by Brian Bondari and Everett Griffiths

Read more about this book at Packt Publishing » or Buy it at Amazon

At root, this book is an excellent overview of the techniques and issues which will be encountered by any developer — however experienced — when they are authorizing a plug-in using the WordPress plug-in API in WordPress 3. In particular, I appreciated the emphasis on organization and coding best practices. I’ve worked with plenty of plug-ins, and there’s a lot of ugly, unmaintainable code out there. (And I’ve written some of it, too!) The fact that anybody looking to develop a plug-in who uses this book as a major reference will also get a guide to some best practices in writing software is a definite bonus.

The authors are very realistic about the limitations and benefits of the WordPress plug-in system. They observe that WordPress has a great deal of flexibility when it comes to coding style and organization — and the result is that there’s a low resistance to entry. Great for beginners, but it does mean that trusting the code you find is something you shouldn’t do blindly. Clearly the authors want to emphasize that anybody looking to begin developing plug-ins should give some significant thought to the sustainability and quality of their work. Kudos to them!

The book doesn’t cover an enormous number of different API functions, but it does give a good overview of the key hooks that are needed to get started programming for WordPress. Given the scope of what can be done in WordPress, it’s really a better solution to solidly introduce some of the core techniques rather than try and cram a huge number of concepts down the throats of their readers.

I found the systematic approach taken by the book to be extremely effective — I appreciated that the book intentionally had the reader introduce common errors into their plug-ins. Having encountered most of those issues by accident somewhere along the line, it’s tremendously valuable to already have been made aware of some key elements.

I do think that this is a good book, and very worthwhile for the beginning plug-in developer. There are a few additional areas which I would have liked to have seen covered, however.

Although the book is very thorough in addressing programming best practices, it doesn’t address the quality of output code at all. Valid HTML, consistent use of elements, semantics, and accessibility are all issues which deserve a significant mention in the programming of a WordPress extension — however easily the plug-in can be maintained, if it doesn’t produce high-quality output, this can be a major disadvantage for the plug-in. It is very dissatisfying to install a plug-in which does exactly what you need it to, but produces output which can’t easily be styled or doesn’t meet the standards required for your web site.

Nonetheless, there are no other issues which I felt were truly missed — the book is well-written, thorough, and methodical. I can highly recommend it to anybody looking to start authoring WordPress plug-ins.

Note: although this review was not paid, I was provided with a free review copy by Packt publishing in exchange for the review. It was definitely a worthwhile trade!

Book Review: WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

Read my review of of Pets Contained at Practical eCommerce.

It’s always interesting to see what I’ve written after the editors have had their way with it…

New Accessibility Review at Practical eCommerce
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

Not a bad way to get a handle on WordPress plugin authoring. There may be a better way to approach the subject, but I can’t honestly say that I know what it might be.

The fact is, WordPress plugins are incredibly powerful and cover an enormous breadth of possibilities. As the guide indicates, the WordPress plugin API is essentially a WordPress-specific method of accessing the entirety of the PHP programming language. If you can do something with PHP, you can probably do it in a WordPress plugin.

The book has a basic assumption that you’re already fairly sophisticated in your use of PHP programming. Rather than hold your hands through PHP logic, the important information provided in this book is about how to make use of the WordPress specific functions which will allow your script to tie to WordPress — and the key information that plugin authors need to be responsible for the security of their own scripts.

This is an extremely important piece of information, and can’t be emphasized enough. Probably the biggest flaw in this book is that plugin security isn’t highlighted sufficiently. It’s not that the book doesn’t state clearly that plugin authors need to take care of security, but it doesn’t do it on every single page in six-inch bold type….

But I digress.

On the whole, you can learn a lot from this book, whether you’re a beginner at WordPress plugin authoring or not. The breadth of WordPress plugin capabilities means that most experienced authors don’t know everything, so there’s almost certainly something here for you — but it starts simple, and within the first 30 pages you’ll already have a usable, practical plugin written.

Review: WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner’s Guide, by Vladimir Prelovac
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

The goal of this article isn’t to tear down the hard work web site owners have done, so I’m not as harsh as I might be in another context — it’s also not a paid consulting review, so I’m not as thorough as I could be.

