from Drupal to WordPress

As a guy with a good bit of Drupal experience, and a limited amount of WordPress experience, I’ve thought about writing up a little comparison & contrast essay for my blog. I just found this post from a guy who has a lot of Drupal experience, and is just getting into WordPress. I agree with most of what he’s saying here, and have definitely noticed some of the same stuff that he has. So now I guess I don’t have to write up that comparison/contrast post!

One note though: since I started using WordPress, I’ve been keeping an eye out for something similar to drush, the command-line tool for Drupal. Well, I stumbled across it today: WP-CLI. I’m not sure if it does quite as much as drush, and I’m also not sure if I’ll be able to get it working on my web host, but it looks useful.

too much to do this weekend

I just figured out that both AnimeNEXT and WordCamp Philly are happening this weekend. I kind of like the idea of checking out a WordPress gathering, and the Philly WordCamp would be relatively convenient. And I haven’t been to an anime convention in a few years, so it would be cool to drop in on AnimeNEXT and check it out. Maybe I can drive to Philly on Saturday and drop in on AnimeNEXT on Sunday? Of course, I need to fit my laundry and grocery shopping in there too somehow.

SSL is working

So my SSL cert came through (after about 12 hours, instead of the expected 4). I’ve added:
define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);
to my wp-config.php, and it seems to be working. I think it’ll be OK to have the whole admin under SSL and not just the login; SSL doesn’t seem to have slowed down the admin interface.

I realized also that I should make sure the WordPress iOS app will connect with SSL. According to the FAQ, it does, though I don’t know if I have any good way of checking that.

SSL for WordPress

After reading a little about Reset The Net, I got to thinking that it might not be a bad idea to order an SSL certificate for this site, and put, at least, the admin stuff behind SSL. (I never really thought about it much with Blogger, but of course the blogger.com admin interface was always behind SSL.)

So I went ahead and ordered a cert from my host, 1&1. They charge $30 for the first year, and $50 per year after that. So it’s not the best price, but it’s not horrible. It looks like I don’t need to do anything special to set it up, just click a few buttons and wait (then click a few more buttons).

For WordPress, I will likely try this plugin to manage what’s behind SSL and what’s not. Or maybe I should read this page at wordpress.org.

WordPress themes and Amazon links

Anyone reading this blog is probably tired of me posting about WordPress by now, but I wanted to write a quick follow-up post on my new theme. My base theme is Stargazer, from Theme Hybrid. I’m using a fairly simple child theme of my own creation, that tweaks just a few things from the main theme.

One thing I’ve been doing is going back through the old posts that I imported from Blogger, and trying to clean up any display issues. The first thing I addressed was the display of program code, which I think is looking reasonably good now. That required just a bit of tweaking in the child theme, and a switchover to using the Gist shortcode provided by Jetpack.

I also found that pretty much anything that I had embedded from any other site was getting messed up. I cleared up most of those problems using other shortcodes. So now, YouTube videos and SoundCloud embeds are looking reasonable. (And, as a side project, I replaced some dead video links with working ones.) In the case of some fairly oddball embeds, I just removed them entirely. Some were pointing to dead web sites, and others just weren’t worth bothering with.

The last big nut to crack was all the Amazon Associates links that I had scattered through the blog. Those were using iframes, and they weren’t displaying quite right. I messed with this myself for awhile, but eventually gave up.

The Stargazer theme is free and open source, but you can get support for it by signing up for the author’s “club”. Just this week, he dropped the price for a one-year membership from $29 to $10, so I went ahead and signed up, then posted about my issue in the forums. Well, I got a fix from him within 24 hours, I copied it up to my blog, and it’s working great. So, thanks to Justin for being awesome. If you’re in the market for a free WordPress theme, definitely give Theme Hybrid a look.

By the way, I’ve never made any money at all from any of the Amazon Associates links I have on this blog. But I like the look of the little product widgets, so I’m going to keep using them. (I stuck a fairly random one at the top of this post, for no particular reason.)

