• What time of day and week would suit you best?
• What level of WordPress knowledge do you have?
• What level of computer knowledge do you have?
• How long should each class be?
• How many classes should we run per course?
• Would you bring your own laptop if that was required?
• What would you consider a fair price ?

If you’d like to attend a live classes somewhere in Dublin on learning WordPress, please leave a comment below with a real email address so we can contact you if it goes ahead.

If you’re interested in online WordPress training, check out SelfAssemblySites.com

Recently, just after a WordPress upgrade, the portfolio slider items stopped displaying on the homepage. I believe that Omar is working on a WordPress 3 update for SimpleFolio, but in the meantime there is a simple fix that you can apply to get your portfolio working if it’s broken.

First, find out your portfolio category ID.

1. To do this, go to your Categories page in WordPress admin (located at http://www.YourSite.tld/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=category).
2. Click the Edit link under the category that you use for your portfolio
   • Aside: if you don’t know which category it is go here and scroll down to “Portfolio Category” to find out: http://www.YourSite.tld/wp-admin/admin.php?page=sf-options)
3. Look at the address bar of your browser to find the category ID – it will be the number just after “tag_ID=” in the address, like this where it is 17: http://www.YourSite.tld/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?action=edit&taxonomy=category&tag_ID=17&post_type=post.

Now we need to edit some code. Go to http://www.YourSite.tld/wp-admin/theme-editor.php and click Home Page Template (template-home.php) on the right-hand side. (You should see an “Update File” button at the bottom left – if it’s not there, you need to make your theme files writable by the server, or use FTP. See here for more info. You can also just edit the files and FTP up if you prefer that – I do)

Look for the following code:

$my_query = new WP_Query('showposts='.$slide_count.'&category_name='.$category);

You need to change that to:
$my_query = new WP_Query('showposts='.$slide_count.'&cat=n');

where n is the category ID number e.g.

$my_query = new WP_Query('showposts='.$slide_count.'&cat=17');

Note there are 2 changes:

1. Change category_name to cat
2. Replace '.$category with n'

Make those changes so that line looks just like this (note: it is essential you get the single quotes correct):

$my_query = new WP_Query('showposts='.$slide_count.'&cat=17');

Then hit Update File (or upload manually if you’ve used FTP) and your change will be made. Refresh your homepage to verify.

For the record, here’s what the block of code looks like in its entirety:

<ul id="sliderContent">
<?php
$category = get_option('sf_portfolio_category');
$slide_count = (get_option('sf_slider_slides')) ? get_option('sf_slider_slides') : 5;
$text_count = (get_option('sf_slider_chars')) ? get_option('sf_slider_chars') : 100;
$my_query = new WP_Query('showposts='.$slide_count.'&cat=17');
while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID;
$thumb = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'thumb-large', true);
?>
<li>
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><img src="<?php echo $thumb; ?>" alt="<?php the_title() ?>" /></a>
<span><h3><?php the_title() ?></h3> <?php the_content_limit($text_count, ''); ?></span>
</li>
<?php
endwhile;
?>
<div></div>
</ul>

1. WordPress is free for personal and commercial use.
2. WordPress is very popular – lots more people use it in comparison to every other system.  This means there are:
   • more design templates (called Themes) – both free and commercial – available for WordPress than for other systems
   • more add-ons (called Plugins) available which allow you to do almost anything you need with a WordPress site
   • more WordPress programmers and designers all around the world
   • more documentation, help files and how-to videos
3. WordPress is easy for non-technical users. One of the most important things for me is that non-techies can log in and edit their website quickly and easily, and because of WordPress’s quite intuitive admin screen, the support requirements are easier.
4. WordPress is a very powerful Content Management System (CMS). Despite still (at least in v3) being configured ”out of the box” as a blogging solution, it has almost every CMS feature you may need:
   • Parent and Child Pages and Posts
   • Categories and Page Templates
   • Multiple Users and different User levels (Roles)
   • Advanced Menu editing system
   • WYSIWYG Visual and HTML Editors
   • Plugins and Themes (templates)
   • XML import and export
   • loads more – there’s almost nothing it can’t do
5. WordPress is open source, which means bugs and security issues are fixed quickly, and website owners can customise the system as much as they want themselves. It also means new features are available on a regular basis, and those updates can be applied within seconds using the easy update tools within the system.
6. WordPress is the market leading Open Source CMS, according to the 2010 Open Source CMS Market Share Report:

