Wordpress plugin for importing Media Library items in bulk

February 10th, 2010 | Posted by admin

So your moving your site into wordpress from a old flat file or other system how do get them into the media library without making yourself insane :)

Add From Server – Plugin to allow the Media Manager to add files from the webservers filesystem. Note: All files are copied to the uploads directory.

It freaks out around every 200 items or so, so you need to break the upload process down and just upload things  in chunks when you have hundreds of items.

Wholesome Wordpress plugin goodness

February 5th, 2010 | Posted by suzi

These are some simple and easy-to-use plugins that we’ve found. I’ll highlight fancy/super-awesome plugins elsewhere; this list is just for the basics.

Breadcrumb Trail

Really simple breadcrumb plugin, you just include:

<?php breadcrumb_trail(); ?>

or to keep things from breaking if the plugin gets removed:

<?php
if ( function_exists( 'breadcrumb_trail' ) ) {
  breadcrumb_trail();
}
?>

Example: EPIC

Added: 2/5/2010 (Link)

WP-Print

Gives you a handy little ‘print this page’ link wherever you want in the template. Use their provided little icon, or text, or define your own image. Quite handy.

Added: 2/5/2010 (Link)

Tiny MCE Advanced

Extends functionality of wysiwyg (good for hiding unused icons)

Added 2/5/2010 (Link)

Google Analytics for Wordpress

Makes it easy for the user to simply add their google analytics tracking number from the wp interface, and edit some add’l settings. Doesn’t show analytics in the interface though.

Don’t forget to add

<?php wp_footer(); ?>

to the footer of your template; that’s how wordpress renders the g-analytics javascript snippet.

Added: 2/5/2010 (Link)

Wordpress.com Stats

Not as extensive analysis of stats as Google Analytics, but has the advantage of being right there on your dashboard. Easy peasy.

Added: 2/5/2010 (Link)

Forms

WP Email Capture

Super simple widget for email signups. Sends to an email, and captures, so you can export to .csv. See recent signups on dashboard!

Dumb: can’t use widget more than once (e.g. 2 different sidebars). might be possible with some hackery.

Added: 2/5/2010 (Link)

Cforms

Contact Form 7

Adding ‘Share This’ Links

October 15th, 2009 | Posted by suzi

We know that there’s a lot of good stuff being passed around on this here internet, and ‘addthis’/’sharethis’ buttons are a fine solution for letting your users disseminate your site to their friends and networks. But, if you’re looking for something simpler, drop this code on yer site (or in your newsletter template[with a link to the web-version, of course], which sent me on this quest in the first place) for some easy-peasy-lemon-sqeezy facebook/twitter share linkage.

twitter:
1) Share link

<a title="Click to share this on Twitter" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=PUT TEXT OF STATUS UPDATE HERE, INCLUDING LINK TO PAGE" target="_blank">Share on Twitter</a>

makes: Share on Twitter

2) ‘Tweet this’ box

<form method="GET" action="http://twitter.com/home">
<textarea id="status" cols="35" rows="5" name="status"></textarea>
<input type="submit" />
</form>

makes: a text box for pushing tweets. add content to the text box with jQuery like this (to prevent bot-ness):
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
$("textarea").val("#TextInBox");
});
</script>

facebook:
<a title="Click to share this on Facebook" href="http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=http://LinkToPage" target="_blank">Share on Facebook</a>

makes: Share on Facebook

more info on this can be found here:
http://wfc2.wiredforchange.com/o/8001/p/salsa/web/common/public/content.sjs?content_item_KEY=10025

Voila!

Adding A Widgetized Sidebar

May 26th, 2009 | Posted by margot

Wordpress Theme templates can have as many widget based sidebar’s as you have the patience to define. The default one is always in a file called sidebar.php — after that it doesn’t really matter what you call the files.  Here’s the steps for adding one:

1) Call dynamic_sidebar – create the new sidebar php file, lets call it rightsidebar.php and include this code:

<?php if ( function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') && dynamic_sidebar(1) ) : else : ?>
My right sidebar goes here, widgets you gotta use them.
<?php endif; ?>

See that number as an option in dynamic_sidebar(1)  — this is gonna be a different number for each sidebar you add and correspond to the ordering of the functions we will define in step 2.

2) Add register_sidebar - Add this code to functions.php:

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'name'=>'left sidebar',
'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</li>',
'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));

You will have one of these for each of the times that you create a sidebar by calling dynamic_sidebar() in different php files and they will correspond in the order in which they are called to the numbers defined. So dynamic_sidebar(1) corresponds to the first register_sidebar  See the name attribute?  That’s what’s gonna appear in the widget interface. See the before and after stuff, that’s the wrapper html that it produces.

3) Include the sidebar in your template – include the sidebar file in the template like so:

<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/rightsidebar.php'); ?>

That should about do it.

A Simple CSS Image magnification effect

May 20th, 2009 | Posted by margot

This is a great little trick for making a hover effect for images to show a larger version.  It takes a little CSS skill to get it setup and some HTML confidence to make use of it but it is a simple flexible effect.

http://webdesigninfo.wordpress.com/2007/05/26/creating-popup-image-viewer-in-css/

Email templating, disaster of the century

May 18th, 2009 | Posted by suzi

Sitepoints Legion of Doom
Updated: January 19, 2010

So, you want to build an email template that looks decent across email clients? There’s only one rule: keep it simple. Restrain your fancy CSS skills folks, ‘cuz tonight we’re gonna code like it’s 1996.

First check out some » Guidelines
For more info » Resources

Read the rest of this entry »

Resizing the default text size on the built-in Tag Cloud Widget

May 18th, 2009 | Posted by margot

The default Tag Cloud Widget that comes install in WP has it’s text set to a range of 8pt to 22pt. if this doesn’t fit your available space the regretful only way to change that is directly in editing a function.

check out: wp-includes/widgets.php

looking for:
function wp_widget_tag_cloud($args) {
….. find
wp_tag_cloud();
…. add
wp_tag_cloud('smallest=7&largest=18&unit=px');

Keep in mind though that this might get overridden by an update so perhaps an override of this function in your theme’s functions.php is in order?

Origin of this info: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/158016

Margot’s Approved Themes Page

May 12th, 2009 | Posted by margot

SimpleX

Super simple 2 column design that just needs your custom color palette and logo or banner image at the top.
http://www.wpshoppe.com/

Inove

A reasonable 2 column design that looks alot less techno like once the top banner is removed or replaced.  Simple and spacious and great for displaying long content.
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/inove

The Morning After

A complex three column or more theme designed with online publication publishing in mind.  See a site (by my friend Mosa) using this theme customized by her.
http://themasterplan.in/tma
(actual Preview)

Wordpress MU Domain Mapping

May 8th, 2009 | Posted by margot

Austin and I semi-successfully installed this plugin today:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping/

This plugin has a conflict or problem associated with plugin commander — we got an error reporting that the copy of domain_mapping.php — austin added a wrapper of

if(!function_exists(’dm_add_pages’)) {

to ensure that when both this file and the file in /wp-content/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping get run the do not cause conflicts.

weeeee!! that was so fun  :)  but now we have working multi-domain setup.

Squids

April 7th, 2009 | Posted by admin

Squid Cookie! FTW!

squids

squids