Not many developers would spend 300 hours of their free time spread out over eighteen months to make things easier at work. And not just his work, but the work of any one who develops using WordPress. But Kelly Meath isn’t just any developer, he’s a Nerd.
Kelly created the WordPress Developer Tools Plugin to speed up WordPress Development. He said it could potentially shave 30 hours off WP projects. Though Kelly developed the plugin, which anyone can download from WordPress.org, he made it open source last month so other people could add to the development of the plugin.
What does it do?
“It creates an admin user interface for many of the code-only enabled features in WordPress,” Kelly said. “It also adds many commonly used JavaScript libraries that we use at The Nerdery. It will also render theme template code snippets with details on where to place the code.
“Another bonus is that it acts as a ‘WordPress plugin admin UI frame-work’ so creating a new feature takes less than an hour (documentation on how to add new features is coming soon). Think of it as a collection of commonly sought after WordPress plugins rolled into one.”
So far the plugin has been downloaded nearly 2000 times and got a nice mention from Smashing Magazine.
It’s Pentathanerd week. The Summer Games will play out over the noon hour all week long with Friday BottleCap Talk replaced this week (4:30) by the grand finale and closing ceremonies. Reasonably good seats remain available. (Much) more on this later…
MSP WordPress user group meeting, Thursday, 6:30-9 p.m. at The Nerdery (free)
Topics:
BuddyPress for Dummies (Toby Cryns, presenter)
Moving WordPress to a new domain/server (Ray Champagne, presenter)
Chess: Tuesday, July 20 (preliminary rounds occurred Monday, July 12)
Scrabble: Wednesday, July 21
Pinewood LEGO Monkey Ball: Thursday, July 22
“Air Quotes” Quiz Show: Friday, July 23 (Quiz Show will also have a championship round at 4:30)
Sticklers on rules (from Pentathanerd founder Mark Seemann):
“Air Quotes” Quiz Show
Setting the scene: You’re in a game show. You’ve been given the answers. Well, some of the answers. Can you remember them? End scene. Freeze frame. Star wipe. The preliminary round of “Air Quotes” Quiz Show involves taking an online quiz about a database of questions, some provided before the competition. Some questions will also be about the Pentathanerd itself, such as “Who won the Darts Event?” The competitors with the top three scores will advance to the Championship Round (Friday). The top three will truly test their skills at memory, competing against each other in three final rounds:
Icon Recall – an image of 15 icons is shown at the start of the event for a period of time. After the second round, the finalists will take turns calling out an icon from the master image. If it’s there, 10 points. If not, the finalist is done with this round. Getting five correct earns a maximum 50 points.
Nerdy Numerics – finalist must recite as many digits in order as possible from one of three numbers: pi, e (euler’s constant), and the square root of 2. One point for each digit past the decimal point, to a maximum of 50 points. Hint: the numbers start with 3, 2, and 1, respectively. Now remember, after this recitation comes the recall portion of Icon Recall!
Showdown – three categories, one question each. Finalist in third chooses their category first, then second place. Get the question right, get 50 points.
Pinewood LEGO Monkey Ball:
Competitors design crafts that convey a LEGO person (or a reasonable substitute thereof) down a short ramp onto a field of point-valued areas. Where the LEGO person ends up determines the score for that run. Crafts may be constructed of anything (within reason: non-lethal, non-oozing, legal, etc) with the following three stipulations:
Must fit within a specific size (to be determined, for now say roughly a shoebox)
Must not have any external controls (no remote-controls)
Must be activated/initiated by the deadfall mechanism common to Pinewood Derby ramps
Scrabble
Competitors will be ordered randomly. Each competitor in turn will take seven new tiles and then have one minute to place a word on a standard Scrabble board, scoring points as per the game. Unused tiles are not retained. After seven competitors have placed valid words on the board, the board will be reset, allowing the next competitor to place the first word. The words will be tested against the SOWPODS [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOWPODS ] word list. Invalid words will be removed, and the player attempting an invalid word will score zero points. After every competitor has had a chance to place a word, the order of competitors will again be randomized, and play will continue with any existing words in play on the board. There will be a third round, after which the total scores will determine overall placement for the event.
Chess
Clocks will be set to five minutes per side with a three second delay.
Players will be randomly seeded into pools of four (or as close as possible).
Everyone in a pool plays everyone (there’s only time for one match each, random color selection).
Top 50% of each pool advance to the next round – ties advance together.
Darts
Competitors will have two sets of three throws each to get the best combined scores. Top 50% advance to the next round (ties advance together) until the field reduces to the top four competitors. Final round of four will determine top four placement. Ties in the final round will be broken by single sets of throws.
More rules may be added as needed (not that we’re just making this up as we go). Some rules may be made to be broken…
MSP WordPress meetings are free and open to the public; you need not be a developer to check it out from 6:30-9 p.m. Thursday. There’ll be a session on creating basic WordPress plugins. Please RSVP so we know how many pizzas to order.
