My First Plugin: SimpleCart
So, here it is. The tutorial I wrote a couple of weeks ago on putting Mal’s into WordPress with some functions is now a plugin. This is totally my first plugin – I’ve never written one before. I fully expect to be lambasted with “this sucks!” and…stuff like that.
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I got Stumbled!
I was very (pleasantly!) surprised today when I checked my analytics and saw my visitors shot through the roof yesterday. I had a new referral in my stats: StumbleUpon. Now, I’m not a “new media guru” or a marketing expert – but I do know what StumbleUpon is. I’ve never fully explored it though – at the moment I’m dealing with Twitter – and it’s just a fun socializing experiment right now.
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Bloggy vs. Professional
If you’re a designer, I’m sure you’ve heard clients say this to you when you try to implement a content management system for them – especially one that works like WordPress (and is well-known for being a blogging platform).
“It looks too bloggy.”
Recently, on Twitter, I asked the community “What makes something ‘too bloggy’?”
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Make your existing site work with WordPress
One of the big questions you see…well anywhere, really, in regards to WordPress is the desire to integrate it into an existing website. Usually, this is because a business has seen the benefits of adding a “blog” to the site (although most usually use it for “news releases”) and they want it to match their current design, or they want to be able to manage their content easily without going to the extreme of a complete overhaul.
I’m going to tell you how to do this.
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How to reset your ZenCart Password
I am notorious for this. In the past week, I’ve needed to reset my ZenCart password on 4 different sites, because I’ve lost or forgotten them. ZenCart isn’t quite as easy as WordPress when it comes to this. You’d think it would be – in WordPress, all you have to do is log into phpMyAdmin, browse your users table, find the admin and edit the password (making sure you save it as MD5) and that’s it. ZenCart? Nope. I don’t know why you can’t do this – I haven’t figured it out yet. The only way you can edit the password is by completely resetting it so that it then becomes “Admin” and “admin”.
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One Way to Use WordPress as a Shopping Cart
Alrighty then! So I just finished up a site (subcontract, so unfortunately I can’t share it) where we started to code out the site in ZenCart, but ended up plopping it into WordPress. ZenCart seemed a little too powerful for the job, and the client was very familiar with WordPress. Plus they wanted a really specific design, and in the timeframe I was given, there was no way I could pull it off in ZenCart – but in WordPress I could.
So what I did was write some custom functions for the client to use. They typically use PayPal, but for this job, they decided maybe Mal’s was a better option – the main reason? Because when you set up products in PayPal, you have to create them one at a time within the PayPal interface, and then copy and paste the generated code where you need it.
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Dynamic Stylesheet
This has been something that has plagued me for a while now: dynamic stylesheets. What is the purpose? Well. sometimes it would just be nice if you could create IDs and classes on the fly, and not have to update the stylesheet every single time you do something.
As an example, say you want all the Pages on your blog to look different, so you have the body tag dynamically generate an ID for every page, using the pagename. But the stylesheet – well… every time you want some kind of different layout, you have to manually edit the stylesheet. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just have it happen when you created the Page?
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WordPress 2.7 and Comment Display
WordPress 2.7 has a great interface. I’ve also found that many of the theme designs I’ve created in the past still work well in 2.7. So it was a no-brainer to move on up. There’s too much cool stuff back here to not do it.
However, I can say that one thing that was always “fun” to work with was the comments. My comments.php file is immense. I have so much stuff going on in there that I even get confused every time I look at it.
But 2.7 had a solution. You may not know it, but they now have “wp_list_comments()” as an available tag. Shiny and sparkly new.
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