plugin
If you’ve been following the Bluelime Media website you will know that we’ve partnered with Barbara from BlueCitrus on many occasions to develop websites and as the saying goes, “The son of the cobbler has no shoes“, the BlueCitrus website was in need of a facelift. My latest teaching gig at Langara provided me with the opportunity to design and develop a WordPress site for Barbara. The goal of the class was to teach the students how to use WordPress to create a portfolio. So building a site for Barbara was the perfect project.
Barbara laid the ground work and designed the header, navigation and gave me a good indication of how she wanted the site to work, but I was given carte blanche on how to make the portfolio work. After looking at numerous portfolio examples, I came across the stunning work of Koldo Barroso. Koldo’s illustrations are simply marvelous and I could look at them all day. His portfolio section is simple, yet very elegant. On closer examination of his site, I noticed that he uses Slimbox to display his gallery pieces which is just a slimmed down version of the original Lightbox.
A few clicks later, I read a few tutorials on how to use Slimbox and decided to use it to build it Barbara’s portfolio section. If you’re familiar with WordPress plugins, you’ll know that beyond how to install and activate, instructions are usually fairly slim when it comes to how to use them. Since I just finished the site and the steps I took are still fresh in my mind, I thought I’d walk you through on how to set your own gallery using the Slimbox Plugin.
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Ever wondered how you can provide someone with a sidebar text option without having to use widgets? Or maybe you’ve designed a slightly different home page and want to display more than one area of content? Vito Tardia’s Improved Include Page plugin is very useful for that and super easy to use.
Just like any other plugins, simply go to WordPress, download, install the plugin and activate it. Once activated you can use the following function in your templates:
<?php if(function_exists('iinclude_page')) iinclude_page(post_id); ?>
Creating a sidebar text option without using widgets
If you take a look at the Aquattro Living website, you will see that the contact information appears at the bottom of the left hand side column on all pages. This information is likely to remain unchanged for a long time, but instead of inserting it in the template file and make it unmanageable by the client, all you need to do is create a new page called Contact Us Sidebar, exclude it from the main navigation and insert the include function in your sidebar.php template file.
Display more than one area of content on a template
Both West Coast Sightseeing and Ascent websites have three boxes of content on their home page. These different area of content are easy to create using this plugin. Simply create three new pages, called for example home col1, home col2, home col3 and display the content using the following code:
<div id="col1">
<?php if(function_exists('iinclude_page')) iinclude_page(1); ?>
</div>
<div id="col2">
<?php if(function_exists('iinclude_page')) iinclude_page(2); ?>
</div>
<div id="col3">
<?php if(function_exists('iinclude_page')) iinclude_page(3); ?>
</div>
You would of course change the post_id numbers to the number of your new pages and mark up the css to display the columns as you’ve stipulated in your design.
Post revisions we’re introduced with the release of WordPress 2.6. These are incredibly useful especially when you have a multi-author blog, but unfortunately this also increases the size of your MySQL database, which decreases the speed or your site.
If you have access to your database and know what you are doing, then an easy solution is to execute the following SQL statement:
DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";
This simple SQL query will delete all of post revisions and, if you have a lot of posts, this may considerably reduce your database in speed up your blog.
An easier way to do it however, is by installing the revision control plugin. Once installed this plugin allows you to either disable or enable post revisions or what I like to do is to limit post revisions to the latest two.
This plugin is an ideal way to optimize and speed up your blog.
Yes you’ve heard before, back-up, back-up, back-up. It can be hard and tedious to do database back-ups but it’s very important. Luckily for us, there’s a plugin for that.
The WordPress database backup plugin makes it a cinch to carry out back-ups. Simply download the plugin, install and activate it as you would any other plugin. Once activated, you will find a new menu entitled Backup under the Tools menu. Navigating to this area will reveal a new admin window where you can make a back-up immediately or you can schedule it to be delivered to you via email or downloaded on your server or computer.
I’m not sure that back-ups could be any easier.
For some reason that baffles me, there are loads of morons out there who have nothing to do but hack into websites. Because WordPress is Open Source, the source code is also available to them. The best way to protect yourself from attack is to update your WordPress to the latest version, but you can also make it a bit more difficult by hiding what version of WordPress you are using from everyone.
Depending on which template you start with, you may find the following line of code in your header.php file.
<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>” />
If you do, take it out.
If you are running version WP 2.6 or higher, and you should be, you will notice that this line may not be there, but appears in your source code. This line of code is generated from the wp-head.
To remove the version from appearing in your source code, I like to install the secure WordPress plugin. The plugin not only removes the WordPress version it also remove error information on the login page and adds an index.html file in the plugin directory.
