I can reveal that this will be an homage to the ubiquitous Hello Dolly plugin – with some extras, and some Pods magic.

Just to remind you. I love Pods as it is intended to be used – a Content Management System that extends WordPress Pages and Posts to allow developers to provide new content styles. This is extremely important to me as I develop new tools for webmasters, and new web applications to extend my health sites.

But for the moment, I’m hooked (pun intended) on using Pods to hook rapidly developed packages into WordPress as plugins. This series of articles explains the Pods features used to create WordPress plugin files complete with readme.txt. WordPress explains what a plugin is by way of the Hello Dolly example. In a similar way, I needed a very simple plugin application to test and demonstrate my WordPress Pods Plugin Builder.

Enter Soft Charisma, the music company run by Scott Kingsley Clark, one of Pods lead developers. Scott has written the perfect song to complement Hello Dolly – Think Of Happiness Today.

Happiness Today Plugin - click for large size

My plugin, Happiness Today, displays random lyrics from the song on the admin pages. So far, so Hello Dolly, but there are extras:

• Up to 3 link buttons
• Customizable lyrics, position & links
• Easily editable content & options through the Pods interface

It is currently at ‘proof of concept’ stage. A complete, usable plugin, but incomplete readme.txt file, no deactivation routine (though easily tidied up manually via Pods administration), and untidy code structure. Also, it borrows its styling to match the selected admin scheme in a way that is best described as Borrow Code.

Borrow Code is a semi-original term, coined by me, to explain the style of programming I borrow and use. The style of Borrow Code reflects how I use snippets of code without understanding the original concept, shape it with a big hammer until it just about works, then refine it properly for public use, or discard it in favor of suggestions from better coders.

I will add it to the WordPress extensions database once it is fit for public consumption, when we can also discuss potential uses and enhancement suggestions.

WordPress Happiness Today Plugin

Potential uses:

• Promotion for musicians, poets, authors, etc to randomly present their own lyrics and links
• Promotion for website developers to randomly present support tips and links
• Random product benefits and links
• Fund raising quotes & links
• Your suggestions

Enhancement suggestions:

• Widget support to display random messages, adverts, etc to visitors
• Single click data import, export, delete routines
• Remote data updates
• Your suggestions

WordPress Pods Projects: Next Steps

That’s enough background for now. In the next article I’ll explain some specific Pods techniques used in the WordPress Pods Plugin Builder, and its example project, Happiness Today.

With it’s easy to use interface, it is good for novice writers, but it also stands on a very powerful data management platform.

This makes it a real candidate for Rapid Application Development, but how to package and distribute those applications?

Before I present my latest project for building structured WordPress plugins, packaged with properly formatted readme file, straight from the Pods interface let me explain what Pods is.

WordPress Pods Background

Pods builds applications by creating data tables and presenting that data on pages, using display templates to keep presentation simple. Going beyond basic table administration, Pages and Templates can include any HTML or PHP code you like to manipulate data. And going beyond that, there are Helpers that can manipulate data before during or after it has been entered.

This means that any extension to WordPress can be coded in Pods. Tasks that do not require data manipulation probably do not need Pods. On the other hand, most plugins do need to use the WordPress database, even if only to store some options. Using Pods makes that data easy to maintain and it’s structure means that it is very easy to build reusable code libraries.

I will explain Pods Data, Template, Page and Helper features in more detail when I explain how my Pods projects work. First let’s look at my current to build WordPress plugins using Pods.

WordPress Pods Plugin Builder

Pods already does a good job of easing distribution of projects. It is extremely easy to bundle your project components together and export them as a Pods Package. The Pods CMS site has several examples of these packages which as well as being useful in their own right, can be used to learn various techniques.

These packages can be pasted directly into Pods, or loaded programatically, as demonstrated in the Pods UI demo. This makes distribution very easy, but there is one vital thing missing for most projects, and another missing for many.

The vital missing part is data. Though pods can export and import data, this is not part of the Pods package process. If you are handling a project for a client, it is very easy to move data to your clients site by exporting and importing, but it is not possible to supply a single package including code and data.

For most Pods projects, that data problem is the only one, and the import and export routines simply mean you have to distribute code and data separately. For many of my projects, I want to provide WordPress plugin functionality. This means that I need at least one plugin file to hook the functions into WordPress.

My Pods Plugin Builder produces standard format WordPress plugin files from Pods. The plugin it produces will load a Pods package, load the data, and add the hooks that WordPress needs. It also produces a correctly formatted readme.txt file which is so important if you want people to be able to find your plugin in the WordPress repository.

