9seeds

Building Custom WordPress Solutions | Plugin Development

 

plugin

Stealing math from Wikipedia

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WordPress + Jetpack + LaTeX = Awesome

On my personal WordPress website I wrote about an Arduino device I built to help brew beer.  Being my first foray into electronics, I wanted to document my experiences.  One of my difficulties centered around turning electrical values (voltage, resistance) into real-world values (temperature) using math.

As part of my documentation, I wanted to re-create some equations that I had found on a Wikipedia page about thermistors.  While in the process of grabbing their images and putting them into the media library, I remembered something…

One time while on the main Jetpack screen in the WordPress dashboard, I noticed a tile that advertised “Beautiful Math.”  So I looked into it.  Jetpack has a LaTeX module that can accomplish this.  LaTeX is a rather old-school markup/typesetting language that has been very popular in academia, especially in regards to math.

So Jetpack and LaTeX can do math, but I didn’t really want to learn a new markup language, I just wanted to quickly copy & paste the equations into my post.

Good Authors Borrow, Great Authors Steal

So then I wondered how Wikipedia is storing the images or if they’re doing something similar.  Guess what?!?  They use LaTeX too!  Putting the same equation into WordPress is as easy as clicking “Edit” on the Wikipedia page and copying the text between <math> and </math> and pasting it in-between [latex] and [/latex] in WordPress.

Native vs. Shortcode formatting Tricks

Jetpack supports using the $latex $ native format instead of the shortcode, but there are a few noted (and undocumented) differences between using the two methods. For instance, if you want to increase the size of your rendered LaTeX text, you can use the s (size) parameter in your LaTeX equation as such:

$latex \LaTeX&s=4$

Where size in this example is “4.”  However if you try to do this using the shortcode as such:

[latex] \LaTeX&s=4[/latex]

it will render as: [latex] \LaTeX&s=4[/latex] – Not exactly what you’d expect 🙁 The trick is that the following LaTeX parameters need to be fed in as shortcode parameters:

So if you want to have “LaTeX” rendered as:

$latex \LaTeX&bg=ffcccc&fg=cc00ff&s=4$

You can either do:

$latex \LaTeX&bg=ffcccc&fg=cc00ff&s=4$

or  move the size & color parameters into the shortcode tag like this:

[latex bg=ffcccc fg=cc00ff s=4]\LaTeX[/latex]

New plugin: WP Event Ticketing

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As we were gearing up to organize WordCamp Las Vegas 2010, we wanted to move the management of the ticket ordering process in-house. One of the main reasons being we didn’t want to pay a third party site to handle the ticket sales for the event since they charge per ticket. Sure, we could have passed the cost on to the ticket buyer, but that’s just not how we roll! Instead, we got to work building a WordPress plugin; WP Event Ticketing.

If you are the impatient type, you can download WP Event Ticketing and try it out, or read on for a list of features and screenshots.

WP Event Ticketing Features

  • Real-time payments via Papal
  • Multiple ticket types. (For example, basic ticket includes entry only, gold ticket includes entry plus a shirt.)
  • Ticket packages that can include multiple tickets. (Useful for offering registration to sponsors.)
  • Set your event’s maximum attendance
  • Choose what data you want to collect from attendees
  • Limit quantity of each type of ticket packages to sell
  • Display/hide # of tickets remaining on registration page
  • Create single or multiple use coupons
  • Create flat-rate or percentage based coupons
  • Send email notification to all registered attendees
  • Export attendee list to CSV
  • Manually create a ticket for an attendee
  • Ticket and revenue reporting
  • Summary reports show counts by data collected. (for example, display a list of t-shirt sizes and how many of each you need to order)

Screenshots

Looking for more features?
We are currently hard at work on Event Ticketing Pro. We have a ton of features planned for the pro version! You aren’t going to want to miss it. Sign up for our newsletter to be notified when the pro version is released.

Affiliate plugin for WP-ecommerce

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Since Shayne has spent so much time helping people out in the WP e-Commerce user’s forum, it’s no surprise that we receive a steady stream of requests for people looking to enhance their online store. One of the requests we get the most is from people who would like to pay affiliates to drive traffic to their site. With no real solution available, we did what any enthusiastic development team would do; we built it!

Introducing the Affiliate Plugin for WP e-Commerce

The Affiliate Plugin makes it simple to sign up and manage affiliates for your online store. You can easily set the payout amount (flat rate or % of sale) per affiliate, add custom banners and text links with unique tracking codes, view stats and more.

We didn’t forget about your affiliates. They will have the ability to get their unique tracking links and see their traffic and earnings stats.

Screenshots (click to enlarge)

Display a list of your affiliates

Easily create and edit your creatives.

See which sales your affiliates drive.

The Affiliate plugin is available now. Purchase your copy today.

If you need assistance with the plugin or have a feature request, please let us know!

New WordPress plugin: ComparePress

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It’s always exciting to see a project you work on take flight. Such is the case with a new plugin in the WordPress repository called ComparePress.

We recently had the opportunity to work with Andy Symonds from The Blog House. He was in the final stages of development on his plugin and was looking for some colaboration to finish things up. While he did the lion’s share of the work, we were happy to step in and offer some assistance along the way.

Andy explains the plugin best: “ComparePress allows any WordPress based site or blog to replace their existing text based ads with an affiliate marketing based, SEO, price comparison system which adds 1000s of intelligent price comparison pages to their blog. By having this detailed and relevant comparison data, users will stay on the site for longer and the system also gives the site owners the potential to earn a greater share of the true worth of their traffic.”

The plugin was launched with 1 module that offers content for UK based sales. They are working on additional modules and are hoping to have US based solutions in place real soon.

Congratulations on your plugin, Andy! We wish you all the best!

I can has plugin?

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Last month at Blog World Expo I ran in to Ben Huh. For those who may not know, Ben is the CEO of Pet Holdings, Inc., the company behind the wildly popular blogs I Can Has Cheezeburger?, Fail Blog and dozens more. I told Ben about our new WordPress plugin development company and he said, “We need a WordPress Plugin!” How great is our timing?

I present to you, LOLPress!

LOLPress is a free WordPress plugin that adds a tooltip pop-up to images in your WordPress blog pages and posts giving you the option to add a caption to the photo and submit it to the cheezburger network. You can also click to see previous captions created by others using the same photo.

You can see a demo of the plugin in action on 606diaries.com

Download the plugin and let us know what you think!

Happy LOLing!