Bob Wire
Chérie Newman
Ednor Therriault
Lila Cleminshaw
Sergei Boutenko
V-Tech Auto Repair
Best Practice: Check if Function Exists When Adding in WordPress Theme
Best Practice for WordPress Theme Designer: Always check to see if a function exists before adding it in a theme.
The best part about WordPress is plugins. Theme designers also have a tendency of using WordPress plugins for adding cool features. When working on a custom WordPress theme project for a client, one thing you want to make sure is follow the best practice. Yesterday, we got an inquiry from one of our users whose site was broken. He had a custom design done by someone. The theme worked great until he changed hosts. His single posts would not load after post content. The comments area, sidebar, footer, nothing will load. It will simply output the error. We went in and fixed the issue for them. The issue was that his theme designer did not follow the best practice. He had a very popular plugin “User Photo” which allows you to add user’s photo at the bottom of the post, except he was just adding the function directly. Now this would work unless ofcourse the plugin gets disabled for some reason. When this client switched hosts, apparently the GD Library was not installed in the new server. This caused the plugin to deactivate. You also could not re-activate the plugin because it relies on the GD Library. This caused the site to be broken for all users. This obviously gets that theme designer a bad reputation because when the client asked what was the issue, we explained to them. If you are a theme designer adding plugin outputs, you should always follow the best practice. Here are some examples of how we do things with our clients: read more …
Share on Facebook
S12-024: WordPress-Web Development for the Right Side of Your Brain
This class focuses on using the free open-source software called WordPress. WordPress makes it easy to create and deploy your own professional website. The user interface is designed let you present your business or ideas in an attractive format to the public without having to know complex programs. Learn set up, common uses, how to add plugins and design themes and search engine optimization as well as integration with common free social networking tools like Youtube, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook. No prior knowledge of HTML, web publishing or ownership of an existing website required but you should be familiar with web browsers such as Internet Explorer and programs to format text such as Word.
Mondays, April 9 – May 14
9am – noon
$81 (early bird $77)
Share on Facebook
When exporting and importing content, links aren’t included. Here are the instructions for importing links using OPML (Online Processor Markup Language)
http://en.support.wordpress.com/blogroll/import-export-links/
Note: When trying to use the OPML URL http://www.mysite.com/wp-link-opml.php directly from the import blogger program, I got the error
XML error: XML_ERR_NAME_REQUIRED at line 248
Inserted 0 links into category 3. All done! Go manage those links.
Simple work-around to import from file.
- In browser
- goto http://www.mysite.com/wp-link-opml.php
- save file as “wp-links-opml.php.xml”
- import blogger
- Browse to “wp-links-opml.php.xml”
Share on Facebook
Here are some parameters that you can be added to your Youtube video embed code to control what your visitors see.
- View in high quality
Youtube gives you the option to switch to high quality videos for some of the videos. To check if a video is available in high quality:
append ‘&fmt=18′(stereo, 480 x 270 resolution)
or
‘&fmt=22′(stereo, 1280 x 720 resolution) for even higher quality - Embed Higher Quality Videos
The above trick works for playback. To embed high quality videos:
append “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″
and
“&ap=%2526fmt%3D22″
to the embed url - Cut the chase and link to the interesting part
Linking to a video where the real action starts at 3 minutes 22 seconds, wondered if you could make it start at 03:22? You are in luck.
All you have to do is add #t=03m22s (#t=XXmYYs for XX mins and YY seconds) to the end of the URL. - Hide the search box
The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url. - Embed only a part of Video
append ‘&start=30′ to skip first 30s of the video
where any number can be substituted for 30\ - Autoplay an embedded video
add ‘&autoplay=1′ to the url part of the embed code - Loop an embedded video
Append ‘&loop=1′ to make the video start again automatically after reaches the end. - Disable Related Videos
Remove other people’s content:
add ‘&rel=0′ to the end of the url part of the embed code - Bypass Youtube Regional Filtering
Some videos are only available in certain parts of the world. Your IP Address is used to determine your location and then allow or deny access to the video. Change the url from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<somecode> to http://www.youtube.com/v/<somecode> - Download Video
Although not inherently a youtube trick but useful all the same for downloading videos. Just change youtube to kickyoutube in the url of the video and it will take you to kickyoutube.com with all the options for downloading the video you were watching.
How to tell if a site is Wordpress or not.
- Right-click on page
- View Page Source
- Ctrl-F (to find in page)
- Search for the word “wp-content”
- If it is a wordpress site you will see wp-content throughout the source
How to find out the Theme:
- Searching the source (as above)
- search for
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”http://phylliserck.net/wp-content/themes/twenty-ten/style.css“ - changing phylliserck.net domain to the domain name of the site you’re looking at
- the style name is between /themes/ and /style.css
e.g.
twenty-ten
W12-030.2: Wordpress – Web Development for the Right Side of Your Brain
This class focuses on using the free open-source software called Wordpress. Wordpress makes it easy to create and deploy your own professional webstie. The user interface is designed to let you present your business or ideas in an attractive format to the public without having to know complex programs. Learn setup, common uses, how to add plugins and design themes and search engine optimization as well as integration with common free social networking tools like Youtube, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook. No prior knowledge of HTML, web publishing or ownership of an existing website required. But, you should be familiar with web browsers such as Internet Explorer and programs to format text such as Word.
Fridays, Jan 20-March 2 (no class Feb 24)
9am – noon
$81
| taught throughThe Lifelong Learning Center 310 South Curtis Street Missoula, MT 59801 (406) 549-8765 |
 |
Share on Facebook
Start your year off with an inspiring presentation by Analyst, Rose Lockwood. Rose splits her time between the UK and Montana and specializes in language technology. Check out her LinkedIn profile.
Information Architecture can make or break the usability of your website. Rose will share her experience developing information taxonomies and will demonstrate her latest project LangTechNews.
Rose has worked for several decades in the area of automated language translation. Wordpress core provides multilingual support. Bring your machine translation questions for consideration by a leading expert in this field.
Date: Jan. 4, 2012
Time: noon-1pm
Location: Ruby’s Inn & Convention Center
4825 N Reserve St
Missoula, MT
Cost: FREE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI&hd=1
Share on Facebook
Instructions for Webmaster using Plesk panel on dedicated server.
Adding alternative domain name for your website using a domain alias.
- Plesk Control Panel
- Websites & Domains tab
- Show Advanced Operations (gray link in middle of the page)
- Domain Aliases link
- [manage] link next to desired domain
- Add Domain Alias
- type new domain name
- leave default checkboxes
- OK
- Logon to domain registrar and set nameservers.
Share on Facebook
The December Montana Wordpress Meetup proved to be another good tech-networking opportunity. This months meeting format was open forum. We went around the table and took 5-min or so each talking about things we’re doing with WP.
- Ednor aka Bob Wire – had copies of his new Christmas CDs Off-white Christmas for everyone. His cool CD website done in Wordpress of course, is at offwhitechristmas.com
- Krista has been doing some cool reusable Theme customizations and demoed her cool photography site.
- Rebecca recommended Cafe Press for jit merchandising
- Bridget is implementing SEO techniques she learned in Rebecca’s class on the Solor Flashlights site.
- Jamie is keeping busy working on his wife’s Bette Boomer site and his New Zealand vacation home site.
- Nora is teaching an advanced wordpress class Beyond the Wordpress Dashboard starting Jan 18
- Phyllis compared and contrasted contact form plugins Contact Form 7 and Custom Contact Forms.
- Stephanie has been working with plugins mailpress and Blog-in-Blog.
Share on Facebook
