It’s a lot of time that I don’t speak about my work.
Even if I’m working a lot, more than 14 hours each day, since January.

Part of my work actually is photography, and this post is about that…
… because in a week or two I will publish more than 200 pictures.

They will be divided into two parts…:

• … the personal stuff (as always) will be published in this website.
  I remember to everyone that I never published my work as photographer on this website…
  … the pictures you can find here are just “personal” stuff.
• The high quality stuff or pictures I took for work reasons will be water-marked and will be published in my new website: www.alvisenicoletti.com

The new pictures are about:

• Fashion shooting
• Dance pictures (biennale danza, tango, and various theater stuff)
• Internals, architecture, and other stuff

Damn… the internet explorer problem with this website was really stupid.

After months I had some time and an intuition to find wich it was the real problem, and I resolved it.

Internet Explorer Sucks.

Today I added a new plugin in my roster: AStickyPostOrdER.

AStickyPostOrdER, a plugin created by AndreSC, is a powerful addon to WordPress to touch it’s categories handling without messing up with the code.

Still in developement, the plugin augures well, thanks also to the interactivity of it’s developer that helped me to help him to resolve a problem in less than 24 hours.

As he asked, I’m writing that post to help people to see an example of the use of his plugin in a huge website like this with a lot of categories and sub-categories and a complex structure.

Actually, AStickyPostOrdER is helping me in the Music section…
But let’s start from the beginning:

• my target was to keep the musical group always the first of it’s category, and to put the posts after it
• after some googling I installed AStickyPostOrdER, easily like every other WordPress plugin
• After that, I went on the easy-interface that AndreSC did, giving a “1″ to the weight of the Pink Floyd post
• Now the Pink Floyd post is the first of it’s category, even if the published songs of the category are newer than it
• that works, of course, without messing up with any row of code and without making the Pink Floyd post the first of it’s mothers categories, the blog category, the I like category, and the Music category.

What else to say…?

Thank you AndreSC !

I worked a lot on this theme, but honestly I don’t know how to describe it.

WordPress is an amazing publishing platform, and the more I use it the more I know it.
Customization is the key of the modern business, expecially if we talk about the web.

A WordPress theme should provide some features that the other themes don’t provide, but cause the customization of a WordPress website is strictly connected to the plugins you use, I’m a bit stuck on what to do to make this theme downloadable by other people.

The best theme I saw until now, browsing the deep web of WordPress, is SandBox.
SandBox embraces completely my filosofy of web… to change behaviour of a website just changing it’s stylesheet.

I think that I will publish my theme when it will be completely SandBox-compatible, cause it is a (small) standard and I like standards.

However, this theme haves also it’s features, so I will need to extend SandBox someway.

Features of this theme actually are:

• The possibility to create a multi-menu with categories and pages in the same branch.
  For example, my album galleries 2007 is a page, and it’s in the same branch (photography) of camera reviews that is a category.
  The trick is done with the plugin “top-level-categories” plugin and with a xml reading-parsing of the menu, that is doable by the user in the administrative panel.
  So, the user can create it’s own menu that is called with a WordPress-like function inside the theme itself.
  My structure for example is “post-category-page” so I have the posts links, the category links, and at the end all the pages of the same branch.

  This feature comes also with a widget (menu) that displays “on request” in the sidebar the same menu I’m using on the top.

• The widgets contains more than one widget each, that is more a customization than a feature, my problem was that the single widgets (searchform, category listing, display recent images, ecc.) wasn’t enough for me cause they would have produced a lot of html code and I liked the actual “navigation-look-menu-links” structure of my sidebar.

  In the future, I want to provide a “widget-group” plugin for everyone that accomplishes this task.

  At least it’s in the wish-list.

• Also a stilesheet switcher (that you can try in the “look” menu) allows the final-user to change and select the style he prefers.
  That was always been a mine fad, and now I fell comfortable with that solution.
  The secondary style that I actually provide sucks, but it’s here just to show-off it can be done.

Be patient…
One day I will publish that theme, in the meantime, if you’re interested in having it, you can contact me.

I want to write something more than the last time about WordPress.
I also hope that in the future I will muse on more about publishing an article with so much hurry.
It’s not easy to use an instrument like this one, the faster it is, the less you can think when you use it.
That’s confusing, cause if blogging software is revolutioning the world making always more people settle on the web, it also make them produce more shit.
I have to think about it.

When I started to use WordPress, I was searching for a powerful blogging platform, easy to edit and customize, but also well developed.

At the beginning, I was dubious about WordPress… cause it seemed to me more a game than a blogging platform.
The platform itself was very basic, but a lot of people was using it, so I tryed to hold on and I looked it’s code.

The first feeling was friendly. I have always developed with php in that way, using a lot of inclusions to abstract up things… changing the behaviour of a page just including from a different source.
Also, the attempt to define a standard, the WordPress… functions and tags, was so appreciable.

So, I googled for”WordPress Themes” and also for “WordPress Plugins“, and a world opened in front of me.
A huge amount of websites, with a huge amount of code.

A Revolution, in the world of blogging.
It needed an in-depth examination.

First I tryed some plugins, amazing for me they was Plug & Play just like the hardware, and that their use don’t involve any change in the platform itself, at all.
I have also appreciated that a lot of official plugin exists, demonstrating that the WordPress stuff wanted originally a light and basic platform to spread in the web, and that everyone can download the extras he wants/needs.
That was encouraging.

Then, I tryed some themes. Amazing. A click, and go.
That is not really unusual in the world of the web platforms, but in WordPress you don’t change just a style or a template… you change everything.
Coding with WordPress is like doing a website with a more powerful version of php, able to fetch posts, pages, display their links and navigation gadgets with just a row of code.

