The cats who preside over our house certainly like to interact with the keyboard, but they walk back and forth, they lie down, but they never seem to close tags or care about the user experience.  They scoff at SEO. I guess Jean-Baptiste has better-trained cats.

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WordPress Post Formats. Image courtesy of Greg Rickaby/GregRickaby.com.

Check out this impressive array: WordPress Post Format Eye-Candy: Tumblr Style Theme Inspiration Showcase by Kym Huynh at WordCast. The problem those site designs solve is inherent in WordPress, which will permit the posting of many types of information. Just text alone – WP is ready to accept haiku-or-shorter-length compositions, documents long enough to require pagination, lists, lots of white space, no white space – lots.

This is a problem when – for instance – the post title is very large – and the post body itself is very short. It’s  not pleasing to the eye  – and not an efficient use of screen space. Such as

An h2 post title which sits atop a very short post

A very  short post.

There is a feature now available for theme authors called “post formats.”  Here’s the WP Codex entry on “Post Formats.” And here are some other excellent resources.  At present – if I understand things correctly – only  the Genesis theme framework from StudioPress uses this feature, and so far not in every theme. (One nice theme that uses most or all of the formats is Tapestry).

From Greg Rickaby, a designer who works mostly with the Thesis Theme and with the aforementioned Genesis, these posts:

• How To: Post Formats for Genesis Child Themes (this post predates the adoption of page formats by the folks at Studio Press, but if you’re comfortable altering your functions.php file, it’s my impression that this post will help you introduce page formats into an existing theme);
  
• While you’re there, checkout Mr. Rickaby’s Fringe child theme forGenesis
• How To: Enable Post Formats in WordPress (If my post is confusing, start with this post from GregRickaby)

From Andrew Nacin, a WP Core Developer, and excellent elucidator of WordPress and other issues),   On standardized post formats gives some insight on how this evolved, and reminded me not to take for granted the people who labor over open-source apps and who generally are not rewarded in a way remotely proportional to their efforts. Mr. Nacin points out that this is still a work in progress, and

Are there flaws? Yes. There are a few confusing factors here. One, as Mark [Mark Jaquith - see MarJaquith.com, and/or this post] suggests, a ‘custom post type’ is a horrible name for what it really is. Ironically, the best name for ‘post formats’ (trust me, we pulled out our thesauruses for this one) would have been ‘post types.’ Then there’s the confusion where some have used the term ‘custom post formats’ even though they’re not talking about custom ones at all — probably because of confusion around the similar-sounding ‘custom post types’ term.

To point out another example – an “aside” for these purposes, appears to be defined as a post without any title ir caption, and below a certain length. In one theme I tested, it was clear that, less than one complete line of text, and the post stayed as an “aside.” But when I added five lines additional copy, WP – or the theme – in any case, automatically – switched the radio button from “aside”to “standard.” One assumes that eventually themes will come with  some documentation about the limits of formats – perhaps some control over them. But – even as is, this feature is an enormous step forward in WordPress’s trajectory towards being even more flexible without the average user touching code. My point  is that while this feature is likely to get rapidly better, even as is it’s  an outstanding improvement.  How hard it is to incorporate into an existing theme I couldn’t  say.

Last,post types and formats and taxonomies, oh my! from Otto on WordPress.

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Also – if you need more explanation of the post issue – Mark Jaquith’s post here should help. My current understanding is – that, all in all, it’s a good thing – but I’m still not sure what the new categories are. I’m beginning to suspect that it’s very obvious, and that I’ll be embarassed when it’s pointed out to me.

Without further delay, from Otto on WordPress:

Custom Post Formats and why you don’t need them

As soon as this was announced, naturally theme authors got up in arms, because theme authors are a rowdy bunch of folks. They like to do things their own way. So there was instantly the question of “how do I add my own format”? The answer is: you don’t, nor should you even think about it.

Why? Why prevent customization? Think of it from the perspective of the user:

• They’ve got an existing set of posts.
• Those posts have formats.
• They switch to your theme, which uses some custom formats.
• Now their own posts don’t display properly with the new theme, because it’s using a whole different set of formats.
• Bad user experience, that is.

