OcTwitter Contest

EverythingWebRealted.com is sponsoring the OcTwitter contest. It is a movement to get more people involved using Twitter, while also giving away some great prizes. WPforSale is one of the supporters of this contest - go ahead and get involved.

Learn more here: OcTwitter Contest

Prizes

Grand Prize
(1) 125×125 Banner Ad on WPForSale.com for 4 Months.
(1) 125×125 Banner Ad on Gift Reviews for 3 Months.
(1) 125×125 Banner Ad on Free Famous Quotes for 3 Months.
(1) One year VIP membership to CreateBanner.com at a value of $35. Sponsored by Xavier Media Blog.
(1) 125×125 Banner Ad on The Pinay Blogger for one month.
(1) 125×125 Banner Ad on Momma Wannabe for one month.
(1) 1 year backlink on The Stay Fit Blog.
(1) 1 year backlink at Barack Obamas Blog.
(1) website review on Everything Web Related.

Second Place
(1) 125×125 Banner Ad on Better Interpersonal Communication for one month.
(1) One year VIP membership to CreateBanner.com at a value of $35. Sponsored by Xavier Media Blog.
(1) 125×125 Banner Ad on Journal of Journey for one month.
(1) 125×125 Banner Ad on 24Patrol for one month.
(1) 125×125 Banner Ad on NickThrolson.com for one month.

Third Place
(1) Text link ad on Blogging From Scratch.
(1) Text link ad on Ragnarok Guide.
(1) Text link ad on Dota Hero.
(1) One year VIP membership to CreateBanner.com at a value of $35. Sponsored by Xavier Media Blog.

Fourth Place
(1) One year VIP membership to CreateBanner.com at a value of $35. Sponsored by Xavier Media Blog.
(1000) - EntreCard Credit’s from Everything Web Related.
(1000) - EntreCard Credit’s from Multilpy Themes

Fifth Place
(1) One year VIP membership to CreateBanner.com at a value of $35. Sponsored by Xavier Media Blog.
(1) 125×125 Banner Ad on Positive Thinking for 2 weeks.

Rules of the Contest

Void where prohibited or restricted by law.

All entrants must be 13 years of age or older.

Prizes will be awarded either by the Everything Web Related or by its sponsors in a timely manner. The Everything Web Related reserves the right to substitute any and all prizes with prizes of equal or greater value, if an advertised prize becomes unavailable.

Odds of winning depend on the eligible number of entries received.

Prize winners will be notified via email. Winners must respond within a timely manner (3 days) or the prize is forfeit and a new winner will be selected. This means you must have a Twitter account.

By accepting a prize, all winners agree that the Everything Web Related may post his/her name on the “Previous Winners” page and in any and all media, including future advertising or publicity, without further consideration or compensation, unless prohibited by law.

Contest begins at 12:00 AM (CST) on October 1st, 2008 and ends 11:59 AM (CST) October 10th, 2008.

Learn more here: OcTwitter Contest

Filed Under Blog

WordPress Hack | Set Class for Home Page Link

The Problem:

Needed the home page button status to appear active, or in WP terms, as the “current_page_item”. So I need to determine if the page I was on was the home page or not, and if it was, I needed to add a class to it of “current_page_item”.

Solution:

Just a little PHP script does the trick- added into the LI element.

<ul>
<li <?php if (is_home())
echo ‘class=”current_page_item”‘;?>><a href=”<?php echo get_settings(’home’); ?>/”>Home</a></li>
<?php wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=’);?>
</ul>

That’s it!

NOTE: Here is a useful plugin to check out and that I am using with the code above: Current-Page-Bugfix

Filed Under Blog, Cool Stuff

How to include posts within a page using WordPress

Hey everyone. Thought I’d share a solution to a problem I just solved.

I was creating a portfolio of case studies for a client and I want to use the “posts” within WordPress to list the case studies. However, the main menu uses the ‘wp_list_pages’ function, so I cannot interject a “portfolio” category link where I want that link placed within the menu, since it is auto-generated.

This means I could hard-code the portfolio category link at the beginning or end of the menu - but I need it somewhere in the middle, so I devised this workaround.

I have found the best way to do this is through the creation of a page template. This offers you the greatest flexibility, and will also help you learn a bit more about WordPress.

OK - enough blabbing, let’s get started.