I passed a milestone today when I used the package to produce my first plugin.

WordPress Pods Plugin Builder: Next Steps

In the next few articles I will:

• Describe the package in detail, including work still to do, and potential additional features.
• Introduce the plugin that this package has produced, and describe how key features of Pods work.
• Apply the package to my shrewdBar & shrewdChat projects.
• Release the package for wider testing and distribution.

But are they relevant to WordPress website owners, and will they help or hinder your marketing efforts.

More to the point – what are they?

The buzz for webmasters is that microformats help you on Google. But there are one or two fairly large points missing from that.

Before we look into those, let me explain what microformats are. They are tags in your web page, similar in operation to HTML tags. Whereas HTML tags change the appearance of text, microformats tell search engines and other robots what your text means. More specifically they describe the context of your text as structured data.

Whoopi-f-ing-doo you cry, or at least “so what.”

But wait, this is important.

If a search engine can interpret the type of information you are presenting, it can list you better. It puts your information into the right context. You can explicitly distinguish the author of a work from a work about an author.

Your words, with these descriptive tags, are known as rich snippets. If you currently earn money by providing content that includes reviews, people, businesses, organizations, events or video, then you need these snippets to help you get richer.

Why Microformats?

A search engine that might have sent you a little traffic from time to time has more information on rich snippets (including a validation tool), but before you investigate that, consider what is missing from the “Google & Microformats: Drive More Traffic” article.

There are two ways of providing rich snippets: microformats and RDFa. Microformats are more common, but RDFa is to be implemented in HTML 5, so is more likely to become the standard in future. In fact search volumes for RDFa have just started to outstrip microformats. I believe webmasters should focus on RDFa.

WordPress Rich Snippets

The second missing point, close to the heart of WordPress webmasters, is how can I add some rich snippets without hand-coding all my articles?

There is some good news there. If you are yet to be convinced on the microformats vs RDFa debate, search the plugin database for microformats. You will get 27 results at the time of writing – let me know if any of them help you.

For RDFa, there are only two results in the search, but a third one is hidden in the secret lair of WordPress plugin developers who like to hide their work behind poor tagging and descriptions. I’ll review these in detail sometime soon, but if you’d like to check them for me (and maybe write a guest review?), they are:

Dublin Core for WP

A plugin to add Dublin Core metadata to all posts and pages. I will let you know later if this is currently supported by the author or someone else.

Image Licenser

Provides an easy way to tag embedded images with a CreativCommons license. This uses RDFa, to enable search engines finding your images even if the user filters for CC licenses. A very new plugin from Raphael Mack.

wp-RDFa

wp-RDFa is a WordPress plugin to bring the Semantic Web to your WordPress blog. Currently this plugin supports FOAF and the Dublin Core. WP-RDFa seems very much alive and supported from SquareCows.

By default, the standard WordPress WYSIWYG editor is TinyMCE – but it is a non-standard implementation, and it is only used in new posts, not comments.

There are many plugins that extend both the functionality and application of TinyMCE. Life can get very complicated checking all the options, but I stopped looking when I road tested Front-end Editor. This uses the NicEdit WYSIWYG editor, which is very easy to implement.

I looked at the WP NicEdit plugin, but it is no longer supported. Anyway, I checked out the NicEdit site, and it only needs a couple of lines of code, so I just added them to my footer. Being short of time, I took the lazy option of linking direct to the NicEdit site, using the two lines of code on the NicEdit homepage, instead of installing on my own server. I regretted that, but it was easily fixed, with some interesting options, which I will explain soon.

First let me mention a terrible problem (with a praise-winning fix) I found when I tested in Internet Explorer instead of my faithful Firefox.

I was getting a good, consistent look and feel for contributors. Comment boxes, new post forms using TDO Mini Forms, and in-line editing using Front-end Editor, all picked up NicEdit. Looked great in Firefox, but when I tested in MSIE, the textarea box did not display properly, and the NicEdit interface was disabled. I got an error message:

Unknown runtime error
Line: 8
Char: 721

But this was impossible to decipher in the minimized nicEdit-latest.js on nicedit.com. Googling the problem showed me that someone else had raised it on the NicEdit forum, but there was no solution. I was about to give up and install my own copy that I could debug properly, when I saw the warning in the aforementioned WP NicEdit Installation notes (edited for clarity):

=Config to make it work in IE=

The default installation will work great with all non IE browsers. In IE6, the Rich text editor may not work by default. To make it work please follow following steps.

