All Posts Categorized: ‘Web Development’

Excuse the Dust

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I am in the process of re-organizing and re-doing a lot of the backend of my jappler.com sites so if you see anything out of place or broken – I am on it ;)

Jappler Recommends: jQuery TOOLS

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About a year or so back Demitrious shot me over a link to something he thought looked pretty slick: jQuery TOOLS. I took a quick look but never did anything else with it because I had my old standbys in place for most of what jQuery TOOLS offered (overlays, tabs, tooltips, etc).

What does jQuery TOOLS offer?

  • Tabs
  • Tooltips
  • Overlays
  • Expose
  • Scrollable
  • Flashembed

Last week I decided to finally step out of using what I normally used (Thickbox for overlays) and try something from jQuery TOOLS. One look at their demo and I was completely sold. The overlays were slick, easy to implement and best of all – really light weight. Demo: click on the photo.

If you have any web development projects coming up or in the mix, do yourself a favor and check out the demos at jQuery TOOLS. You can accomplish a lot with a little (and have fun doing it).

WordPress 2.9 – An Amazing Update

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I have been working with WordPress 2.9 now for a few weeks and I cannot remember the last time I was so excited with the new features of WordPress. There are countless little improvements most users would not notice, but there are some killer new features that should not be overlooked.

  • First and foremost – working with images just got a lot cooler!
    • Thumbnails Finally after creating several custom plugins for this – there is now a simple way to select and then use a thumbnail for each post. Simply add a few lines of code into your theme’s functions.php file and you are ready to go.
      [php]
      add_theme_support( ‘post-thumbnails’ );
      set_post_thumbnail_size( 150, 150, true ); // Normal post thumbnails[/php]
      (more details)
    • Cropping Ever need to crop a photo for your post or page? You can now upload any image, use built in crop functions to select the part of the image you want, save the cropped photo, and then use it – all within WordPress. Say goodbye to opening up Photoshop, cropping, saving, uploading, etc. Say hello to an easy to use streamlined process.
  • We’ve got trash! No more “crap I just deleted that post”. Now you have the option to Edit, View, or Trash a post or several posts. Once the items are in the trash you can easily recover them or permanently delete them.
  • Repair those tables please.Now you can automatically optimization your database by adding this line to your wp-config.php file: define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);

Some screenshots of interest

Use As Thumbnail

Crop, Scale, etc

If you have not updated to this version – please take some time and take a look. The cropping alone will save hours of time if you ever needed to manipulate your images! Overall, this update took things one step further to making a solid, feature rich content management system and I am excited to use some of these new features with each new site I create!

WordPress 2.9 RC 1

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Well – it is that time again – another new version of WordPress is coming out in the next few days (WordPress 2.9). I am running WordPress 2.9 RC 1 here on jappler.com and only one issue so far. If you have not read anything about the newest version soon to be available and you use WordPress, check out: WordPress 2.9 New Features/Changes.

Try and Try Again

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Well – In the past I thought about posting on a particular subject certain days of the week would be good for me and something the readers might find interesting…until I started dreading it, posting less, getting a lot less comments, and realized I was pushing content like traditional media (I say when and where, you tune in).

I am going to be making some changes here over the next few days – to really make this more interesting, relevant, and more fun for me to post/share information.

Thanks for your patience – and I hope this will become a blog you look forward to reading again.

WordPress Wednesdays: Little WordPress Gems

  • Written by: Jen on September 16th, 2009 at 10:29 am
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Every once and awhile while looking through the WordPress documentation, I find little gems. Here are a few that I found particularly interesting:

  • wp_page_menu Easily create a menu with the home page appended onto the menu with a lot of parameters. Similar to the standard wp_list_pages, but with some different possibilities
  • the_search_query I have seen several ways to get this, but this is by far the easiest, quickest, and most secure.
  • wp_reset_query If you use conditional tags, you will end up going crazy at some point and then will realize this is needed. Note to self everyone.

Linkfest Thursday: September 10, 2009

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This week – I feel like I really found some gems.

WordPress Wednesdays: Custom Taxonomies

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I recently worked on a project where we needed something sort of like tagging, and sort of like categorizing – but neither really worked as there would be way too many exclude this and only show that stuff involved. I needed a way to classify certain content, have easy access to it, and display it in a manner that be effective and quick.

After exhausting all ideas – someone pointed me towards using “Custom Taxonomies” and it was a perfect fit.

What is a taxonomy? Simple – a way to group things. Why not use categories and or tags?

An example to better your understanding:
Right now – on this blog I use tags for my post themes (WordPress Wednesdays, etc). This is not ideal, because I am trying to group together posts by a particular theme, not necessarily by tags. Even though WordPress Wednesday could be seen as a key word – it is more a description or a classification of the post. What I plan to do in the next few days is to go back, create custom taxonomies for all my post themes and then use that for classification of posts instead of using tags. With this, I can then query them using query_posts or even make a tag cloud.

[php]
‘wordpress-wednesdays’, ’showposts’ => 10 ) ); ?>
‘post_theme’, ‘number’ => 15 ) ); ?>
[/php]

Still confused? Check out the links below. Once you start thinking about organizing information, I think it will make sense.

References:

CSS Tuesday: Images as List Bullets

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There are plenty of ways to spruce up the boring bullets used in HTML lists.

The best way and most browser compatible way I have found to do this is using the following code:
[css]
ul li {background: url(‘images/dot.gif’) no-repeat 0 3px; list-style:none;margin:0 0 2px 0;padding:0 0 0 10px;}
[/css]

You can see that here:

  • Example of fancy bullet
  • Another bullet point

Vs. The plain list:

  • Example of fancy bullet
  • Another bullet point

Something like this may seem simple, but it is often overlooked and can really dress up a site.

WordPress Wednesdays: Get the Current Page

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I was writing some functions that are used in the admin for my commercial WordPress theme: Lucidity and stumbled upon a great variable in WordPress: $pagenow. This variable will return the current page you are on and is great form admin functions – especially those that you want to only make available on certain pages.

To use this – just add it to your functions as a global variable, then you can use it to load in specific js/functions:
[php]
global $pagenow;
if (($pagenow == ‘admin.php’) && ($_GET['page'] == ’sdac_appearance’)) {}
[/php]

This proved to be very helpful when dealing with some finicky JS.