Technical Blog – Page 24

Nextgen Gallery and WP-Ecommerce

Just the slightest bit wonky when used together in one WordPress installation

I have 1 website freshly updated to WordPress 2.6 and only using the latest version of nextGen.
I have 2 other websites, both using 2.5.1 and the latest stable versions of WP-Ecommerce and nextGen.

In the first website with just nextGen the pop up window displays the full size link under the image which you can see in example 1.
In the sites where both plugins coincide nextGen detects that WP-Ecommerce is installed and links to it’s version of jquery and no full size link is displayed. Also the pop up is different – it shows a vertical row of thumbs down the side of the window alongside the main image.This is nice but wonky because sometimes the vertical row of thumbs don’t display as thumbs but as little dots.Which you can see in example 2.To tell you the truth I’m kind of liking just seeing one large image pop up at a time. Now I think the vertical row is overkill because a page of thumbs is already being displayed on the page itself, making the pop up row redundant. Just my opinion. I saw the same kind of design when I activated wordtube, another plugin from Alex Rabe meant to be a media center for WordPress.You can use it to display images and videos in a playlist. I’d tried using it just for photographs but found once again it seemed like overkill. But if you have a lot of videos I could see it’s appeal.

One good thing is I learned how to use custom fields to control each individual gallery or slideshow.
This is essential because you might want a slideshow to display first on one page but have a row of thumbs show first on another gallery page. And if you do have a few slideshows you can use custom fields to control how they look independent of each other no matter what settings you configured in the Gallery options such as:transition effects(blocks,lines or fluids),size of the slideshow,colors of the rollover,timing,etc.
The second nice thing was finding an explanation of the Imagebrowser option for nextGen.
Place this in the page or post [ imagebrowser=6 ] “6” being the id of the gallery you want to show,and you will get this

I could try deleting the jquery that WP-E-Commerce uses and loading nextGen’s in it’s place and seeing how that works…But to tell you the truth being able to at least control the nextGen galleries is work enough for one day.

Easy Custom WordPress Login Page

Without too much code hacking or any plugins.

(For 2.5 up to 2.6.5. Not for WordPress 2.7)
I really wanted to change one website’s login page but I didn’t want to install a plugin.

I’d done so for another site which was awesome but it really hooked it’s little self into that site and it was hard to get rid of even after I deleted it and deactivated it.

I just wanted to change a few little things and thought installing a plugin was overkill.

So I stopped Googling and just thought for a second.

What if I just make a simple alteration to the login.css?

You find it in wp-admin/css/.

I had a logo that was roughly the size of the wordpress header image and I just replaced the WordPress logo with my client’s.

Line 41 in login.css
background: url(path to the image you want to use) no-repeat;
Just put in the path to the logo: i. e. : /wp-content/themes/your theme/images/logo.jpg

Change the link embedded in the header: wp-login.php
[php]<div id="login"><h1><a href="<?php echo apply_filters(‘login_headerurl’, ‘http://yourwebaddress’); ?>" title="<?php echo apply_filters(‘login_headertitle’, __(‘your title text’)); ?>"><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></a></h1>[/php]

Replace http://yourwebaddress with your url that you want to use.

Replace ‘your title text” with what you want the title text to read when you hover your mouse over it.

Optional
Line 270 is where you can change the are “you lost question” text.

Upgrading
You’ll have to repeat this each time you upgrade automatically. If you upgrade manually please check the revision log to see if the files mentioned here have been changed and so need to be overwritten and then re patched with your changes.

WordPress 2.6 and Custom Fonts

After waiting a bit of time to see if the world would end after WP 2.6 was released and seeing that it did not end I decided to upgrade my test site. Well, I meant to upgrade my test site, I instead upgraded my main site. Nothing bad happened and my main site could just suck it anyway if it had exploded.

It’s my client’s sites I give a fig about which is why I am such a cautious old so and so when it comes to upgrading. For myself, if a plugin turns out to be non compat I just say see yis to that plugin and move on.

But some of my clients have tastes that can only be satisfied with certain plugins,like Custom Fontswhich is a great plugin but doesn’t look like it’s compatible with WP 2.6. Having it activated seems to get rid of the media upload buttons in the editor page.
I’m being diplomatic when I say seems but I’m almost certain that it is the culprit.When I de-activate it the media buttons come back.When I activate it they go away. I’ve tested it with the visual editor on and off and with that option completely disabled in my user profile.I’m sure it’s an easily fixed problem,though.

I may just go ahead and try to convince my client that it might be more important to have the latest version of WordPress as her website’s engine than it is to have fancy page titles.In her case sifr-replaced page titles was a branding choice and one that I was not able to talk her out of but it was better than the other option which was using images to replace text.

If it’s a popular plugin, the author will get so bombarded with emails and forum posts and etc and will probably make it compatible out of sheer exasperation with the demands of the (usually) non paying/donating public. What a thankless task. I salute all you who do this for free and deal day in and day out with kibuttzers who think you owe them something.

The best news so far is WP Ecommerce seems to chug along just fine on WP 2.6.

Google Analytics+Visitor Trending+Design

In a perfect world we would all be using the same technology and wouldn’t have to design for older OS/outdated browsers/different OS/different browsers.We wouldn’t have to provide accessible websites because everyone would have perfect eyesight. We wouldn’t have to worry about our navigation systems because everyone would just get it.

But it isn’t a perfect world and some people are still using Windows 95 and MSIE 5.5.
So we can’t leave them out when we design websites anymore than we can ignore people with less than perfect eyesight. And we have to provide idiot proof navigation. I’m not calling you idiots but too many times with navigation we give more attention to design than comprehensive legibilty.
So I ask myself if someone’s Aunt Rose in Nebraska will be able to use this navigation.

We are up against a lot when we take on a new project, the biggest being taste. Our taste versus the client’s taste. Oftentimes a designer’s taste is tempered with the idea that the design ought to be clear and readable first, pretty last. I don’t think client’s want to skip clear and legible but they do often put pretty first. Personally, I believe it’s possible to have both.

Recently Matt of WordPress fame wrote about how the great day when we can all stop worrying about MSIE6 in applications or website design is upon us(actually I think he was only talking about applications).But because I do not author applications I focused on design.

So if you have signed up with Google Analytics, if you haven’t you ought to, you can see what percentage of your visitors are using IE6. If no one is using IE6 you can probably stop worrying about IE6. Lucky you.

I wish I could stop designing for IE6. But if I check Google Analytics reports for most of my website’s profiles (Visitors>Browsers>Browser Capabilities) sadly IE6 makes up almost half of the graph.

The Website’s Content Makes Design Decisions For Me.
Products or content that draw an older audience who likely have not upgraded to IE7 let alone IE6, have got to be presented in a design that IE5.5 and IE6 can render.

Many times this group won’t have the right version of the flash plugin needed so you might not want to make a flash website for this audience.
Older audiences tend not to upgrade as fast we’d like them to.
I don’t intend to stereotype older people. But in the long run it’s more important to consider what happens to eyesight when someone gets older and how that affects their experience when they come to the website I’ve designed. We have to provide legible, high contrast sites that an older audience (not as able to read small text with low contrast colors) can read. We can’t require them to download a plugin in order to see the website because chances are if they are coming to the website for the 1st time they will just leave if they get asked to download a plugin.

A Solution.
Many times when I am working on a new project I develop it on my own server. It can take weeks to complete.This gives me time to sign the client up with Google Analytics and install the tracking code into their existing website. After 24 hours I will be able to check what browsers are the top ones being used and I can factor that into my design.