1. Open the comments.php of your theme, using the WordPress Appearance Editor.
2. Search for textarea. If it is wrapped with paragraph tags, remove them (<p> & <\p>).
3. Save the file.
4. Congrats, it will work fine now.

And it did!

Delighted by the quick fix of removed paragraph tags, I left my NicEdit configured as before, which you will soon see, was not the best decision. In a small attempt to give something back, I reported my solution in the NicEdit forum, which has earned me at least one Brownie point. I just got a response:

shrewdies,

I love you, MAN!
You saved me at least 3 years of my life!

Removing

tags totally help with ie, thanks a lot!

Cheers,
Greg

Happy to help, Greg.

WordPress WYSIWYG Made Hard

All has gone well until yesterday. The nicedit.com server went down, and I was returned to plain textareas. I’d happened to notice when searching earlier that there seemed to be a mirror site, so I went in search of that. Sure enough, ns2.bkirchoff.com/nicedit.com/download.php was available and let me download the code for my own server. If you need this to get out of a hole, please note:

• ns1 is also available – just replace ns2 with ns1 in the above URL.
• When navigating that site, the links do not include the /nicedit.com/ subdirectory, so you will have to manually edit the URLs.
• Be sure to load any plugins you need. I noticed a discussion referring to problems with the compressed download not including plugins, so I chose the uncompressed option, then minified my download.
• You may need to edit the path to nicEditorIcons.gif

The script is working fine now, and I also made sure the installation code in my footer included the HTML edit button. Not all the allowed WordPress tags are covered by NicEdit (notably, blockquote), so HTML editing on top of the WYSIWYG editor is good. The footer code is:

<script type="text/javascript" src="yourInstallPath/nicEdit-min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">bkLib.onDomLoaded(function() { nicEditors.allTextAreas({fullPanel : true}) });</script>

Note that nicEdit-min.js is the name I gave my minified version – the standard is nicEdit.js.

Then WordPress removes the incentive for you to contribute by adding a nofollow link to your comments!

In turn, I remove that nofollow attribute, in most circumstances, so that you get search engine rewards for your valued contribution.

I interrupt my series on the shrewdBar development of a Pods package to highlight the benefits you get from joining the web hosting discussion on this site. By discussion, I mean adding valuable questions, comments or theories to existing topics, or starting a new discussion on a web hosting, or WordPress, related topic.

I have updated my link policy today, to explain more clearly how you can get incoming links to your site.

I have also added a top contributors list on the sidebar, to give extra links for those who contribute most. This list is automatically generated by the No Follow Free (NOFF) plugin. This plugin removes the nofollow attribute from links. It has a range of settings, but the important ones for you relate to the thresholds at which nofollow tags are removed. I have lowered the default settings so you get the nofollow free benefits as a guest when you add more than one comment, and immediately if you register.

I’ll be on the lookout for abusers, and raise the threshold later if necessary.

The purpose of this policy is to encourage meaningful debate without rewarding the people who add “me too” comments. Can you think of improvements, or is the whole nofollow debate flying over your head?

In most WordPress extensions, a lot of data is hidden in the code.

The massive advantage of Pods is that we can easily store additional data, and manage it very efficiently.

In the first installment of this series, I introduced shrewdBar, explaining it was based on a WordPress plugin that creates a menu by outputting data in the form of a CSS LIst driven menu. This type of menu is quite common – you style a nested list to have hidden items that reveal themselves when the mouse hovers over them. The added attraction of this type of menu is that without the styling, you simply have a nested list of items that search engines can follow.

The CSS issues are for another time. What I need you to realize is that these menus are usually built in code, with a lot of hard-coded links. True, the original menubar, DashBar, on which shrewdBar is roughly based, does have some items that are extracted from WordPress database tables. In my first version of the menu bar, I extended this to extract messages and topics from the Simple:Press forum.

Pods allowed me to put all the menu items into WordPress database tables, and I explain in this article, how I achieved this.

shrewdBar Database

In its current release, I have limited the menu to two tiers, so we have a Pod for the top tier, that you see across the top of the page. Optionally, each of these top level records can have a variable number of child items.

The schematic is:

Pods automatically creates the name and slug fields when we create a new pod. name identifies the record, and I also use it as a sort order. slug is very useful in many Pods packages, and I’ll cover it in depth later, but it is not really required in the current version of shrewdBar.

The text, title and url fields are the menu links that are used to navigate to different pages. The pick fields are used to relate tables – in this case a one to many relationship.