When using WordPress as a CMS, you may end up with numerous pages and sub-pages. WordPress provides you with the ability to order your pages by giving them a number, but the process is very clumsy and takes way too long if your site is deep.
The self proclaimed computer geek at Geeky Weekly has created a plugin that lets you set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. It’s very convenient and super easy to set up. Once you’ve downloaded it, installed it and activated it, you will see in your Pages sub navigation area a new link called My Page Order.
Navigating to this page brings you to a screen which looks like this:
My Page Order Interface
All you have to do is simply drag and drop the pages where you want them to appear and hit the button. It couldn’t be more simpler. I never install a website without this plugin. I love it and can guarantee that you will too. If you like it a lot, you can visit the Geeky Weekly website and make a donation.
Unless your a web developer you might not have heard about jQuery. As defined in Wikipedia, “jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript library that emphasizes interaction between JavaScript and HTML”. Released in 2006, it’s use is very common on many websites, yet, I’ve never had a chance to play with it, until now.
Inspired by a beautiful design by Mizu Creative, my task was to convert the design into a WordPress based website enabling the client to make edits themselves and insert a series of slide shows with different behaviours. Converting the design into WordPress templates was a breeze, but finding a way to integrate the slide shows proved challenging. My initial thought of course was to use flash, but flash is expensive, annoying, hard to update and quite frankly, I don’t like it. I knew that Tzaddi had recently built a WordPress site where she used jQuery, so I thought I would investigate.
After a couple of Google searches, I found exactly what I needed.
InnerFade by Medienfreunde
The first demo I found was the InnerFade plugin. As the name suggests this plugin allows a series of text or images to fade in and out.
I’m not exactly sure who created this code, because my German is non-existent, but using his/her demo, I found the solution for one type of slide shows and used it on several sections of the Enhance Dental Centre website including this page, where you can see a series of before and after shots fading in an out.
Better Coda Slider by Remy Sharp
The second demo I found was the better coda slider. The aim of Remy‘s demo was to look at the original effect used on the Coda site and improve on it. Once again, using his example and making a few adjustments, I was able to use the code and create a “slider” effect where users can view the various testimonials.
All in all, I’m very pleased with the final outcome of the site. What proved to be daunting and challenging initially, turned out to be fairly simple and I look forward to playing with jQuery on more sites. What are your thoughts?
Akismet is probably one of the best WordPress plugins out there. Since my first installation of Akismet, 14,732 spam comments have been caught and eliminated. Today, Akismet 2.2 was launched and along with the usual bug fixes, came stats. The stats provide you with a graph showing how much spam was caught per day and a yummy pie chart with spam vs. ham! Personally, I would have called it nifty pie chart, but whatever, this is so geeky; I love it!
I read an interesting article a few days ago by Johnathan where he examines the dark side of content management systems – CMS for short. His arguments focuses mainly on the markup and the aesthetics of the site. Once the site is live and you’ve provided the client with the ability of changing content, images and copying and pasting from Word, then one must face the fact that it’s now out of your hands and God knows what the site will end up looking like.
I’ve been developing websites for over 5 years now and find it amazing how everyone now seems to want a CMS. Additionally with the use of WordPress, I no longer desire to create static websites. The issue that I have with CMS is that damn “copying and pasting” and I put 100% of the blame on Microsoft. Super bloggers and geeks aside, most people I know use Word to write their content and rely on it for formatting and spell checking. Unfortunately when it comes to incorporating it in WordPress, copying and pasting leads to strange formatting which ends up ruining the aesthetic of the site and adding extra code.
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WordPress version 2.5 was released just a week ago with a bit of grumble from the web community but overall I think that it’s a major improvement. This week I upgraded 15 blogs and installed 3 new ones and I must say that everything went without a hitch. I held my breath for quite a few minutes while upgrading one particular blog from version 2.0.2… but nothing broke and everything seems to be in working order.
I must say that the interface has come a long way. I really like the work that the Happy Cog folks and the WP community have created. My favourite component is the image uploading. Having the option to add different types of media and a window pop-up makes it much friendlier.
In the past I’ve used the flexible-upload plugin for re-sizing my images but this new version has made it no longer required.
The only glitch that came about was with the admin drop down menu plugin. If you were a fan of this plugin and upgraded to 2.5 you’ll notice that your navigation has completely disappeared. Just remove that plugin and everything will be back to normal.
If I were to complain about anything with this new version is the absence of post-id. These id numbers are very useful when building sites to be used as CMS. Let’s hope that they bring this back.
I also noticed that when you insert an email address, the tinyMCE interface no longer gives you the alert box telling you that it will convert your email address into the right HTML code. Instead it just sticks your email address into a url, which of course makes no sense. Maybe this is something that needs to be added, but I’ve never enjoyed fiddling with tinyMCE. Has anyone come across this and found a solution?