When we add all this up, we reach the conclusion that for 2010, WordPress has moved into market leader role in the Open Source CMS space. We conclude that the system leads in key metrics for both rate of adoption and brand strength. What accounts for the surge in WordPress brand strength this year? There is likely no single factor explaining the change, but we would attribute the success at least in part to the following:

• The success of WordPress 3. The newest major version release occurred in June of 2010.
• The continuing popularity of the WordPress hosted blogging service.
• A growing awareness in the market that WordPress is suitable for more than blogging.

But what about…

Security

Security is often leveled as a criticism against WordPress, and maybe deservedly so back in the day, but since 2007 or so WordPress has been very quick to roll out security fixes when found, and it hasn’t been any more often than other systems lately.

Other security issues with sites running WordPress are often caused by bad web server configurations or loose file permissions, i.e. not WordPress-specific, these are issues that can apply to any CMS (particularly those on shared hosting services).

Updates too often

The flip side of the security coin – and again this was very much the case in the past. Looking at the release history there were 5 updates in 2006, 16 updates in 2007, 7  in 2008, 9 in 2009 and 7 (up to 11 December) in 2010. Clearly 16 in 2007 felt excessive. However, with the easy update from the dashboard, you can update quickly and easily in 30 seconds or less.

Performance

WordPress is often accused of having poor performance, and I’m sure that some optimisation can be done, but out of the box on a good webserver with fast database, it’s quite good. Add caching  (WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache) and you can serve static pages when you’ve got intense traffic. For extreme traffic use a fast webserver like Lighttd instead of Apache on dedicated server with caching enabled, gzip and minify your scripts and use a CDN and you’ll handle anything the web can throw at you.

Specialised Tasks

There are still certain specialised tasks that I wouldn’t use WordPress for, even though it’s possible and there are many plugins available to allow it to do almost anything

Ecommerce: I wouldn’t use WordPress as the main platform for an ecommerce store – I’d use something more specialised like Magento, ZenCart, OScommerce, CubeCart if going self-hosted, or Shopify, 1ShoppingCart etc if going hosted.

HelpDesk Ticketing: I’d use something specifically for ticketing (like osTicket), but I have seen many WordPress plugins for this.

Project Management Task Tracking: I currently use BaseCamp, and there are other open source alternatives which are more suitable than configuring WordPress, although again, there are plugins and themes available for that.

Your Thoughts

What about you? What types of sites would you not recommend using WordPress for? Have you any comments or suggestions?

This is usually caused by missing CSS (“cascading style sheet”) code which WordPress expects to be in every theme. The solution is simple, add the following code into your /wp-content/ThemeName/style.css file:
img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em}
img.alignleft {float:left; margin:0 1em 1em 0}
img.aligncenter {display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto}
a img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em}
a img.alignleft {float:left; margin:0 1em 1em 0}
a img.aligncenter {display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto}

Another cause of this and similar errors is use of a CSS reset style sheet without manually setting styles afterwards (e.g. bullet lists with no bullets, strong text that doesn’t show as bold, etc).

First, find the location where you want to display the link. A good place to put it is either just before, or just after the main content of the page.

I look for the following code in the /wp-content/YourThemeName/page.php (or single.php) file:

<?php the_content(); ?>

and place the following code just after it:

<?php edit_post_link('[edit this page]', '<p>', '</p>'); ?>

That displays [edit this page] in it’s own paragraph so it shouldn’t mess up your page formatting on you! Hope this helps.

For this example I’m going to setup two menus: a header menu for the top of the page, and a footer menu for the bottom.

First, we need to register the menus with the theme. To do that, open the /wp-content/themes/YourThemeName/functions.php file and add this code to the bottom (before the closing “?>”):


/* Register Menus*/
function register_my_menus() {
register_nav_menus(
array( 'header-menu' => __( 'Header Menu' ), 'footer-menu' => __( 'Footer Menu' ))
);
}
add_action( 'init', 'register_my_menus' );


Now the theme knows it can support custom menus. Next we need to tell the theme where it can put them – we do this by placing calls to the wp_nav_menu() function where we want the menus to appear.

