WordPress 3.2 is a release we’ve been working towards for a number of recent clients. Their sites have been developed and even launched on the betas.

What we most like about this launch are the design tweaks that have been made to the admin, cleaning up the design a little, and the performance increases that have been made to make adding content even faster than before.

From a developers point of view the underlying WordPress framework or CMS has stayed quite similar to the previous version, ensuring that upgrades to our clients on slightly older sites will go smoothly. It’s just the way we code, ensuring compatibility for future changes.

The two biggest WordPress changes are an increase in the minimum PHP and MySQL spec (PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0), though this isn’t something that would affect our clients as our server has been running on newer versions for quite a while; and finally a retirement of Internet Explorer 6 support. We don’t design our sites to support IE6, because it’s such an old web browser with such incomplete support for modern standards, so we are very happy that WordPress has dropped IE6 support in their admin. I suspect just removing the compatibility code caused a lot of the performance increases.

I’ll finish with a nice video showcasing WordPress 3.2 (video produced by Automattic).

Dreamweaver-Style Websites

In the initial days of websites, before database driven CMS systems became commonplace, a website company would have various packages on offer. These packages would frequently be listed as ‘silver‘, ‘gold‘, ‘platinum‘ and ‘diamond‘, or maybe as ‘basic‘, ‘standard‘ etc. These packages would have mostly the same features (free domain, year hosting, etc), but then there was the X list of items.

These are things such as X number of email addresses, X disk space, X bandwidth per month all of which went up with the more expensive packages.

This is fine, but these packages would also have X number of pages listed.

Now if you’re creating a website within Dreamweaver you would create the first static HTML page, then have to duplicate it to create the next and so on. Then going back and ensuring that the menus linked to each other, and that the client provided you with the content to insert. All of which is time consuming.

Database Driven CMS To The Rescue

However with a database driven CMS, such as WordPress, once the initial template has been created, the content of pages (and any corresponding menu) is automatically inserted.

WordPress supports unlimited number of pages, and the menu system is flexible enough to allow anything you want.

Reintroducing Arbitrary Limits

I recently had the pleasure of looking at a potential clients existing website and it’s admin. Even though that CMS was database driven, they had implemented it in such a way as to have these old limits (such as number of pages) baked into it. If you’d hit your limit of pages it actually asked that you upgrade your system! It also didn’t allow editing the menus as this was set by the developer.

The client was frustrated in that there was little they could do. Because of the fixed page limit (and fixed menus), they had no choice but to edit existing pages and squeeze more content onto them.

I should point out that there were a number of other fixed aspects to their site, which if changes were required, the developers then charged to make.

Finally Some Common Sense

We don’t believe in these kind of arbitrary limits. We’d prefer giving our clients the ability to have as fully flexible a site as possible, to allow editing all the textual content, and to reposition content if necessary. It takes more work upfront, and cost, to ensure this remains true on our sites, but the advantage to our clients is immeasurable.

I guess this is the reason why that potential client became an actual client.

Custom post types.

Three simple words, but a whole heap of functionality. We’ve already begun development of new sites using WordPress 3 betas but custom post types will really help speed development and more importantly make easier to use and more powerful sites for our clients.

No longer will we be fairly limited with just posts and pages. Anything we can think of could be developed. I’ve already got my eye on a property type. I suspect that quite a few plugins that currently use separate database tables will refactor to use custom post types instead.

Custom menus

Up to now menus on WordPress sites have been limited to either pages, or categories or some complex custom code to create something else. Now we can have an easy to edit menu with anything, pages, links, categories etc. Again helping the most important people, our clients.

With these and everything else that the team and contributers behind WordPress have done as they say, the future is looking quite rosy, it’s going to be an exciting time.

To finish off, I’ve got to mention the WordPress app on the iPhone. Even though I may be in the middle of nowhere being able to write this is brilliant. If you have an iPhone and a WordPress powered site, this free app is a must.

Updated: If you want to view a video tour of WordPress 3 just view it below.

Our first full Magento based e-commerce site www.sportsgolfstores.co.uk went live recently and gives a good idea of how flexible this platform can be for e-commerce web sites. It is the home of Karl Kertess Golf and also a great place to buy golf trousers and associated products so do take a look.

The White Horse Inn at Clun have also had a new site launched. As regular readers will know, I take it upon myself to quality test any pub or restaurant we work with (!!) and I can certainly recommend Jack’s establisment. If you are looking to find a good real ale pub in Shropshire that also provides B&B and an ongoing events programme I’d give them a visit. The site also provides interaction with their various social media channels and we would recommend everyone in the same gane look at using these channels to promote their business.

In association with Hunter Bevan we also worked on the development of the new Leema Acoustics website. As a Hi-Fi buff to some extent I’d certainly suggest taking a look at some of their award winning products.

We have also launched a new site for Marc Beaumont. Marc is one of the world’s top downhill mountain bikers and the site should help his many fans keep up to date. Personally, I get frightened even hearing Mark talk about what he does! This site is built on the WordPress platform.

Having developed the original Fabric Spray website on behalf of The Needham Group we have now set the Irish version live at www.fabricspray.ie. It’s a pretty amazing product so take a look!

We have also revamped www.fine-boxes.com for Andrew Crawford. Andrew is looking to teach more people – his work is really quite exceptional so please take a look.

Lastly, but not least, we set G Bryan Jones live. Locally based, in Bishops Castle, they are your port of call for all things farm machinery related.

I think that is it … working on a good few more at present so watch this space. The sites above give a fair idea of the range of work we do so if you need any help yourself, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Both agencies produce high quality work in the areas of graphic design, branding and corporate communications and we are proud to be associated with these companies. We look forward to developing the relationships over the coming months and years.

If you are a design, marketing or PR agency who feels you could benefit from a reliable and effective development partner, please do not hesitate to get in touch – we use open source platforms including WordPress, Drupal and Magento in addition to any bespoke system development that is required such as integration with in house platforms.

We have now decided to change our philosophy somewhat. This blog for instance is written with the WordPress Engine – there is surely little point in writing a new blog platform if an open source version exists.

Why? Apart from the fact it is free, there are any number of devlopers out there who keep building extensions for the platform, such as the Twitter feed you see running to the right.

The same philosophy can be extended to Content Management and E-Commerce. Indeed WordPress can operate as a Content Management platform itself – if you know how to program in the extensions. We have therefore decided to build our sites using Drupal or WordPress for those that are content managed (all our sites are content managed) and Magento for E-Commerce.

What does this mean? – It means that we can develop sites more efficiently for our clients.

It does not mean that we will take a whole lot less time for the base site build – unfortunately for those of you who thought we’d start building £500 E-Commerce sites there is still a fair degree of development work involved! It does mean however that the base site build is likely to contain more options as standard. It further means that when a client wants a particular add on that it likely exists already and  it will therefore be a quicker build and less money for the client.

New projects from 1 July are being built using the new methodology, so they will be up early August … we’re quite excited about this development and would obviously be happy to discuss implementing something for you, so drop us a line or call on 01743 244204.