Oracle of ONE1

An excellent article on the reasons for using and how best to create hand written excerpts has been posted at http://op111.net/67.

Do I use hand-written excerpts? Well no but I really probably should. A bit lazy I guess.

I regularly develop GPL open source plugins, modules, and widgets for Joomla and WordPress. On ocassion, a users has asked if a donation would help support this development. The comment alone is a great compliment and incentive. Cash is always greatly appreciated but in this case, if you find one of my plugins useful please make a donation to one of these great organizations instead.

American Red Cross in Southeastern Wisconsin – Provides relief to victims of disasters and helps people prevent, prepare for, and respond to emergencies in Dodge, Kenosha, Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Racine, Walworth, and Waukesha Counties.

Milwaukee Achiever Literacy Services – Inspires and empowers adult learners to gain the skills necessary to enrich their lives through education and training in an atmosphere of mutual acceptance and respect.

New plugin for Wordpress developed. It should be available on the their site shortly. In the meantime, it will be available for download here.

If you have any comments or questions, please add them here.

What is it?

ggis Subscribe gives authors an easy way to insert a form that performs emailing list subscription management.

Features and Requirements

• Wordpress 2.5 or greater
• An email list to subscribe to. Currently supports:
  • ezmlm lists – subscribe by sending email to listname-subscribe-your=address.com@domain.com
• Designation of success page

Setup

Using ggisSubscribe is a very simple matter of performing a short setup and then inserting a simple code in your post.

1. Download and install plugin using standard means. Download here.
2. View the ggisSubscribe options from the Settings menu.
3. Add the email address of your mailing list. If you have more than one list, use commas between each address.
4. Enter the URL of your thank you page (next page)
5. Enter the URL of you main subscription management page.
   • Yes. Create and publish your subscription management first and then finish with your ggisSubscribe options.

Usage

The subscription form may be inserted on a post, page, or text widget by including the following code in your text.

[-%ggis-subscribe %formtype "%listname"-]

Here is an explanation of the fields:

• ggis-subscribe – identifies the code (required)
• formtype – identifies the form type
  • 0, default – full subscription management form
  • 1 – subscribe only form , requires “listname”
• listname – identifies the list to include in a subscription only form

See the demonstration forms.

In a Widget?

A subscription form may be placed into the standard text widget using the methods above. For widget use, I suggest using only formtype=1, the short form.

To Do

1. Add template tag output
2. Add other list manager types

Here are working examples of the plugin ggisSubscribe. You may subscribe to any of the lists shown here. Extra spaces were added between the [ ]and the -. The correct code should be of the form [-ggis... -].

(more…)

I have noticed that many novice WordPress users try to build their site using Pages. This fights the WordPress system. These users are not using WordPress as a blogging platform but as an entry-level Content Management System. Now I know we use words such as ‘view a web page’ but page here has a different meaning.

One thing I push, is that 99% of the site’s content should be in posts. Write content to posts. They are much more flexible and easier for a developer to work with.

Pages have their place on a site but are limited to non-hierarchical, never-changing, organizational metadata (information about data). So what goes on a page? About, contact, history, jurisdiction, terms of use, privacy statements, and a sitemap. All the boring stuff.

Posts, on the other hand, can belong to multiple categories and have unlimited tags. Categories and tags automatically create the navigational structure of the site. The power of going with the flow is that most of the structure is done for you instead of needing to be created by you.

This is a very simple version of a Categories sub-menu implemented in the sidebar.php. Once a category is clicked, the sidebar should show the following:

1. Category description (this is useful other than the sidebar)
2. Children categories
3. Posts in the category

(more…)

The default template shows the sidebar only on selected pages. I often make a design decision to display the sidebar on every or nearly every page. This is a fairly straightforward set of template edits. As an example, we will work with the template single.php. This is the template which displays individual posts

To gain further understanding of which template files are used when view a WordPress site visit WordPress Site Architecture.

(more…)

The Home page of your site is the entryway for many visitors. By default, WordPress shows nothing but your most recent posts. Alternatively, WordPress makes it easy to set a page as your Home. I find that neither of these are sufficient and take another approach. If your templates contain a file named home.php then that template file will be used instead of the default WordPress options.

(more…)

The header is the identifying masthead of your website. It is often convenient to include top level or special navigation here. In fact, I usually modify the header to include navigation to these pages:

1. Home
2. About
3. Contact
4. Site Map (activate the sitemap plugin and include
   <!-- ddsitemapgen --> in your page or post)
5. Store

(more…)

There a many reasons why you might not want all categories to display in the side bar. Some possible reasons are:

• Display some categories under 1 title and other categories under another title
• Some categories may serve a special purpose
• Some categories may meant to be hidden

(more…)

Use the Text Widget to add HTML to the sidebar. This makes it very easy to add a wide variety of features to your site. I will demonstrate a few simple examples.

(more…)