Get the details on the Carrington web site.

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Version 1.3 of Carrington Blog is now available for download.

Upgrading is strongly recommended due to a security patch in this release.

This version has a couple of changes - both bug fixes and new features:

• Added an image.php file for displaying media. This is not yet abstracted into the framework, but will be in the future.
• Added a field to the settings page for adding in analytics code.
• Fixed a problem with IE7 and the dropdown menus.
• Explicitly send headers with AJAX responses, hopefully fixes some issues reported by Safari users.
• Added a Log In link to the header.
• Added code to load in translations.
• Updated documentation.

Enjoy! Let us know in the forums if you run into trouble.

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• Added autocomplete="off" to the username and password fields on the Settings page.
• Made the error message when the login fails more explicit (removed debug info).
• Made the link to the Settings page from the Plugins page a bit more elegant.

If you aren’t having problems with 1.5, no need to upgrade. If you are having trouble, this version might help.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and e-mail me a link to the thread.

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This version has an important bug fix for a problem in earlier betas of 1.5 that didn’t properly throttle requests to Twitter.

If you are using a 1.5 beta - this is a must upgrade situation.

There are also a bunch of new features:

• Weekly digests.
• Updates to match Twitter API changes so that “in reply to” links are properly created
• Ability to exclude @replies from daily and weekly digests and blog posts
• added support for hashtags (linked to search.twitter.com)
• Made URLs in blog posts clickable (using the tweet to blog post feature).
• abstracted all API endpoints and URLs so that it can theoretically support any service that implements the Twitter API
• Fixed the duplicate custom field issue for people running WordPress 2.6+.
• Numerous other tweaks and fixes.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and e-mail me a link to the thread.

Enjoy!

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I’m giving a presentation on WordPress widgets: outlining how they work and how they differ from standard JavaScript widgets. I think the Q&A at the end of the presentation will be very interesting - I’m curious what the questions/topics of discussion will be like.

UPDATE: Here are the slides from my presentation.

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Version 1.2 of Carrington Blog is now available for download.

It’s been great seeing developers picking up the Carrington theme framework and using it. We wanted to get these fixes and features out ASAP as a result.

This version has a couple of changes - both bug fixes and new features:

• Added support for meta-{key}.php content templates (previously supported only meta-{key}-{value}.php templates) as requested.
• Added a field for entering the About text that is shown in the sidebar. If this is present, the /about page content is not used. The content of this field is passed through regular WordPress filters for formatting, etc.
• Fixed a layout bug with comment links.
• Adjusted some header tag spacing.
• Abstracted all general templates (header, sidebar, etc.) - this was not working completely in 1.1.
• Updated documentation.

Enjoy! Let us know in the forums if you run into trouble.

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I wasn’t exaggerating (that much) when I characterized Carrington as the best thing since the wheel and sliced bread. I really feel like this has the potential to be the largest contribution I’ve made to the WordPress community. I’m very excited about it.

Enough self-congratulation - on to the good stuff.

What is Carrington?

Carrington is an attempt to better abstract WordPress theme organization, and simplify commonly needed theme functionality.

At the moment, Carrington is basically three things - in this order:

1. A developer friendly theme and conventions-based templating system.
2. A set of best practices for theme organization.
3. An elegant, semantically rich WordPress theme for end-users with advanced features (like SEO-friendly AJAX loading of comments and archives and drop down navigation menus).

How Do I Get It?

Carrington is released under the GPL, just like WordPress. You can download it from the WordPress theme directory. You can also purchase Carrington from the Crowd Favorite store. This isn’t required, as we also make it available for free; but Carrington is definitely a premium theme and has real value. The more people purchase it, the more we can dedicate resources to improving it and building new Carrington themes.

Download Carrington Blog version 1.1

Carrington Blog is our first theme released on the Carrington framework.

Changes in Version 1.1

• There is now a setting to allow you to set how many posts should appear on the archives pages (seperately from the home page).
• Added parent-{page-slug}.php support to enable custom content display for sub-pages.
• Support cat-{slug}.php, etc. template support throughout all top level directories (header, footer, sidebar, etc.).
• Some IDs were converted to CLASSes to remove in-page ID conflicts (due to AJAX loading of templates).
• Firefox 2 compatibility for drop-down menus.
• Improved ShareThis compatibility with AJAX archives loading.
• Additional classes for misc. support.

Why Did We Build It?

At Crowd Favorite we build a lot of “WordPress as a CMS” powered web sites. WordPress makes a great, easily customizable, CMS back-end; and Carrington is the perfect compliment for it on the front-end.

