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Evo Launches Energy4me Website on WordPress

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Jun 12, 2010; Category: WordPress; Tags: Design/Development, Information Architecture, WordPress; No Comments

Visit energy4me.org»

Evo recently launched Energy4me.org, the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ education outreach website, on WordPress. It’s a pretty big site, content-wise, and it required us to grow as WordPress developers (that’s our favorite kind of website) to accomplish some of the functions that were needed.

Our clients, SPE’s Darci Ramirez and Margaret Watson, were wonderful to work with. These are people who do things on schedule and do them well. People who ask your advice and value it enough to incorporate most of it (whatever, in their judgment, makes sense). People who respect your experience and knowledge. People who pay invoices on time. Dream clients, in other words.

“Evolution Web Development surpassed our website strategy and design expectations,” said Margaret Watson, Senior Manager, PR/Communication. “Evo is the only website design firm, large or small, that offered us a creative, out-of-the-box solution that truly addressed our business objectives to help us achieve our goals.”

The website’s audience is primarily elementary and secondary-level teachers, providing information about various energy sources and careers, as well as lesson plans and educational materials. Secondarily, the site provides resources for SPE members in support of their education outreach efforts, including school presentations, career events, and scholarships. Because SPE is an international organization, some information is provided on the website in six languages: Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian, in addition to English.

Ecommerce was implemented, but then pulled back just prior to launch when there was an issue with FedEx furnishing negotiated rates to FoxyCart, the shopping cart, to add appropriate shipping costs. Hopefully, that will soon be ironed out and we can turn the switch back on for online purchases of the Oil & Natural Gas book and the Energy4me Kit.

At any rate, this was a great site to have an opportunity to work on. Most people who’ve seen it “get” that WordPress is more than a blog platform.

Help from a LinkedIn Group: Ordering WordPress Custom Field Items

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: May 21, 2010; Category: Design/Development; Tags: LinkedIn, WordPress; No Comments

In general, I’m not as thrilled with LinkedIn as I had hoped I’d be. Like a lot of social media platforms, it draws its share of spammers, shills, and snake-oil salespeople. However, one LinkedIn group I belong to has proven itself to be of benefit time and again: the WordPress group. I’ve gotten useful answers for several WordPress issues I’ve faced over the last several months. There are some really capable and helpful people in the group. I was once given a solution to a problem by Mike Little, who I recognized only later is the guy who, with Matt Mullenweg, started the WordPress project.

Most recently, I needed a way to order WordPress custom fields easily (easily enough that it made sense to clients who would have to maintain their site). By default, custom field items are displayed in the order in which they are created. This is a problem if you want to add a new item and display it at the top of the list.

Mike Schinkel, a web marketing strategist from Atlanta, stepped in with a solution. (How cool is that? I can get coding assistance from someone several hundred miles away!) Mike Schinkel is one of the more active and helpful folks on the LinkedIn WordPress group, and he’s worth connecting with and following. He runs a WordPress business conference (among other conferences) and is Executive Director of Startup Atlanta. I’d guess he’s fairly busy, but he takes time help people like me with limited coding skills.

His solution is so clean and simple I wanted to share it here. One of the beauties of it is that, not only does it organize the custom field items on the page in the order you want, but it also organizes the items in order in the page admin area, taking advantage of WordPress’ default alpha organization.

Essentially, you create custom field items with names like so: item-1, item-2, item-3, etc. As you might guess, item-1 is meant to show first on the custom field listing. Want to make item-1 show second? Change the custom field name to item-2, then rename the other items to complete the reorganization (you can’t have more than one value for each name in this scenario).

On the page template, the code to call the items in order looks like this:

<?php
     for($i=1; true; $i++) {
     $item = get_post_meta($post->ID, "item-$i", true);
     if (empty($item))
     break;
     echo '<div class="itemdiv">'.$item.'</div>';
    }
?>

I used this to display thumbnails and a short description for artwork on a recently launched artist’s website. As she adds new pieces, or if she decides to emphasize different pieces on a category page, she can easily rename the existing custom fields to reorganize items.

One of the caveats of this solution is that the custom field names must start with -1 and be sequential. Going from "item-1" to "item-3", with no "item-2", breaks it.

Basic Custom Fields Technique to Enhance WordPress as a CMS

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Mar 11, 2010; Category: CSS, Design/Development, PHP for Designers, WordPress; Tags: Custom Fields, PHP for Designers, WordPress, WordPress as CMS; No Comments

This is not a new trick, and I certainly did not invent it. It’s been used before, but when I went searching for information about how to do it, it was hard to find. In fact, I finally had to ask a friend who is much better at PHP than I am to help me (I only recently learned to spell P-H-P). This is really basic stuff, but for a lot of us, basic is what we need to get on with our projects.

Sometimes, you need things to NOT appear on a page unless something else that goes with it appears on the page. This is a pretty basic capability for most CMS systems, but I had never done it with WordPress on a page-by-page basis.

