On the weekend I replaced my last Drupal site with a WordPress one.
The main reason was that it and one other site had become resource hogs due to spammers. The registration tables were bloated and it felt like my host had downgraded my sites to a slower server.
That plus upgrading drupal is a nightmare of historic fails and plugin inconsistencies.

Although despite the reputation, WordPress conversions are not always smooth sailing. The old nextgen gallery plugin refused to create thumbnails. The forums all implied a memory issue but at 256m it should have been enough. So i went hunting for a new gallery plugin – responsive, stylish, lightbox and few negative reviews. I ended up with Gallerix – that also didn’t auto generate thumbnails but by then I’d had enough and stuck with it. At least you could upload a thumbnail specifically.

Creating custom post types and views was easy with the premium http://wp-types.com/ plugin. I created a different custom type for events, locations, craft and recipes.

But the creme de la creme was the premium http://wphostreviews.com/product/mappress plugin. The wptypes forum had sample code to create a custom maps mashup shortcode that pasted simply into the custom code section. Logically you create a map for each post, and when you filter by custom field, the map applies points of interest from the displayed post.

I haven’t migrated most of the data across yet, but you can see it in action at http://www.halloween-australia.com/trick-or-treat-locations/

The best thing was that the entire site was built through the WordPress admin dashboard. Not a single line of source code had to be edited – it was all configured in the admin screens. A large part of this is the flexibility of my favourite WordPress theme http://my.studiopress.com/themes/prose/ that I use on most of my sites now. Responsive, with tons of hooks for you to paste any CSS overrides, tracking, or additional functions you desire.

So now if you’re walking through your suburb on halloween and you’re not sure how far away the next location is, just use http://www.halloween-australia.com/trick-or-treat-locations/

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I did a survey the other day for a wine company.

It had arrived in the mail, had a nice brochure, offered a decent free gift for doing their survey, no strings attached. I mailed it off and promptly forgot about it.

On Monday I got a phone at work saying they had the free gift ready, and would like to deliver it this week. I asked if they could simply drop it off, but they (in very fast, hard to understand English) said they had to deliver it, and could do a free wine tasting at the same time. I said I really didn’t want a wine tasting, and preferred Tuesday if I had to, but they were quite insistent on the phone that it had to be Wednesday, and to invite others from my street. I repeated that I really didn’t want a wine tasting, and they repeated that I should invited others from my street, and that they would be there on Wednesday 6pm.

They didn’t leave any company name, contact details, and hung up.

So I came home early on Wednesday, cleaned up, but had my hearty dogs and giant sons at hand, just in case, as the phone caller had been quite pushy.

They were half an hour late. They came to the door, and I said it was quite late, I didn’t want a wine tasting, I wanted to prepare dinner, and they should just leave the gift and go.

Gee, they said they weren’t allowed to do that, and that I had to do the wine tasting. And that it was such great wine.

Rather than waste any more time of my time (when I could have been coding!), I stated that the survey had not mentioned anything about a compulsory wine tasting to earn the gift, and that he should just go.
I got him to spell the name of the company – Pieroth.

Then it was time to Google.

http://www.simonswineblog.com/2012/01/pieroth-home-wine-tasting.html was an interesting post – almost like a sales pitch – but got some quite negative comments about the pressured sales pitch from Pieroth.

http://pierothwines.hubpages.com/hub/pieroth-wines was another article that sounded positive (and then you notice the affiliate link in the text), but also got slammed by lots of people writing in with negative experiences with hard-sell tactics, poor service etc.

I’ve never heard of Pieroth before, but if this is their standard marketing practice, pushing people into wine-tastings they don’t want, misleading people about free gifts, then it’s not a company I will buy from.

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Dear Magento,

You need to update your documentation. It’s a consistent message across all the blogs and forums I’ve visited.

We want to build plugins that follow best practice, but finding documentation about best practices has proved elusive. Magento, more than most other sites I’ve worked on, has multiple ways that changes can be implemented, but really, one method generally stands out.

Whilst studying for Magento Certification, I read all the knowledge base, masses of blogs, bought two books about Magento, and ended up overwhelmed, and sadly disillusioned.
Even my favourite author misled me by introducing a topic, and then extended it in a different version.
The second book I bought was worse – he admitted to not placing files in the standard location, and there were enough spelling mistakes in his book to drive me crazy.
I saved pages from the knowledge base on my tablet for later reading offline, and discovered missing code statements – the “rewrite” override in particular.

(to be completed – just testing a new plugin…)

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Was just viewing a site through the Web Development Network console, to check whether tracking codes were in place, and noticed warning messages from Twitter that our Twitter widget was deprecated and would stop working soon.

?No other announcements? Followed the link, and apparently it was already formally deprecated and according to the forum posts, would stop working soon. We would have been pretty unimpressed if suddenly a whole bunch of sites started having errors where the Twitter feed used to be.

We used to just cut and paste the Javascript feed, adjusting height and width if we needed.

Now you need to login to the Twitter account, generate a widget and widget-id, minimal customisation (background is either light or dark!) and maybe a link colour.

Here’s a sample dark one – just to see how it looks:

Tweets by @ozgeekmum

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Sometimes you find the right plugin.

I’ve been playing with WordPress for a couple of weeks, reorganising my AdWords, AdSense, Analytics, Tag Manager, AddThis accounts into consolidated accounts. All managed through the lovely ManageWP interface.

This year I’m planning to concentrate on my Christmas in Australia site, beefing up the content and using it as a testcase SEO study. Hopefully.

I just added the W3 Total Cache plugin for WordPress. Before and after I ran a performance test through ManageWP.
Before I had a page speed grade of C.
After a grade A.
Page load time decreased from 4.63 seconds to 1.9.

Yes, dear plugin author, I’ll buy you a coffee.

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