If you’ve been following the ArtPress project at all you know that I’ve been saying “I’ll have a BETA out in about a week” for more than a couple of weeks now. I’m writing to inform you that I’m still plugging away and am in the home stretch. There’s just a few things that need to be taken care of:
Settings Panel
This is currently a cramped up mess. It needs to be broken into individual pages for ease of use. Currently there are settings sections for Classification Methods, Theme Integration, Modules, Pricing, Overview and Custom Post Type Labels. My initial idea was to have them all on one page which totally works, but I found it to be a bit overwhelming and it didn’t really make sense when viewed on screens with small resolutions. Hopefully this shouldn’t take too long.
I also need to activate a bunch of settings for the display of pieces on both single and multiple views. My goal is for ArtPress to be able to work on as many themes as possible which involves putting a fair share of control into the artist’s hands. Colors, white-space, image sizes and “elements” (things like edit links, comments on multiple views, pricing) all need to be able to be adjusted via the Theme Integration interface. I’m probably about 90% of the way there on this. Luckily I found a few awesome GPL scripts that made this process easier.
Mad Props to Austin Matzko who’s Custom Image Sizes plugin served as a base for ArtPress’s automatic image resizing functionality.
And a big ‘ole High Five to Stefan Petre for creating the awesome Color Picker plugin for jQuery. ArtPress uses this script to provide easy color selection for borders and backgrounds.
Widgets
I had initially put widget creation on hold and then I ran into a problem today with theme integration. The built-in WordPress function for paging on single views do not allow me to hook into them in a way that would provide seamless navigation from an image page to the next or previous parent’s page. This will be very important for artists who choose to upload more than one image for any given piece. The only real solution that I found was to post a patch, hope for the best and create a widget that provides navigation. I’ve also found that some themes do not provide previous and next navigation by default. So this needs to be done before I can release the plugin.
I guess that’s all that really needs to be done. I’m getting pretty close. This is exciting!
looking forward to this plugin. I spoke to my photographer friend and showed her the video which she really liked.
If you need testing just let me know. Ready when you are
With my friend in town for just today, I was curious if this beta was available to show her or not. If not, no worries, just figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.
By any chance was this plugin ever released?
I’ve searched wp all over, but have had no luck finding it. I’m still quite interested in it should it become available.
Hi Shawn. Thanks for your interest in the project. I really have to sit down and set the scope for 1.0. I’ve never coded something this large for public release and I want to get as much as possible right the first time around. Between the time I created this post and now, the project has gone from a plugin to a theme and now I’ve finally decided that I was right the first time and it should be a plugin.
I was getting fed-up with the restrictions I found in the plugin version’s ability to override certain template tags and I opted for a parent/child theme structure. Then I read this article by Justin Tadlock where he states that . This statement spoke volumes to me and played a crucial role in my decision to revert to a plugin.
I want ArtPress to be as flexible as possible and I believe that a plugin will provide the best level of flexibility for all users. While this will enable ArtPress to be used with “any” (oh, and I do use this term loosely) theme, there are a few roadblocks. See Why Custom Post Type theming is broken in WordPress where a few of the most important points are covered.
Basically, what I need to do is: A. set the scope for 1.0. B. Code the remaining functionality. C. Build a theme that uses the plugin to it’s full potential without creating a dependency. D. Write tons and tons of documentation.
“A.” is really the tricky one. I get very confused when deciding how “easy” the plugin should attempt to be for novice users. Should I build a full on css editor for display of automatically generated images? I’ve built it out to about 70% (not factoring the fancy jQuery necessary to provide world-class UX). I dropped this functionality when I moved to the theme format, but I’m sensing that it will come back again now that I’ve firmly decided on creating a plugin.
Perhaps, I should of listened to what my friend Devin suggested a few months back which would be to make 1.0 a “developer release”. I really didn’t like this idea when first presented, but now I’m thinking that it is the best idea at this stage.
Any thoughts on all this are totally welcome :)
Thanks for the link about the theme discussion. It was quite interesting to read through and only validates some of the questions I have had recently. I’m nowhere near strong enough yet to even post an opinion in that thread, but I do understand the issue.
As to Artpress…
I was actually hoping to include it in my own custom themes that I build. Simply having a list of available output functions would be more than enough for me. It would be nice to see a general framework ‘demo’ of what all is available with artpress for output in my theme.
Either way I will check back from time to time to see if anything new comes about.