Allchorn Blog

Please Note: This article is no longer relevant. You can now download this plugin and have all this and more. It’s a pleasure.

Wordpress by default makes use of the TinyMCE rich text editor and as such, it’s quite extendable. It’s very well documented in their documentation wiki and does a lot more than what Wordpress enables out of the box.

This is what I was looking to do

Wordpress’ WYSIWYG displaying table editing tools on the bottom row.

Shock horror! I hear some standardistas ranting about tables being evil already. Well, I hate to burst some bubbles, but tables were invented for a reason. Believe it or not, for tabular data!

Wordpress, the popular content management system was initially built for blogs, and I am guessing the omission of the ability to create and edit tables in the interface was a well thought out decision and I hold nothing against them for doing so. My clients however, they disagree. Well some of them at least.

Now that Wordpress is powering not only blogs, but online magazines, corporate websites and all different types of sites, it’s quick becoming a very powerful and popular generic CMS. Extending it has become a big game.

My client had a pricing page and needed the ability to add tables, modify cells, padding, spacing, background colours etc.

Cobus over at Fresh01 found this page on the Wordpress codex site which you’ll noticed I’ve commented on. I just felt the need to write this post with a bit more detail.

The process

Firstly I downloaded TinyMCE, and put the “table” folder into the plugins directory in wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins.

Then in the file tiny_mce_config.php I edited this line:

$plugins = array( 'safari', 'inlinepopups', 'autosave', 'spellchecker', 'paste', 'wordpress', 'media', 'fullscreen' );

and added

,'table'

into the array.

I then scrolled down and edited

$mce_buttons_3 = apply_filters('mce_buttons_3', array( ));

by adding

'tablecontrols'

making it

$mce_buttons_3 = apply_filters('mce_buttons_3', array('tablecontrols' ));

Then opened up a post/page edit and refreshed the page…. Viola! Table editing tools.

Problem, I can’t edit the cell colours…

Well, after editing the config file and being familiar with the way it’s laid out, all I needed to do was look at the available buttons and controls for TinyMCE and find the button for background colour, and that happend to be backcolor.

Therefore, after ‘tablecontrols’ in the line

$mce_buttons_3 = apply_filters('mce_buttons_3', array('tablecontrols' ));

I added

, 'backcolor'

So it looked like

$mce_buttons_3 = apply_filters('mce_buttons_3', array('tablecontrols', 'backcolor' ));

And thats that.

If you want to add other buttons and controls, browse through that wiki page, and if they don’t activate, you’ll just need to upload the relative plugin folder from your downloaded TinyMCE package.

Lately I’ve had a lot of blog-worthy material rattling around in my brain. Some of which will have to wait, so I’ve filed them all under drafts in my cerebral cortex. Today however I experienced something that personally marks a point at which I believe the website design industry is starting to be irreparably damaged.

Lowballer
Someone that sells products or services for drastically less than what it’s worth.

This isn’t meant to be a rant, but more an expression of my concern over what seems to be seriously effecting the industry. Not just my pocket, but the quality of the web in general and that effects the website owners themselves. The people I affectionately call clients.

I never used to worry about lowballers much as I always gave prospects the benefit of the doubt that they’d be discerning enough to choose a website creator based on what the output is likely to be rather than solely on price.

A little cheaper or more expensive is natural but…

Sure I used to lose the odd project to a competitor who was maybe 10% or 20% cheaper than me and that didn’t phase me a bit. If someone gains a project by being cheaper… well, good for them. Now it seems as if people are bidding about a third, a quarter even a fifth of my price.

I used to pride myself on the fact that I only ever lost deals to less experienced website designers with lower prices, and I’d often be awarded projects despite the fact that my quote was higher. Not that I bid higher out of greed, but I know what it takes to design and develop an effective web presence created according to web standards and best practice. The time it takes, and the knowledge that can only be acquired through real world experience or extensive studies, or both.

I don’t deal in “cookie cutter” sites, and in my 9 years working on the web, I’ve never sold nor used a “template” (templates as in Template Monster, not Smarty Templates) in the creation of a site.