WordPress 3.7 Complete

WordPress 3.7 Complete” is one of the books I picked up a few weeks ago, on the “Day Against DRM,” when Packt had all their books on sale for $10 each. I finished reading it last week, so I thought I’d post a quick review. (I’m going to cross-post this to Goodreads and Amazon.)

WordPress 3.7 Complete” is meant to be an end-to-end overview of WordPress, covering pretty much everything you’d need to know to get a WordPress site up and running. It was last revised in November 2013, so it’s pretty much up-to-date. (WordPress was at 3.9.1, at the time this review was written.)

There are two authors credited on the book, Karol Krol and Aaron Hodge Silver. The book is reasonably well-written, with a few grammatical quirks here and there. (In general, Packt books don’t seem to be too tightly edited for standard usage and grammar.)

The first few chapters do a pretty good job of walking you through the basics: getting a site up and running, either on WordPress.com, or self-hosted; a brief overview of the admin interface; and some details on how to create content and manage comments. (If you’re looking for really detailed information on how to self-host, and how to get past some common problems, this book isn’t the place to find it, though it will give you enough info to get started.)

The book then progresses into more detail about the structure and content of a WordPress site: pages, menus, media, and so on. This is followed by a chapter on plugins and widgets. This includes a list of must-have plugins, which is a good general list, though I might quibble with some of the details.

From there, we continue into a few chapters covering themes, starting with a chapter on choosing and installing themes, and then getting deeper into the subject, including a pretty good start on theme development. This was the most useful part of the book for me, personally, as I didn’t really know anything about WordPress themes, and wanted to learn more.

The book also contains one chapter on plugin and widget development. (Again, this was something I was interested in, as I knew very little about it.) I would say that this chapter gives you a good basic intro to the subject, but if you want to develop a non-trivial plugin from scratch, you’re going to have to do some more reading, elsewhere.

The book also contains a few random chapters that I wasn’t terribly interested in, on podcasting, community blogging, and creating non-blog web sites. I just skimmed through those.

Overall, I’d say the book is worth buying and reading, for someone (like me) who has a little bit of familiarity with WordPress, but wants to learn more, and really start digging into it. I can’t really compare it to any other books on WordPress, as I haven’t read any others, but I’d guess that it compares favorably to something like “WordPress for Dummies” or “WordPress: The Missing Manual”.

My New Theme

As you can see, I’ve switched this blog to a new theme. Since I moved the blog to WordPress a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been messing around with themes, on a test site. While I did like the Responsive theme that I’ve been using here, there were a few things I wanted to change. I poked around with quite a few free themes, and explored a number of commercial themes, and found a few that I liked, but nothing that seemed quite perfect. And I was leery about spending money on a commercial theme, without really being able to see the code first, so I could tell whether or not it would be easy to tweak, or if it was coded reasonably well.

In the end, I settled on using Stargazer as a base theme, and created a child theme to fix all the stuff I wanted to do differently.

Stargazer is a free theme from Theme Hybrid that was released late last year. While it looks pretty good as-is, there were a few things I wanted to tweak.

I have my child theme set up to show, on the home page, the full text of the most recent post, and excerpts for the next several posts. And I also changed it to always show full-width on single-post pages, and to show the sidebar on the right on other pages.

The most popular, and most useful, posts on this site are those where I include any program code. Recently, I’ve been doing that with Gists. In the past, I’ve done it with either plain <code> and <pre> tags, or with those tags, and some embedded CSS directives. I’ve set up my child theme to apply a couple of tweaks to both the Gists and the <pre> & <code> tags. I think this will give me some decent-looking code blocks that should be easy to read (and easy to copy & paste from, if needed).

I need to go back to some of my old posts and clean up the formatting on them, though. It always bugs me when I find a post on a programmer’s blog with useful code in it, but the formatting on it is all messed up. Well, I don’t want that to happen here, so I’m going to spend a little time trying to clean everything up.