WordPress Events

WordPress Events gives you a simple interface for adding events to your site and displays them in a beautiful calendar with pop up details.

Simply add events in an interface you are already used to and display your calendar by adding the shortcode [calendar] to any page of post!

New in 0.2 !

Multiple user calendars! Allow individual users to have their own calendar and display different calendars by specifying a user id in the shortcode. For example [calendar user=2] will display the calendar for the user with an ID of 2.

Built in sharing generates tiny urls that when linked to opens the shared event in a pop up just as if the user had clicked on it.

Google maps integration allows you to add a map of the venue.

Download a pdf user guide from here http://fishcantwhistle.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/wordpress-events-user-guide.pdf

0.9 now uses ajax to load events to save on load time.

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ChimpPress

*** THIS IS A BETA RELEASE ***

ChimpPress provides an interface for creating and managing your MailChimp campaigns without having to leave your WordPress dashboard.

It also allows you to utilise MailChimps campaign sending and management tools to send automatic mailouts when ever a post/page/CPT is published.

Current features of ChimpPress

• Create bespoke HTML emails using the intuitive drag and drop editor.
• Add padding and colours to specific cells in your email or to the entire campaign.
• Select from a number of layout templates and then add multiple rows and columns as needed.
• Import/Export as well as quick import of existing campaigns.
• Resize images within the editor by dragging them to the desired size.
• Receive in-depth stats about your campaign.
• Set up a campaign as a "Template" and specify when it should be used to send out notifications when a post/page/CPT is published.
• Manage your subscribers.

All you need is a MailChimp account and an API key and you can start creating bespoke html emails!

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Getshopped – Add more details to sales CSV

I have previously showed I added shipping columns to the sales logs page in a getshopped (Wp-Ecommerce) installation. This was fine but now we need that data to show up in the csv download.

Here’s how to do it-

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GetShopped – Add order without shipping column to sales view

The sales view in the wp-ecommerce (GetShopped) is great but it will show you the total price of an order rather than the price without shipping, the shipping, and the total.

To introduce this functionality you do have to hack the plugin files, but there is not another way as I can not see any hooks I could make use of. If I have missed one, please do let me know!

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New version of WordPress Gallery

Version 0.6 of WordPress Gallery is now available!

It’s always nice to see my plugin on the front page of WordPress plugins. Even if it is only in the recently updated section!

Two massive new features have been introduced in the latest version-

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Tags | drag and drop, galley, order, pager, slider, thumbnails, wordpress

Is WordPress good enough for my site?

Quite often I have people asking whether or not WordPress can handle their large site. They have very genuine concerns that WordPress can not handle things like scaling and caching and large visitor loads.

Whether you are performing due diligence or just wondering what WordPress can do, the below should be quite useful to you.

Its always best to lead by example right! So here we go!

A whole bunch of sites with massive user bases use WordPress. Here are a few-

http://tutsplus.com/ – A HUUUGE site with thousands of articles, media and users. Alexa rank 591

http://freelanceswitch.com/ – I use this site a lot! Both the site and the jobs board are powered by WordPress. Alexa rank 5,813

http://mac.appstorm.net/ – Another site with a huge following. Alexa rank 5,856

http://wiki.envato.com/ – The wiki for the ginormous envato market place. Alexa rank 4,101

http://workawesome.com/ – A blog but a large blog nonetheless. Alexa rank 31, 945

http://blog.themeforest.net/ – The blog for themeforest, possibly the largest template site on the net. A huge following. Alexa rank 287

With large sites caching is very important. Querying the database as few times as possible and only doing so when cached content is not available is crutial for a large site. Serving users static html rather than server intensive php powered by goodness knows how many DB queries saves a tonne in terms of server resources and site responsiveness. WordPress already has numerous plugins for this. The best two are WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.

http://codex.wordpress.org/High_Traffic_Tips_For_WordPress is a really good read straight from the WordPress mouth about the capabilities of WordPress. For me, the overriding message from that page is that it is more about the hardware behind the site than the software serving the site.

