Category Archives: WordPress

WordPress Real Estate Plugin: Stay Tuned…

Posted on December 9, 2011

You may have noticed this blog has gone un-updated. That’s because I’ve been working on an awesome new plugin.

WordPress + Real Estate + User Data + SEO

In the past, I’ve written posts about how to optimize your WordPress real estate website for SEO and I’ve created a Trulia plugin for WordPress.

This WordPress real estate plugin changes the game of what you can do with your WordPress website — and for how much money. No longer do you need to pay tens of thousands of dollars for an indexed IDX solution.

Next week I will release a beta version, so stay tuned for the formal announcement.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Easy Content Deployment for WordPress: RAMP

Posted on August 25, 2011

RAMP allows you to make all the changes you need in your staging environment, then selectively push these changes to your production site. You can set up a new section of your site, upload some images to fill out a nice carousel for it, and add a link to it on your home page. Once this content has been reviewed and approved, you can go to your RAMP page, select these content changes, and push them to your production site.

via Easy Content Deployment for WordPress: RAMP.

This would be really handy for larger WordPress sites.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Paginate Links in WordPress Link Manager

Posted on March 16, 2011

Links are not a first-class citizens in WordPress

In developing the a website for professional genealogists, I was tasked with creating link directory functionality in WordPress. I didn’t want to install some big plugins; I wanted to use the Links Manager that’s built in to every WP install out of the box. There were two problems, however:

  1. Link categories are not hierarchical, and;
  2. There is no pagination in the Links Manager: all links are displayed on one page by default.

My client’s website will have over 20,000 links; having them all on one page was simply not an option.

I didn’t want to create a new Post Type or Taxonomy; Links are already the right tool for the job. I moved forward creating the custom solution, and am sharing the results of that development here. The result of the project was a successful deployment of a crazy amount of links (see an example on their Iowa genealogy resources page).  Read more…

Posted in Code, WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments

Hierarchical Link Categories for WordPress

Posted on January 25, 2011

Download the plugin on WordPress.org

If you’ve ever tried to use WordPress’ built-in bookmarks / links manager, you know that its limits can be frustrating. One of the biggest issues I’ve encountered is that the link categories are not hierarchical.

Let’s say you have a tech blog and you link to a lot of pages about TV’s. You may want to categorize the links under TV > Plasma or TV > LCD. With the existing system, you cannot.  Read more…

Enter the Hierarchical Link Categories plugin

Posted in Plugins, Uncategorized, WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 20 Comments

Gravity Forms Shortcode Explained

Posted on January 18, 2011

This post is about Gravity Forms, a WordPress contact form plugin.

What are shortcodes?

Think of shortcodes as a placeholder for where other content will be displayed: instead of “Insert a Gravity Forms form here,” we use the gravityform shortcode. Learn more about shortcodes on WordPress.org.

The Gravity Forms shortcode has five pieces:

[gravityform id=# name=TEXT title=boolean description=boolean ajax=boolean]

  1. id (required) – The ID of the form, as displayed on the Gravity Forms Edit Forms page in the Id column
  2. name (required) - The name of the form.
  3. title – Show the title to users? Default is true; set to “false” to disable
  4. description – Show the form’s description to users? Default is true; set to “false” to disable.
  5. ajax – Submit the form without refreshing? Default is false; set to “true” to enable.

Gravity Forms Shortcode Examples:

[gravityform id=1 name=Example Form title=false description=false ajax=true]
Will result in Form #1 being displayed without a title or description, with no-refresh entry submission.  Read more…

Posted in Tutorial, WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Shopify Importer – Import Shopify Products into WordPress

Posted on December 2, 2010

Download the plugin from WordPress.org

Shopify is a great hosted eCommerce provider. WordPress is the best blogging platform.

I first learned about Shopify in 2007, and was very interested in their service: they take care of every aspect of an eCommerce shop, and you pay them monthly plus a little cut of your sales.

  • Themes: Shopify has a great theme generator package that uses Ruby on Rails and it also has a theme store with tons of beautiful, standards-compliant themes.
  • Apps: The Shopify App Store features free and paid applications that integrate using the Shopify API.
  • Hosting: Shopify uses Rackspace and Akamai for hosting and as a CDN, respectively. Security, hosting, etc.
  • …and tons of other features

Shopify Blog FunctionalityI am still impressed with Shopify, but when I logged in recently to my Shopify account, I saw that Shopify’s “blogging” functionality is weak. Very weak. When I saw that there was an app to import a WordPress blog into Shopify, I laughed, and went ahead creating a Shopify importer for WordPress.  Read more…

Posted in Plugins, WordPress | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

Passing parameters from PHP to Javascripts in plugins » Otto on WordPress

Posted on December 1, 2010

Much cleaner. One static and unchanging JS file to cache. Parameters get put into your HTML itself as a one-liner. You can deal with the parameters using a normal PHP array before passing them over. No need to screw around with generating Javascript from PHP or looking for wp-load or even messing with tricky actions.

via Passing parameters from PHP to Javascripts in plugins » Otto on WordPress.

Posted in QuickTip, WordPress | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Storing Data in WordPress Plugins – A Quick Rundown

Posted on November 23, 2010
Beatles love WordPress

Coding better WordPress plugins

As I’ve worked with WordPress plugins, I’ve learned new ways of working with WordPress. WordPress has tons of built-in functionality that is very useful and easy to use once discovered.

I am by no means a great PHP coder. I am still learning OOP principles and how to write code better. In creating new WordPress plugins (see a list of my plugins), I have improved how I code: writing more efficient code using WordPress functionality rather than hacks.

One of the methods of coding that I have discovered (thanks to Jeremy Clarke) is using the WP Cache and Transient APIs to store plugin data. It’s made a big difference in the speed of all my plugins.

The following is a quick review of three different ways of storing data when you code plugins or work with WordPress. This is to the best of my knowledge, and I welcome feedback/improvements in the comments.  Read more…

Posted in Code, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Two Easy Ways to Add “nofollow” to WordPress Menu Items

Posted on October 8, 2010

By default, WordPress menus don’t have the ability to add “nofollow” to the link items…but WordPress 3.0+ has the functionality built in.

This tutorial will show you how to add nofollow to specific items using the new wp_nav_menu() function.  Read more…

Posted in Tutorial, WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments
12345