Geolocation in Wordpress?
Posted on December 17, 2008
Filed Under experiments | Leave a Comment
Does anyone know how I can get the GPS in my Google G1 Phone to talk to my browser when I’m posting to WordPress? (Oops - I’m posting tweet sized posts again).
Video in wordpress
Posted on December 17, 2008
Filed Under themes, video | Leave a Comment
Do you remember, back in the day, how many hoops you had to jump through to stop WordPress killing your YouTube embed code. It was a nightmare. Save from HTML view, and redo the whole post if you made a typo because opening it for edit would kill your scripts.
Those days are long gone - this video took 16 seconds to embed, including firing up a new window, doing a search for wordpress 2.7 and grabbing the embed code. Video is so easy it hurts!
So now we are interested in making our video look GREAT - not just making it turn up.
Queue a nice new theme from Elite which gives a very ‘video site’ feel to WordPress. Preview it here because the screenshot doesn’t really do it justice.
You keep all the good stuff of your blog posts, they are just centered around video content rather than text. So you still get your SEO goodness, your commenting, your stats, and pretty much everything else. Plugins should work well too to drive alternative rating systems, polls and other side content.
If you have a predominantly video based project which demands a blog engine which presents video in a youtubey fashion you could do a lot worse. This is a pay theme, but the low cost and the time it would take you to format all those styles for housing videos seem a good trade off to me.
Paying for a WordPress Theme - Is it worth it?
Posted on December 17, 2008
Filed Under themes | Leave a Comment
Paying for a WordPress Theme is becoming more common, even for personal bloggers. Often termed ‘premium wordpress themes‘, pay themes are really any theme which demands a licence fee to use.
I’ve deployed a few sites recently where the cost of a $200 theme licence presented good value to my client against the time it would have taken us to re create the detail available within the theme. Customisation from a solid base theme from the likes of Woo Themes allows for a more sophisticated development where budgets are tight. Great for the credit crunch!
Woothemes is probably the best known source, although there are others like brian gardner who have been releasing pay themes for years.
What to look for
There are always lengthy bullet lists of amazing features associated with any pay theme. It is easy to get distracted by these, and miss the critical stuff. This is the critical stuff.
Timeliness - does the licence allow you to continue using the theme indefinitely on your site, are theme updates and patches free (for a year at least), when WP2.9 comes out will the theme be updated
Support - can you get email, twitter, IM, and other forms of support quickly (under 24 hours)
Updates - check if this is the first version, how old it is, if it’s three months old without even a minor update make sure you email and ask about support in detail
Developer option - most themes allow you to make a single payment for multiple deployments, if you think 5 clients might use a theme this is usually the cost effective way to go
All the rest of that great long list of features should be read - but won’t matter if you don’t have good answers to these three.
Comment below with examples of sites you’ve deployed with a pay theme and I’ll link them up so people can see what to expect, and how far a theme needs to be pushed to look ‘unique enough’ for the site owner.
no more excuses - time for WP 2.7
Posted on December 5, 2008
Filed Under why wordpress | 1 Comment
If you’ve been wondering about trying out a build of 2.7 now is the time to do it - before it goes live - it makes you cooler. Honest.
But don’t worry - you won’t be living too far out on the edge - current official wordpress advice is “Due to the recent security release of WordPress 2.6.5 and the stable WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1, it is recommended that you upgrade to RC1 so when the final WordPress 2.7 version is released, the automatic upgrade will update your version quickly and easily.”
You’re going to have to upgrade eventually - you might as well get it over with this week, and live the good life from there. Trust me - I’m the wp guy!
wordpress google checkout
Posted on December 2, 2008
Filed Under code, mechanic | 1 Comment
How to integrate Google Checkout with WordPress? A simple enough question!
I decided to test the two obvious routes for flexibility, time, and complexity. Route 1 - using the Instinct eCommerce WordPress Plugin, Route 2 - a custom application of the checkout code to a raw WordPress install.
My hunch is that the Google Checkout code is now advanced enough that it should compete pretty well with the Instinct plugin for smaller shops - and should give better flexibility.
In this first post I’ll discuss step by step how I get from no website to an operational WordPress shopping cart with Google Checkout fulfillment in place.
11:40am - Install WordPress
Here I cheat slightly and use my hosts 1Click WordPress installer to do this for me in the background. I pick a test URL and set it off. Should take 5 minutes. Time to make a coffee.