Visitors: The Nerdery is open during construction, but please note that we’ve recently knocked down walls to liberate/occupy some much needed adjacent office space.
Tonight only, the Minnesota PHP user group graciously yields it usual first-Thursday-of-the-month slot at The Nerdery to make way for tomorrow’s Minneapolis-St. Paul WordPress group meeting. Please note that Minnesota PHP will return to regularly scheduled programming in March.
Minnesota PHP, Wednesday, Feb. 3, 6-9 p.m.
PHP 5.3- Mike Willbanks will go over new features in PHP 5.3 (major and some minor you likely wouldn’t know about unless you troll the release logs) as well as anything to watch for in migrating.
Zend Framework Introduction to Zend Application- Nerdery rockstarJustin Hendrickson discusses Zend Framework and utilizing Zend Application.
Promotors of last week’s WordPress vs. Expression Engine webinar hinted that there could be blood. Two Nerdery programmers trained hard for this CMS bout. They drank raw eggs and ran stairs, and then a nationwide audience of agencies tuned in for what turned out to be a rather amicable exchange. Or was it? Watch Thursday’s rematch above.
Here is a list of recommended plug-ins for both content management systems, with WordPress plug-ins submitted by (in this corner) Anthony Lukes, and Expression Engine plug-in faves from (challenger) Brian Litzinger.
WordPress plug-ins:
Dagon Form Mailer - This is my (Anthony’s) personal favorite because it’s easy to customize and it supports file attachments. Another favorite of mine is Contact Form 7.
Flutter CMS - This plugin allows for easy assigning of different data types and for easy custom page templating.
Inline PHP - This allows you to insert php code into the text editor.
All in One SEO Pack - Pump up your SEO. Customize page titles, meta keywords, and descriptions. This works out of the box and can be fine-tuned for super-users.
Google XML Sitemaps - Generates an XML sitemap of your site to better your search rankings with Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.
Akismet (comes with WordPress) - This helps keep spammers from posting comments on your blog.
NextGEN Gallery - Great photo gallery plug-in. Not an essential for every site, but this is a really well built plug-in that’s too good not to mention.
And in this corner, recommended Expression Engine plug-ins:
Structure - It forgoes the current template_group/template setup and creates “static” and “listing” pages that can be edited through a tree sitemap view. Traditional page style content and multiple entry pages can live within the same area.
Image Sizer - Resizes images as specified in EE tag and caches the resized image in the cache folder. If you update the original image, a new resized version is created. If the image is not on the server the tag will not return anything. The architecture is setup to only process images when needed.
FieldFrame - A framework for rapid development of fieldtype extension, FieldFrame will be included as part of EE 2 core when 2.1 is released.
nGen File Field - nGen File Field is a field type for the FieldFrame framework thatadds a custom field type allowing you to upload files from the Publish/Edit interface, and also functions as part of the FF Matrix. This extension is useful for creating galleries and downloading libraries.
If you barely know the difference between WordPress and bench-press, this evening’s WordPress user group meeting is for you.
MSP WordPress is a relatively new user group to gather here at The Nerdery, and this evening’s meeting features a couple beginner-oriented Q&A sessions. About 40 people have already registered, and please RSVP so we can order enough pizza for all.
Here’s what’s happening and when:
6:30 – 7:00 pm: Social
7:00 – 7:05 pm: Salutations
7:05 – 7:55 pm: Session 1:
Super Basic “I know nothing about WordPress” Beginners’ Q&A, led by Gillian Reynolds
“I know a little bit about WordPress” Beginners’ Q&A (i.e. How do
I install email forms? How do I change the website title?), led by Josh Leuze
7:55 – 8:05: You are free to move about The Nerdery
8:05 – 8:55 pm: Session 2:
Blogging with WordPress, led by Mitch Hislop
MSPWordpress.com Website Discussion, led by Toby and Gillian
9:00 pm: You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here
OK, so a few people who thought they were Nerdery-bound last month for the first-ever meeting of the Minneapolis St. Paul WordPress User Group got a bum steer and ended up at our old office (come on, GoogleMaps).
Don’t let this happen to you. Sierra Bravo, home of the Nerdery, is at 9555 James Ave S in Bloomington. Mingling begins at 6:30 p.m. with breakout sessions from 7-9.
Session 1 @ 7 p.m.:
* 25 Reasons to help you sell WordPress to your client (Adria Richards)
* Using WordPress as a CMS for Flash or Flex (Judah Frangipane)
Session 2 @ 8 p.m.:
* My favorite plugins for using WordPress as a CMS (Gillian Reynolds)
* WordPress freelancer’s discussion (Toby Cryns)
It’s free, there’ll be pizza, and if you have a beverage of choice (no hip flasks, please), bring it. Help the Nerdery roll out enough red carpet for all by telling us you’re coming – please leave us a comment or click here to register.
