As you may know, I am a big WordPress fan and I use it on a few of my ‘killer’ sites. Anyway, I just discovered that the WordPress nerds have used the Google Gears project to speed up the WordPress admin user interface.
What is Gears?
Gears is basically a browser add-on that allows Javascript code to run much faster. To use Gears, you as a programmer, has to build it into your Javascript code (as the WordPress people did ..) and for people to benefit from Gears, it has to be installed into their browsers.
.. You can learn more about this in this video I just created:
You can install Gears (into your web browser) here:
Creating a ‘killer’ blog is not that hard to understand … but it is hard to do.
As the title of this post suggest, there are three things you need if you want to create a ‘killer’ blog:
Start with a great blog software.
Get a great design.
Produce great content.
The list above is in order of doing, but not the order of importance: content is still king and so you must be able to produce quality content on a regular basis for your blog, otherwise it won’t work.
A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?
From a community members point of view, what’s cool about gravatars is that you don’t have to upload your avatar image on every blog, forum or community that you are a member of. And from the community owner’s point of view, you can now add a little pizazz to your blog or forum with your members gravatars.
What is the difference between a CMS (content management system) and a Wiki?
In a nutshell:
Both are web based applications/software designed to allow many people to contribute content (typically articles … but podcast and videos are becoming more common) to a website.
I would say the basic difference is that a CMS (Ex: Drupal) is a closed system where only certain people can add or edit content to the website/cms.
On the other hand, a wiki is an open system where anyone can edit and add content. The idea behind a wiki is that the masses will eventually correct any false information – with the help of editors.
My thoughts:
I’m no wiki expert, but I see wiki’s being more suitable to general encyclopedic information. If you need a tighter structure and control over what is being posted on your site, I would be leaning towards a CMS rather than a WIKI.
That said, I am sure that the differences between the two types of software has room for a lot of gray area – I’m sure some CMS software have WIKI like functionality and vice versa.
How about blogs?
Blogs are kinda like a CMS for one person. One other distinction would be that the blog traditionally is date driven – where newer articles are posted to the front page of the blog. As with the WIKI/CMS blurring of the lines, you see the same with blogs and CMS software.
For example: WordPress (a popular blog program) has CMS like features:
Multiple users can post articles.
You can have static non date affected pages. WordPress call these ‘pages’.
Beyond the CMS-like features built into the core WordPress package, WordPress has a huge number of plug-ins out there that extend it’s capability considerably … bringing it even closer inline with a true CMS.
I was just looking around the CMS and Blog scene, in terms of software, and I just finished taking another look at Drupal 6.
… Based on what I’ve seen so far, it looks very cool.
With this version of Drupal (Drupal 6.2) you see a lot of administration panel improvements and the whole process of installing and configuring Drupal has been streamlined. It is actually really easy.
Drupal 6 has a lot of other cool additions and tools like:
Built in triggers: you can tell Drupal to do things when say for example someone post a comment.
Better Forums: more features now.
Drag-and-drop admin UI capabilities. It is easier to manage where things appear on your pages.
… And much more.
Most important, Drupal looks to be much faster than it was in previous versions.
… That’s one thing that bugged the hell out of me about old and slow Drupal 5.
You can get Drupal at: http://drupal.org/
I know, short post. I’m just busy with other stuff.
This first article is meant to give you a global picture about creating WordPress themes. Let’s start by answering a few common questions.
Do you need to know PHP to create or edit WordPress themes?
The short answer is no. It would help to know some PHP but many theme designers don’t, and they do just fine.
Do you need to understand MySQL to create or edit WordPress themes?
Again, no. Mysql is the database that drives WordPress and is a key component … nonetheless, it has no impact on creating themes. So don’t worry about it.
What do you need to know in order to be able to edit or create a WordPress theme?
I would say that you need to know three basic things:
HTML/XHTML
CSS
The WordPress page hierarchy and behavior.
I think the first two are obvious, but the last needs some more explaining.
