WordPress is the worlds most popular blogging software.

Content Structure

Must plan ahead for content structure. Many think WordPress isn’t capable of doing things such as departments, features, columns and sections. WordPress templates let you to filter by category name or category number. Start with a clean and logical system to simply this process. Ability to set up RSS feed for each category. Sections are set up with slightly different color schemes. Ability to display related articles on an article page left nav.

Category for front page, items classified here show up on home page. Create an e-newsletter by creating a category for stories you wish to appear in your newsletter. Keep category slugs short, but descriptive.

To change automatically generated category ID numbers, you must go into MySQL and update two tables.

• WordPress Posts vs Pages

Editorial Workflow

Normal editorial workflow includes Story Creation, Copy Editing, Line Editing, Publishing. You must extend WordPress plug-ins and techniques to enable each of the workflow steps to work in WordPress.

Plug-ins to enable real-world editorial workflow

• Custom Field Template
• Get Custom Field Values
• Co-Authors Plus
• Capability Manager
• Peters Collaboration E-mails
• In-Series (if story is part of series)
• Custom Field Images
• Simple Pull Quote
• Peters Post Notes (internal notes which never get published)
• Scissors
• NKMImageField
• Remind Me (for cross references within your site, if you change permalink structure, links continue to work)
• Public Post Review (send proofing link before posting it on the site)
• Suma (to allow paid subscriptions, this one isn’t free, but worth the price)

One of the big limitation is the WordPress loop, or the text in the body of the post.

WordPress Limitations and Solutions

Slides at http://bit.ly/D2WCPSB

Books by Rob Huddleston

Adobe Flash Catalyst

Catalyst is middleware. Start in Illustrator or Photoshop, then pull in project using Catalyst. Convert to Flex project, then go to Flash. Catalyst does have very basic drawing tools and could be used for wireframe or a very basic prototype. Biggest challenge will be training designers to create things in Illustrator or Photoshop that will work well in Catalyst. Fireworks has the ability export as .fxg file which can be imported into Catalyst. It’s important to remember, Catalyst is a 1.0 application. It’s stable, but there are obvious capabilities that are missing.

Complete round tripping with Illustrator and Catalyst. A plug-in is needed for Photoshop and Catalyst and it’s not as seamless. Catalyst is creating code, Flex projects are written in ActionScript and MXML.

Best Practices for Designers

• The web is not print, as different from print as video is from print.
• Design for interactivity.
• Don’t overuse interactivity. Realize when you’re enhancing and when you’re making something obnoxious.
• Stay organized. Become obsessed with meaningful layer names. Rename layers, group them logically.
• Plan your layer structure.
• Use a naming convention. Figure out logical naming convention and stick to it.
• Do not link to external files.
• Design assets to be duplicated. Come up with a way in your naming convention to notate these.
• Create outlines for text with filters and effects and text with uncommon fonts.
• Do the right things in the right order in Catalyst.
• Use components in Catalyst, everything in Catalyst becomes a component.
• You don’t have to be a Flex developer, but understand Flex.

Other thoughts on Flash Catalyst best practices

Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5 best practices

If you’re trying to use CSS3 now, you might run into frustration when trying to figure out the vendor prefixes and subtleties that go along with it. Here are CSS3 generators and tools, I’ve found helpful along the way.

CSS3 Generators

• CSS3 Generator
• CSS3, Please
• CSS3 Sandbox
• border-image generator
• font-face generator
• border-radius generator
• gradient & gradient button generator

CSS3 Tools

• CSS3 Selectors Test
• CSS3 Cheat Sheet (5-pg PDF)

We need your help getting rid of Internet Explorer 6. IE6 gets you from point A to point B, but doesn’t have a lot of extra bells, whistles or safety features. In 2001 it was competing with Netscape 4.

Five years later, Microsoft shipped another browser. Who thought IE was ever gonna come back? When we started working on IE8, we asked, how can we do this without screwing people over again? That’s why there are two modes in IE7.

You can put meta tag on page to determine the rendering engine for IE 7 users, though it causes problems for IE6 users. Microsoft has a vested interest to get users to IE 7 or 8. Moving them to Windows 7.

Free tools for IT Professionals, Designers and Developers: IE Compatibility Toolkit, Fiddler, ExpressionWeb. Some tools expire every x days.

Microsoft is working on users who don’t have auto-updates enabled.

Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview. Four things; performance, the same mark up, GNU-Powered HTML5, Platform Preview and Feedback.

How Can You Help?

Encourage upgrades and tell the users why and how their experience will be improved. Consider the level of support you provide to IE6 users. Analyze usage on the site you’re working on.

Troubleshooting cascading style sheets (CSS) can be a tedious & time-consuming task. Working with complex CSS written by another developer makes things even more challenging.  Here are my favorite tools for troubleshooting CSS. The best part about the tools is they’re absolutely free!

Browser tool bars & extensions

• Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar – add-on for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 that aids in design and debugging of web pages
• Firefox Web Developer extension – Wide array of development tools including WYSIWYG CSS editor
  
• Aardvark Firefox extension – Shows structure of a page & allows modifications using various keyboard shortcuts

Other tools

• XRAY bookmarklet
• MRI bookmarklet

What are your favorite tools troubleshooting and/or developing HTML and CSS?