Here’s the scenario. I wanted to add a highlighted note in the subnavigation area of my WordPress theme, Evo4 CMS, and I wanted it to be tied to the content of the page it appeared on. I hadn’t used custom fields much, but it seemed to me that was the way to go. Here is an example of the code I wanted to appear below the subnavigation items on the pages:

<div class="sub-note">
     <h5>Subnav Note Heading</h5>
     <p>Sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt velit esse cillum dolore
     duis aute irure dolor.</p>
</div>

Pretty simple, right? I decided that, for greater flexibility, my client would have to be responsible for the HTML formatting within the div (this particular client is capable), but I did not want them to be responsible for the div itself, as things can get ugly when someone forgets to close a div or attaches the wrong class to it. In the WordPress backend, on the page on which I wanted the note to appear, I created a custom field named “subnavnote” and added the value (same as above, but without the div):

<h5>Subnav Note Heading</h5>
<p>Sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt velit esse cillum dolore duis
aute irure dolor.</p>

On the page template in my theme (page.php), in the subnavigation column, I added the following:

<div class="sub-note">
<?php echo get_post_meta($post->'ID, 'subnavnote', true); ?>
</div>

Woohoo! That displayed the text from the custom field in the subnavigation area. But there was a problem: when I went to other pages, an empty “sub-note” div displayed (CSS specified padding and a background color for the div, which caused it to be visible even when empty). And that was definitely NOT something to yell “woohoo” about.

I needed a way to make the div appear on a page only if there was a value for “subnavnote.” No note, no need for the note container. This was where Googling left me high and dry, as I didn’t know the right terms to use, or how to ask the question so that I was able to find a usable answer. I have no doubt the answer was and is out there, but it remained outside my grasp.

After fiddling and failing with some PHP code snippets, I asked a friend who is a PHP coder for help. Here’s the solution she gave me:

<?php $subnavnote_value = get_post_meta($post->ID,
   'subnavnote', true); ?>
<?php echo ($subnavnote_value != '') ?
   "<div class='sub-note'>".$subnavnote_value."</div>" : ''; ?>

Basically, if there is no value for the custom field on a particular page, this code prevents the div that contains the custom field content from appearing. And if there is a value for the custom field, both the value and its container div appear on the page.

I would break down the code and explain it if I was competent to do so, but I’m not. I can see how it works, however, and have adapted it to other similar circumstances, which greatly increases my ability to use custom fields. I hope this solution is similarly useful for you.

WordPress Selected Best Overall Open Source Content Management System

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Nov 23, 2009; Category: Content Management System, WordPress; Tags: CMS, WordPress; 2 Comments

We’ve been on the WordPress-as-CMS bandwagon for several months. Recently, we heard WordPress was awarded the Best Overall Open Source Content Management System award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards, beating out Drupal, Joomla, and a bunch of other geek favorites. We didn’t even know there was such an award, but of course, we like that it confirms our point of view that WordPress is a great CMS.

Recently we posted that All Small Business Websites Should be on a Blog Platform, by which we really meant "on WordPress." We were trying to appear open-minded. But really, we’re biased: we love WordPress. There, we said it! And we don’t care if the whole world knows it! WordPress has earned our favor by being simple, flexible, and powerful. And the more we use it, the more we understand how simple, flexible, and powerful it truly is. Read the above article for the benefits of blog-based websites for small businesses.

Also, check out our recently released (September 2009) CMS theme: Evo4 CMS. It was designed specifically to be used by professional designers who need a CMS for websites that incorporate a blog. We suggest it for professional designers because it’s not pretty out of the box, and you’ll need an excellent understanding of Photoshop and CSS—along with some understanding of PHP—to use it as the basis for a great website. You can also download a companion Photoshop template to help in the skinning (we can almost guarantee you won’t want to use the theme as is: it’s gray on gray).

My Favorite WordPress Plugins

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Sep 10, 2009; Category: Blogging, Design/Development; Tags: Design/Development, Plugins, WordPress; 2 Comments

I love plugins that solve a problem or expand my capabilities. The following plugins have earned a place on my standard WordPress implementation list because they do one or both, and because they are extremely reliable.

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu
Simplifies the admin area of WordPress and creates more space on the admin page by putting a horizontal dropdown menu at the top of the screen. It’s one of the first plugins I install on every WordPress implementation. Plugin site»

UTF8 Sanitize
Takes care of or prevents virtually ALL broken characters due to misinterpreted HTML entities. I rarely even think about broken characters anymore: no need to. (Plugin site seems to be down).

All in One SEO Pack
Such a useful plugin! Allows you to craft meta data for each post and page as you would expect, but also allows you to make the navigation links different from the h1 page title. Extremely useful for blogsite implementations. One minor complaint: the developer updates this plugin frequently, and everytime you update, you must re-enable it. Plugin site»

Akismet
Almost forgot about this one because it comes standard with the WordPress installation (you have to activate it with a WordPress API key). Catches about 99.9% of comment spam; turns spam into a non-issue.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
One of the coolest plugins ever! Generates a highly configurable site map so that lost visitors can find their way. Again, this is invaluable for blogsites using WordPress as a CMS. Plugin site»

Simple Section Navigation Widget
Another plugin that’s a must-have when using WordPress as a CMS, it generates subnavigation for pages within a section. For example, if you attach several pages to your "Services" section, it generates a subnav menu listing those pages. And, it incorporates WordPress "current_page_item" and "current_page_parent" classes so you can easily hilite the current page menu item. Plugin site»

Google XML Sitemaps
Generates a spider-friendly XML sitemap that Google loves and is also supported by supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. And you don’t even have to think about it, once installed. I love that part. Plugin site»

Contact Form 7 with Really Simple CAPTCHA
Contact Form 7 is such a nice little plugin, easy to create, style, and configure forms. Be sure to get the companion plugin Really Simple CAPTCHA, which prevents spambots from submitting the form. I had one instance in which the plugin would not work on a blog, which may have been a conflict with another plugin (at some point I gave up trying to figure it out and used another form plugin). Other than that, it’s been one of my staples. Plugin site»