May 8th, 2012
In order to make my gallery and slideshow plugin HighCycle compatible with the WordPress plugin repository, I’ve reworked HighCycle to use the open source Colorbox library instead on HighslideJS. This is a win for all since Colorbox is just plain awesome.
ColorCycle replaces the default WordPress gallery shortcode with Colorbox powered enlargements. In addition it provides a slideshow shortcode for displaying attached images in a slideshow, powered by the Cycle plugin for jQuery.
New is also the ability to group images, which allows for having multiple galleries on the same page. Demo coming soon.
Download ColorCycle Here
March 16th, 2012
Follow up to my review of NowYo.com
I reached out to the new owner of the domain I had supposedly purchased on 3/9 from NowYo.com, who informed me that he purchased it on 3/14.
So to recap. They sold me the domain on 3/9 for $300.
Then on 3/14 they sold it again for $350 to someone else.
Must be nice to be in a business where you can operate like this. No – I was not beaten to the punch. They just got a better offer.
I could understand if they sold it first thing Monday morning, but my payment arrived to them on Friday at 4:30pm, then they sold it the Wednesday after. Hard to trust a company that manages themselves like this.
If you’re thinking of buying a domain for NowYo.com – Buyer Beware!
March 16th, 2012
NowYo.com is a company based in Cincinnati Ohio that resells domain names. Normally I do not buy domains from resellers, but they approached me with a domain I was interested in and I decided to give it a shot. Here follows my review of the domain reseller NowYo.com
Short story – Poor customer service experience. Do not use Now Yo for your domain name purchase needs. Even if you pay the invoice as promptly as humanly possible – you’ll probably not get what you ordered.
I called their office after receiving their solicitation via email. I spoke to Ryan who agreed to sell me the domain for a fair price and promptly sent me a PayPal invoice. I paid the invoice within 10 minutes and was informed that I would receive instructions on how to retrieve my purchased domain within 24 hours.
Things got busy and a week went by with no communication from them. I called to see what was up, after my attempts to contact them through their website’s contact form proved unsuccessful. I was treated like a alien, as if they’d never heard from me before (despite getting the same person, and having an invoice # from them) – and was told that ‘we got a lot of action on that’ – and ‘someone beat you to it’ – ‘we sold it yesterday’ (despite me buying it a week previous).
I suspect they got a better offer on the domain after I paid and took it. It’s charlatans like these that make a bad name for the domain reselling business. I noticed that the first time I visited their site to check the price of the domain it was $375, then I checked from another computer and it said ‘Offer’. When I called without me even pressing they offered it to me for $300.
OK, so if somebody truly beat me to it – you have no procedure in place to refund money you’ve accepted from others for the same goods?
Who knows how long NowYo.com would have kept my money had I not called. They are not running a good business and I cannot recommend them to anyone. Feel free to contact me if you’ve had similar issues. In the end they hung up on me, so I don’t think their too serious about keeping customers happy.
That concludes my review and vent of NowYo.com, now back to your regular programming…
UPDATE: See what I find when I contact the new owner.
February 21st, 2012
Taxonomy Templates allows user selection of a theme’s available taxonomy templates, much like how pages can select their template. If you’ve ever wanted to style many categories differently, it can quickly get tedious making copies of templates and changing file names to match slugs or id’s. Lacking a term meta data store, this plugin stores the selected templates in the options table.
With the plugin installed, and available templates in the theme, the user can select the desired template on the Edit Category/Tag/Taxonomy page:
On the theme side a comment is added to the top of the template to identify it:
/*
Taxonomy Template Name: SMPR
*/
UPDATE: Now available in plugin repository
September 21st, 2011
I was unable to find anything that made it easy to paste iframe embed codes into the visual editor. The existing solutions all required me to transpose info from the embed code to the shortcode. This allows you to simply paste your iframe code. Just put it inside [iframe][/iframe].
Update: Now available in repository as plugin ready to go
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/iframe-shortcode/
add_shortcode( 'iframe', 'simple_iframe_sc' );
function simple_iframe_sc( $atts, $content = null ) {
$char = array( '‘', '’', '“', '”', '′', '″' );
$replace = array( "'", "'", '"', '"', "'", '"' );
return html_entity_decode( str_replace( $char, $replace, $content ) );
}
Example use:
[iframe]<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/KuxWu1D3Mk4"
frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>[/iframe]
August 31st, 2011
I got this question at the Happiness Bar at WordCamp (in front of Andrew Ozz to boot!) also, so I’m committing it to bits here.
function custom_mce_styles( $init ) {
$init['theme_advanced_buttons2_add_before'] = 'styleselect';
$init['theme_advanced_styles'] = 'Style Name=styleclass,Style Name2=styleclass2';
return $init;
}
add_filter( 'tiny_mce_before_init', 'custom_mce_styles' );
function my_mce_css() {
return get_bloginfo( 'template_url' ) . '/editor-style.css';
}
add_filter( 'mce_css', 'my_mce_css' );
Add this to your theme’s functions.php file. Obviously (or not) you’ll replace Style Name=styleclass,Style Name2=styleclass2 with your own comma sep. list of names and classes.
To style the appearance of the display within the visual editor, you need to create an editor stylesheet in your theme folder – ex: editor-style.css
To add the dropdown to the first row, revise line 2:
$init['theme_advanced_buttons1_add_before'] = 'styleselect';
WordPress.org Support Forum Post
August 31st, 2011
This works great on Rackspace Cloud Sites, and eliminates the need to upload an archive or individual files. Script works by grabbing and unpacking the latest stable version of WordPress.
Read the rest of this entry »
August 23rd, 2011
This was my first pilgrimage to the annual WordCamp San Francisco. 3 days of WordPress heaven. Sunday I enjoyed volunteering at the ‘Happiness Bar’, helping people with their WordPress problems. Saw some interesting stuff. Great speakers, great venue and crowd.
March 10th, 2011
One of my favorite, and most used plugins is — Automatic WordPress Backup by Dan Coulter under commission by Web Design Company.
It backs up your entire site (database, themes, plugins, uploads, settings) and then sends it off to Amazon S3′s low cost industrial strength storage.
You can set it to run automatically or trigger it manually as you like. It will even clean up old backups.
It does not support multi-site yet – but hopefully it will soon.
One note of caution – the automated backup jobs are triggered by wp_cron. This can be problematic for low traffic sites. You may wish to setup a cron job to visit your site at regular intervals to insure that wp_cron gets triggered regularly.
Thanks Dan and Mel!
Download WordPress Backup
August 17th, 2010
This painfully simple plugin provides a shortcode for inserting simple contact forms, with JustHumans powered spam protection. JustHumans is one of the most reliable ways of stopping contact form spam in my experience, I highly recommend it and use it frequently.
Download JustHumans Contact Form Plugin
Update: Anders Brownworth has blogged it.
July 8th, 2010
Simple plugin for inserting ‘Add to Cart’ buttons with shortcodes. Includes visual editor button for easy inserting of shortcodes.
Download, change email address configuration variable, upload, and activate plugin. Look for the new button in the visual editor to easily insert shortcodes wherever you like.
Download jw-paypal-shortcodes v0.2
June 17th, 2010
Update: Cloud Sites WP Scanner is now available via the plugins repository:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jw-cloud-sites-wp-scanner/
Use at your own risk. Upload, activate, and visit new menu item. Can remove all world and group permissions. Search options table for backdoors, and posts table for spam links. Also looks for *.bak.php, *.old.php, and *.cache.php files.
Download Cloud Sites WP Scanner