Now, from the perspective of a theme author, I understand the reasoning here. You want to be able to display things differently.

The problem is that you were already able to do that before.

Custom taxonomies have been around a long time. All you had to do was to a) create a custom taxonomy (call it “mytheme_formats”), b) allow users to sort posts into your taxonomy, and c) display things differently in the theme based on the terms in that taxonomy.

Post Formats is just a taxonomy. It’s a set of adjectives, describing the nouns that are the posts. So now we have “aside posts” and “gallery posts” and “chat posts” and “video posts” and so on. If you want to make your own formats, then you’ve had that ability forever. Why have you not already used it?

The answer to why you didn’t do it before is because there was no standard set of formats.

Without a standard set to work with, users won’t have any idea what your formats mean. You have to write documentation. You have to educate the user. You have to explain what this weirdness in your theme is.

Post formats changes that. Now you have a standard set of formats, and the user, having used other themes that support those formats too, will have some idea of what they mean already. But in order for this to work, themes must all use the same basic formats. There has to be a standard set of adjectives to describe the posts.

If you want to create your own set, then create your own taxonomy and box to have your set in it. But don’t complain when users don’t understand why your theme’s formats don’t mesh with the formats of every other theme that does support them.

The point of standards is to be standard. You don’t have to support the standard, but you also will have to deal with the consequences of being non-standard.

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There’s been a big fuss lately over the latest WordPress hacks that have targetted older versions of WordPress.

And in my view, they show the less pretty side of WordPress and some people in the community… but not all of them.  The attitude has been a straight “upgrade your blog and you’ll be secure.”

Well, I have news for you.  They’re wrong.

You’re Never Secure

Even if you have the very latest version of everything there are, out there, what are known as zero day exploits.  These are vulnerabilities which are kept secret by the hackers who have found them.  They cease to be secret if they become widely used in a large scale attack.  Like the current one against WordPress.

Now, if there are vulnerabilities out there that nobody knows about then your high profile WordPress site or blog could be targetted in a way that you, I, or the (great and lovely) WordPress developers out there don’t know about.

Not Everyone Can Upgrade Immediately

Quite frankly, I find the glib assertion that staying up to date is all you need to be secure to be… terrifying.  It’s bad advice because it leaves people with the feeling that all they need to do is to stay up to date and all is well.  Not only that, but it sidesteps the whole issue that WordPress should really consider running security updates on older versions of WordPress – not all sites can quickly change from one version to another.  When WordPress 2.8 came out it broke multi-use widgets – you could recode them, but then settings could be lost.  There are sites out there that run hundreds of widgets, and re-configuring them will be a big job.  If a new vulnerability comes out in WordPress it may not even be relevant to some sites because they may be doing everything else correctly.

In fact, in a critical environment you absolutely do not update your software without running a full suite of tests to make sure the updates won’t bring down your site.  This is a major problem for sites which, in some cases, are turning over tens of thousands of pounds a month.  Yes, they can throw money at the problem, but it still takes time – and when there’s a vulnerability the one thing you don’t have is a lot of time.  So a site needs to rely on more than just WordPress for security.

Mr. Coveney clearly understands something about the phenomenology of risk, and he’s got some good practical advice. Perhaps we can persuade him to write something for Popular Logistics, our primary blog, which is about risk assessment, mitigation and control.

A Common-Sense WordPress Security Primer. By David Coveney at InterConnectit – or perhaps it’s pronounced “InterConnect IT.”

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I have only one thing to add to his advice, which includes using the excellent plugin WP-DBManager, by Lester Chan. Be careful that you don’t set the plugin to backup too often without removing older backups. The reason is that some web hosts, because of the way Unix works, are even more concerned about the number of files on their servers than they are about space. I ran afoul of my hosting company’s limits by being a little careless about the settings in WP-DBManager. It doesn’t take very long to generate a few hundred thousand files when you back up a WordPress installation.

