Using WordPress For Project Management

At WordUp Minneapolis 2014 I gave a talk on using WordPress for project management.

In this session I talked about building a simple project management app with WordPress using the P2 theme and a handful of plugins. With this app you can create to do lists, check off those tasks, and mark posts as unresolved or resolved.

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Inspecting WordPress With Firebug

I have been using WordPress for about six years. Different themes, plugins, and code editors have come and gone through this huge learning process as I have developed hundreds of websites, but the one constant for me has been the Firefox add-on Firebug.

It’s the only tool that I have stuck with throughout those years because I have been able to learn so much with Firebug and build projects so much faster by using it.

If you have never used a web inspector like Firebug before, what it does is allow you to bridge the gap between the source code and the rendered out page in your browser. You can look at each bit of code interactively and see how it fits into the page, adjusting the code in the inspector and seeing the updates live in your browser.

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Using the Members plugin with Meteor Slides

One of the new features in Meteor Slide 1.4 that needs covering in more detail is support for the Members plugin. Using Members, you can control which roles can create and edit slides and slideshows, and which can change the slides settings.

By default slide posts use the same capabilities as blog posts and only admins can change the slide settings. So admins, editors, and authors can create new slides, and contributors can create slide post drafts. This is straightforward, but not exactly ideal.

Most of the time I only want the admin and editor to create and edit slides. And what if you want to give an editor access to the settings? This is where Members comes in handy. Read More

Creating your own Page Templates

On many WordPress powered sites, the primary focus is static pages rather than blog posts. I have built some sites that only use pages and don’t even have a blog. For these types of sites that are using WordPress “as a CMS” rather than a blogging platform, the theme file that generates the pages becomes that much more important.

Using this same page template file on each page could make a site very homogeneous and be a headache to customize. But it is easy to create your own page templates and apply them to specific pages on a site. Read More