Post Formats Presentation
Slides for the presentation I gave on Post Formats at the WordPress Memphis Meetup yesterday. It was a short presentation, only about 15-20 minutes, really. Post formats simply aren’t that complicated, and tend to be easy to grasp quickly.
Link if you can’t see the embedded version above: http://go.otto42.com/uhwrv
I followed up showing on a demo site how you could use CSS to easily add and style post formats. During that, I used the Web Developer Addon for Firefox, since that’s my preferred means of quickly editing CSS files and seeing the results, live. Frankly, I just find Firebug too complicated to use for that sort of thing.
Shortlink:
Nice to see that you are suggesting use of get_template_part() for specific templates. This is one of the best new(ish) features for WordPress theming IMHO. Currently working on integrating it more into my own projects!
[…] plenty of tutorials on post formats out there, so I’ll assume you’re more than capable of figuring out how […]
You’re right, Post Formats are really simple to understand, unfortunately though every tutorial or post focuses on the end outcome of using post formats, rather than the steps involved in creating a post classified by a post format.
Reading the many discussions around the internet, many people bemoan the lack of user-friendliness when using post formats (i.e. selecting as format using the radio button and then trying to remember entering correctly formatted content either in the main body of the post or via custom fields.
The only solution I’ve found is the free wootumblog plugin that uses an ajaxified interface to emulate the simplicity of the Tumblr input screen, unfortunately rather than calling a standard wordpress function (such as edit_post() in post.php) it uses its own commands to insert the post and set its post format classification. This unfortunately causes all sorts of problems with integrating it with wpmu sitewide tags on a multisite install.
Given how useful post formats should be for most bloggers I’m surprised there isn’t (a) an alternative to wootumblog’s quickpress interface that follows standard WP protocols, or (b) more discussion about how to integrate it (and therefore post format usage) with other plugins and functions.
Are other developers just not aware of this interface, or reluctant to seemingly promote a plugin produced by a commercial developer? Just curious..
Not everybody agrees on how to change the interface dynamically. I have not used the plugin you’re talking about, but likely they picked one way that they thought made sense and went with it. Other people have differing opinions.
Until it shakes out and there’s at least some idea of a standard method of implementing it, I doubt that sort of thing will make it into the core.
It’s actually a thoroughly well developed plugin in terms of the improvements it makes to the WP post interface (which is where the present gap exists between WP and Tumblr), there just appears to be a slight divergence (from core) in the way it hooks into the main WP actions.
There’s even an iPhone app (Express App) with the same post format interface (minus video posting) which has been developed by 3rd party specialist Kenobi Studios – http://kenobistudios.com/2010/10/introducing-express/
I’ll post a link when I get it fully working – Michael (Fields) has kindly volunteered to take a look at the compatibility issue I mentioned and perhaps launch an updated plugin.
I understand there will be many different views on the dynamic interface, but it would be nice to see some more discussion moving the subject along and widening the appeal of WP to bloggers.
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Thanks for the slideshow Otto.
My blog will never look the same.