At the Vancouver WordPress Meetup the week before last, we got an eyeful and earful about the new WordPress 3.5, the Elvin Jones version.
About 50 people gathered at The Network Hub and we heard host Morten Rand-Henriksen and Joachim (Joey) Kudish from WordPress.com tag-team through the many changes.
In my November 12 post, Making Friends with BuddyPress, I bemoaned the difficulty of adapting BuddyPress to the Next theme, one that is not on the BP’s preferred list of compatible themes.
I used BuddyPress Template Pack and moved folders around on the server before being faced with the task of tweaking the layout to make BP appear correctly on the page. I got pretty far, copying and pasting the header and footer tags, but not far enough to make the sidebar go where it needs to sit.
After much frustration with BuddyPress, I did what any WordPress designer does when the coding gets tough.
I hired a developer.
Yelp is not all it shouts about as I found out this week when two reviews for Blogsite Studio disappeared from view. All that remains of them is “(2 Filtered).”
The first review, from Doug S., still remains, but there is a big difference between Doug and the BC Association of Travel Writers. Doug is a regular Yelper and the others are what the site calls, “Drive By” reviewers, according to a June 11, 2012 story by CBC.
So, if you are not an active member of Yelp’s club, your review will be filtered out. Thanks for trying.
This week I finally had the opportunity to use BuddyPress – a forum program who’s very name implies we’ll be fast friends – but the friendship has been higher maintenance than I expected.
According to Wikipedia, BuddyPress is open-source social networking software package owned by Automattic that can be installed on WordPress to transform it into a social network platform. Perfect, I thought, for a client who organizes educational fairs.
BuddyPress includes its own theme, which looks like your average bulletin board from the late 1990s. Functional, but not pretty. Having never used BuddyPress, I was surprised when it activated and replaced my premium theme and had no idea I would have to shake off that built-in theme. Turns out, what I needed was, you guessed it, another plugin.
All WordPress themes are created differently, endowed by their Creator with peculiar features, that among them are responsiveness, theme options, and the pursuit of developer support.
This statement should be written into a WordPress constitution somewhere but it’s not, so I’m saying it here. While the WordPress platform may maintain a certain consistency of usability, the themes created for it simply do not.
When picking a theme for your site you just have to know what you’re getting into before you hit “install”.