37 signals (the makers of Basecamp and other very successful web apps) wrote this very honest and wise piece.

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch04_Scale_Later.php

Basecamp is probably the most successful online project management tool out there and they openly admit that precious time is lost worrying about problems that may never occur. And when they do occur it is optimal to fix them and tweak the set up as they happen.

As they say -

In the beginning, make building a solid core product your priority instead of obsessing over scalability and server farms. Create a great app and then worry about what to do once it’s wildly successful. Otherwise you may waste energy, time, and money fixating on something that never even happens.

Another brilliantly honest article from the same guys-

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/dont_scale_99999_uptime_is_for_walmart.php

Edublogs is one of the most successful education based blogging platforms and they use WordPress MU (multi-user). Here is an in depth (and quite geeky) article on the set up of that system.

http://wpmu.org/scaling-wordpress-wpmu-buddypress-like-edublogs/

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress made an interesting response to somebody moving their site to drupal from WordPress after getting to 200,000 hits per day. He offers some sound advice-

http://webdevnews.net/2008/12/mullenweg-scale-wordpress-to-20000000-views-per-day-for-100-pmonth/

“Barry” is the “Chief Systems Wrangler” at automattic (the people behind wordpress, askimet, vaultpress and IntenseDebate) and he wrote this article about hyperDB -

http://barry.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/hyperdb-lag-detection/

Essentially what he is saying is that using hyperDB (found here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hyperdb/) enables huge sites to effectively and sparingly use DB queries to further optimise a high traffic volume and user interaction site. Read more from “Barry” on scaling here http://barry.wordpress.com/category/scaling/

The only other thing I will add is that words like “blog”, “theme” and “plugin” are used a lot with WordPress. Do not be put off by them! WordPress started out life as a blogging platform and it has struggled to shift that association. In truth, WordPress is actually an extremely powerful Content Management System with a highly intuitive and extensive API. Plugins are essentially little (or large) packages that add extra functionality to a WordPress install. Themes define the look of your site. They contain all the client side code and it is in themes that a design of a site is held.

Tags | cache, plugin, Scaling, wordpress

Add Links to Pages

Easily display page specific links on any page or post by quickly adding a link directly from the add/edit page/post screen.

Delete links by clicking the trashcan next to the link.

Supports adding URL, name, target and description.

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Hana FLV Extension

This plugin extends the capabilities of the Hana FLV Player plugin.

It allows users to upload their FLV files directly through the Tiny MCE button rather than having to copy and paste a URL.

It also adds a new meta box to posts and pages which allows the user to save the same data but as post meta. This can then be called from within a theme from a simple function.

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WordPress Gallery

WordPress gallery provides a simple interface for uploading images, editing them and having them displayed on the front end of your site via a shortcode or a function call.

The front end gallery can be configured in the following ways-

• Height and width of your gallery.
• Transition effect.
• Transition time.
• Optional lightbox effect to original image.
• Choose whether or not to display a "pager" which can contain nothing (just empty squares), numbers or thumbnails. Thumbnail sizes are configurable.
• Order the images by dragging them.

Uploading images is done through a simple interface that allows you to upload multiple images at once (only limited by your server's execution time and maximum file size). You can then edit the image to adjust crop, scale and rotation. Any changes you make to an image can be easily reverted back to the original image at any time.

If you have an Amazon S3 account your images will be uploaded there saving bandwidth and storage costs.

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WP E-commerce – Image previews to change on hover

</div><!--close single_product_page_container-->

<script> jQuery(".attachment-gold-thumbnails").each(function () { jQuery(this).css("cursor", "pointer"); var large_preview = jQuery(this).parent().attr("rev"); var even_larger_preview = jQuery(this).parent().attr("href"); var preview_title = jQuery(this).parent().attr("rel"); jQuery(this).hover( jQuery(this).mouseover(function() { jQuery(".product_image").attr("src", large_preview); jQuery(".product_image").parent().attr("href", even_larger_preview); jQuery(".product_image").parent().attr("rel", preview_title); }) ); }); </script>