  1. First thing to do is look in your theme folder for a file named page.php - make a copy of it and rename it to an appropriate name - we’ll use Portfolio.php for this example.
  2. Next, open the new file (portfolio.php) and copy and paste this into your file at the very top (change the name ‘Portfolio’ in the code to the name of your choice - this is the actual name of the template that will be listed when selecting the template from within the Write/Manage Page editor:<?php
    /*
    Template Name: Portfolio
    */
    ?>
  3. We will be pulling all posts from within a single category into this page. Create your new category now, and take note of the category’s ID. If your category already exists, just get its ID.

    Note    : To find the ID, go to Manage >> Categories and hover your mouse over the Category Name. You will find the ID as the last parameter of the URL in the browsers status bar (bottom-left corner)
  4. Ok, back within the Portfolio.php, we need to replace the default code with new code that will import the posts from the category we’ve created / selected. Here’s how:
  5. Replace the loop (code varies so I have just included the beginning and ending tags - replace / remove everything between the tags and the tags themselves: <?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
    ………
    <?php endwhile; ?>

    with this below - where ‘category=[the ID of your category you noted in step 3]‘:

    <?php
    $lastposts = get_posts('category=3');
    foreach($lastposts as $post) :
    setup_postdata($post);
    ?>
    <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
    <?php the_content(); ?>
    <?php endforeach; ?>

  6. Save the template.
  7. Create / Select the page you want to import the posts within - you should be in the page editor
  8. From within the page editor, under the Page Template dropdown, select ‘Portfolio’
  9. Publish / Save the page.
  10. Create posts under your selected category, if they are nor already present.
  11. Go to the front-end of your website and locate your new page. You should see the page displaying the posts you have created from within your selected category.
  12. As for placing the page’s link in the menu - just set your page order for the page.

That’s it. Pretty cool, huh?

WordPress templates are easy to create and offer you tons of flexibility.

Obviously, you can place any code you like in a template. The above is just an example of including the posts from a specific category. There are more option at WordPress.org.

Filed Under Blog, Themes

Kickass Form Plugin for WordPress

OK - I am not sure when Contact Form 7 hit the scene, but it is incredibly flexible and, quite frankly, kickass.

Why?

  • you can create multiple forms for your site - you’re not relegated to just using one contact form to meet all your objectives
  • you can add html and CSS directly into the form, thru the management page
  • Easy to install on a page - just cut and paste a single line of code
  • It’s free!

I just stumbled on this software for a need I have with a client’s website. It is the perfect solution.

Hope it may help you too!

Again - Here is the link: Contact Form 7

Filed Under Blog

WordPress on Crack - Broken Link

Hello,

I apologize for anyone wanting to purchase the “WordPress on Crack” product. Seems the affiliate I signed under went AWOL. Anyways. I contacted the author and we got it fixed.

I haven’t received a response from anyone on the original post, asking if anybody has tried this product, so I decided to purchase the software and try it out myself.

First impression? Good stuff! Worth $97.00 to me because I like to see how things are done by experts. I suppose I could thumb my way thru the WP docs, but I honestly do not have the time. This video has allowed me to learn the basics of writing a plugin - and I have just watched the first one .

There are 7 total video tutorials with full code. And the tutorials are actually useful - something you may want to add to your WP site.

The first video has given me an understanding however of how simple it is to “hook” into WP and create a plugin. The more I learn about WordPress, the more I love it!

Stay tuned for more posts on this or check out this page.

Filed Under Blog

Thank you MediaCore Studios for the plug!

I have to thank Carlos at MediaCoreStudios for the nice post regarding WPforSale.com.

It’s so cool how people can come into your life at just the right time and Carlos is one of those people. Carlos initially contacted me a couple of weeks ago to make me aware of his CelebrityPress Theme. I thought his theme was beautiful so I was happy to share it with all of you. We were emailing each other back and forth about some different things (like using e-junkie) and just hit it off. Since then we have become friends and are actually now collaborating on a new WordPress Theme together. You will hear more about this very soon - I promise.

Again, thank you Carlos for the kind words. Very appreciated!

Filed Under Blog

WordPress on Crack | Have you tried it?

Wondering if you can help me out on this one.

I found a seemingly cool product called WordPress on Crack. read more

Filed Under Blog, Plugins

A WordPress Designer’s Feed Site That Doesn’t Suck

WooHoo

I have been working the last couple of days on this new release. It’s still in BETA, but I wanted to share this with you as soon as I could.

What the heck is it?

Well, it is kinda like an RSS reader for WordPress Designers, but not quite. The best thing you can do is just check it out and experience it for yourself.

