Brainstorm Media

Styles – quick & creative WordPress themes

pdclark — Mon, 06 May 2013 20:25:14 +0000

There has been some great discussion in the WordPress community lately about the sad (and bloated) state of premium themes. WordPress already has an excellent theme customizer, but either because developer’s haven’t explored its full potential, or because many themes want to differentiate themselves with unnecessary features, we experience horrible inconsistency and bloat from theme-to-theme.

Don’t take just my word for it – Brian Krogsgard makes a call for something better than over-stuffed themes, and Chris Lema reveals the sad numbers of how huge these themes have become.

I think there is a better way, and it’s working today in all the default WordPress themes. This single lightweight plugin adds hundreds of options to the built-in WordPress theme Customizer when you want to change how your site looks. Once you’re done, it stays out of the way.

Take a look at these demos and downloads below. No more guessing what your changes will look like, or reloading for feedback. No more custom admin interfaces from theme-to-theme. The framework won’t get out-of-date, because there is no framework – it’s built on the WordPress core API.

Styles makes adding these options 100 times more efficient. Adding new themes is the easy part – there are many more to come.

Live Demos

Pre-release plugins

Main Plugin: styles.zip

And theme support plugins:

Please comment with any input or issues!

The post Styles – quick & creative WordPress themes appeared first on Brainstorm Media.

WordCamp Phoenix 2013

pdclark — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 16:36:32 +0000

Hi! I’m excited to be in Phoenix this weekend to help lead WordPress 401 with Erick HItter on Friday, and to share on Sunday about the medical and human rights database we created for Free Burma Rangers.

Friday: WordPress 401

Slides

Sunday: How WordPress Saves Lives

Freedom, Hope, and Custom Post Types

Presentation Slides with Notes

Large version (PDF – 23mb)
Small version (PDF – 2mb)

Where Can I Find a Cause For Me?

catchafire.org is a match-making site that help people with talent find causes they care about. Thanks to Weston Ruter for the link!

Plugins & Code

Maps

Charts

Database Diagrams

 SQLEditor (Mac)
Workbench (Cross Platform)

Articles

Free Burma Rangers (Warning: Human rights abuses. Graphic images in reports.)
Fixing Wells in Africa
 Justin Tadlock: Post types and taxonomies: Linking terms to a specific post

Comments on Twitter

Wow, @pdclark just gave the best presentation I have seen at a WordCamp #wcphx

— Chris Lauzon (@squireX2) January 20, 2013

@kimparsell I got goose bumps, being there in person for @pdclark‘s talk. Amazing.

— Lance Willett (@simpledream) March 8, 2013

It is immediately obvious that @pdclark is passionate about #wordpress and freedom. “You are changing the world” #wcphx

— Betsy Cohen (@betsela) January 20, 2013

First user test for freeburmarangers.org in a Burmese jungle with medics who don’t speak English, never used computers @pdclark #wcphx

— Betsy Cohen (@betsela) January 20, 2013

The post WordCamp Phoenix 2013 appeared first on Brainstorm Media.

Plugin for WordPress Developers: Uploads by Proxy

pdclark — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 05:30:09 +0000

This is a tool we came up with that can save WordPress developers a bit of time. Ever wonder why you’re waiting for a progress bar to go by while a site’s uploads directory downloads to your local installation? This plugin solves that problem.

We recently switched over to hosting our high-performance sites with WP Engine. They’re an awesome WordPress-specific host that is really great to have as a partner. They are able to work really closely with us in recommending plugins and security practices that will keep sites running fast and safe. On top of that, they also run dedicated caching servers for dynamic content and CDN’s for static files like images and javascript, so files load blazing fast for users. If you can’t tell, we’ve been really happy with them.

Anyway, a very specific part of our workflow recently caused us to have a challenge to work out with WP Engine support. We use Git, a version control system, to allow our developers to track changes we make to WordPress sites while several team members might be working on them. Once changes are ready and tested, we also use Git to deploy changes to live sites. This allows us to avoid downtime while testing sites and releasing enhancements.

WP Engine supports Git, which is great, but they don’t allow Git to be used for versioning the wp-content/uploads directory. There are a lot of good reasons for this, since Git isn’t especially good at versioning images, and things get unstable once those images cause a repository to get too large. Most of our sites hadn’t fallen into that category in the past, however, and we’d found it most convenient to store uploads in Git just to have everything ready and in one place, while working around the “gotchas” that caused.

Now that we’re switching to WP Engine for a lot of sites, we had to rethink our workflow a bit. Ideally, we would manage WordPress the same way no matter where it’s hosted–fewer exceptions means fewer mistakes. But, we REALLY didn’t like the idea of switching back to FTP for downloading wp-content/uploads. Compared to Git, FTP is slow, insecure, and unstable. We could do development without wp-content/uploads, but then we’d be giving up chances to catch image display issues before we commit changes to live. We want our development environment to be as close to production as possible so we can release without issues.

This is where WP Engine’s awesome support comes in. Sean O’Shaughnessy went over-the-top in discussing technical details with us, and pointed us to strategies he’d seen in the past. We got a lot of great ideas out of that discussion, and then wrote the Uploads by Proxy plugin. It takes care of the uploads folder in a transparent way, so now we don’t need to keep it in Git, or even worry about downloading them from the live server.

Now when we’re working on sites locally, Uploads by Proxy will notice if an image that’s supposed to load is missing. Before returning “file not found,” the plugin instead checks on the live site for the image, and if it exists, downloads it to the local site right as it’s needed. It even works out complex DNS issues, so there’s no problem if the development and live sites both use the same domain name.

Thanks for all the help, Sean! Hopefully our plugin can help save time for other developers as well– less time spent downloading images means more time coming up with great features!

The post Plugin for WordPress Developers: Uploads by Proxy appeared first on Brainstorm Media.

WordCamp LA 2012: Freedom, Hope, and Custom Post Types

pdclark — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 00:18:01 +0000

Hi! I’m excited to be in Los Angeles today to share about the medical and human rights database we created for Free Burma Rangers. Below are links to my slides with notes, as well as links to all the tools and articles mentioned in the talk.