Comments on: Wordpress discussion, anyone?

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:29:10 +0000

Sounds like a good idea and I’d love to help with the session. I’m no expert but I’ve managed to learn enough to customize installations for myself and friends.

By: Beth Still

Beth Still — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:05:00 +0000

I would attend a session on WordPress. I set up an account about 2 months ago, but I put it on the back burner while completing other things this summer. I am very interested in learning all I can about it.

By: Dean Shareski

Dean Shareski — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:47:26 +0000

I’d be interested and after just reading Alan’s post on WP, want to get more “hard core”. I’ve done the odd hack but certainly would love to learn more. I’ve been using WP and trying to use it less like a blog and more like a traditional website. That’s the versatility it offers but I’m not all that sure how to make some of those things happen.

I’ve been using Podpress and for the most part, it’s been okay. But I understand Alan’s point and on one of my other sites, it’s never worked properly.

But yes, A WP session would be great.

By: Wesley Fryer

Wesley Fryer — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:20:31 +0000

Excellent Alan, thanks for the advice and the links… I’m bummed you will miss NECC this year, it would have been great to meet you in person as well as hear your contributions to this discussion offline! I will check out Anarchy Media Player. I’ve liked the stats feature of PodPress, but perhaps I can do the same thing another way using a service like PodTrac or Blubrry. Are you able to track individual episode downloads another way, since you are not using PodPress? I’ve got my RSS feed for my blog set to use the PodPress URLs (which redirect) so for me it would involve a fair bit of work to abandon PodPress at this point.

By: Alan Levine

Alan Levine — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:00:02 +0000

I’d be game if I were there, though it might be tough as the spectrum of WP-ness will run from total novice to a few hard corers.

From my experience, I’d steer clear of PodPress- sure it has a gazillion features, but the code is monstrous, updates like every other week, and i had too many cases where it mangled my templates. What is problematic is that it stores content in custom fields, whereas many other plugins simple convert media URLs to links/players in the post and enclosures in the feeds.

I use Anarchy Media PLayer on all my sites- it is simple and just converts media URLs as needed.

Most important tip for newbies- turn off the damn visual editor. The basic one is quasi visual. It munges more things than I can list.

My interest has been ripping templates apart and using blog software to build web sites that don’t look like blogs, a full project I did last fall is spelled out at:
http://cogdogblog.com/2008/02/14/wordpressing-dissected/

and from a presentation I did in Feb, I had people tag web sites that are run in blog software that dont look like blogs:
http://del.icio.us/tag/notcatdiaries

Curious to see who shows up! Have fun