My “mate rates” are more than somes full client rates

Today I had a conversation with a client, who happens to be a good friend of mine. I gave him an exceptionally low price for my standards, but also lessened the deliverables (fewer design concepts etc.) and we got the project off to a good start. We’re on the tail end of the project now, and while we remain good buddies and we share mutual respect for each other’s professional ethics, he questioned me on my costing as he had been told that I had “ripped him a new one”.

To be honest, he was well within his rights to question me when there are people out there charging so little. He was kind enough to tell me who was so besmearing my name to him, and I went to look at their own site. I now understand why they are so cheap. Leave that be.

I managed to explain to my buddy that he has to compare apples with apples and that the quality of their work was so low and their criticisms so subjective and exposing of their lack of experience, that their criticising me is not only bad business (slinging mud), but also shows me what I have to contend with.

He chose me despite my lowest rates being higher than the competition

My friend actually told me that he chose me over them initially besides the fact that I was (much) more expensive than them. He values my experience and is aware of my successful track record. Note that they were much cheaper than my reduced price! I wouldn’t even go that low for a non-friend client, and I didn’t even make profit on the job aside from my restricted design time?! How could they make money on it cheaper than me? They live in the same country, have the same petrol price, don’t live in a shack, surely they drive cars too…

Web designers and web design shops need to look at their expenses. Rent, insurance, hardware, software, the value of their time, profit etc. Also, have some goddamn pride in your work! Learn your trade. Stop polluting the web with your crap and wasting your client’s money by “generating” rubbish that your client’s visitors laugh at and struggle to use.

Spending £200 on a website where established professionals are charging £1,500 for the same specification is more of a waste of money than spending the larger fee. At least it won’t need to be re-built a month after it’s launched, and you can rest assured that the job is done properly, your visitors can use the site, it will look good, the search engines will index you and other sites might even link to you!

This was an interesting little experiment for me. It was an idea I got from filming myself take a motorcycle apart and playing it at 3x normal speed.

I found CamStudio which very effectively recorded all my on-screen movements, and in Movie Maker (I’m a web designer, not a video guru), I stitched it to some video from my Sony Handycam. Threw in some nice music and put some titles and credits in.

Here’s the result.

Having worked with content management systems both proprietary, home grown and open source in the past, I’ve taken a little time lately to step back and look at the pros and cons of each. Let it be known that while I’ve been heavily involved in the development of a home grown CMS in the past, and am a big advocate of the proprietary system Realm Platform, I do use Wordpress and Textpattern, so I am not necesserily bias either way.

This may come across as a rather opinionated post, but it’s my view, and my blog. Any thoughts (logical, non trolling comments) would be most appreciated.

I’ve broken the different types of systems into

• Home Grown CMS
  A system built in-house rather than buying one or customising another system.
• Open Source CMS
  A system built by a community of developers under a sharing community based methodology. Usually free. Examples – Joomla, Wordpress, Typo3.
• Proprietary CMS
  Built by one company, maintained, supported and available as either a one off cost, or licencing payment structure. Examples – Realm Platform, Expression Engine, Vignette.

Having adopted Google Chrome from the day it was released, I must say it’s an amazing web browser. For web browsing, speed and reliability I’d give it a 10/10.

That being said, I can’t deny the fact that I sorely miss a number of Firefox plugins that are too important in my regular browsing and web usage to to not have at hand. Perhaps the Chrome arsenal will grow over time, but for now, I can’t do without the following:

• FireFTP
• Web Developer Toolbar
• Delicious Plugin
• HTML Validator
• Search Status

There are other non-essentials, and they all add up to a lot of features I’d really like to have at hand. Believe it or not, the Google Page Rank indicator that comes with the Quirk Search Status is one of them. I’ll admit, I haven’t searched much for a toolbar/plugin for Chrome that does this.

All in all, Chrome should be more than suitable for the average web user, but I suppose working on the internet and specifically in design and development, it just doesn’t cut the mustard for me.

A quick mention this so you can be one of the first to dive in and test drive Google’s latest release on their ever growing list of wares and services.

The new browser by Google called Chrome was officially announced on Tuesday 2nd September 2008. Featuring some really useful and slightly different ways of operating.

It’s apparent that a great deal of thought has gone into the development of the browser and it’s all brilliantly and succinctly explained in an illustrated online comic.

I’ve downloaded and installed it already, and I’m actually typing this post in Chrome. So far so good, but I guess time will tell if this is a Firefox killer.