A WordPress guru with an MBA

You might now know this about me, but a few months ago I got my MBA and it’s been interesting combining it with my technical (including WordPress) skills. The great thing nowadays is that you can do the whole thing online, which is how I did mine, seeing my university only when I actually graduated.

One please you can do this in the US is Western Governers University, where you can get an online degree in a variety of subjects including a masters degree online. They offer courses in business, IT, health and education and seem to have a great track record. I haven’t done anything with them, but I can vouch that studying online is an extremely effective way of meeting your educational goals without too much impact on your daily life.

Top WP Themes

I’ve pulled down some cool themes the other day from a website called Top WP themes. They have a collection of free themes which are really quite interesting. I’m playing with one called ClassicMag at the moment which I’m planning on using on a site I’m putting together at the moment. It’s a purple theme, which wouldn’t look too good on a site selling furniture or bathroom fixtures, but it fits the client’s logo, so it just might work.

I’ll let you all know when it’s up and look forward to your critique.

What should super-plugins be called?

There’s an interesting post on the WordPress blog that talks about canonical plugins, a set of plugins aimed at enhancing WordPress. They are going to be a special class of plugin in that they will have teams working on them (as opposed to individuals) and will carry a certain amount of support.

It still hasn’t been decided what they will be called, there are more choices than types of tile flooring you can buy, but here are the names being floated:

Standard - Implies that these are the standard by which all other plugins should be judged, as well as the idea of them being the default plugins.
Core - Makes the close relationship to core WordPress development very clear, and has the implication of bundled plugins (even though we don’t need to actually bundle them now that the installer is right in the admin tool).
Premium – Identifies these officially-supported plugins as best-in-class and of the highest value, and could potentially disambiguate the word Premium as it is currently being used in the community (to refer to anything from commercial support to licensing terms to actual code quality).
Validated - Focuses on the fact that the code is reviewed for compatibility with core and for security.
Official – Makes it plain that these are the plugins officially endorsed by the core team as being the best at their functions.
Canonical – Maybe once people get used to it, canonical wouldn’t confuse so many people?

What do you think? If you want to have your say, cast your vote here

Maintenance Mode Plugin

Here’s a plugin that I use all the time on different blogs and I would really be lost without. It’s called Maintenance Mode and it’s a plugin that lets you block access to the blog or website until it’s ready for real visitors hitting the page. If you’re signed into an admin account then you can visit the site and see the pages that a visitor would normally see; but if you don’t have an account on the site all you get to see is a holding page.

It doesn’t matter if your blog is about ipods or fart cushions, it’s always best to develop your site in private than launch it when it’s complete.

WordPress 2.9 Beta 2

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WordPress 2.9 Beta 2 has just been made available and I’ve rolled it out to this blog. Here’s what we know about it:

WordPress 2.9 is currently in beta and is expected to be ready in several weeks.

Major new features for developers:
- comments meta table
- improved support for custom post types
- register_theme_directory() for additional theme locations
- back-ported JSON encode/decode for both PHP and JavaScript

and for users:
- oEmbed support
- “Trash” for posts, pages and comments
- post thumbnails support
- basic image editor

I’ve deployed it on this blog and it seems to be running really nicely. I look forward to having a play with it and reporting what I find. It beats looking around the web for medical coding training courses doesn’t it?