September 13, 2008 – 11:59 pm
Ok it’s been quiet. Too quiet. And I could easily say the standard cliches that work has been busy (actually yes), I forgot that I had a website (not that), I’ve been working on a large consultancy project (I wish) or even that I had an accident and I’ve been flat on my back in the hospital. It’s not really any of these.
Yes, I have been working on some plugins. The minor problem with that is that the ones we use internally at work are not in a good form for reproducing for others (it’d currently be too much work to get them integrated, but I am working on them). And if no-one has noticed, there are plenty of plugins already available for WordPress, and plenty of plugins that are very similar. So finding a niche that hasn’t already been written for is difficult.
Anyway the real reason for not being on this site (and the Internet in general) is that I have an upcoming wedding. My own wedding that is. To the lovely Natasha Macdonald. Anyway the wedding is mid October in the Forest of Dean and after the honeymoon finishes (beginning of November) I’ll be back to updating this site as often as possible.
In the meantime, bare with me, a wedding turns out not an easy thing to organise.
I’m still amazed from learning so much on the WordCamp UK meet. There was so many people to greet and so much information to absorb. Already I’m looking forward to next years event.
My thoughts of the weekend are mixed though. I generally thought it was a well run event (hats off to Tony Scott and his team of helpers) though sometimes only one session at a time made it more lecture than group discussion. We didn’t really use the other rooms in the building, although I am told we only had access last minute so weren’t able to plan anything around them. Next year though is already planning on being more multi session.
The most notable sessions for me were:
- Essential Plugins - I was using most of these, and have a couple of my own that I like. I didn’t realise that Role Manager can be disabled once the roles are set up. Useful to know.
- SEO for WordPress - Nice to know that my thoughts on site SEO are similar to the expert opinion. Definitely new things to use from this.
- Managing blog upgrades using Subversion - This showed me that I have been doing some things wrong (most notably around the use of .htaccess). And once I get my head around the use of external repositories I’ll be laughing.
- Large Companies - How to talk and persuade corporations that WordPress is a viable solution.
- Getting involved with WordPress - Submitting bugs, patches, helping the codex and many other avenues. One that I plan to do more off.
Not forgetting the two large panel sessions WordPress Question Time and Code Surgery Session, the later of which had Sod’s law editing a live site and causing an error just as the venue WiFi went down. Both these sessions were great fun.
The other sessions were just as good, including the one that I spoke in Blogging and Journalism. Hopefully I managed to hold my head, I didn’t feel under any pressure.
So thanks to everyone I met, and we’ll see each other soon in the (to be planned) local meet ups.
Finally the shock news that the Number 10 website will be soon relaunching with WordPress. That’ll be a site to watch!
Ok, it turns out that I haven’t even temporarily fixed cforms. All that I did was to get the styling working again.
2.6 has a new AJAX interface which is a must for those WordPress installations that have moved their wp-content away from the normal location, i.e. like mine. My thanks go to Sam Bauers and his Managing Blog Upgrades with Subversion session for pointing this out and saying that many, many plugins died getting us this information.
In the meantime I have tried to disable the AJAX, but although the form says it’s sent I can’t view the tracked database entries.
Update: The email copies I still get so at least the form is working well enough for anyone to still use.
Off to WordCamp UK 2008 for the weekend at The Studio in Birmingham. The running order has several sessions that should be really good. I’ll update when I can. Meet you all there!
This is the personal web site of David Page, a web developer based in Shrewsbury, Shropshire UK specialising in PHP and WordPress.