Launch! YOXI pilot
As seen on GOOD.is, the yoxi pilot project gives four teams of three people each to solve one social problem in four weeks.
As GOOD.is put it: “Yoxi (pronounced YO-see) is a new problem-solving model that hopes to frame social innovation around friendly competition. Four teams will spend the next four weeks creating an initiative that increases the number of cyclists on the streets of urban areas. Guided by a team of professional mentors, the teams will craft a pitch for a solution that could range from a new product to a government initiative.”
Learn about Springthistle’s role in the website »
New WordPress Plugin – April’s Facebook Like button
Take a look at the new facebook like plugin I wrote for WordPress.
It’s the fourth plugin I’ve written, but it’s the first time I’ve gone to the trouble to get it added to the WordPress plugin repository. That was a fun process, involving SVN, of course. I hope you’ll try my plugin out, and write to me with feedback!
Here’s the plugin my website:
http://springthistle.com/wordpress/plugin_facebooklike/
Here it is at the WordPress plugin repository:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/aprils-facebook-like-button/
Assure WordPress passes correct image to Facebook
If you have a WordPress blog and want to be sure that when people share a post on facebook (either through AddThis or directly through Facebook), the right image is grabbed, you can add a meta tag to your theme that will assure it happens.
1. Install the plugin get-the-image
2. Create a default image for your blog and call it blog_icon.png. Upload it to your theme’s images/ directory.
2. Add this code to your theme’s <head>: (more…)
New WP theme for Quo Vadis Blog
Today launched the new theme for the Quo Vadis Blog website, a long-time client of Springthistle. The blog theme was overdue for an overhaul, and boy is the new theme a revelation.
It’s got all of the features Quo Vadis wants, with new colors, a double right-side column, and additional space for the posts themselves. Also added are a variety of features and plugins including AddThis links, tweetmeme, the comment notifier, most popular posts and threaded comments.
Take a look at the new Quo Vadis Blog!
For comparison,
you can also view the
now-retired design,
at left.
Theme for Evernote launched
I’ve been working with people at Evernote for the past couple of weeks to build their new theme. I finished it a couple of days ago and sent them instructions for putting it live. Today, they put it live and it looks great! They provided the design, so my challenge was to implement all of the functionality indicated by the design, even items that aren’t built into WordPress. Thankfully, WordPress is so well-designed and flexible that it was no trouble to get it all done. Some jQuery was also required! Read more here »
Tree-styling for threaded comments in WordPress
After quite a bit of wrangling, I got comments to display the way the client wants – in a tree (three levels deep only). I had tried to find a pre-existing solution for this, but none seemed to appear. Using a little wordpress comments tweaking and css’s :last-child pseudoclass, it’s all good to go now. Solution below the jump. (more…)
Highlighting current post’s category in WordPress
Wrote a little javascript and hook for a WordPress client today who wants the category of the current post highlighted (on single.php). Note that if you’d like to implement this, you’ve got to have jQuery already.
The php for category html output:
- All Posts <?php wp_list_categories('title_li='); ?>
I’ve got the cat-item-0 in there because WordPress doesn’t generate something like that automatically, of course. It’s essentially just a link to the main posts page, or blog home. So after WordPress processing, the output html looks something like this: (more…)
Colorbox with WordPress
I’ve used this method a bunch of times and have decided it’s high time to document the process. It’s my favorite method for using colorbox with the built-in WordPress gallery. Detailed steps after the jump. (more…)
SSDSA website gets a major upgrade
The SSDSA’s website got the biggest upgrade of its life this week when we launched the new website. This new site was created from the ground up in WordPress, with a brand new design and lots of additional custom programming.
This new site has dynamic Announcements and Events managed easily from within WordPress, as well as custom widgets, shortcodes, and other back-end cleverness to make the site dynamic and easy-to-use as well as manage
TAMFS Site Launch
Launched a brand-new website for That All May Freely Serve. Their site had been an old Joomla installation that got hacked multiple times and finally died. Springthistle created a brand-new design for a brand-new WordPress installation and moved both hosting and registration to DreamHost.
Their new site will be so easy to manage, both in terms of editing their page content and adding news (blog) posts, and of course it’s handsome.
Website Makeover Complete
Hop on over to TCJewFolk.com and take a look at their new site. It’s still running WordPress, but has gotten quite a makeover from the old theme (blacks, yellows, greys) to the new one (blues, whites, usability).
These folks came to me after having launched their site entirely on their own a few months earlier. They had reached a point where they wanted to do more and wanted to have a new look, but couldn’t keep doing it entirely alone. They worked with a logo designer and then handed everything over to me to improve.
