James Andrews

Since it’s inception Wordpress has been customized and built into probably the most easiest CMS to use for maintaining website. The page administration is real simple to use. They have created a wonderful API that is simple to understand, so that even the most novice developers can jump in and get their hands dirty. I have fallen very much in love with that simplicity.

For the past few days I have thought that I wanted a new look for my website. I am not a designer. I can cobble together something that looks “ok-ish”, but that’s about it. I turned to a website that I have come to rely on when I need designs for personal projects. That site is called Themeforest.net. It allows you to buy designs, prebuilt HTML templates, and even Wordpress themes that you can use on your site un-exclusively. Now I could have gone and found a design, and coded all the HTML/CSS/PHP for myself, but I didn’t want to spend the time. I have other projects on my plate, so I thought I would simply find a Wordpress theme that was appealing purchase it and make a go of it. SIx hours of watching video.

While the theme is artistically pleasing, and full of all sorts of features it fails like so many other themes whose designers still see Wordpress as a blogging tool, and not a content management system. The home page is driven by blog category instead of it being a “page”. The javascript carousel is also driven by a category. While I can’t say that I feel it’s 100% wrong, I have had customers who have bought themes and became frustrated because the theme they bought didn’t support pages in the carousel, and then I had to figure out a way to fix it.

These designer/developers have to figure out that Wordpress is not just a blog, and that their customers do not want to rely on the blog aspect and categories to manage “pages” of a site when “pages” is already part of the Wordpress functionality.

I have spend too much time this evening hoping for a response on their forums, or my comment on Themeforest.net. Then trying to debug the code because I really wanted the new look up tonight. Alas, that is not the case. I have it at 99%, but am missing something stupid I am sure. Tomorrow is a new day, maybe I’ll 1) get a response with a fix, or 2) figure out what I am missing.

Tonight I opened up my Craigslist job tabs. A nightly ritual it has become. I am working now, but its a contract and in a few weeks that contract will be gone, and I will be back to searching.

Today’s topic is based on one of the ads placed today titled “Wordpress Guru Needed”. Now I’ve got one Wordpress plugin under my belt, and another one in the works. I also have re-coded a template that I found (the HTML was overly complicated). I figured I’d click on the ad and check it out. The contents are below.

Must have Bachelor’s degree, but Master’s is preferred
Harvard and MIT students preferred
Must send hourly rate
Must be available on evenings and weekends
Must send resume
No offshore companies allowed
If you do not meet this criteria, your message will be deleted

Let’s break this down. No offshore companies. That’s reasonable. Wants a resume, also reasonable request. Wants an hourly rate, and must be able to work nights and weekends. Pretty standard stuff. It’s the first 2 lines that seem a little off the wall.

First off Wordpress is not rocket science. Any php developer who is any good can figure it out. What truly baffles me is why does this guy need a person with a Masters Degree from MIT in order to modify his blog? There is absolutely no reason for it. If he’s creating anything that is so complex that he needs that kind of skill set he really should not be using Wordpress for it.

Now let’s look at the reality of this. I’m not saying that having a college degree is bad, quite the contrary, but to think that because someone has one of these degrees makes them smarter and more able to do the job than the next person is ridiculous. There are many successful men and women who have never stepped foot in a college who could probably do what this person is asking. There are many college drop outs who have gone on to make billions of dollars in the computer programming industry (Queue in Bill Gates). I personally get frustrated by these people who seem to think that a college degree means you’ll get a better grade of person.

Through out my career I have worked with many a college graduate who have felt that my opinion in programming and web development was quality enough to ask for my opinion on approaches on how to solve problems they were working on. Do people really think you’re better off with a degree?

It is my opinion that it is not the degree that matters, but the passion that person has. I would not have made it as far as I have if I did not have the passion and desire to learn this on my own. The desire to spend my me time learning an growing. Why does a person have to have a white board and a professor in front of them to get a quality education with something?

If this sounds like I am taking it personally, I have to admit I am. For someone to throw out perfectly acceptable candidates over a ivy league piece of paper is just stupid. Yes sir who wrote that craigslist posting. I called you stupid.

I am happy to announce the release of Full Circle v0.5.1 This is a new feature release. I asked for feature requests, and Gary mentioned he would like to be able to enable disable posting to facebook and only enable it on certain posts. It was a relatively easy feature to add, so I did.

At the bottom of the advanced edit page. You will find 2 new checkbox fields at the bottom of the page. One for twitter one for Facebook. You can disable one or both. In your Full Circle settings page, you can enable Facebook and twitter, but set their default to be disabled posting. If this is the case then the 2 new checkbox fields on the advanced edit page will be unchecked. Checking them pushes the post to which ever ones you have activated.

Download Full Circle Today

OK new version of Full Circle.  This one includes the ability to include links at the bottom of your blog posts.  Just another step in making Full Circle the only plugin you need to advertise your blog posts on your social networks.  I’d be interested in what other networks people think they need to have included.  Friend of mine mentioned linked in, so I am going to go look at linkedin’s api and see what I come up with.  Who knows that may be v0.5

The new version is available here.  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/full-circle/

New Version of Full Circle is now available at the WordPress plugin archive.  Plugin now offers the ability to connect to your Facebook feed and your Twitter feed.  All done in one handy dandy little plugin instead of 2.