We wanted to simplify how we built these highly customized sites. We wanted to make them easier and faster to build, and simpler to maintain. Carrington is our solution.

Framework = Convention Over Code

The main win from a framework is the move to convention over code. Instead of writing a bunch of code to accomplish something, using the supported naming conventions and the framework takes care of the heavy lifting for you.

By standardizing file naming conventions and template hierarchy (while retaining compatibility with WordPress theme standards), and including functionality to act on these standards, Carrington makes it dead simple to implement commonly requested theme features. These include a custom design/format for:

• posts in the “Tech News” category
• posts by a Joe Smith
• posts by contributing authors
• comments by the post author
• comments by registered users
• search results
• custom footer/header/sidebar for page X or category Y
• etc.

Carrington allows you to stop cluttering your templates with conditional logic and just build your templates. The framework will take care of the logic for you.

The Details

The WordPress engine prepares data for a page and hands it off to the theme and it’s the theme’s job to make that look right to the end user. Carrington takes that data, and makes a bunch of intelligent decisions about how the page should be displayed.

The override system looks at the page to display, and the available templates, and goes through a series of checks to see which templates to use at each level. Don’t worry; you aren’t stuck with the evaluation order we chose. The order in which the fallbacks are processed (and the final decisions on templates) can be overridden by plugins using actions and filters - using the standard WordPress system. This means that if you want your author role template to be more important than your category template (or vice versa), it’s a simple matter of a couple line plugin (and can even be placed in Carrington’s plugins/ directory for easy distribution with the file). Of course, we are happy to provide development services to help build these plugins or customizations.

The core of the Carrington engine is in the function.php and functions/ directory. That’s where the magic happens. The rest of the theme is organized into template files in different directories. There are a lot more directories here than you normally see in a WP theme because Carrington abstracts the theme elements to their atomic pieces. This enables you to have a template that displays a post, comment¹, etc.

These atomic templates enable the AJAX loading features you see in Carrington. People have long asked me to release the AJAX loading features you see on this site, but I couldn’t really do it (until now) because it required this kind of theme abstraction and most themes don’t support it.

Every directory in Carrington has a pretty thorough README file (you can also access this documentation online). These files explain how the templates in the given directory are used, and what named templates are supported for this directory. These took a while to write, and could probably use some more detail (I’m not a tech writer), but they are a very good start and have been part of Carrington since 1.0.

Online Resources

This is still a little bit in-flux, but we’ve got the following set up so far:

• Download
• Buy
• Live demo
• Documentation
• Forum

Carrington’s Future

Expect to see some new themes from us based on the Carrington framework in the future - we’ve just scratched the surface of what Carrington can do here. We’re excited to be bringing new Carrington-based themes to the community; and we’re equally excited to see what the community builds with Carrington.

1. Similar to the new comment template in WP 2.7. [back]

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WordCamp Utah was a great event - well organized by Joseph Scott (thanks Joseph!), well attended and with some very good speakers.

I gave a presentation about WordPress plugins. This was a challenging talk because of the vastness of the topic combined with the variety of the interest and technical background of the audience. Here are the slides.

Some folks seemed upset that I didn’t give a technical demo of how to build a plugin. However, I chose to keep the talk at a high level based on the make-up of the audience.

Instead of getting into the code, I talked about techniques and approaches, and different kinds of plugins. My intent was to give people an idea of what they can do with plugins; and a little start on how to approach writing one. We may change this at WordCamp Denver and have some technical presentations.

I also announced a couple of goodies at the end of the talk. We pulled an all-nighter on Friday getting everything ready for release. My presentation might have suffered a bit as a result.

We’ve released some development tools for other WordPress developers to use. These are things we’ve had to build over the years, and thought others could make good use of.

• WordPress Install (SVN Checkout) Script - a shell script will walk you through a checkout of multiple versions of WordPress from SVN and set up the requisite config file and database structure. This makes it easy to create a series of installs for testing purposes.
• WordPress Compatibility Plugin - sets some constants and some other little things that provide backward compatibility for older versions of WordPress.
• Quality Assurance (QA) Checklists - checklists to help guide plugin and theme testing. Includes considerations such as WordPress version, theme compatibility, browser type, WordPress settings, etc.

The biggest announcement - and the one I’m most excited about - was the Carrington theme, but I’ll have a follow-up post about that as there is just too much to cover here.

Thanks again to everyone who made WordCamp Utah a success.

UPDATE: Oh yeah, the presentation was recorded. (Thanks Jeremy)

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Progressive License is similar to other plugins that allow you to easily put a license on your content, but it brings a little twist: the ability to change the license applied to the content as the content ages.

