I’ve always wanted to create some themes for communities, with BuddyPress this became a reality. Normal WordPress doesnt offer much in terms of social interaction, BuddyPress and bbPress pick up the slack. The basic idea was to create a theme that is based on a single picture as the background. That way it should be easy to create different themes for different games. You can check out my example site for Diablo III. BuddyPress requires a lot of styling, so there are still some parts left to do but all in all it’s comming along nicely.
Microsoft’s Metro UI causing up a storm
The first of Windows 8 has been controversial to say the least, it shows the Desktop OS using the same Interface as the Windows 7 Phone. While it is a very fundamental change in the user experience, it is not the focal point of the storm. At the heart of the new Metro UI is HTML 5 and Javascript. An openly supported standard capable running of any platform. This is a radical change for the company known for it’s closed source mindedness. What ever the outcome it is a significant change of direction.
A lof of Windows developers are questioning this change and fear their hard earned skills become meaningless overnight. From what I can tell this is not the case, as the video clearly shows a normal Windows UI running inside the Metro UI. I doubt the normal interface is ever going away. The new UI is geared towards more simple computing and touch screen devices, I can’t really see it working for power users. My own preference would to not use Metro at all, while its nice on the phone, i run dozens of applications at the same time and on multiple screens and somehow I cant see it working. As for Silverlight and WPF, these are not going anywhere, Microsoft is the one company that is commited to backwards compatiblilty. Most likely WPF will be able to generate HTML 5 and Javascript code as well as normal output.
The biggest disappointment right now is that all the questions go unanswered by Microsoft, they haven’t giving out a single statement about this major shift and keeping us in the dark. Things are getting cold in hell already, what’s next?
Performance tuning your WordPress Plugin
Ever since I started working on plugins I have learned a lot about coding but I never really looked closely to performance. While not mandatory at first, your plugin will work without it, it is something that you will run into as you get closer to finish it.
Lately i’ve been working with Xdebug to increase performance and it has helped. It dropped about 5ms each pagehit from 23 ms to 18 ms. The average pagehit takes about 1300ms. Note that running xdebug causes a lot of overhead and these figures drop a lot when you turn it off, but the percentage gain stays.
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PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library php_exif.dll
Running on a new install on my laptop, the is_callable( ‘exif_read_data’) function returned false all of a sudden. Dumbfounded since I had’nt made changes to the meta lib in a long time I started to investigate. The exif library was loaded but it was not visible in phpinfo. Upon googling the error, I found this solution. It seems that windows based servers need mbstring loaded before exif. So in your php.ini move the php_mbstring.dll before the php_exif.dll.
Browser Roundup
Every now and then I test web applications to see if they are still functioning correctly, I use a lot of javascript, jQuery and flash and things tend to break when you do this. So I downloaded all the latest browsers (chrome/opera/firefox/internet explorer/safari) and run a few test to see if all the functions work correctly. And all is well mostly, except for Internet Explorer. But that’s not really breaking news. Also contains some biased opinions on browsers which aren’t necessary factual or true.