I just requested a golden ticker for VaultPress. I will test it out and use it for my blog. I do not have the intention to use it with the intention of it. I will test everything out because it is a nice feature for a plugin I am working on, called SalesPress.
With SalesPress WordPress users will be able to create a webshop like it should be in WordPress. I got a small team now and we are sure we can build a better solution for what is now possible. We will work hard on it this summer and I think that VaultPress is a great add-on for the webshop. This because you don’t want to loose data and VaultPress will helped the users of our plugin to do that.
To do this I need to test VaultPress abilities since it need full support. Otherwise there shouldn’t be support because otherwise users expect the wrong thing. Till now this is the story and it will continue this month.
Since WordPress 3.0 is almost be released to the real world, I was thinking how WordPress 4.0 should look like. Today I watch Scott Berkun at WordCamp San Francisco 2010 and he got good points. His story is different then what I going to tell you now.
WordPress should be OOP based
To become a good blogging system also the code should be updated to the new techniques. It doesn’t mean that everything needs to be rewritten. I think a lot of code can be reused. The reason this is an important point is the way how plugins are builded. Some plugins are not working with each other because of names that functions got.
The downside of this point is that all the plugins will break. This will probably frustrated users and developers.
But to make something better it sometimes need to break. Because from that point all plugins will be rebuilded and can be checked at bugs, leaks and code improvements.
Plugin support
Because of OOP based every plugin will break. This is in my eyes a good point since everything can be rebuild like how plugins should be for WordPress like when you look at the user interface and user experience. Also there should be a system that looks at names of plugins. So every plugin can work with each other. So users don’t have to worry about that they maybe can break things.
This was also a point Scott was talking about. He one time update a plugin and the whole site got broken. I don’t know which plugin it was but it was an important point he made their. When that happens the user will be disappointed in that their site got broken and it cost time and they maybe need an expert to fix it.
I also mentioned that plugin should be checked. I don’t say every plugin should be checked but when a plugin is checked it should be mentioned to the users. You also could mention the developer of that plugin is a trusted developer because he builded more plugins and some of them are checked. When a plugin is checked it is trusted for the user and it has less change to break. This because it also checked if the user use WordPress functions.
Media support
The standard media support is weird to me. You can insert images, videos and music but to me it sounds like the same box. This is more a user experience issue that can be solved in 3.x. I think this is an important point since users keep using more media stuff on their blog. The way they do it should be improved. They know it themself and I really hope they going to improve it soon. The really should because now also custom post type can use them and the standard media box isn’t really extendable without hacking in WordPress.
A better database model
This sounds like a crappy request because the current model is extendable but how some things work now are crappy. One of the things is the new menu within WordPress 3.0. It creates the same dataset in the post table (Not sure what the exact implementation is now). The same with revisions. In my eyes it should be different tables. This because revisions you normal don’t look at. So why in the post table? To create a different table for it is probably not going to be notable faster with small blogs, with large blogs it maybe is. It’s something the database experts should say something about it.
Wrapping up
WordPress 4.0 should be a little bit more controlled by WordPress itself. WordPress is a great product and it’s a clean product. But a lot of users also adds plugins to extend their blog. But the control of WordPress to those plugin isn’t there. Everyone can add plugins what other users can use. And they trust the plugins. When their blog got hacked they complain about WordPress but the should complain about one of the plugins.
As of today I added a form to the WordPress page. You can use this form when you have a plugin idea or a question. As of saturday I will start with a really create idea to build a kind of webshop for WordPress calles Salespress. I will work on it with at least 2 other people. If you want to work on it to please left a message.
Also from now I will try to answer WordPress questions trough a kind of webcast. Not sure how and when but I will look at that when I got some questions to answer 
.
As you can see I already started to implement my own custom post types. It is pretty easy to do and gives you better control on your content. At this moment I started to create two post types: Projects and script library.
First one I already implement in my website. Still need some work but the begin is there. The scriptlibrary is something for later on.
Because I so love about this new functionality, I also applied to be a speaker at wordcampnl. My presentation idea I send is devoted to the custom post type functionality. I’m not sure if I will give the presentation then. This is something I will hear after the summer holidays.
For a iPhone app what I am working on right now I included Flickr. It is for a music festival. The reason that I included Flickr integration was because it fits perfectly to what people do.
People already take pictures with their phone, so why not share the pictures to the rest of the world. I finished that with the help of the API documentation. The only strange thing I came across was the API call to upload an image. The only response is Restfull and till that point I was using JSON. I think when you support a kind of response that it should be available everywhere. So my hope is that flickr will integrate the response.
For now i used the following piece of code:
NSString *logString = [[request responseString] substringWithRange:NSMakeRange(39, [[request responseString] length] - 39)];
NSString *digits = [logString stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:
[[NSCharacterSet decimalDigitCharacterSet] invertedSet]];
The output is the picture Id. I used that to add the picture in a group so people without using the app can see all the pictures that were made. The group I also use to load the pictures in the iPhone app.
But uploading only the pictures isn’t really meaningful. It needs a title and some tags. For title I used the artist, location and festival name. This information also comes back as the tags. This information will be get by the user’s favorite. I don’t use location yet. I first need to test how it will work since the locations can be near to each other.
Now you can upload photos what automatically gets some useful content. The user can overview the pictures that are made by himself and other people. I think this feature really adds something to this app and the festival.
For my school there is an award for best project in the current school year. I selected Par 23 for that. Till now I didn’t blogged a lot about it but in the next few weeks I am going to do. Most of the blogs will be technical since that is the work what I did till now. Hope to blog more about the code in the next weeks.
Please vote for me at: http://goldendotawards.nl/projecten/60
I started all complete over again. I started to install WordPress 3.0. It’s still in beta but there are some cool new features in it like the custom post types and the integration of WordPress MU. The last one didn’t worked that well on my site since I have my .nl and .com. This was easy to fix to build an small fix:
if($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == "markoheijnen.nl" || $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == "www.markoheijnen.nl")
{
$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] = "markoheijnen.com";
}
I started of with new theme of WordPress and changed it to my own need. For now I only changed the header. Later on I will include several kind of jquery stuff in my website like an smooth menu.
Also I going to build several plugins for WordPress like an portfolio and an feature header(got an small part). When my HTML website is ready I will rebuild the flash site I build.
It is a lot of work but I know itt is worth it.