The purpose of these reviews is to provide an overview of some accessibility problems on every site reviewed; it’s superficial, but it will hopefully help make ecommerce web site owners more conscious of the issues they face with users with disabilities.

The first review is available today: Accessibility Review: Lori’s Wigsite.

I know perfectly well that this review, and the ones to come, will be leaving issues out. This is unavoidable. However, I’m interested in comments concerning these missing issues — if you are passionately concerned about elements left out, covered too superficially, or dismissed too quickly, let me know about it! I can’t cover everything, but I do want to know your thoughts.

Accessibility Review at Practical eCommerce
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

My overall reaction to this book was positive. It covers a wide variety of key issues for mobile web programming in an easily understood manner. The book is targeted primarily at developers who already have some experience at web development and design, so it doesn’t delve into any serious detail when it comes to server-side programming or HTML coding, but instead makes a point of emphasizing places where the mobile web is different from internet interaction on a desktop device.

Mehta goes out of his way on many occasions to emphasize the serious importance of considering who (and what!) will be using your mobile web application.

“Any website accessed from a mobile device is mobile web — whether it’s been tailored to work on a mobile or not!” Mobile Web Development, Nirav Mehta, page 10

The book covers a wide range of issues — from developing for mobile devices using a “lowest common denominator” plan to implementing highly dynamic mobile applications which adapt automatically to the device currently in use. The text is easy to understand and follows a logical progression, starting with the mobile web development practices which are most similar to the development of standard web applications before moving into the areas which are very specifically targeted towards mobile devices.

This isn’t to say that the book doesn’t have a few flaws. I identified three areas where I really would have liked to seen better work.

Editing

In general, the copy editing on this text was pretty poor. The editing improved as I got further into the book (or I became more oblivious to it), but the introductory chapters had a lot of problems. There weren’t a lot of typos — but the grammar was noticeably lacking. The book is rife with sentences like this:

“We will need a recharge of patience if we wanted to watch a movie preview on low speed mobile networks.”

I’m not a member of the grammar police, but I’m certainly sympathetic. Professionally published books simply shouldn’t contain the kinds of errors found in this book.

Code Examples

The author talks about following web standards as a critical element of mobile web development. That’s great. It is, however, a serious pet peeve of mine to see code examples which don’t reflect the text of the book. The very first code example in the book is this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" href="mobile.css">

The text preceding it states “Here’s how you can add an alternative stylesheet link in your XHTML page.” I see a problem here. Yes, the author does explain at a later point in the book that all XHTML elements must be closed: but it’s a simple fact of life that most people referencing this book will be far more likely to simply reference the code as is. This is simply a mistake; but it’s not one that should have made it through a review of the book.

I’ll admit that I haven’t gone through and checked the validation of every code example. Most of them seemed solid and accurate. There are definitely examples which wouldn’t be valid under the XHTML DocType, but I’m not adept enough with XHTML-MP to know off-hand if the same is true within the mobile profile DocType.

Appendices

Simply put, there aren’t any. There were numerous points in the book where I thought to myself that an appendix would be great. A list of resources cited by topic, a section summarizing the syntax of VXML, tables showing the differences between XHTML and XHTML-MP or between CSS and WCSS. These kinds of resources would have been tremendous benefits to the overall reference value of the text.

Overall

This is a worthwhile book. Even though I wouldn’t recommend trusting the code examples, the truth is that you should never simply take code examples as written — you learn best by taking an example and re-purposing it for your own needs. Mobile Web Development will introduce you to the key issues for mobile web programming and design in a manner which can give you a quick start on mobile web application development.

Review of “Mobile Web Development”
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

If I had to say there was anything missing for me, it would be that I felt the material didn’t necessarily challenge me much. The articles didn’t make me confront new ideas about how search marketing could work, or challenge my notions of the world of search. Granted, I’m pretty well plugged-in to the industry: The fact that I’ve read moderately extensively in the search marketing field MIGHT just have an impact…. I’m not viewing the subject from the perspective of the intermediate marketing manager or business-owner who really needs the information, after all.

Disregarding the level of the information, the articles were uniformly well-written, informative, and interesting. My universe wasn’t shattered by the news, but there were tidbits scattered through out which were valuable reminders or interesting perspectives on the issues. It was filled with good stuff.

