entries from website visitors are saved into the database, and you can review them and you can save notes about each one or respond the people that submitted them.

Form Editor

Edit the form is very intuitive, allowing you to set as many fields as you want. But, for each field you can set all sorts of options to control field behavior and display. Number of form fields you can use is quite extensive, and includes validation fields (for email, or phone), hidden fields to embed all sorts of runtime variables (logged in user for example, or date, post ID or link…).

But, that’s not all, Gravity Forms has add-ons. Currently, there are 6 add-ons available. 5 of them will help you integrating plugin with Campaign Monitor email marketing service, MailChimp email marketing service, FreshBooks invoicing service, Twillo for SMS notifications and PayPal. Sixth add-on is for expanding default WordPress registration form and replacing it with form made using Gravity Forms so you can gather more info about the user during registration process.

Plugin includes default styling, but that can be changed and expanded so that you can give it better look for the theme you are using. All my xScape based themes all have custom styling for Gravity Forms so that they can get more native look inside the theme pages. Also, with numerous hooks inside the Gravity Forms, you can expand it and add own fields, values for fields and many more things.

Here, on Dev4Press, I use Gravity Forms for 6 different contact forms for the past 2 months, and it really made my life easier handling different contact submissions and responding to them. Forms are very flexible and so far, I only used hooks to add items into some of the selection fields, everything else is done with Gravity Forms alone.

If you decide on purchase, there are 3 different licenses you can get: personal (for 1 website with no add-ons), business (3 websites and basic add-ons) and developer (unlimited number of websites and all add-ons with priority support). All 3 include one year of updates and support. Whatever license you decide on, getting Gravity Forms will very much improve your WordPress powered website. Highly recommended.

Clicky: Site Analytics

There are many services on the Internet for tracking website visits and overall analytics, some are free, some not. More than a year ago, I have decided to try Clicky Web Analytics  based on a recommendation, and now, it’s the only analytics system I am using for all my websites.

For a long time I have been using WordPress.com Stats and Google Analytics (both free). But, both of them had so many things I didn’t like, and I never felt comfortable using them. I was searching for an alternative, and I didn’t care if the service is free or not, I needed something different and better. So, someone recommended Get Clicky Web Analytics, and after few days using free plan, I purchased Pro plan (tracking of 10 website).

Clicky: Spy

Clicky uses slick and fast AJAX powered interface, and there are many elements to customize and show on the main website dashboard for each website you are tracking. As for the features Clicky has, some of them are available with Free plan (one site tracking), but for everything else you need paid plans. Statistics gathered by Clicky is quite extensive and detailed and it can be exported into file. You can create campaigns and goals to track, and much more that you might be using already with some other analytics services.

Detailed analytics include visitors log, traffic sources (it can distinguish links, direct, search, social, media, email and rss sources), platforms statistics (OS, browsers, screen resolution and hardware), locale (by country, city, hosts and more) and much, much more.

Another really cool feature is Spy. You can see real time visitors and their actions with geographic location on the world map (see image on the left). Spy is really detailed and useful tool, with listed countries, visitors, actions and adjustable filters or easier tracking of current users.

Integration into website can be done using different types of tracking code, including asynchronous one that will give best loading performance and very small impact on the page loading. If you have WordPress website, there is a plugin that will integrate code automatically and also integrate parts of the analytics into WordPress for quick overview.

I highly recommend you try Clicky Free Plan and see all the great features in action, you will not be disappointed.

WordPress Top Plugins on Packt Publishing Website.

WordPress Top Plugins

Book Contents

First chapter deals with plugin basics including searching for and installing the plugins from WordPress.org plugins repository both auto install through WordPress interface and manual installing over FTP. This is followed by information on updating the plugins and troubleshooting common problems.

Plugins are divided into chapters according to plugins category and usage. First category is for content generating plugins and it starts with my own GD Star Rating plugin and some practical advises on changing thumb/star rating display. Gallery, tags, and other content plugins, forms and content scrappers are part of this chapter.

