Triggered (I presume) by Rarst’s citing the A Day of REST conference site as a an example of a site not using progressive enhancement (now removed), Joe Hoyle responded at length.

Here is my contribution to the discussion (I originally started it as a comment on Rarst’s site, but it outgrew that):

I presume from Joe Hoyle’s response and Rarst’s mention of removing specifics, that Joe’s REST conference site was highlighted as a bad example. So I understand the offended/defensive tone of his reply. Further, given the audience for that particular event and thus that site, I could regard it as a reasonable compromise to forego support for those without working JavaScript.

However, that does not apply to the rest of the web.

People not numbers

Joe, you quote some figures, quite small figures really. 1.1% of users don’t have JavaScript available; 5% of users running very old versions of Internet Explorer, even referring to 2.4% of screen reader users who don’t have access to JavaScript.
But the problem with those small numbers is that they are small percentages of very large numbers. So 1% of all web users is 30 million. And those users are people, not numbers.

But let’s look at just one of those numbers: the 2.4% of screen reader users who don’t have access to JavaScript. All of those people, by definition, have difficulties accessing the web: likely their only method of accessing the web is through a screen reader. And you imply that it’s OK to prevent them from accessing the web in the name of the latest shiny trends and to save some development time and cost. Actually I’m being polite, you don’t imply it’s OK, you said “I don’t care…” but I’ll accept you may be talking about one specific site.

Just from the RNIB figures in this 2014 report (PDF) there are 2 million people in the UK living with sight loss. If only half of them want to use the Web, then that 2.4% is really 12000 people you just excluded from the web.
Don’t forget: for many people with sight loss the internet is a lifeline helping them feel less isolated.

Blind users are not the only ones

And of course, visual difficulties are not the only reason people need accessible web sites. Those with motor difficulties, who can only use keyboards or special devices like braille readers, head wands, sip and puff controllers, etc. or simply those with unsteady hands that find a mouse difficult to use like the ever-increasing aged population, all need to be able to use the web too.

Time for honesty

These are real people you may walk past in the street this weekend. Be honest, do you really want to join Facebook, Netflix, American Express, and yes, Automattic and boldly say to them “I don’t care that you can’t access all of the internet”?

Originally published at Thoughts on Progressive Enhancement and Accessibility.
Copyright Mike Little. All rights reserved. Mike Little - WordPress Specialist.

So, WordPress has come a long way. A huge collective of talented people maintain and improved every release. The business of WordPress is maturing at an increasing rate. The latest indicator being Automattic‘s acquisition of WooThemes. And WordPress itself is maturing. Some of the latest improvements, including those under the hood, show a maturing code-base. Albeit somewhat lagging in some people’s opinions. But that’s what almost 100% backwards compatibility gets you.

But one thing I don’t see much evidence of is the paths into WordPress development maturing. Getting started as a serious WordPress developer still seems too hard. It’s a journey fraught with poor examples, bad advice, and vaguely improving references. The docs team are doing a great job of replacing the ageing and increasingly dangerous WordPress Codex. But their efforts still seem centred around references.

References are great when you know what it is you need to look up. But if you don’t know what you need to look for, you end up hoping you will stumble upon something useful or relevant. I know the Theme Handbook is coming along nicely — hey! I learned some stuff from it last week — but the tutorial section slides right back into reference mode after just a couple of pages.

As WordPress heads towards it’s teenage years, I’d like to see some better resources for new developers. Both those new to development per se, and those experienced developers new to WordPress. I’ll be heading in that direction. I hope others will too.

Originally published at Happy 12th Birthday WordPress.
Copyright Mike Little. All rights reserved. Mike Little - WordPress Specialist.

You will find a transcript of the episode at the bottom of the post.

I welcome any feedback you may have. I’m also interested in any suggestions for topics or news to cover. Please leave a comment below.

Show notes:

(Links to references in the podcast)

• Sucuri blog
• Plugin Vulnerabilities plugin
• Press This plugin
• “Allowing site switching is the eventual goal”
• Google’s “Mobile Friendly” announcement
• Theme review team’s blog post
• Google’s Mobile Friendly testing tool
• Stack Overflow article on WP Tavern
• WP Dev Shed caching benchmark
• Emoji Support means more languages
• Theme Review co
• WP Tavern article on Microsoft
• IIS Versions of WordPress
• Microsoft Europe and Microsoft News
• Pippin Williamson Giving back article
• Make.WordPress.org – Get involved

Episode Transcript

Originally published at WordPress news roundup #2.
Copyright Mike Little. All rights reserved. Mike Little - WordPress Specialist.

