Spuda Fett

Darth Mash

Big Toe

Lego Motorized AT-AT

Thanks to Josh for the use of the new D300 for the shots.

The Publisher Blog highlights some of the lesser known features of WordPress, interesting plugins and also projects using WordPress (hence the PS feature) so check it out if you’re not already.

Customizing WordPress

The PlayStation Blog is a design by Josh that pulls influences directly from the main Sony PlayStation website.

Customizations on the theme include:

• The home page pulls in the two most recent posts in their entirety (or until the MORE tag is used) and then the next five entries as headline and excerpt.
• The PS Blog requires users to have an account in order to comment on posts. The wp-login.php page was completely re-skinned from the traditional WordPress login to match the site.
• The registration process was customized to include an age gate. In order to comment on the site you must be at least a certain age so we check for that (I can't tell you what age, then you'll just cheat the system).

Plugins We Used

The great thing about WordPress and the community behind it is that in most instances if you want to do something, someone has already created a plugin for that. In our case we have quite a few plugins at work on the PS Blog including:

• Audio Player - Enjoy those soundtrack posts
• Wordpress Download Monitor - Helps us track the number of downloads on the PS Blog Widgets.
• Paged Comments - When posts easily get 300 comments the pages can have a tendency to get long. We limit things down to 50 per page.
• WP-Post Rankings - Great little AJAX plugin for letting users rate posts and pages on your blog.

Plugins We Developed

Sometimes you need something and there isn’t a plugin for it. No problem, you develop a plugin to fill that need. What’s really great is when you have a group like the guys at Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) who want to contribute back to the WordPress community and then release these plugins back for others:

• Image Rotator – Adds the ability to insert a random image rotation panel into a WordPress blog.
• Author Comment Replies – Gives authors the ability to reply directly to a posted comment. Unlike threaded comments only authors can respond, not all visitors.

Maximizing Performance

No matter the amount of traffic every blog can benefit from a caching plugin such as WP Cache or 1 Blog Cacher. A site like the PlayStation Blog receives a constant high volume of traffic and the difference between using one of these caching plugins and not is incredible.

If you manage your own servers and are running WordPress then a session on performance at last year's WordCamp is a worthwhile watch. Barry Abrahamson and Matt Mullenweg give great tips on topics such as opcode caching, WP Cache and HyperDB. Watch it, learn it, and increase your blog's performance.

My WordPress Wish

In my perfect WordPress world, plugin developers will get together with developers of plugins that complement what they’ve created and make them play nice together. This may be happening out there more than I realize, so excuse me if this is, even better, let me know which plugins you're developing that work together. I only bring this up because of two plugins we use on this blog that just don’t play well together. One would be a recent comments plugin, the other would be the comment paging plugin. I’ve already written an extensive post about this once before, so read more on my frustrations there.

Just the Surface

This really just scratches the surface of customizations on this blog. If there’s something specific that you’d like to know more about let me know and I’ll do my best to answer. I hope to do more in-depth looks at some of our other projects here soon… time permitting.

WordPress Had Some Work Done

In the midst of the hustle we skipped right over posting about the release of WordPress 2.5. Kudos to Automattic and Happy Cog for the wonderful administration facelift. Expect to see our full thoughts on the upgrade in a future post.

With the upgrade of WordPress the WordPress.org website also received an update. A section of the homepage is dedicated to a rotation of companies with sites powered by WordPress. I’m very excited to say we have several of our projects in the rotation. See below…

That eBay logo is a new one for us… as this week we were able to launch the official eBay Corporate Blog (eBay INK) as well as the eBay Insider Blog (both of which are cnp_studio/Voce joints). The others – PlayStation (PlayStation.Blog) and Yahoo! (Yodel Anecdotal) are previous releases that continue to grow. You can see more about each of those in the portfolio.

