Building Custom WordPress Solutions | Plugin Development
Posted on December 5, 2011
The holiday season is upon us. It’s time to go hang out with friends and family and look back on an amazing year.
December 14th will be our last full day in the office this year. We will be back at our desks digging out from under a mountain of email on January 2nd.
Have a terrific holiday and we look forward to working with you in 2012.
Cheers!
Posted on August 24, 2011
Most of the time companies go out of their way to tell you all about the HUGE projects they’ve completed. Heck, we’ve done it ourselves. But the smaller projects come and go without much fanfare. We intend to change that with a new series of posts highlighting some projects that we’ve done where they may not have been big projects, but for the client, the end result was just what they needed.
A few months back we got a call from Michael Spremulli from the Chrysalis Corporation, a service provider of pre-employment assessment solutions. The former Chrysalis Corporation website was comprised of static HTML pages that were becoming increasingly cumbersome for him to update and maintain. Although Mike was brand new to WordPress, he knew that he wanted to take his website in that direction, and that’s where 9seeds entered the picture.
Mike came to the table already armed with a vision for the new Chrysalis site. Based on his needs, we took an existing StudioPress theme on the Genesis framework – the Enterprise child theme, to be exact – and made some custom design changes to match what Mike was looking for. On top of that, we created some custom post types to allow him to easily add new assessments. To ensure Mike would be comfortable with his new WordPress back-end, we provided him with a bit of training, and walked him though all the steps he needed to update and maintain the site.
In the end, the newly-converted Chrysalis website went live and is working well for Mike. He likes the SEO-friendly aspect of his WordPress site, and is thrilled with the ease of updating content without having to contact a developer. As it turns out, he’s received a consistent string of compliments from his existing clients about the changes and is also converting leads better than his old site did. It’s definitely the kind of turnout we like to hear!
Getting kudos from clients we work with is always very much appreciated, so you can imagine how flattered we were to see this video review that Mike made about our services. It was quite a nice gesture to mark the implementation of another 9seeds project. We’re just glad that he’s happy with the end result.
Thanks for your kind words, Mike!
Posted on August 19, 2011
We are proud to announce our involvement with a new event coming to Las Vegas, Digital World Expo! From their site:
Digital World Expo debuts an annual forum for professional education in all forms of interactive marketing, media, communications and advertising. Attendees will learn, train and build awareness of technology application in media and what’s to come. Four areas are presented to meet the needs of today’s media professionals in digital advertising, marketing, public relations, development and strategy.
DWE will take place at the Mirage Event Center here in Las Vegas and will contain 30+ classes on all aspects of online marketing. The classes are going to be less about being a simple presentation and more about actual “Next Steps” that attendees can take action on when they return to the office. One of the courses will be lead by 9seeds’ John Hawkins who will be talking about… you guessed it, WordPress.
9seeds will also be involved in something we find really cool, The Digital Startup Speaker Series. In short, the DSSS will give startups 10 minutes on stage to show off their product or service to a room full of decision makers. Best of all, there is no cost to the startups!
If you are part of a startup and want to register for one of the 24 available time slots, complete the online registration form here.
With an expected attendance of 500-700 people at DWE, this is going to be a great opportunity for some startups to jump-start their project. We are very excited to be a part of it and hope you will come check out the event.
Posted on July 4, 2011
Earlier today WordPress 3.2 was released. The new version brings with it new minimum requirements for PHP and MySQL. The new minimum supported versions are PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.
Before you upgrade to version 3.2, you’ll want to make sure your server is ready. Here are a few ways you can do that:
1. Install the WordPress Requirements Check plugin by Ryan Duff.
2. Log in to your hosts control panel. If it’s using cPanel, the server information will be displayed down the left side. Look for PHP and MySQL and confirm the version numbers.
3. Contact your host directly and ask!
By now, the majority of the hosting companies out there are already meeting these minimum requirements. However, if you are hosting on your nephew’s friend’s server, you will definitely want to take a moment to double check. If you find that your hosting company is NOT up to date with these minimum requirements, we strongly suggest you look in to a host like InMotion Hosting or Page.ly
If you would like some help confirming your server’s compatibility or assistance with the upgrade process, fill out our contact form and take care of it for you.
Posted on April 8, 2011
Back in January I released a plugin that we put together when we were building the site for WordCamp Las Vegas to make it easy to display a page of speakers for the event. It’s was pretty basic, but it served our purpose. We released it in hopes that we could save somebody else some time if they had a similar need.
Fast forward a couple months… I received an email from Josh Harrison letting me know he used the plugin for WordCamp Seattle’s site, and, he had made several improvements to it. Nice! He sent the updates with a note:
I made some modifications to your plugin CPT Speakers. Go ahead and use them if you’d like. Here is what I added:
- template tags for speaker information with filters and paragraph formatting
- shortcode to include the speaker information on an agenda (like what I put on http://wordcampseattle.org/agenda)
- post thumbnails. I did not remove the old way of uploading images though.
After merging in the changes Josh made, it made perfect sense to go ahead and remove the old way we were dealing with speaker image uploads and instead use the featured image method.
WordPress Community
One of the greatest parts about working with the WordPress community is their willingness to give back. It would have been very easy for Josh to use the plugin we provided, make his changes, use it for his site and go about his merry way. But instead, when he was done he bundled up the changes and did his part to make the plugin better for the next person who comes along. That’s what it’s all about. Thanks, Josh!
You can download the latest version (1.1) from the WordPress plugin directory.
Upgrading
If you are planning to upgrade from a previous version, keep in mind that you will need to go back and add the speaker’s photo as the featured image for their post as we’ve switched the way photos are handled. Also, you will need to manually move single-speakers.php and template_speakers.php from the plugin folder to your active theme folder.
Styling
After you install the plugin you will want to add some styling to it. There is no inline styling, so you will need to some CSS to your existing style sheet. You can use the following as a base and change it up as needed:
#speakers {
font-size: 12px;
min-height: 300px;
}#speaker_image_section {
width: 150px;
float: left;
height: 300px;
margin-right: 18px;
}#speaker_image img {
margin-top: 5px;
border: 1px solid #333;
padding: 3px;
background: #0099cc;
}#speaker_name {
font-size: 18px;
font-weight: bold;
margin-bottom: 10px;
}#speaker_url {
text-align: center;
}#speaker_twitter_url {
text-align: center;
}#speaker_pres_title {
margin: 5px 0px 5px 0px;
font-size: 13px;
}#speaker_pres_description {
font-size: 12px;
font-family: arial, helvetica;
line-height: 16px;
}#speaker_session_description {
font-size: 12px;
line-height: 18px;
}#speaker_image_section_single {
width: 150px;
float: left;
height: 600px;
margin-right: 18px;
}#speaker_image_section_single img{
margin-top: 5px;
border: 1px solid #333;
padding: 3px;
background: #0099cc;
}#pres_url {
text-align: center;
}.speaker_snippet .thumbnail {
float:left;
display:inline;
margin-right:10px;
border-bottom:0;
}
#content .speaker_snippet .thumbnail a {
border-bottom:0;
}
.speaker_snippet .name {
font-weight:bold;
line-height:16px;
}
.speaker_snippet .title {
font-size:0.9em;
line-height:15px;
}
