divydovy

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The importance of keeping WordPress (and plugins) updated

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It is very important that WordPress and any plugins and themes are kept up-to-date for several reasons:

  1. Security – this is the most important reason. WordPress is a huge target for hackers and other malicious online types – being able to hack WordPress means instant access to over 50 million websites and the ability to read their secure content, insert dodgy links or do other bad things. WordPress is continually identifying and fixing security risks and holes. These fixes are released as WordPress updates. If you don’t update your WordPress, you’re leaving known security risks in place, which means that sooner or later your site will probably be hacked. This could have serious impact on your business, as well as costing you time, effort and money to fix.
  2. Performance – the WordPress team put a lot of time and effort into making WordPress faster and more efficient. Keeping your WordPress updated means that your site is performing as well as it can.
  3. Features –  Major releases of WordPress typically include improved functionality and tools to allow you to get more from your site.
  4. User experience – Most updates to WordPress make the content management system quicker, easier and generally nicer to use, encouraging you to interact with your site more.
  5. Future-proofing –  at some point, you’re bound to want changes made to your site. Those changes might require the latest version of WordPress (for example to use a particular plugin that only works with newer versions). By updating frequently, you pick up small changes and errors that need to be attended to on an ongoing basis, keeping your site reasonably up-to-date with the core of WordPress development. If you don’t update for a year or two, you’re far more likely to suffer major disruption when you do, because all of those small and minor issues have become intertwined, making diagnosis and fixing harder and more time-consuming (and expensive).

These are the main reasons I can think of to keep WordPress updated, but there’s also a broader, more fundamental reason. Good Housekeeping. Why use the world’s leading publishing platform and then not keep it updated? It’s like buying a Mercedes and not getting it serviced. So: keep your WordPress installation up-to-date. It’s more than just software, it’s part of your business.

Thematic Snippet: Show full content / enable $more link in archives

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I can never find this incredibly useful snippet when I need it, so I’m blogging it.

If you child-theme Thematic, you’ll notice that archive and search results pages only return the excerpt rather than the full content. This snippet changes that to give your archive pages the full impact:

// Make sure thematic_content is always set to full to enable the more link
function childtheme_content($content) {
	if (is_home() || is_front_page()) {
			$content = 'full';
		} elseif (is_single()) {
			$content = 'full';
		} elseif (is_tag()) {
			$content = 'full';
		} elseif (is_search()) {
			$content = 'full';
		} elseif (is_category()) {
			$content = 'full';
		} elseif (is_author()) {
			$content = 'full';
		} elseif (is_archive()) {
			$content = 'full';
		}
	return $content;
}
add_filter('thematic_content', 'childtheme_content');

Hope someone else finds this useful!

Carbon Leapfrog

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Working for a fantastic London-based charity, and teaming up again with Simon Bottrell of 7creative, the functionality of this site really pushed my use of Custom Post Types and inter-relating content to the max. I also did some pretty cool stuff with the jQuery Crossslide plugin, using WordPress to manage the gallery and some cool loop-stuff to populate the crossslider itself.

Crossfit Hove

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A simple child theme for TwentyTen for my local sadist cross fit trainer, Miles Key down at Crossfit Hove. This job was mostly about driving WordPress to achieve his business’s goals than about doing any particular development. The end result though, is a distinctive, functional and successful site.

Ciptex

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This was a great project, working again with Atelier Grafik. He did some great work creating a new identity for the company, then designing a new site around that. I then developed the site as a child theme for Thematic, using the jCarousel, some jQuery UI, Cufon and some cool custom post type work.