Next two chapters are for sharing content and style plugins, and here I have found several great plugins I never tried before. Overall, very good choice of plugins. Next chapter focuses on BuddyPress: setting the plugin, specific themes and plugins.

E-commerce plugins are next, followed by user related plugins. Security, maintenance and administration plugins end this book.

Verdict

For the most part, choice of plugins is good, and as I said, I have found myself several plugin new too me that I will surely try and use in my projects. Content for each plugin ranges from simple description to solutions for some common problems with that specific plugin. This is really handy for some complex plugins like CForms or some of the e-commerce solutions.

All plugins in the book are free, no premium/commercial plugins are included, and that is the something that such book really needs. Also, there are no SEO plugins in the book, and that is really strange decision not to include them. Last chapters on maintenance and security are missing some important plugins and on the other hand included are plugins that don’t even work with most WordPress versions, and are long time outdate. My own GD Press Tools Lite plugin is missing, and compared to most other plugins included, it’s much easier to use and more powerful.

But, even with the few problems, this is very useful book for WordPress beginners and even experienced users can find it interesting and find some interesting plugins inside.

Buy the book

You can get both PDF and print edition of this book from Packt directly, or you can buy print edition from the Amazon.

Win a free copy of this book

I would like to say thanks to Packt Publishing for providing me with a copy of this book for this review, and also giving one more copy of the book for one lucky reader. Starting today, for the next 10 days you have a chance to win this book by leaving a comment or sending the tweet about this review. On Monday, January 24 at 14:00 CET I will announce the winner that will be picked up randomly from all comments and tweets:

1. Leave a comment here and talk about jQuery, or
2. Tweet about this review follow and include @milangd in the tweet

Lucky winner is getting PDF version WordPress Top Plugins from Packt Publishing.

Giveaway completed

Winner of PDF version of the book WordPress Top Plugins is @NiceThai. Congratulations!

jQuery 1.4 Plugin Development, Beginner’s Guide on Packt Publishing Website.

Book Cover

Book Contents

I like the way this book is structured. Starting with some basics about how jQuery works, list of useful resources: other books, tutorials and cheatsheets. It’s a good thing that not a lot of space is wasted on the way jQuery works, this is after all book about making plugins for jQuery, and chapter 2 is already giving us basic information about that.

It’s a great thing to actually start with existing jQuery plugins repository, basics of how to use plugins and how the plugins work. This second chapter is here to give you basic experience in dealing with plugins.

Most of the book after this deals with different types of plugins you can create for jQuery, and it starts with chapter 3 and creating of first plugin, focusing on the right way to do it: how to structure the plugin, organize your files, dealing with plugin options and adding functions.

Plugins examples

Book has several very interesting and useful examples. It starts with images plugin that deals with similar problems like lightbox or thickbox plugins do. Next is plugin that handles audio files and getting a basic player in jQuery followed by the video plugin and example on handling YouTube videos.

One of the most important things when making a website is handling forms (contact, login, registration…), validating input from user before doing anything else. There are many existing plugins for this, but I think that example in the book on how to actually make your own plugin for this is very useful, and will help you great deal, since plugin for this will turn out to be very complex.

Starting with chapter 8, book deals with user interface elements and plugins that can be used to enhance user experience on your website. You will get tooltip, menu and animation plugins. Last practical chapter (12) gives you basic utility plugin.

The rest

In many cases is better to use existing plugin, not writing everything from scratch. Chapter 13 gives you overview on how to use 10 popular jQuery plugins. More in-depth reference is in Appendix A with quiz answers in Appendix B. Index (as well as the rest of the PDF version of the book) uses interlinking, so you can easily navigate through the PDF.

