Finally added some things I’ve worked on in the past the the work page of this site. Right now I broke things up into four categories:
Just updated the ACCCEA (Atlantic Cape Community College Education Association) website. They were one of the first freelance sites I built.
The biggest upgrade to their site was moving their blog from the custom one I built for them a few years ago to being powered by WordPress. As a result of the upgrades they now have a fully featured CMS (Content Management System). So now they can just login and make edits to their website on their own.
Moving the blog over to WordPress also gives them a much more feature rich blogging engine then what they were currently using. They can be a lot more creative when writing posts, adding images, video clips, styling the text, etc.
Just upgraded to WordPress version 2.5 yesterday. My host Dreamhost has a super easy 1 click upgrade, so it only took a few minutes for the upgrade. Just had to update the database and I was all set. My custom theme didn’t break, nor does there seem to be anything else broken (cross my fingers) since the upgrade.
From the user end not too much will probably change as a result of this upgrade. But the admin upgrades with 2.5 are very impressive. The whole look and feel has been overhauled in a good way. It took a few minutes for me to adjust to some of the changes, but so far so good.
The upgraded RTE (Rich Test Editor) is great, works so much better with Safari. The Add media functions are a great addition, including a YouTube video in a post just got a whole lot easier. Overall I’m very impressed with the upgrade and will begin moving my clients over to 2.5.
Found the Custom Fields feature of WordPress to be very useful. I’m using them on the posts on this site that have ratings. It’s pretty cool. I’ve also used custom fields for one of my clients so that they can easily embed videos into their blogs.
Setting up a custom field is real easy. Within the WordPress admin near the bottom of a Write Post or Edit Post screen is an option for Custom Fields. You can select from existing field names the enter a value for that custom field or you can type a new custom field name into the key field to create a new custom field. So, creating custom fields is pretty easy, but how do you now present that info?
WordPress offers a get_post_meta() function to work with the custom fields. Below is an example in PHP of using the get_post_meta() to display the contents of a custom field named video.
echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "video", true);
Three parameters are being passed to get_post_meta. The first is the ID of the current post, then the name of the custom field, and last is if you want to return a single string or an array.
I create a lot of web forms and like to share the data with those whom the form was created for. And while I was brushing my teeth the other morning I thought why not dump it straight to a Google Docs Spreadsheet, since most of the people I do this for are very familiar with working with a spreadsheet anyway.
Thanks to the Google Data Spreadsheets API this and many other features are possible. The site is well documented and the Zend Framework PHP client is a huge help. Luckily someone else had tried the same thing and documented it on his blog, so check that out as that was a tremendous help for me figuring out just how to do this.
The folks at Google have added some very cool features to the YouTube API. They now offer the ability to upload and make other write calls using the API. So now it’d be possible to have users make comments or even upload their own videos without leaving your site. This is very cool and I can already think of a few things I’d like to try out with this.
It looks like they’re also offering a Javascript API that allows you to control the player via javascript. Along with that they’re also offering a chromeless player too. So now you can make custom controls for embedded YouTube videos. I can’t wait to get started with these features. A custom player can really make the movies work better with someone’s site.
The PHP Client Library (Zend Framework 1.50RC2) was also updated today too.
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