The second is adding some great powerful functionality – e.g. the Insights plugin. Insights permits you, while you’re composing a post, and without leaving the editing window, to search your own blog (“didn’t we write something about this before that we should refer to here?”); open-license images (“wouldn’t a picture of, say, a cherry make this post perfect?”), videos, Wikipedia, news, blogs, and books, all of which permit you to very efficiently improve a post by making it more authoritative, more persuasive, clearer, and more entertaining.

Using Insights, I’m able to quickly retrieve earlier posts about Vladimir: Here’s our earlier post about Insights: Insights Plugin: finding images, citations, references while composing. This plugin’s so good that I don’t mind at all repeating myself.

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Update: Vladimir Prelovac advises use of the plugin WordPress Exploit Scanner, by Donncha O Caoimh¹

Riyad Kalla of the blog/website Kallasoft has written one helpful post How to Remove reycross.com WordPress Malware.

Vladimir Prelovac – always sharp, wrote about this over a year ago: Check your website for virus attack ! and in how to check WordPress sites (Readers may remember our posts about Vladimir’s exceptionally helpful Insights Plugin, which I use daily.(See the rest of his WordPress Plugins – and you’ll see what great contributions he’s made to the WordPress toolbox)

My preliminary take on this is that by WordPress 2.8 or 2.9 – the vulnerability had been removed – so at a minimum, one can upgrade – and then manually remove the offending code. But – haven’t confirmed it – so we’ll try to update this.

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1. I’ve done an injustice – as English-language users often do – to the Irish transliteration of his name. There are accents and phonetic markers missing. There’s probably a way to resolve that in WP and/or HTML, but I don’t know what it is. Mr. O Caoimh, it’s my understanding, is one of the early major contributors to WordPress – and with this plugin, now having undergone a number of iterations, he’s working to keep it safe. Gives an entirely new meaning to the idiom “gift of Blarney.”

Check out his portfolio: he’s done excellent work for family-owned businesses, and gargantuan businesses (one or more in the Fortune 500, apparently, but I didn’t check).

And if his own WordPress design were released as a theme, people would probably be buying it in large numbers.

He’s got some free themes here.  

Thoughtful choices about plug-ins

And he knows a lot about Internet commerce.

Dan Masters.

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is a website, as described by Smashing Magazine, “A useful little website created by Chris Coyier. It provides you with the standard Latin text already in HTML tags. Clicking on any of the blocks automatically copies the text to your clipboard!”

Here’s one sample copied and pasted, in one click, from HTML-Ipsum, a service of Design O’Blog – home and Design O’Blog (blog)

Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Vestibulum tortor quam, feugiat vitae, ultricies eget, tempor sit amet, ante. Donec eu libero sit amet quam egestas semper. Aenean ultricies mi vitae est. Mauris placerat eleifend leo. Quisque sit amet est et sapien ullamcorper pharetra. Vestibulum erat wisi, condimentum sed, commodo vitae, ornare sit amet, wisi. Aenean fermentum, elit eget tincidunt condimentum, eros ipsum rutrum orci, sagittis tempus lacus enim ac dui. Donec non enim in turpis pulvinar facilisis. Ut felis.

Header Level 2

1. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
2. Aliquam tincidunt mauris eu risus.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus magna. Cras in mi at felis aliquet congue. Ut a est eget ligula molestie gravida. Curabitur massa. Donec eleifend, libero at sagittis mollis, tellus est malesuada tellus, at luctus turpis elit sit amet quam. Vivamus pretium ornare est.

Header Level 3

• Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
• Aliquam tincidunt mauris eu risus.

From HTML-Ipsum, a service of Design O’Blog – home and Design O’Blog (blog)

And, as noted above, spotted on Smashing Magazine.

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Smashing Magazine. Most of this work is – admittedly – more sophisticated than my skill set – but the outcomes are all beautiful (or otherwise desirable), and, based on my experience with Smashing Magazine, likely to be entirely reliable.

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BloggingTips is – as we’ve said earlier – worth reading regularly on its own terms. But look carefully at the design. To my eye, the folks at BlogDesignStudio did several things that should have been impossible to do in the same space:

• lots of content and subdivision by category, and other taxonomies of content type;
• usable navigation
• Without feeling cramped

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