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Editing WordPress’s Visual Editor

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These are the slides from a talk I gave at the 2011 WordCamps (WordPress conferences) in Chicago, Philly, and Orlando. I consider this a “sequel” to a broader talk on editing the WordPress administrative experience that I like to think I pioneered in 2010 at a few WordCamps, including Chicago and Mid-Alantic, which several new speakers now seem to be running with.

WordPress’s visual content editor (TinyMCE) is, in many ways, at the heart of WordPress’s content management experience. It’s where editors spend most of their time, and where content is crafted to appear on the front end of your site. Like most of WordPress, the editor can be customized to be both more powerful and more specific to the needs of an individual site or client. This presentation covers topics including custom editor stylesheets based on post type, modifying and removing buttons from the editor, and even creating your own custom buttons for the TinyMCE toolbar. It even covers brand new WordPress 3.3 techniques introduced with the new wp_editor function.

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Introducing WordPress as a CMS

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A week and a half later, here are the slides from my WordCamp Boston 2011 talk, “Introducing WordPress as a CMS”. Unfortunately, the slides don’t include my live demo of some CMS-centric implementations, which I think was eye opening to a few participants.

None-the-less, if you’re looking for an overview of content management concepts applied to WordPress, you can find them here. I’ve uploaded the slideshow as a video to YouTube (to preserve its feel); the video moves quickly, so you might have to be quick on the pause button!

New Smashing Magazine Power Tips for WordPress

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My latest WordPress-focused article for the web’s leading online / digital media publication, Smashing Magazine, was published last Tuesday. New WordPress Power Tips For Template Developers And Consultants features a few tips exposed in my Custom WordPress Admin theme and talk, and adds a handful of new tips like:

  • Creating pagination links using WordPress’s built in paginate_links function
  • Adding body classes based on your own conditions
  • Redirecting failed logins
  • Adding warning messages to specific admin screens

My favorite tip is the leading one: applying WordPress’s highly underutilized, built in pagination function. I frequently see even high end, WordPress.com VIP themes relying on plug-ins like WP-PageNavi to do what WordPress can actually handle pretty well natively. The paginate_links function is a flexible little gem that should be used far more often than it is.

In the 5 days since the article was published, it was tweeted over 1,100 times and like on Facebook nearly 200 times. This website also saw a surge of traffic, which it handled gracefully thanks to some smart object caching and a highly reliable, distributed host.

Check out the article over at Smashing Magazine.