Update: I’ve added the audio only version of this roundup. You can listen to it here. Just click on the player.

Update 2: There are now subtitles in English for the video. Click the “CC” button on the video player. You can also find a transcript at the bottom of this page.

References.

(Links to places mentioned in the video)

• WordPress SEO Plugin security issue
• Joost’s announcement about the security issue
• Blog post discussing auto updates
• Codeguard Backup awareness survey article on WP Tavern
• Codeguard.com
• WordPress.org plugin repository
• WordPress.org theme repository
• WordPress.org security white paper
• WordPress 4.2 beta 1 release
• The WordPress Foundation
• Delicious brains tour of the WordPress database
• WordPress version stats
• Blog article discussing the Major update to the version stats

If you have any questions about any of the things  I covered, please ask in the comments below. And if you have any suggestions for what I should include next time, again, ask in the comments below.

Originally published at WordPress news roundup #1.
Copyright Mike Little. All rights reserved. Mike Little - WordPress Specialist.

Twelve years ago today, I left a comment on comment on Matt Mullenweg’s blog (back when it was photomatt.net) that kicked off a fork of the un-maintained b2/Cafelog blogging software that turned into WordPress!

From those beginnings WordPress has matured into a world-beating open source CMS. B2/Cafelog was used by perhaps 2,000 bloggers. Now WordPress runs millions of sites around the world. In fact over 23% of the web and still growing!

WordPress has had an interesting year as usual

For me, the past twelve months have been a mixed lot. Personally, I failed to meet a some key goals I set myself. Perhaps because I set too many! In other areas, things have gone well.

One of the things I helped to organise last year was WordCamp Manchester, where we kept it almost 100% local speakers, managed to achieve 50% female speakers on both tracks. Videos of all talk are available on WordPress.tv. We also had a well attended Contributor’s day.  We are hoping to run another successful WordCamp Manchester later this year too.

My WordPress training has gone very well this year. I’ve really enjoy teaching in the classroom and interacting with the attendees. It’s personally very rewarding.

The Manchester WordPress User Group I run has gone from strength to strength with some great speakers and talks throughout the last year and plans for more this year. Our Meetup membership has grown to more than 500.

Out in the wider world, WordPress has continued to grow and gone from strength to strength. WordPress supports a world-wide, billion dollar, industry from WordPress specialists like me (I’ve completed my sixth year trading as my company zed1.com); growing WordPress-based companies like Human Made; through to multi-million dollar companies like Copyblogger, WooThemes, and of course Automattic.

As usual, praise must go to the fantastic community around WordPress, and the awesome power of the GNU GPL open source license.

Here’s to the next year

I predict it will be another great year for WordPress. I hope it will be a great year for me and you too.

How has your WordPress year been? And how do you think the next will be? Leave me a comment below and let me know.

Update: HumanMade, now sixteen strong, can hardly be described as ‘small’.  I updated their mention.

Originally published at WordPress–12 years since the beginning.
Copyright Mike Little. All rights reserved. Mike Little - WordPress Specialist.

WordPress passes another year, it’s eleventh, gaining strength at every step. The last year has seen the software and, more importantly, the community only get better.

Across it’s life from the humble beginnings through the first release, and nearly 90 more releases  to the current version 3.9.1, it has come to dominate the CMS world with a market share of 60% and the general web with over 22% of all websites. Happy 11th birthday WordPress!

As always, WordPress owes its strength to the fantastic community around it.

I am continually excited about WordPress and its future. In particular, I am more than pleased that in the UK this year we will have at least four WordCamps; Sheffield we already had, with Manchester, Bournemouth, and London to come.

The number of local meet-up groups is growing too: my own Manchester WordPress User Group goes from strength to strength, other established groups continue to thrive, and yet more have started, are re-starting, or are in the planning stages.

I’m happy to call myself a WordPress Specialist and work 100% exclusively with WordPress. WordPress changed my life and WordCamps and the WordPress community continue to enhance it; how has your life been affected by WordPress?