Why does this kickass?

I have implemented SimplePie , RSS technology, and the ShadowBox technology, which is like lightbox, but much more robust. This allows you to surf all the links (RSS feeds) and remain on this site. It also allows you to navigate from one link to the next using the lower right-hand corner nav buttons too.

Ways you can help - because helping feels good

  • Let me know of any other feeds that would work well here
  • Notify me of any bugs (already found the more/less doesn’t work in IE so I am hiding it using conditional CSS
  • Anything I can do to improve your experience?
  • If you don’t want your feed posted, let me know that too (who doesn’t want traffic?)
  • Buy your premium WP products from our site so we can keep the lights on

Here’s the link - hope you like it: WordPress Feeds

Filed Under Blog, Themes

Create Image Overlay Effects for Your Images Using CSS in WordPress

How to create dazzling image overlay effects with minimal effort.

Web Designer Wall has a posted a great article on adding image overlay effects to your images using CSS. The author does a great job of explaining how this works, so I am only going to explain how to get this working in WordPress.

I just introduced this effect to my category listings pages (archives.php template) - see sample. I have created my own variation of the ‘Tape’ style (even though I removed the tape ;-)

Here is what I have done.

  1. Read how this technique works at Web Designer Wall
  2. Download the sample files from Web Designer Wall
  3. First thing I learned is you need to alter / create your own overlay images if your files dimensions differ from those in the downloads. I just opened up FireWorks and modified the tape.png image to the same dimensions as the images on my site. Make sure the images you are applying this effect to all have the same dimensions or your effect will not be applied properly. Extra Note: My layout is probably different than yours, in that I have included my images in the archive.php template in a DIV container with a fixed height of 225px and set overflow:hidden using CSS. The reason I do this is so that all of my thumb images (created using Viva Thumbs) in the left column appear to have the same proportions. The truth is, however, that them images themselves vary in height, though all have the same width of 400px. This overlay technique is even more advantages to me, because I can give my images a finished, polished look, whereas before I could not apply any styling to the bottom of the images because they were longer than the 225px height of its parent DIV, and the bottom effect was always hidden due to the overflow:hidden assignment.
  4. Once you have your image created, upload it into your images folder within your active Theme. Note it’s name as you will have to add this to your CSS file (See #6). My image is named tape.png.
  5. Open up the decorative-gallery-index.html file in your favorite text editor.
  6. Locate the CSS code for your favorite style, and add it to your Theme’s Stylesheet (Style.CSS). Edit the span portion of your CSS to include your image name. Here is the code I am using:.photo {
    margin: 0px;
    position: relative;
    width: 400px;
    height: 225px;
    float: left;
    }
    .photo img {
    background: #fff;
    border: solid 1px #ccc;
    padding: 4px;
    }

    .photo a {
    text-decoration: none;
    }
    .photo span {
    width: 400px;
    height: 250px;
    display: block;
    position: absolute;
    top: 0px;
    left: 5px;
    background: url(images/tape.png) no-repeat;

  7. OK. Now we need to make some quick changes to our Template so the image(s) we want to effect receive the CSS styling we’ve prepared. Open up your Theme Editor in WordPress and navigate to your respective file. For me, I opened up the (Archives) Archive.php file. Here is my code, before and after adding the needed code:
    Before:
    <a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”><img class=”imgarchive” src=”<?php viva(’template’,”); ?> “/></a>
    After:
    <div class=”photo”>
    <a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”><span></span><img class=”imgarchive” src=”<?php viva(’template’,”); ?> “/></a></div>Changes have been highlighted in bold.
  8. As you can see I manually added the <span> tags into my template, and did not use the JQuery technique.
  9. As far as the PNG fix for IE, you can just upload the iepngfix.htc to the root of your theme.
  10. Open up your Header.php in the Theme Editor and add this line just above the </head> tag: 
    <!--[if lt IE 7]>
<style type=”text/css”>
.photo span { behavior: url(<?php bloginfo(’template_url’); ?>/iepngfix.htc); } </style>
<![endif]–>
  11. I also had to add the following IE6 fix to my page to get it to work properly due to my setup as described in the #3 extra note. Here is the code I added after the .photo span style above:.photo {height:225px;overflow:hidden;width:410px;}

That’s it. I hope you find this helpful.

Filed Under Blog

WordPress Theme Tips and Tricks

Here is a great post showcasing some of the reusable snippets of code we all need from time to time. read more

Filed Under Blog
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