We've been doing even more with WordPress and as a result are finishing a few posts on the topics of security, performance and scaling. All three seem to be a recurring theme lately so it seems fitting. Speaking of WordPress, WordCamp is this weekend out in Dallas. I won't be making it, but they say they’ll make the videos available online a week or two after the fact. In the mean time I'll watch the trackbacks on the schedule pages for anyone blogging the sessions.

We'll get the posting back to normal here soon. Lots to talk about.

Be sure to save this. You never know when you might get into a war of buzzwords with someone and need to "engage scalable web services."

The alternative was to have SQL Server sort and page the data and only send back the data that was needed to the web server. After some research and some time to combine the ideas I found into my own solution I came up with:

 
CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.ReturnPage
(
  @SelectStmt varchar(1000), --Select Statement with Where Clause
  @OrderBy varchar(1000), --Order By Clause 'ASC' is required
  @StartRow int, --First Row of Page
  @EndRow int, --Last Row of Page
  @totRows int output --Output: Total Rows in Set
)
AS
 
DECLARE @ColList varchar(2000)
DECLARE @WhereCls varchar(2000)
DECLARE @i int
DECLARE @i2 int
DECLARE @tmp varchar(1000)
DECLARE @dec varchar(1000)
DECLARE @f varchar(100)
DECLARE @d varchar(100)
DECLARE @Symbol char(2)
DECLARE @SQL varchar(4000)
DECLARE @Sort varchar(1000)
DECLARE @tmpSQL NVARCHAR(4000)
 
--Assign the total number of rows available to @totRows for output
SET @SQL = N'SELECT @totRows = COUNT(*) FROM (' + @SelectStmt + ') tbl'
SET @tmpSQL = '' + @SQL
EXEC sp_executesql  @tmpSQL , N'@totRows int OUTPUT',
     @totRows = @totRows OUTPUT
 
SET @Sort = @OrderBy + ', '
SET @dec = ''
SET @WhereCls  = ''
SET @SQL = ''
 
SET @i = charindex(',' , @Sort)
 
--Pull apart the sort by clause for declarations
WHILE (@i != 0)
BEGIN
  SET @tmp = LEFT(@Sort,@i-1)
  SET @i2 = charindex(' ', @tmp)
  SET @f = ltrim(rtrim(LEFT(@tmp,@i2-1)))
  SET @d = ltrim(rtrim(substring(@tmp,@i2+1,100)))
  SET @Sort = rtrim(ltrim(substring(@Sort,@i+1,100)))
  SET @i = charindex(',', @Sort)
  SET @symbol = case when @d = 'ASC' then '>' else '< ' end +
          case when @i=0 then '=' else '' end
 
  SET @dec = @dec + 'declare @' + @f + ' sql_variant; '
  SET @ColList = isnull(REPLACE(REPLACE(@colList,'>','='),'< ','=') +
    ' and ','') + @f + @Symbol + ' @' + @f
  SET @WhereCls = @WhereCls + ' OR (' + @ColList + ') '
  SET @SQL = @SQL + ', @' + @f + '= ' + @f
 END
 
--Put together Transact SQL for final output
SET @SQL = @dec + ' ' +
  'SET ROWCOUNT ' + convert(varchar(10), @StartRow) + '; ' +
  'SELECT ' + substring(@SQL,3,7000) + ' from ('
  + @SelectStmt + ') a ORDER BY ' +  @OrderBy + '; ' +
  'SET ROWCOUNT ' +
  convert(varchar(10), 1 + @EndRow - @StartRow) + '; ' +
  'select * from (' + @SelectStmt + ') a WHERE ' +
  substring(@WhereCls,4,7000) + ' ORDER BY ' + @OrderBy +
  '; SET ROWCOUNT 0;'
 
EXEC(@SQL)
GO
 

What's it doing?

The procedure works by turning a simple query like:

 
SELECT col1, col2, col3, col4 FROM TABLE ORDER BY col1 ASC
 

and turning it into the following to add the paging.