Steve explains:

In my case, as an example, it applies a Creative Commons noncommercial license for the first 60 days - this one - and then retires the noncommercial provision after that time period, applying this license on everything older than 60 days.

This is the sort of thing that would have been really simple to build as a one-off custom plugin, but RedMonk instead chose to have my company, Crowd Favorite, build a solution that could be distributed back to the community.

This was an interesting user interaction challenge. We did our best to make this definition of the license time windows as user friendly as possible.

You can see we created a JavaScript based configuration page that does some date calculation to show when licenses would be applied to a post published today. Hopefully this does a good job communicating how the various licenses will be applied.

Progressive License ships with seven Creative Commons licenses included out of the box, but also gives you an interface to add additional licenses you would like to use.

Many thanks to RedMonk for bringing us in to build this plugin, and kudos to them for choosing to sponsor the creation of a robust solution for the rest of the WordPress community.

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This release is just the same as 1.5b2, but fixes the duplicate custom field issue for people running WordPress 2.6+.

Hopefully this will be ready for a full release shortly, with only minor changes (if any). I guess we’ll find out soon.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and e-mail me a link to the thread.

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JabberWerx AJAX is a set of thin client JavaScript libraries that can be easily embedded into existing web sites and web applications to add rich push functionality (chat, live content updates, etc.) to them.

There are easy to drop in bits for one to one chat (tabbed), group chat and a library that allows you to push data updates to your page (think pushed stock or twitter updates). It’s a pretty good system to get up and running easily.

Most of us think of XMPP/Jabber as a chat protocol, and it does that very well (as anyone using GTalk can attest to); but it’s also got a very interesting place in the web 2.0 space as a real time data push channel. Using push instead of pull/poll can dramatically reduce server loads, and also gives you new data faster.¹

Building libraries and building applications are two very different things. With applications you need to make functionality available to your end users. With libraries, you need to build robust and complete solutions that will be used in ways you probably haven’t thought of yet; abstraction and building small, distinct components is key. It’s a fun and different challenge.

I’m very proud that my company, Crowd Favorite, was able to work with the great folks at Jabber to help bring this concept to fruition.

1. Steve has a great Q&A on this. [back]

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This release has a couple of bug fixes (from version 1.5b1) and a couple of new features:

• fixed a logical bug that made the “exclude replies” option work backwards (oops!)
• removed a try/catch for PHP 4 compatibility (oops!)
• added support for hashtags (linked to search.twitter.com)
• abstracted all API endpoints and URLs so that it can theoretically support any service that implements the Twitter API

Hopefully this will be ready for a full release shortly, with only minor changes (if any). I guess we’ll find out soon.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.

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ShareThis is a plugin that makes it easy for your visitors to share your content to other people or online destinations and social web sites. You can see it in action by clicking the ShareThis link at the bottom of any of the posts or pages on this site.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the ShareThis Support Forums and the team will be happy to help you out.

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The new plugin makes it easy for you to enable Lijit search from the default WordPress search box, or you can add in the full Lijit widget wijit if you like.

I use Lijit search on alexking.info, where I aggregate content from all of the various sites and services I publish content on. The Lijit search performs a search across all of that content - pretty slick.

I’m pretty pleased with the overall user experience for the plugin. It nicely handles set-up for new or existing users, gives straightforward options and instructions, and even brings in your Lijit search stats with a new link on the WordPress admin dashboard.

Many thanks to the great folks we were able to work with at Lijit in building the new plugin. It was a pleasure working with people that care deeply about their users and are also technically astute.

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The overall look has been updated with a great new design from Bryan Bell, and a number of little features have been added and minor tweaks made since the initial launch.

I’ve got a few more screenshots here, but it’s a lot more fun to just go poke around.

Here is a partial list of the changes:

• New theme design.
• Welcome message for first time visitors.
• List of Hot Topics next to the Create box.
• New Browse the News navigation.
• Integrated ads from the Deck.
• More little JavaScript effect niceties.
• Numerous behind the scenes changes for performance.

The main focus of the refresh was to make it easier for new visitors to explore the site. To this end we exposed more links to Hot Topics, added weight to the Browse the News (formerly Newsfix) button, and configured the Browse the News drawer to stay open on Browse the News pages. This last change keeps the other news topics visible more often, giving people enticing things to click on. Hopefully the results will be good.

Thanks, as always, to Dave Pell for trusting us to work on his baby. We have a lot of fun building and using Addictomatic.

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