Last night I debuted a 5 minute lightning talk at the WordPress Providence Meetup in front of an enthusiastic crowd of 30-40 locals with varying WordPress interest and experience. Entitled “That’s a WordPress Site??”, the presentation is a tongue-in-cheek, rapid fire debunking of 3 pervasive myths about WordPress: that it’s just blogging software (not a CMS), that it’s not meant for big business or enterprises, and that all WordPress sites sort of look the same.
All of the lightning talks were recorded, so we’ll hopefully have video of me engaging the audience with the slides sometime soon. The raw slides really work on their own as a 3 1/2 minute showcase, so I’ve published the slide deck – animation and all – in HD quality on YouTube for all to enjoy.
Last weekend I debuted a new talk at WordCamp Chicago. Aimed at developers, Customizing WordPress Administration might have been a little bit dry, but the tips – many of them unique to this talk – are killer for consultants looking to tailor the other end of WordPress for their clients.
The slides are embedded below the fold, couresty SlideShare, but they won’t do you much good alone. The meat of the talk was a walk through a simple Twenty-Ten child theme, the focal point being a functions.php file loaded to the gills with hooks and functions that customize the branding and admin experience. That download is also available below the fold!
Author’s Note: This is the first post in what we hope to make series: “Ask a Web Strategist”. These are intended to be relatively short, public answers to questions web technology and strategy we receive. Do you have a question? E-mail us!
Question: I’m all bent out of shape about the Flash vs. HTML 5 debate. I’m interested to hear your opinion about it. Will Adobe Flash still have a place on the web in 5 years?
Answer: Generally, trying to predict where any technology in a field susceptible to rapid change will be in 5 years is a losing game. Flash will probably be around for many years to come, but we’d bet on a much smaller place.
Ask any front end web developer to describe common challenges involved in converting (or “cutting”) a design. Ask a designer who’s savvy about front end web technology what the biggest creative limitation of the web “canvas” is. In both instances, you’d likely hear an earful about fonts.
For the front end web developer, it’s all about taking someone else’s creative – often designed on a highly controlled and extremely flexible canvas like Adobe Photoshop – and implementing it in the much less controlled and much less flexible world of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Sometimes, a design that look great as a static image or storyboard just doesn’t translate well into web code, especially when not-so-design-sophisticated clients have to maintain the content and some of the imagery.
Fonts have long been a classic example. A storyboard designer can use any font they have installed on their own computer to make a beautiful design, but hacks aside, web browsers have only been able to render text with fonts installed on the visitors’ computers. Since there are only a handful of fonts that are more or less guaranteed to be on all modern computers (think Arial and Times New Roman), websites have been limited to a handful of uninteresting choices.
On Wednesday, December 16th, WordPress Tavern published their interview with Jake Goldman, Director of Client Services at C. Murray Consulting. You can listen to the latest episode on their website, or download the podcast directly from iTunes. The 90 minute interview covered a lot of ground, including WordPress value perception, site design philosophy, the upcoming 2.9 update, and the future of WordPress.
Jake is also one of the lead organizers of WordPress Boston. Jake is managing the new Applied Track where he will be moderating a panel, and is also presenting “Themes 101″ in the beginner track. The entire C. Murray Consulting team will be in attendance… look for us there!
The original article covered 4 over-arching topics, and was so lengthy that the editors decided to split it into two parts! Part two – which focuses on customizing the administrative experience – will be published in two weeks.
Advanced Power Tips, part one, covers techniques for multi-block page / post content and digs deeper into methods for associating page content with post categories.
The report incorporated a variety of criteria, including adoption, mindshare, and third party support to reach their overall conclusion: WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are dominating the open source market. The 70+ page report, which discusses a variety of open source CMS topics, compared 20 top market leaders.
Joomla came away the leader in overall market share by a little over 6% (although WordPress dominated by a large margin in sites identifying as “blogs”) – a result that doesn’t surprise us; more on that below the fold. But digging into some of the key metrics we use to measure project success as a service firm – like user satisfaction – suggests a different conclusion: WordPress is leading the pack, and Drupal is just behind.
Source: 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, water&stone and CMSWire (2009)
On September 23, Google released Chrome Frame, an add-on for Internet Explorer (IE) 6-8. Chrome Frame allows websites to request that IE visitors use the rendering engine behind Google’s speedy Chrome web browser instead of IE’s native engine. A TechCrunch synopsis and the Chrome Frame page provide further explanation. This article offers strategic insight into why Google is aggressively pushing their own browser technology, whether Chrome Frame will succeed, and how Chrome Frame should be seen by web development clients.
In the 6 month since IE8’s release, competitors Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and even Opera, have all seen major updates. All of them introduced performance upgrades, in particular to their JavaScript engines. JavaScript is increasingly the engine for dynamic content on websites, from animations to on the fly content loading without page reloads (via AJAX). Google’s browser, Chrome, positioned itself from day one as focused on performance, JavaScript performance in particular. At least in theoretical tests, it more than delivers on its promise.
Last weekend I 
Ask any front end web developer to describe common challenges involved in converting (or “cutting”) a design. Ask a designer who’s savvy about front end web technology what the biggest creative limitation of the web “canvas” is. In both instances, you’d likely hear an earful about fonts.
