Scott’s Spiel

This is the start of my 3rd teaching week back at Uni and, to be honest, I’m still a bit bored. The problem is my current Student Selected Module (SSM) which last for the first 5 weeks of teaching. The term “Student Selected” is slightly inappropriate as this SSM - cardiovascular science (or heart stuff) - was actually my 5th choice out of the possible 6.

Unfortunately my higher choices were all a bit too popular. Top of my list was “Resuscitation to Recovery” which would’ve simply been awesome. However only 2 students can fit into this one with somewhere around 50 of us selecting it as our first choice. I would’ve settled for my 4th choice quite happily (Clinical Pharmacology) but I guess I had put that just a tad too low down.

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About 3 weeks ago I wrote a post showing some new features for WordPress 2.7. Since then there has been a bit more developing going on and this post touches on a few more features.

As I mentioned back then, things can and very likely will change by the time this release is completed so don’t come back complaining to me when things don’t look the way the do here.

A excellent post on the Weblog Tools Collection has also appeared between these posts and this goes into some more detail about the major additional features. The comments on this post were an interesting read with many people split over yet another admin design change. Whilst I can understand where they’re coming from, 2.7 does make a few good changes that I know I’ll certainly find useful. My advice to critics therefore would be to give it a try and see what they think. If Subversion isn’t something you’re familiar with then feel free to ask for a bit of help.

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WordPress development, on a whole, is pretty simple. As someone who has come from a background working with IPB and a little bit of phpBB I was quite amazed at how unusual it is to edit the “core” WordPress files - those which are outside the wp-content folder and are distributed each release.

Instead WordPress relies on hooks that are either filters (which change something) or actions (which do something). These are quite simply littered throughout the code and any plugin can jump on these to do whatever is needed by the developer. However, the problem I’ve found is a lack of trying to find the right hook for the job. PHPXref, which is excellent for finding functions and variables doesn’t have the ability to find a hook which is usually in the format of:
do_action('name', $vars); or apply_filters('loginout', $output);

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If anything sets the internet community buzzing it’s rumours about new programs and services, especially from the big players such as Apple, Google or (heh) Microsoft. With Apple we usually have a few months of leaked information to speculate about. However Google’s Chrome browser, expected out in the next hour, was only leaked around a day or so in advance.

That’s not really stopped the gossip though. Fueled by a 38 page web comic Twitter and the Blogosphere have been going all day long as the release of the browser aproaches.

Judging by the content of the comic this browser could stir the browser wars back into full assault. I particularly like the focus on performance that Google seems to have worked hard on. If I have any gripes about Firefox then speed is certainly it. Version 3 has certainly improved things slightly but it’s still no match to Opera or Safari in both starting the application and loading pages.

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So I’ve been working on this for most of today and I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out. I’ve considerably edited a free theme which was designed for a magazine site to something acceptable for personal use.

Comments welcome, I’m particularly interested in whether anyone feels it needs improvement. If anyone can find any bugs then let me know.

So yesterday I noticed a big commit on the WordPress SVN where selected files from the “crazyhorse” branch were merged with trunk. This has resulted in a pretty different look to some of the admin sections. Because I know at least a few interested people read this, I’ve took a quick screencast of what it looks like at the moment.

As a disclaimer, I have no idea if this is technically “allowed”. However all of it is freely downloadable to those who care so I can’t really see any problem with it. I should also add that this is a highly developmental version and the entire thing could spout pink frilly things before it makes it to a release. You may notice a fair few bugs even in this video (which were not intentional but I’m not going to hide the fact it’s buggy). This is also located on my localhost which hasn’t been setup to allow the script to download and has no ftp which is why I stopped at those screens.

Screencast of WordPress Trunk

The crazyhorse branch has a few different widgets on the dashboard, including the ability to post directly from the dashboard.

If I see any more changes of note, I’ll make a similar post.

Looks good to me though.

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