Shane & Sherron have been regularly updating there site from on the road as they trekked across Australia and back towing their toyhauler. Meanwhile I have been working on WordPress plugins for the Wedding. I reckon I have a decent handle on how to hack and bash other peoples plugins into doing what I want but am a fair way off writing my own plugin from the ground up.

Credits go to Navid Azimi for the use of his WP-Lists plugin. It was fairly severely modified on the front end to serve as a Gift Registry function and will no doubt be a large code contributer when I rewrite Gift Registry as it’s own plugin. The most pressing changes need to be made to public access to removing items from the list (including actually integrating this into the plugin instead of parsing a list ID to a standalone PHP script that manually connects to the database and then redirects to a hardcoded URL on completion – very inelegant).

Other components in play include the Countdown Timer (unchanged) by Andrew Ferguson, the NextGen Gallery by Alex Rabe which I am still setting up properly and have yet to modify but the templates function has got my attention (in particular the examples available from Web Designer Wall).

Welcome to deezlepower.com

What used to be a testing ground for my own web applications has become home to several easy to use blogs for family and friends. These days there are so many powerful content management systems out there that you can save yourself a lot of time (and help others) by programming for an existing project.

WordPress is the latest such CMS (Content Management System) to tickle my fancy. It allows for rapid deployment, easy installation of plugins (no FTP required) and content syndication via RSS straight out of the box (so to speak). The vast array of themes make getting a fairly unique looking and workable site up and running in under half and hour very easy, which I was then able to turn over to a friend and have him generate his own content.

I am currently beta testing Windows 7 (Microsoft you are on a winner!) and a number of “Live” apps including Microsoft Live Writer. Writer allows easy publishing of your own “blog” using a very familar interface (looks just like Word). It even allows you to manage multiple blogs or to post to multiple blogs at once.

Take a look around then check out the other sites by clicking one of the links in the sidebar. Development on a few plugins for WordPress to begin shortly – stay tuned.