Verdict

Book does exactly what you an expect from beginner’s guide and more. Not only you will get good plugin examples, but all the explanations are written very well, allowing you to follow the process. Maybe it was  better to include few more UI/Forms examples instead of the chapter with top plugins, but that’s not that big of a deal. Also, I personally could go without quizzes after every chapter, but for beginner’s guide it’s expected to have something like that to help readers memorize most important facts from the chapter.

Now we only need a good developers guide on making jQueryUI plugins. Or at least an advanced guide for jQuery plugins that will cover jQueryUI also. Until then, grab this book and make some plugins.

Buy the book

You can get both PDF and print edition of this book from Packt directly, or you can buy print edition from the Amazon.

Win a free copy of this book

I would like to say thanks to Packt Publishing and especially Nikita Raykar for providing me with a copy of this book for this review, and also giving one more copy of the book for one lucky reader. Starting today, until Christmas Eve you have a chance to win this book by leaving a comment or sending the tweet about this review. On December 24 at 14:00 CET I will announce the winner that will be picked up randomly from all comments and tweets. So how to get this book as Christmas gift:

1. Leave a comment here and talk about jQuery, or
2. Tweet about this review and include @milangd in the tweet

Lucky winner is getting PDF version jQuery 1.4 Plugin Development, Beginner’s Guide from Packt Publishing.

Giveaway completed

Winner of PDF version of the book jQuery 1.4 Plugin Development, Beginner’s Guide is @4forme. Congratulations!

Here is the cover of this latest version of the book. Click on the cover to buy the PDF version for only $27,00.

Digging Into WordPress, Cover

A lot was changed from first version of the book, and now you will get several themes bundled with the book used as examples, code and screenshots are up to date with latest WordPress, and there is even a whole new chapter on WordPress 3.0.

This is a great resource for everything WordPress, regardless of your WordPress development experience. Even log time WP developers will find very useful things in this book. And unlike any other book, this one is always expanding. And if you buy it once, you will get new versions when they are released. Right now book has over 450 pages, almost 100 more than first version released last year.

So, go to the book website and get your copy. If you want to read my review from last year, you can do it here.

Book Contents

First chapter contains explanation of basic blog and WordPress terminology, followed by the chapter covering installation of WordPress manually and setting WordPress.com hosted account. Third chapter covers the process of creating posts, tags and category management, advanced posts options, comments and moderation, working with spam and introduction to Akismet plugin.

Pages, links, media library and plugins are covered in the chapter 4, and themes are in the next chapter. Another chapter covers RSS feeds and podcasting. This chapter introduces several interesting plugins that will help you enhance podcasting experience. Another chapter is dedicated to user management and explanations of user roles. Final chapter contains useful information for blog administrators that can help them solve some common problems.

There are three more chapters that are not really meant for beginners and they are covering creating themes and plugins, and using WordPress as standard CMS platform.

The Good

Chapter 3, covering the basics of blogging with WordPress is really excellent and you will find that information here is more useful than in the WordPress Codex documentation. Feeds and podcasting chapter 7 covers basics of feeds, use of Feedburner, adding and displaying feed in the blog and everything you need to start with podcasting blog.

Book introduces several interesting plugins that can help you with podcast, user management and other tasks.

The Bad

There are few things I really didn’t like, and that’s theme and plugins development. Both this topics are not really needed for WordPress beginners, and both require knowledge of PHP (and even MySQL) development. Both plugins and themes are much more complex topics, and here you will find only bits and pieces that will not going to help you if you need something like that. Both theme and plugin development are complex issues and each one deserves a separate book. This book would be much better without these chapters.

Unfortunately for some of the content this book is released too late. WordPress 2.8 is now main release and it’s very similar to WP 2.7, but some differences can be misleading. Such books should be written parallel with development and released as soon as the software is released.

Conclusion

It’s good to see WordPress book for beginners that will introduce WordPress blogging in an easy and understanding way with many screenshots to help along. Experienced users can skip this one, because there is not much they can find here that they already didn’t know. But, I really recommend this book to beginners who are just starting to know WordPress.