The fact is that there’s little value in targeting a print magazine towards advanced marketers: it’s FAR too small of a community for that to be successful. For a conference (like SMX Advanced), there’s a market: but for a magazine, not really. I think the magazine does an admirable job of addressing the appropriate market.

I did have one minor complaint about the magazine layout: I didn’t like the way the “Industry Analysis” section was laid out. It’s not that it was offensive or ugly…but the three-column continuous layout made it feel kind of like a run-on sentence. I would have liked to have seen more variance to the layout through those four short articles. This could have given each individual author a little more presence and perhaps allowed advertising to be spread out through the section rather than clumped together with two bottom half-page ads in a row. (I should say, clumped together with two easily ignored half-page ads in a row.) Repetition makes it much easier to know where not to look.

But, as I said, only a minor complaint.

The theme of the issue was great – SEM Training and Certification is definitely one of those areas that could stand some better publicity.

I’m looking forward to the next issue!

For full disclosure, I should mention that my subscription to Search Marketing Standard was delivered compliments of the publisher, and came with a bar of Santander Chocolate. So, I wasn’t paid to do this review…but I was definitely bribed.

Search Marketing Standard: Print News for Online Marketing
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

Jim’s tips, rather than focusing on the esoteric details of dealing with multiple populations, provides simple ideas with explanations why these issues are important for accessibility.

You can buy it now at Lulu.com for only $13.34 (PDF) or for 19.95 in print.

The book is a successor to his earlier “50 Hot to Touch Accessible Web Design Tips” – there are a number of significant changes, so it’s worth considering the new version if you’ve already purchased the original. Accessibility is a constantly changing field, so keeping up with the changes through cheap PDF downloads has it’s advantages!

If you’re already an experienced practitioner of web accessibility, this book can still serve a purpose for you: think of it as a checklist. Many of the tips Jim makes are fundamental guidelines to keep in mind when focusing on accessibility: and some of them are easy to overlook when wrapped up in the design process.

This isn’t to say that the book isn’t without warts. I have to admit that, although the book provides a great background to accessibility it’s truly not very thorough. It skims over issues, it doesn’t explain anything in any great detail. If you want a quick checklist of things you should consider, it’s great. If you want to know why – you’ll need to pick a different resource. There’s room to disagree with some of the tips expressed here – but you’ll need further reading in order to start getting into these deeper accessibility conversations.

Jim Byrne’s “60 Hot to Touch Accessible Web Design Tips”
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

I referenced an article of his in May, on the subject of the lawsuit against Target Corporation. I only mentioned the article briefly, but today I feel I need to cover it more thoroughly.

There are two main problems with this article, in my mind – the first is that it contains a highly misleading appraisal of web accessibility. After reading through this article, somebody with little understanding of the basics of web accessibility would be left with the impression that the biggest web accessibility problem is that the blind have trouble with links which don’t have alt tags. Now, anybody with a little knowledge will immediately know that this is not only misleading, but flat out wrong.

What David literally says is:

At a bare minimum, to make basic HTML-driven sites more accessible to PWDs, authors of Web content need to program an alternative text tag into their hyperlinks. For example, if you mouse over the link to ComputerWorld above, you should see how I’ve programmed the alternative text tag to say “Story about disabilities lawsuit between NFB and Target.” When Web authors do this, the text-to-voice screen reading software used by many PWDs puts those PWDs on a level-playing field with people whose sight isn’t impaired and who can intuit the purpose of the link based on what they see. In other words, people with impaired vision need to hear what people without such impairments normally see. By not religiously using the alternative text tag on all links, you’re basically leaving PWDs that rely on text-to-speech assistive technology in the dark.

He’s confused the issue of the alt attribute with that of the title attribute, and confused the importance of logical linking with that of alternative image texts.
David continues to mention that he’s made his article "more accessible" with the "with the links [he’s] included", conflating the unnecessary and lengthy title tags he’s added to links with truly necessary alternate texts on images.

In addition, he judges that the web is not technologically equipped to make compliance with accessibility possible, because of the limitations fo web user agents and the difficulties with accessibility in modern technologies (such as AJAX). But he misses the point here – first of all, it is not impossible to make Web 2.0 applications accessible. It merely requires that all programmers, not merely accessibility specialists, conform to certain guidelines which will enable these programs to function.