Originally published at Happy 11th Birthday WordPress.
Copyright Mike Little. All rights reserved. Mike Little - WordPress Specialist.

Eleven years ago today, I left a comment on comment on Matt Mullenweg’s blog (back when it was photomatt.net) that kicked off a fork of the un-maintained b2/Cafelog blogging software that quickly turned into  WordPress!

From those humble beginnings WordPress has matured into a world-beating open source CMS. B2/Cafelog was used by perhaps 2,000 bloggers. Now WordPress runs almost 75 million sites around the world. That’s now over 22% of the web!

WordPress as an industry continues to grow

WordPress supports a world-wide, billion dollar, industry from  WordPress specialists like me (I’ve completed my fifth year trading as my company zed1.com); small WordPress-based companies like Code for the People and Human Made; through to multi-million dollar companies like Copyblogger, WooThemes, and of course Automattic.

Praise must go to the fantastic community around WordPress, the singular vision of Matt Mullenweg, and the awesome power of the GNU GPL open source license.

Here’s to the next year

Last year saw the releases of versions 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8. Each improving in many ways on what as become the world’s favourite CMS. WordPress 3.9 is being worked on now, and I predict it will be another great year for WordPress.

Update: This should have been published on the 25th, but I seem to have missed clicking the publish button!

Originally published at WordPress–11 years since the beginning.
Copyright Mike Little. All rights reserved. Mike Little - WordPress Specialist.

Although we have an active local WordPress community, especially the regular (and irregular) attendees of the monthly Manchester WordPress User Group I run, I look forward to meeting WordPress enthusiasts from the wider UK community as well as a few international travellers who attend.

This year looks to be as well attended and full of interesting speakers, with a full and varied schedule. I’m looking forward to several of the talks. I’m running a two-hour “Starting out with WordPress” workshop on Saturday morning again this year, and I’m also part of the “Site Doctors” session on Sunday.

There are still tickets available, so if you want to take part in a two-day WordPress un-conference with three tracks and a “Happiness Bar”, a free t-shirt, a mug, and sponsored drinks at the Saturday night social all for just £35,  grab one now.

Originally published at WordCamp Lancaster, UK 2013.
Copyright Mike Little. All rights reserved. Mike Little - WordPress Specialist.

Step 1

Start with the URL of the tweet. The easiest way to get that is to look at the tweet on its own and not on the Twitter homepage or in someone’s twitter stream. Click on the timestamp just to the right of the tweet. It usually has the age of the tweet like “30m” or “4h” or else a date like “2 Jul”. Once on that page showing just that one tweet (and maybe some replies), copy the URL from your browser’s address bar to the clipboard.

Alternatively, right-click the timestamp link and select “Copy link address” or whatever your browser uses.

Step 2

Next, back in your WordPress dashboard, paste that URL into your post or page on a line on its own. Make sure it is not a link, just plain text.  If it does get pasted as a link (it will show blue and underlined) you can click once in the link and click the “unlink” toolbar button.

Step 3

Publish your post or page and enjoy a fully interactive tweet embedded on your site. It’s as simple as that.

Even the “Follow”, “Reply”, and “Retweet” buttons work.

The Result: An Embedded Tweet

Here’s an example embedded in this post.

Update: If it Doesn’t Work

If it doesn’t work for you and your site just shows a link, it will be because your browser has pasted the URL as a link into your post or page. To remedy it, follow these steps:

1. Edit your post or page.
2. Click once on the Twitter URL.
3. Click the “unlink ” button in the toolbar.
4. Update or publish your post or page.

Have you tried this yourself? Did you manage to get it working? Let me know in the comments below.

Originally published at How to Embed a Tweet in a WordPress Post or Page.
Copyright Mike Little. All rights reserved. Mike Little - WordPress Specialist.

I’m trying to change the order of the <title> tag so it reads “site title | page title” instead of the standard “page title | site title”. I know it’s bad SEO, but the client is adamant this is what he wants!

