Episode 31 of WordPress Weekly featured a special 1 hour 26 minute interview with none other than Lisa Sabin Wilson, the author of WordPress For Dummies. Keith and I grilled Lisa on the topics of:
- Writing a book for a piece of software which has an extremely fast development cycle
- How different versions affect the publishing of the book
- WordPress For Dummies The Second Edition
- Lisa’s thoughts on WordPress 2.7
- Lisa’s explanation on permalinks and slugs
- Lisa’s take on premium themes versus free themes
- much, much, more.
Keith and I really enjoyed our time with Lisa and wish her the best for the second edition of WordPress For Dummies.
Announcements: The two lucky recipients who will each receive a signed copy of WordPess For Dummies 2nd Edition are Chris Thompson and Lenire.
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Next Episode: Friday December 5th, 2008 8P.M. EST
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Length Of Episode: 1 Hour 26 Minutes
Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode31.mp3
Listen To Episode #31:
When I work with WordPress, I often find that WordPress is indeed for dummies in its flexibility and simplicity. It’s almost redundant. And WP 2.7 looks like it’s only going to make things even simpler.
And I mean that in the most positive way of course.
… And I was just about to flame you. Sucks to be me right now.
It is the point of WordPress to enable for what would be an difficult task in another product to be easy to do in WordPress. Take the wp-config file creation. You can copy and create your own or with the right permissions WordPress will create it for you. Most web applications do not do that for you. Hell, they don’t even give you a copy for which to base your configurations off of.
The HTTP API, I think also makes HTTP requests easier. HTTP chunked encoding is also handled, so that developers don’t have to deal with that mess.
Well, okay, I usually address things from the developers point-of-view. Yeah, from the users side, I find that 2.7 is easier to use than previous versions. It just works and works in the way you think it should. Which is the way stuff should work. Not that it can’t or won’t be improved in the future.
I have to wonder if I haven’t digressed to being a WordPress Fanboy, which I’m not. I don’t think I am. I did used to have a great hatred of WordPress, on the developers side. However, with the inline documentation and test cases, I think my complaints have been put to rest.
Yeah – all fine on well on most things except that ….
To open the java applet to insert a link takes around 5 seconds for it to load, resetting to open in a blank window takes another 3 seconds – surely there could be a way to default that to a new window?
… and there is no check box to insert a rel=”nofollow” when you need it, which means you have to go into the html and find the right link in the text.
The Java for the image gallery doesn’t work – on any of my installations and never has since way back at 2.5.0 – I’ve had to start using the plugin to disable it (on both Windows and Linus hosted servers with both PHP 4 and 5 – basically with every config I’ve got) … and as for slow – I click to add an image, then go make a coffee, then drink it, then rummage around in the cupboard for a pack of cookies and munch them, them finally it might have opened to allow me to browse for the image I want.
Apart from that, the sheer rate of upgrade releases is a complete pain in the neck when you’re running multiple blogs on different servers around the globe. Admittedly the upgrade procedure is fairly straight forward – but ohhhhhh, all that FTP-ing – believe me when you have servers in several timezones to upgrade, the connections can be depressingly slow due to distance.
WP really, REALLY need to focus next on an auto-upgrade system similat to Simple Machines SMF Forums – that’s a one/two click upgrade from within admin (and foolproof with it).
Apart from that – lovely piece of software and wouldn’t ever use anything else for blogging.
Ed
Great show Jeff. I think it would be a great idea to have someone on the show talking about the Framework and Child Theme concept.
I strongly second the need to have some podcast discussion re the effective and successful use of Child Themes. I’ve fooled around a little with it in my experiments and was impressed by the slickness of the approach.
It would be interesting to hear from Brian Gardner or Alex King as they both are great theme developer and Alex is even using this approach with his Carrington Theme.
Great post! Is this book available already?
No, it’s not in stores yet. The book is ready but they need the final okay of the WP Dev-Team, so they can take the 2.7 screenshots and put it out to print and finally to the stores.