Custom Post Types (CPTs) are a fantastic feature within WordPress. They allow you to define your own Post Type and how it operates within WordPress. As an example, if you're creating a movie review site you might make a Custom Post Type called ‘movies' and include Custom Meta Boxes and seperate entry fields for data such as “Genre”, “Release Date”, “Director”, etc., rather than adding all the content into the standard edit field. This makes for much easier to manage data when displaying it within your theme.
Hand Coding versus WYSIWYG Editing
I recently had the pleasure of joining in on a discussion on Hand Coding versus using WYSIWYG editors, with the awesome guys from the Motley Design Crew. Jane was on the side of WYSIWYG editors while I was espousing the merits of hand coding. Whilst weighing up the pros and cons of each method, we all agreed there's no right or wrong way to code up a site. It all comes down to what works best for you.
WordCamp Gold Coast 2011 #wcgold
Just last week (Nov 5th & 6th, 2011) I was lucky enough to attend WordCamp Gold Coast. This is only the fourth WordCamp held in Australia and the first event to be held in Queensland. Approximately 150 attendees, 21 speakers and 8 sponsors made for an awesome weekend! A huge thanks must go to all the guys that organised the event and kept it running over the weekend as well as all the fantastic speakers.
EasyWPGuide is an easy to follow manual for editing your WordPress site content
I recently released a new side project that I've been working on for a while. It's called Easy WP Guide. It's an easy to follow manual to help you understand the basics of editing your WordPress site content. You can read the guide online or download the PDF or (brandable) Word document for reading offline.
Modifying your WordPress Theme to disable image comments
One of the benefits of having a blog, no matter whether it's WordPress or something else, is being able to interact with your readers through the use of Comments. Obviously, the downside to this is the Spam that you also attract. Thankfully there's quite a few plugins around now that allow you to automatically filter out the majority of Spam comments.