Also, the tags makes it very easy to extract sensible data from the posts/pages, making it possible to do a cross-blog theme in few minutes.

And that, is what I did. Yes… not really in few minutes… but everything needs it’s time, if you want to do it well.

Definitive solutions are rare in a world that change every day like the world of Web Developement.
However, to do a website like this, to publish my thoughts, my photos; to create something that people can see with any kind of additional intervent by me, a solid base is important.
Publishing of images is also very important for me, cause manage thousands of photos is hard, and also, once their online you always want to be sure that they are viewable and that the way you use to reference (so show) them in the posts will never change.

Infact, my idea of weblog is not limited to “post articles and upload photos” but also to put that all togheter.

A post with some images inside it, will tempt the reader to see other images, and also an image can express things often a lot better than words.

In this sense, my choice of image publishing web-platform was very hard, cause the two most popular plugins that do this on WordPress seems really similar but are a lot different.

This plugins are, of course, WPG2 and NextGEN Gallery.

After a forum discussion I did in both the sides, I found in Alex Rabe the developer of NextGEN Gallery a better developer to work with.
Friendly, Avaiable, and also similar to me.
We share the same motto, “learning by doing”, and we both like photography.

So, if you’re deciding wich plugin to use between WPG2 and NextGEN Gallery, and you googled here, consider reading this “pros and cons“ before doing your choice:

1. WPG2 is a plugin that, installed on WordPress like any other plugin, will allow you do publish your photos.
   But how?
   In realty, every WPG2 tab is functional to itself, and will help you to understand what of your webhosting and/or Gallery2 is missing.
   Infact, you will have also to install Gallery2 to make it work.
   Also, it’s hard to understand how pass from the installation part to the “view my photos inside the blog” part.
2. NextGEN Gallery creates, when you install it, some addictional well-structured tables to contain your photos.
   The tabs are intuitive and will make you use the plugin without reading any documentation, exactly how you did with WordPress the first time you used it.
3. Gallery2 is really a strong and advanced platform to publish pictures and videos, but are you sure you really need thousands of php scripts to do what you need?
   A Gallery2 “WordPress installation” don’t exist, for WPG2 the typical installation is required, and I spent two hours just to upload the 3000+ files it consists of.
   Also, every time you will open your wordpress page that huge amount of scripts will be loaded, just to extract a picture.
   Infact you will not just use WPG2 as backend to handle your photos, and WordPress frontend to show them, they will run toghether.
4. WPG2 is not a plugin to include Gallery2 inside WordPress, but a plugin to include WordPress inside Gallery2.
   You will need a Gallery2 theme compatible with WordPress , and developing your will be so hard cause there is a lot of code to be included in the pages.
5. NextGEN Gallery is transparent, you will just need to include a [ gallery=5 ] tag in your pages and the gallery will appear, a [ singlepicture=400 ] and your picture will appear.
   Light, simple. Like WordPress.

In the future, I hope to help Alex Rabe in the improvement and developement of this wonderful plugin.

By now, I have only done a plugin for it to display random and recent albums, that I’m using in my website in this page.

NextGEN Gallery is the plugin I’m using for this website.
An image publishing plugin for NextGEN Gallery done by image publishers.

My second article in this section wants to give thanks to all the persons that have written the free plugins for WordPress I’m using.

• Fist of all, I want to thank NextGEN Gallery written by Alex Rabe.
  I post-dedicated an entire article to it’s wonderful plugin, cause I’m also helping him with some improvements to the code.

Other plugins I’m using are:

• Akismet, an amazing anti-spam plugin for WordPress.
  It have already captured more than 2 thousands spam comments inside my blog, and the number is growing fast.
• Top Level Categories, a very useful plugin that allowed me to remove the prefix “category” from the URL of my blog.
  With that I managed to make an interesting stucture for my blog that is divided into sections, that are organized both with pages and categories with the same section URL.
  This will also be the primary feature of my theme whom I dedicated a separate post.
• WordPress Database Backup, that is sending at my gmail account the backup of my database every week.
  That makes me feel safer. Thank you.
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator, that is creating a very nice Sitemap of my website’s structure.
• My Category Order, a very nice plugin to order the categories of WordPress.
  Why don’t you do a “page” version? The ShiftThis | Order Pages plugin sucks.
• Broken Link Checker, that is so useful to check the links in all the posts/pages of a WordPress website.
  

I love this website.
I worked on it very hard.

I used WordPress to do it, and I customized it doing myself the theme and installing a lot of plugins that I will describe elsewere.

One day I will publish this theme, but not now.
It is not finished yet… and I have to change a lot of things (like I did today with the menu) to allow people to use it with any content.

For now, I just want to relax and use it, cause I need to write and publish my photos.

The first post I want to do in the Web Developement section is about WordPress.

WordPress is really an amazing blogging platform.
If someone asks me “I have to do a website… can you give me some tips?”
WordPress is my answer.

In the past I have always done websites with notepad from the beginning to the end, passing through the “database fight” and the “styling match”.
WordPress, makes things easyer for everyone.

First of all, it puts down a standard, and I like standards.
A standard of data-structure, a standard of website administration and managament, a standard of blogging.

And standards are useful, cause happy coding brings clean code, and like they say theirselves, “code is poetry”.

I fought a lot with WordPress in these weeks, but at the end, I get in touch with it.

I don’t want to do technical articles about WordPress, cause honestly there is a lot of people that know it better than me.
This is just a post to say them “thank you”, I hope that one day I will be able to give back something of what you gave to me.

If you need further informations about WordPress, a good website to get started, is it’s website: wordpress.org

This is the work section.

Here I will collect some works I did in the past.

Actually, I have too much work to do to update this section ;)

I’ll notify updates to this section in the “News“, displayed in the Home.
Stay tuned.