 
DECLARE @col1 sql_variant
SET ROWCOUNT = @StartRow
SELECT @col1 = col1 FROM TABLE ORDER BY col1 ASC
SET ROWCOUNT = (@EndRow - @StartRow) + 1
SELECT col1, col2, col3, col4 FROM tbl WHERE col1 > @col1
  ORDER BY col1 ASC
 

Simple enough right?

Disclaimer

While this procedure does work with more complex queries containing SUB-SELECTS, JOINS and WHERE clauses, it does have its limitations. GROUP BY clauses do not work in this version. Maybe in the future.

I wouldn't suggest calling this procedure directly as that would mean you're building your query in-code, and probably not doing necessary escaping to prevent security issues. Creating a stored procedure that builds the original query from passed in WHERE and ORDER BY Parameters and then calls the ReturnPage procedure will be much more efficient and secure.

I hope to post a complete sample that will illustrate the changes to the .NET code and the wrapping procedure soon.

Rarely do I make it down to Miami, but this is the second time now within a month that I've been down here. The last time was for some personal abuse, though.

Photo by Sean

Basically, how it works is that we submit our best works from the previous year to the local competition and based on several criteria are awarded a gold award, silver award or nothing. Anything that is awarded a gold at the local level is then sent on to the state competition for the next round. I'm pleased to say that at this year's competition we had four of our submissions receive gold and they will move on to the next level. They were:

cnp_studio (one gold for the web site, one gold for our logo/stationery/business cards)

SeaWorld Journey to Atlantis

Kelly Homes

The award on the Kelly Homes site is bittersweet. We're glad the site did well, but sadly the entire site design as well as the HTML and CSS behind the site were completely copied and used by someone who thought it was OK to do such a thing. Expect to see more on this in another post here.

Sites receiving silver awards include Girl Scouts of West Central Florida, Polk Transportation Planning Organization, TrueDemand Software and Heacock Classic Car Insurance.

All of this is a result of the hard work of an all star team (Mike, Pete, Sean, Jeremy) and our great clients.

When developing the Kelly Homes site, we worked with Bonnie Williams of BMW Marketing Consultants. The project, under careless misdirection and disregard for the cost that Kelly Homes was footing, took a 2 month timeline and turned it into more than 6 months.

Months later, we received an RFP from BMW Marketing Consultants for the Silver Palms RV Resort site. The RFP was a spiral-bound book that rivaled the thickness of the phone book for Vermont.

We sent out a quote, and never heard back from BMW Marketing Consultants. A few weeks ago, I was reminded about this when I found this "book" during our move to our new office. Curious to see what happened with the project, I decided to pull up the site.

Lo' and behold:

Funny, guess they couldn't find their "own place in the sun"

Kelly Homes

The CSS, HTML, and most of the images were ripped off. If you pay close attention, you can even see some images were not completely ripped off.

Note the beige/orange color from the Kelly Homes site on the left edge of the banner image).

BMW's response? Well, from what I hear, the response was "well all sites on the internet are templates and can be copied." One of my favorite articles about this subject is Scab at Airbag Industries regarding the Joyent / Corkd design theft. Talking about Ray from Falkner Winery, the company that ripped off the designs…

Ray continued to tell me that all designers borrow ideas from other designers and that his web site design was no different. That line of thinking is the biggest cop-out, bullshit excuse (can't think of a more appropriate term) used over and over by those who simply don't care about how this affects the person who's work has been copied.
…
A real designer does not cut-and-paste the work of others, change some colors and resell it … that would be called a hack. The web is filled with hacks because the web makes it easy to hack. Hacks have about as much talent as the guys who "create" stickers at mall kiosks typically featuring Calvin either pissing on an auto manufacturer's logo or praying before a cross.

Couldn't agree more. Granted, I did not design this site - but I feel the same way about the months of work I put into it. I know Jeremy feels the same way.

No one wants their hard worked ripped off. Least of all, by the company hack that sends you the RFP for the project.

More to come…

Update: Googling "bmw marketing consultants" wields this post as the 2nd hit... got to love the Google juice, eh Hallett?...