They seem pleased: “April, Wordpress guru and founder of Springthistle Design, created a look for the blog that creatively incorporated our new logo and greatly improved the user experience. She held our hands all along the way and made the process feel simple (even when we know it wasn’t).”
pending TCJewFolk redesign
I signed on with the TCJewFolk people after reading about them in the Mpls Star Tribune earlier this fall. In the article, they talked about their goals for site to provide information and community connections to some of the many young people who have become disconnected from Judaism. And they said they needed ‘techie web geek.’ So I emailed them and here we are, working on a redesign of the site.
Can’t reveal the full plan just yet, but you can see from the peeks below that the visual changes alone will be quite dramatic!
current site
new design
New! Universal WordPress How To PDF
Whenever I publish a WordPress website, I create a custom how-to pdf document for that client. It includes all the basics that they need to know in order to manage their WordPress content.
After modifying and perfecting this document for years, it’s finally ready for public release. This particular pdf is not customized to anyone in particular! Rather, it’s a universal version and contains information that’ll be useful to all of Springthistle’s clients, such as:
- Adding and Editing Pages
- Making Use of Plugins
- Understanding Shortcodes
- Regular Maintenance and Backing Up
Download Springthistle’s Universal Basic WordPress How To
Mind you, I’ll still be customizing this doc for all of my clients, adding to the “Special Content,” “Plugins,” and “Shortcodes” sections as applies to their sites.
Linking to your plugin in the dashboard menu area
WordPress is built so that when you create a plugin, you can create a link to the plugin’s management page within the existing WordPress admin menu. The instructions for adding this link in Posts, Pages, Tools and Settings are clear. However, instructions for adding that link just under the Dashboard was hard to find. With some experimentation, I figured it out. (more…)
Son of Suckerfish Modification
While working on a new client site, I needed to modify the three-level son-of-suckerfish css rollover menu to display first and second levels initially and only show third level on rollover. The resulting barebones CSS is below. (more…)
Modifying model associations on the fly in cakephp
CakePHP continues to amaze me. There’s a new feature every time I turn around! Yesterday I experimented with something, and found that it worked. I couldn’t find documentation of it anywhere, so decided to write it down.
If you’ve got a model association defined in your model, you can change it on the fly from your controller.
For example, I’ve got Events and Registrants. Registrants can sign up for an event in step 1, and pay in step 2. At the end of step 1, the registrant is entered into the table as not_yet_paid (paid=0), and at the end of step 2, their row is marked as fully_paid (paid=1). But some people quit after step 1, without completing step 2. When reviewing event sign-up statistics, the client wants, understandably, to be able to separate out those who completed the process from those who didn’t. (Sometimes, if you send a prompt to someone who started but didn’t finish, they will come back and pay, so it’s worth keeping the data rather than just throwing it out.)
The association in my Event model looks like this:
var $hasMany = array( 'Registrant' => array( 'className' => 'Registrant', 'foreignKey' => 'event_id', 'dependent' => false, 'conditions' => 'Registrant.paid = 1', ), );
Now in my controller, I check for a variable set in the URL by the client user when viewing statistics, and decide based on that whether to change the ‘conditions’:
if ($showunpaid=='unpaidtoo') $this->Event->hasMany['Registrant']['conditions'] = null; else if ($showunpaid=='unpaidonly') $this->Event->hasMany['Registrant']['conditions'] = "Registrant.paid = 0";
This way, registered-but-unpaid registrants are never counted and never show up by default, but that can be changed easily from any controller.
Gotta love cake.
BJ in NYC – B’nai Jeshurun
Today launched the culmination of many months of effort by myself and a host of other participants.
After receiving a design from an internal BJ designer, I created the new theme, including some custom shortcode programming, for this new from-the-ground-up WordPress website.
In addition, I built a to-order CakePHP application that allows the congregation’s staff to create, organize and track events and event registrations. More details and more screenshots available here.
Custom CMS for Rutgers Faculty Launched
The faculty of the Rutgers Genetics Department can now create their own lab websites easily and quickly with a custom multi-user CMS built specially for them by Springthistle Design. Built with CakePHP and integrated with a MSSQL database, and living on IIS using ISAPI_rewrite for clean URLs, this clean application allows the non-technical faculty of the department to create pages within their own sites, add images, and more.
Featured post [shortcode]
Over at RhodiaDrive.com, they wanted to be able to sprinkle featured posts in the sidebar using widgets. Via my solution, the authors can choose a post to feature, add a text widget to the sidebar, and enter a simple shortcode. The widget will then display the post’s title and an excerpt of the content with a link to the post page.
Usage:
[ahs_featuredpost id=364]
Want it? Just copy the code below/after the jump into the functions.php file for your current theme and voila! You can then style the elements in the widget, which are all in a div with class=”featuredpost”.
Leah Hoffman launch
Leah Hoffmann, a writer based in New York City with home Springthistle often collaborates, needed a new website where she could direct people to learn about her science and technology writing specialty. Springthistle designed and built this to Leah’s specifications. Launched today!
