Rob Liesland » WordPress

Search and Replace

robhyland — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:29:03 +0000

One thing I love about WordPress is that someone has always done what I need to do, and oftentimes they created a plugin to do it. Most recently I was preparing a site that I developed on one URL to move to another URL and I wanted to make all of the in-content links and image references relative to the site root, rather than absolute. I use the Search and Replace plugin to clean things up in a matter of seconds – nice!

jQuery in a CMS

robhyland — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:38:33 +0000

I have used jQuery twice in the past month to get some custom behavior from a CMS. In the first instance I used it to re-URL a site for Xavier, and in the second instance I used it for some custom menu options that weren’t available in WordPress. I like the results it produces, but I always worry a little bit about JavaScript as a solution. I would much rather keep things server-side, but sometimes client-side is just easier (and almost as reliable).

WP Events Calendar and Internet Explorer 7

robhyland — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:35:35 +0000

UPDATE: I usually don’t like doing updates like this, but I want to keep this together. First of all, I realized this morning that I was using IE7, not IE8. I upgraded, and things worked better, but it threw a javascript error after it loaded the first event, so not much better. I decided to downgrade events calendar (by renaming the folder and uploading the code from the previous stable version) and it looks like everything is working now. Yea!

UPDATE: This fixed the error, but it also broke the tooltip, which is fairly important to the plugin functionality, so I undid my changes and am going to see if there is another way to fix this. What I haven’t figured out yet is why .tooltip does not cause a problem on the calendar in the actual site, but only in the administrator.

It looks like there is also some sort of issue with the jquery datepicker plugin. If I had to guess I would bet that it is the same issue.

One of the sites I help maintain was trying to use the WP Events Calendar plugin, and when we set it up everything worked great, but when our users went to use it IE8 kept denying them access to the page.

I looked at a lot of code and narrowed it down to the jquery tooltip plugin. Eventually I found the solution – change the createHelper function in the jquery tooltip code from .appendTo('document.body'); to .appendTo('document.anotherPageElement');. In my case I switched out ‘body’ for ‘wpcontent’. If you need to edit this for your WordPress installation the pathing should be something like /wp-content/plugins/events-calendar/js/jquery.tooltip.min.js. I actually pulled in the full code so I could understand it better. I can’t imagine that will affect performance too much.

Now I am getting the same error on the page where I edit the events, but I think this is a good start.

WordPress Menubar Plugin

robhyland — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:02:14 +0000

I recently used the WordPress Menubar Plugin on a couple of sites I put together, and I love it. It is so easy to use and it works really well. I like the various options it provides me – from different menu styles to how the menus are actually built out.

Arras Slideshow Setup

robhyland — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:20:14 +0000

UPDATE: My friend emailed me yesterday and told me he found the instructions, right on the dashboard of the template settings. I had actually seen these when I was looking around the template, but it was talking about ‘thumbnails,’ so I thought I didn’t care. i guess I should have paid more attention.

A friend of mine was building out a WordPress site using the Arras Theme and he was having a hard time getting the image rotator on the home page to work. He asked me if I had any ideas, and after looking around, and coming up totally empty, I told him I would come back to it later. Eventually, he found the solution on Google. Here is what he found: http://i43.tinypic.com/4ida3n.jpg, on this site, http://wordpress.org/support/topic/286802 .

Click on the upload image icon and upload your image, with recommended dimensions of at least 700×300.
Once the image has uploaded, click on File URL and copy the URL that is generated in the Link URL field.
In a post that is in one of the featured categories, create a custom field called ‘thumb’ and paste the URL in there. It is the excerpt from this post, and this thumb image, that are pulled into the opening image rotator. Make sure your post is in the featured category, as defined in the arras options.
If you did everything right, it should work.

I am not sure how we were supposed to figure that out on our own. Thanks, scarpi21.

Importing from Blogger

robhyland — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:09:16 +0000

Today I had my first opportunity to import someone’s blog from blogger to WordPress. Overall it went well and it pulled all of the posts in quickly and accurately. The only issue I see is that it looks like all of the images still reside on the blogger server. This is not the end of the world. There are only a few posts with images, so I think I can just grab them and relink. I am not sure what I would do if there were more.

Use WordPress as a CMS and Blog – The Best Way | BrianYerkes.com

robhyland — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:21:46 +0000

I found these simple instructions on how to use WordPress as both a CMS and a blog. I don’t know that I would have figured this out on my own, so it was nice to have some help.

Use WordPress as a CMS and Blog – The Best Way | BrianYerkes.com.

Excluding Pages in WordPress

robhyland — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:51:16 +0000

In one of the sites I help manage the content managers were interested in adding pages that would not show up in the navigation. I knew that this was possible by updating the call to the wp_list_pages function, but maintaining this would be too cumbersome for the average user, so I went in search of a plugin. Previously I had not had a lot of success looking for this type of plugin, but today I found a good one that makes it really simple for the users: Exclude Pages.

I don’t remember what terms I had searched for previously, but when I searched for ‘WordPress hide pages’ I found this in a blog post on another site.

WordPress as a CMS Videos

admin — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:08:24 +0000

A coworker of mine recenly showed me screenr.com and I thought it would be a great way to expand my WordPress as a CMS instructions.

Check out the following videos to see my mouse in action:

WordPress as a CMS

robhyland — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:19:32 +0000

A while back I started looking for some info on WordPress as a CMS, and I couldn’t find anything too useful, so I made my own. It is pretty basic, and I am open to additions/suggestions/comments.