Now, Twenty Twelve sets up the title tag on your page using a filter function in it’s functions.php file. The header.php simple contains this code:

<title><?php wp_title( '|', true, 'right' ); ?></title>

The function in functions.php looks like this:

function twentytwelve_wp_title( $title, $sep ) {
global $paged, $page;

if ( is_feed() )
return $title;

// Add the site name.
$title .= get_bloginfo( 'name' );

// Add the site description for the home/front page.
$site_description = get_bloginfo( 'description', 'display' );
if ( $site_description && ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) )
$title = "$title $sep $site_description";

// Add a page number if necessary.
if ( $paged >= 2 || $page >= 2 )
$title = "$title $sep " . sprintf( __( 'Page %s', 'twentytwelve' ), max( $paged, $page ) );

return $title;
}
add_filter( 'wp_title', 'twentytwelve_wp_title', 10, 2 );

Twenty Twelve adds it’s function to the 'wp_title' filter.

One possibility: Add a second filter

One solution might be to add your own filter to the chain in your child theme; set it on a lower priority so that it runs after Twenty Twelve’s function; and change the title tag that way. In this particular case — swapping the order of the two parts — that might be quite hard. Theoretically, you could split the title on the separator character ($sep) and swap the two halves. But that assumes the separator character will never appear in either the site name or a page/post title. Hmmm… quite risky.

A better solution: Replace the filter

A better solution is to replace the filter in your Twenty Twelve child theme with your own. You need to hook your own function to the filter in your child theme’s functions.php file. Remember you can’t use the same function name as Twenty Twelve. You could do it like this:

add_filter( 'wp_title', 'z1_twentytwelve_wp_title', 10, 2 );
function z1_twentytwelve_wp_title( $title, $sep ) {
global $paged, $page;

if ( is_feed() )
return $title;

//strip out separator already added by wp_title()
$title = str_replace( $sep, '', $title);

// Add the site description for the home/front page.
$site_description = get_bloginfo( 'description', 'display' );
if ( $site_description && ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) )
$title = "$site_description";

// Add a page number if necessary.
if ( $paged >= 2 || $page >= 2 )
$title = "$title $sep " . sprintf( __( 'Page %s', 'twentytwelve' ), max( $paged, $page ) );

// Add the site name before the rest.
$title = get_bloginfo( 'name' ) . ' ' . $sep . ' '      . $title;

return $title;
}

Note: I’ve given my function a unique name by prefixing it with ‘z1_’, and I’ve also kept the same priority. I’ll be removing Twenty Twelve’s function so it doesn’t matter.

Removing the original hooked function

In order to remove a filter we simply call remove_filter() with the same parameters as the add_filter call.

remove_filter( 'wp_title', 'twentytwelve_wp_title', 10, 2 );

However, your child theme’s functions.php runs before Twenty Twelve’s does. That means that when your call to remove_filter() runs, Twenty Twelve hasn’t yet called add_filter(). It won’t work because there’s nothing to remove!

Instead you need to hook a new function to the after_setup_theme action and call remove_filter() from there.

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'z1_turnoff_twentytwelve_title' );
function z1_turnoff_twentytwelve_title() {
remove_filter( 'wp_title', 'twentytwelve_wp_title', 10, 2 );
}

Huh? What’s that doing?

Here I’ve created a new function z1_turnoff_twentytwelve_title() and hooked that to the after_setup_theme action, where I can now call remove_filter().
In other words the sequence of events for replacing a filter in a Twenty Twelve child theme goes like this:

1. WordPress does all it’s start up stuff and calls your child theme’s functions.php.
2. Your child theme adds a filter for wp_title, and hooks a function to the after_setup_theme action.
3. WordPress calls Twenty Twelve’s functions.php which also adds a filter for ‘wp_title’.
4. WordPress runs do_action('after_setup_theme') (because the theme is now set up).
5. Your function hooked to that action gets called…
6. … and it removes the Twenty Twelve filter!
7. Leaving your filter in place.

See http://pastebin.com/hFWgc1p4 for a complete example.

The take away

It can be tricky understanding that code outside any function definitions in your files (functions.php or plugin files) is executed by PHP as soon as the file is loaded and parsed. Which is completely different from when WordPress calls your functions in those files. Often that immediate execution by PHP is far too early unless it is simply hooking on to filters and actions. That’s one of the reasons the filters and actions system works the way it does, so that WordPress will call your code exactly when you want it to, rather than when PHP loads it.

I hope that helps some of you out there. If you have any questions about this, please ask below. If you have other WordPress questions you want answering, let me know in the comments below.

Originally published at Replacing a filter in a Twenty Twelve Child Theme.
Copyright Mike Little. All rights reserved. Mike Little - WordPress Specialist.