11:45 - Download eCommerce plugin
The plugin is available here - I used version 3.6.8 rc1 which was the recommended release today. As with any decent plugin, you just upload and activate the plugin. For such a complex plugin this is commendable, as many would have resorted to a small config file to avoid a lot of work on the interface. I know I probably would! Lazy WPGuy.
11:52 - WP Installed
Finally WP is installed on the server. I complete the setup (title, admin etc…), download a backup, and upload the plugin. The snow must be slowing my broadband… gives me something to watch as I wait though!
12:10 - Activate & Basic setup of plugin
Activating the plugin is a snap - I now need to setup the basics of my checkout account, email addresses etc… All setup is on a new top level tab labelled ‘eCommerce’ - so no hunting around under Settings and Plugins for the admin pages. I’m going for the default in most cases.
12:15 - Add some example products
I make up a couple of categories, and some example products and add them using the admin forms. This takes no time, and the front end site allows me to add them to the basket, and then check basket contents.
12:18 - Setup google checkout
Create google checkout account. Simple 2 minute process at Google. You will need a credit card in order to prove you are real entity. You will now have an ID and a key for Google Checkout Merchant.
12:20 - Set up in WordPress
Now add these to the plugin. Simply copy and paste into place, and return to Google to set the callback URL. This has to be an https address - which may be an issue on your host. Or may not. I also selected ’sandbox’ to allow us to put through test transactions.
12:27 - Test
Add to backet, view basket (or ‘verify your order’ as it says - need to change that!) and click on the Google Checkout button. Sure enough - I’m at Google Checkout, it lists my basket contents perfectly, handles the shipping options and recognises my usual Google Checkout payment options. Bingo!
Results
Now, I haven’t worked on the theme, or added all the products I need to yet - but that was a definition of painless. Despite waiting for my FTP client for at least 10 - 15 minutes during the install we have a working eCommerce website based on WordPress up and running and taking sandbox transactions within 50 minutes.
Another hour to create more products and apply a more appropriate theme and I think you could have a passable web shop.
Next… the direct approach.
Wordpress mechanic - conditional sidebar
Posted on November 28, 2008
Filed Under random | Leave a Comment
So you want to have a different ad, sub menu, or enquiry form in different sections of your website. How do you achieve this?
It is amazingly simple to achieve if you only want to distinguish between types of pages, i.e. search pages, homepage, category pages etc…:
<ul id=”nav”>
<li<?php if ( is_home() ) { echo ‘ class=”current”‘; } ?>><a href=”#”>Home</a></li>
<li<?php if ( is_page(’about’) ) { echo ‘ class=”current”‘; } ?>><a href=”#”>About</a></li>
<li<?php if ( is_page(’thing2′) ) { echo ‘ class=”current”‘; } ?>><a href=”#”>Thing 2</a></li>
</ul>
How to display something only on the sidebar for posts which exist within a certain category is less obvious - but just as easy. A function like the fictional post_in_cat(”Highlight posts”) would be very sweet - but this solution is almost as easy to implement.
You need to know the title of the category you are looking to highlight. This line prints the phrase if the post is in the Highlight posts category.
<?php if (single_cat_title() == “Highlight posts”){ echo ‘this is a highlight post! woohoo!’; } ?>
wordpress book theme
Posted on November 27, 2008
Filed Under random | 2 Comments
Wordpress is a great CMS for all manner of content - but can it cope with a whole novel? I don’t think so. But you could give one a fighting chance using this theme as a starting point:
This theme has been out a while, has a really strong community feel around the comments, and is continually being improved. A great exampe of how doing something a bit unique can garner a strong following.
Chris who built the thing is working on another theme, apparently, which is more pared down for writers.
Wordpress mechanic - running slowly?
Posted on November 27, 2008
Filed Under mechanic | Leave a Comment
So you think you have a slow running wordpress install. How do you quantify the slow ‘feel’ of the site before you start ranting at your host?
Here is a single line of code you can add to your theme footer to tell you how long your page took to pull together.
<p>The WP monkeys took <?php timer_stop(1) ?>s to build this!</p>
This adds a simple line to the very bottom of your site with - surprisingly enough - the time it took to build your page.
But what is a slow time? Worry about anything over a second. Worry a bit about anything over half a second. Under half a second and you’ll be fine unless you have a very busy blog.
keep looking »