Unless society changes significantly, there will always be technologies available which are not "accessible" – does this mean we should therefore never require accessibility? Does not being ready therefore exonerate our responsibilities? I can’t accept that – instead, we should require accessibility and expect that technologies will not be accepted for mainstream use until an accessible use paradigm has been developed.

Finally, David bluntly states:

But I can’t advocate stretching the American Disabilities Act to cover Web sites. Given the state of the state of technology (tools, Web 2.0), the Web, technologically speaking, simply isn’t equipped to make compliance with such a precedent law possible. Shame on Target for not making its sites more accessible. Shame on me too when I haven’t done it (again, I will try harder).

He gives lip service to web accessibility, waving his finger in an avuncular warning, but fails to offer support for principles which would remove significant discriminatory practices from the most critical new media of our age. His justification?

If Target wants to turn its back on an important customer segment, that’s Target’s problem (and business decision). Not the court’s.

It is, in David Berlind’s mind, merely a business decision to discriminate against your audience – after all – all the items sold in the store aren’t marked with Braille. Altogether, a very poorly-informed piece of writing from an otherwise authoritative publication and author.

David’s article has already received some scathing commentary from the accessibility community.

This comment attached to his blog post outlines a number of the unfortunate errors made in the article, and Joe Clark has also responded with his own points of correction. Both these responses are well worth reading, for a welcome correction to some clearly misunderstood points.

Readings on Accessible AJAX / Web 2.0:

• Making Ajax Work With Screen Readers – Juicy Studios
• IceWeb notes on BaseCamp – Joe Clark (thanks to Isofarro)
• AJAX and Screenreaders: When Can it Work? – SitePoint, James Edwards

David Berlind on Web Accessibility
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

One of the key aspects for Search and Go (as one might conclude from the title) is that it’s intended to be fully accessible by mobile internet devices, and also has a featured directory section of sites tailored for mobile devices.

Looking at their code, I’m pretty happy – they are using very clean, semantically appropriate design. Since it’s still in beta, and the front page is clearly labeled as a work in progress, I’m not going to go out of my way to criticize the site’s layout, although I’d suggest making their navigational skip links a little more transparent. That is, possible to be made visible. There’s a very interesting article on the subject of skip links by Gez Lemon and Mike Cherim available at Accessites.org which is worth looking at on this subject.

As for my own site, I was thrilled to see it organized under the category Internet > Web Accessibility > Accessible Designers. The sheer novelty of the existence of this category is worth noting, since many directory sites take so little effort to consider accessibility as to lack a category for it entirely.

Good luck, Search and Go!

Search and Go Information Portal
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

My first reaction, of course, is that in an ideal world, this would actually be equivalent to the Open Directory Project – because, of course, eventually all sites will be accessible! But, of course, for now, this is a very meaningful directory purely because there is such a paucity of meaningfully accessible web sites.

The only thing which will make this directory truly useful, however, will be to really start filling it up with great sites. I intend to submit my own accessible sites to the directory to maximize the potential of the site.

Directories are difficult beasts – they’re huge, unwieldy, and frequently just not used that much – search is much easier. However, developing a means to specifically search for accessible sites has a target audience which can really benefit from the difference, so I hope that this directory can take off.

Limitations to the Net Guide

I said limitations, and I did mean it. The directory itself has imperfect accessibility. The search results page itself failes to validate – a minor flaw, but it’s lacking a required attribute on a Javascript block. In addition, there is no <noscript></noscript> tag set to provide information for users without Javascript support. Is this Javascript critical to the functioning of the site? No. In fact, it seems like it’s not even being used in the page – but regardless, for an accessible directory I’d have higher standards.

The design of the site is literally LITTERED with empty table cells. This is, sad to say, a classic example of a highly complex and screen reader-unfriendly table-based layout.

Many links provide only a moderate background color change to indicate that they are active; no links have a useful indication for their :active or :focus states, which is necessary for keyboard navigators to easily locate their cursor.

All in all, the site has great potential; but has not yet realized that potential. I can see that they have a good aim in mind, and I fully support that ideal – but I also hope that they are working hard to improve the usability and accessibility of their own site in order to set a positive example.

Net-Guide Accessible Directory
Copyright 2004 – 2011 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design