The top level menu records have two additional fields. The boolean hold field allows menu items to be temporarily hidden, without deleting the record. This is not required for second level items, as it is a simple click to break or make the relationship to a top level menu. The display field allows us to enter PHP code which can programatically control the display giving us very powerful dynamic menus. I’ll be discussing this at length in the next installment.

shrewdBar Options

Like most plugins, shrewdBar needs options to control colors and positioning. Unlike most WordPress plugins, these options no longer have to live in the options table where they soon get lost. I put the shrewdBar options in its own table, which makes it very easy to manage. The options data could be managed using the standard Pods edit page, however I find it better to write a special page with information and instructions. I’ll be covering this in detail in a later installment.

In the next installment, I will explain how simple Pods procedures act on the data to produce the list output that forms the shrewdBar menu.

I leave it to you to decide if you prefer book, or website format. This book covers some aspects of WordPress in more detail than I do on this website, though if you ask the questions, I’ll try to give you the fullest answers I can.

This review is designed to tell you the topics covered by WordPress for Dummies. It is not an in-depth review, so please feel free to add your own opinions if you have read this book.

One review of the book comments:

I recommend it to anyone wanting to gain basic familiarity with WordPress (and related technical jargon), see whether it’s the thing for you and, if so, get started using it.

My view is that you would get a much better feel for this by joining WordPress.com and just doing it – you can always shout out here if you get stuck.

WordPress For Dummies Topics

After the foreword and introduction, WordPress For Dummies is divided into six parts. Here is a summary of the chapters:

I. Introducing WordPress

1: What WordPress Can Do For You

The benefits of WordPress and choosing between the hosted version at WordPress.com, or self-hosting with WordPress.org, in single or multi-user varieties.

2: WordPress Blogging Basics

Describing blogs and introducing blog technologies including arches, feeds, trackbacks, and spam. Also, a (very) brief look at business blogs, with the very important advice on the need to plan first (which is why we have shrewdies.com).

II. Using the WordPress Hosted Service

3: Getting started with WordPress.com

Creating an account and finding your way round the key features and initial settings.

4: Writing and Managing Your Blog

A wide-ranging chapter covering all aspects of publishing and categorizing content, links, and users. I feel there are management and planning of some aspects, especially categorization, that warrant a separate chapter. You should have a categorized blueprint before you even begin to think about starting a website. Having said that, the book is about the mechanics of WordPress, so it is unsurprising that management aspects are under-represented.

5. Enhancing Your Blog with Themes, Widgets, and Upgrades

Enhancements with WordPress.com are much less than self-hosted blogs, so themes and widgets are covered. Surprisingly, there are no shortcodes listed, which is the way WordPress.com exposes the plugins it installs for you. This used to be limited to just a contact form, but is much more extensive now – ask if you want a feature on this growing aspect of WordPress.com.

III. Self-Hosting With WordPress.org

6: Setting Up Blogging Base Camp

Registering domains, finding a host, and running the installation.

7: Understanding the WordPress.org Administration Panel

The options and settings that you have to manage extra to WordPress.com.

8: Establishing Your Blog Routine

Expands on Chapter 4 to cover extra options you have when writing your blog on a self-hosted site.

IV. Flexing and Extending WordPress

9: Media Management: Images, Audio, and Video

Inserting, aligning, and managing media files.

10: Making the Most of WordPress Plugins

What plugins are, and how to find, install, and use them.

11: Finding and Installing WordPress Themes

Unlike plugins, we already know what themes are from the WordPress.com chapters, but now we can look for more. Then a look at some premium themes, though since I’ve never seen a theme yet that does not need editing, I think a look at the editor might be more appropriate. But wait, the next part is …

V. Customizing WordPress

12: Understanding Themes and Templates

The structure of themes and how template files work together. How to use template tags in posts and sidebars, and which are particularly useful.

13: Tweaking WordPress Themes

The basics of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and where to look for more.

14: Beyond Blogging: WordPress as a Content Management System

A miscellany of extra features that take WordPress beyond mere blogging. With the advent of Pods, the CMS angle is largely outdated, but the points are still relevant to how you organize and optimize your blog.

15: Deciding to Bring in the Pros

Roles played by designers, developers, and consultants, and how to make the most of them.

VI. The Part of Tens

Chapters 16 to 18 feature lists of 10 WordPress web sites used as a CMS, popular WordPress plugins, and free WordPress Themes. Poor trees

Finally, we close with an appendix: Migrating your existing blog to WordPress, and the index.