Usual locations for menus are in the header near the top of the page, in a sidebar, and in the page footer. What I normally do for smaller sites is put a limited menu in the header, which only contains the main pages of the site and doesn’t change when new pages are added. Then for the footer (or sometimes sidebar) I add a full list of all pages, which grows as pages are added. Depending on the site, sometimes you want to show child pages, on others parent pages only.

Let’s get to the code already! Here’s a typical menu. Note the ‘menu’ => ‘header-menu’ code is what identifies the menu by name within the WordPress 3 menu system, and the ‘container_class’ => ‘header-menu-class’ bit is what creates the class=”header-menu” bit so you can style each menu invidually within CSS.


<!--header.php-->
<h2>Site Navigation</h2>
<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'sort_column' => 'menu_order', 'container_class' => 'header-menu-class', 'menu' => 'header-menu') ); ?>


That’s it – adding custom menu support to your WordPress theme is pretty easy, eh? Your suggestions or questions are very welcome in the comments section below.

I’ll write up a post sometime detailing how the whole thing works, I think it’s pretty cool.

I was recently asked about using custom fields in WordPress and I thought it was worthy of a quick blog post. I’ve seen custom fields used for many different things from review ratings (e.g “3/5 stars“) to mood messages (“Today I feel like listening to  loud metal and shouting at my housemates“), etc. For this example, let’s use a very simple real case we recently dealt with.

We wanted to have an image appear at the top of the WordPress Page or Post, under the headline but above the text. We wanted the image to be shown whenever we supplied one. Here’s how we implemented it.

First off, we want to put it after the header, but before the title. We did a “View Source” on one of the pages and saw code that looked like this for the headline and content:

<div class="content">
<h2 class="title">Case Studies</h2>
<p>What follows are real life examples of recent work we carried our. We have chosen 3 examples representing vastly different business verticals and company age. If you would like to ask us more about these please contact us.</p>
<p><a class="post-edit-link" href="http://www.oursite.tld/wp-admin/post.php?post=476&amp;action=edit" title="Edit Page">Edit this entry.</a></p>
</div>

So we now roughly what the code that we want to find in the theme looks like. We found it in the page.php file (www.oursite.tld/wp-content/themes/our-theme-name/page.php). Here’s what it looked like:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<?php the_content('<p>Read the rest of this page &raquo;</p>'); ?>
<?php wp_link_pages(array('before' => '<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ', 'after' => '</p>', 'next_or_number' => 'number')); ?>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
<?php edit_post_link('Edit this entry.', '<p>', '</p>'); ?>

Now we’re getting places – we want to add our custom image after the <h2>”the_title()”</h2> header, and before the call to “the_content()”. Let’s build the code we want to add.

First of all, we’ve decided to call our custom field “‘custom-post-image” to reflect its usage. We need to check the custom fields array to find out if that exists using the get_post_meta() function like so:

$themeta = get_post_meta($post->ID, $customfieldkey, TRUE);

Now all we want to do is check if it’s empty (or rather, if it’s not):

if($themeta != '') {}

And finally, if it’s not empty, build the <img> tag based on the custom field contents:

echo '<img class= "custom-post-image" src="';
echo $themeta;
echo'" />  ';

Here’s the complete code – rather simple really!

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<?php
/*     check if custom-post-image custom field exists,
if it does, display an image, if not, do nothing */
$customfieldkey = 'custom-post-image';
$themeta = get_post_meta($post->ID, $customfieldkey, TRUE);
if($themeta != '') {
echo '<img class= "custom-post-image" src="';
echo $themeta;
echo'" />  ';
}
?>
<?php the_content('<p>Read the rest of this page &raquo;</p>'); ?>

That’s the code all done! Now all we need to do is add the custom field, and populate it. That’s very easy to do also. From under the edit box in your Write Page scroll down to the Custom Fields box. Click on “Enter new” (highlighted below):

Now add your custom field using the same name that you used in your code – above we used “custom-post-image”. Select it from the drop-down, then fill in a value for the image location – e.g. “/images/our-example-image.png”:

You’re done:

Enjoy playing with WordPress custom fields!

For the WordPress Theme, we found a suitable premium theme on Themeforest and disassembled. We put a completely new design on top of the theme framework and added in some custom WordPress programming for several features. The result is one of our best designs to date.