What on earth are you thinking? Why on earth do you want to organize a WordCamp? You’re not an event planner!! You’re a (check one) [ ]Web Developer [ ]Web Designer [ ]Blogger [ ]Wo/Man on the Street I know, right? You went to WordCamp somewhere and you came away thinking your village/town/city needs a [...]
Recent Presentation – Building the WordPress Community
May 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment
I have had the good fortune to present this talk at two recent WordPress events – WordCamp New Zealand, and the Melbourne WordPress meetup just last night.
Both events were great, both chances to speak were both exciting and a tiny bit nerve wracking, I guess that’s normal but it all seems to me that all the important points were made, and the best news is that some action has been taken as a result of it with a number of new meetups being born across the ditch in NZ! So stoked to hear it – hopefully some more engagement will come in various places both there and here as a result. And hopefully more people will attend WordCamps as well (next one… WordCamp Sydney 2012 http://2012.sydney.wordcamp.org #justsaying)
WordCamp Sydney | July 21-22 2012
May 5, 2012 By 2 Comments
It wasn’t really a heat of the moment thing… All the way through WordCamp Gold Coast all I could think about was… we need a WordCamp in Sydney, it’s been way too long. And blow me down if there weren’t other people at #wcgold thinking the same thing.
So we talked about it over a couple of beers (as you do) and the idea kept getting more compelling so we came home from the conference and we read the instructions and muggins here filled out the form and applied.
So, now I can wear the WordCamp organiser badge… you know, if there were such a thing.
Getting to Grips with e-Commerce
April 10, 2012 By 3 Comments
I had the good fortune to be called on to speak at the March WordPress Sydney meetup last month and am only now posting my slides. Sorry for the delay, life has been… busy.
The talk was pretty informal and centred mostly around actually planning your e-Commerce store BEFORE you actually start building it… get to grips first with the things you’re going to want out of your store before you actually start building.
Having a solid plan will, or at the very least should, influence the choice of plugins you use. Because not all e-commerce plugins are created equal.
Here are the slides…
Easier Custom Post Types
March 21, 2012 By 3 Comments
I’ve been through the gamut of tutorials on creating custom post types for WordPress, and some of them are excellent, really excellent. But a while ago I came across some code, and for the life of me I can’t remember where I got it (lesson learned to add the source to every code snippet I find), that makes building custom post types a lot easier… Instead of having to create each custom post type separately you just add a variable for each new post type and let the code do the rest. (and, just quietly the adding the icon bit is all my handiwork)
Creating a Wholesaler Role in WP e-Commerce – Part Two
February 17, 2012 By 4 Comments
So now we get to play with some of the other cool functionality I used to extend the Wholesaler experience for both Sarah and the user.
4. Customising the Registration page to allow for custom fields.
I mentioned Gravity Forms in the previous post as an integral part of this process. Sarah was already using this plugin because it’s awesome and makes lovely, functional forms really easily. So I was stoked to find that the added functionality we needed was available as an add on and yes, I mentioned also that this add on is only available to users with a Developer license. (Seriously, it’s so totally worth it, as you’ll see below…)
Creating a Wholesaler Role in WP e-Commerce – Part One
February 14, 2012 By 3 Comments
So, I have a client doing some tidy business in handmade children’s clothes. I worked with her designer late last year to turn out her e-commerce website build on WP e-Commerce and it’s been humming along paying for itself reasonably well.
So Sarah, having got the day to day management of the online store running smoothly wants to add her wholesalers into the mix and offer them special pages for their eyes only and discounts on product throughout the whole store.
So where do you go to make that happen?
Before we begin the issues to address are -
Creating a Wholesaler User Role and managing how to give it particular privileges
Being able to offer wholesaler discounts on the cost of store items
Having a payment gateway for wholesalers that allows for deferred payment/COD
Customising the Registration for to allow for custom fields like store name and address
Customising the normal site login page with the Fabrik logo to create a more professional impression!
Creating a way of having content served specifically to wholesalers that isn’t available to ordinary shoppers
Making Simple Coming Soon and Under Construction work with Child Themes
February 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment
It’s quite possible that there are other maintenance and ‘coming-soon’ plugins out there that are more up to date, slicker and better than this one, but for whatever reason I’ve used Simple Coming Soon and Under Construction for a number of years. Unfortunately, in more recent times I have found it not performing to my liking in that while it would display a splash screen when it was in ‘maintenance’ mode it was never my custom one.
As it happens this non-performance coincides with the advent of my diving into developing using child themes…
Web Hosting Customer Service FTL
February 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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I had a text chat yesterday with a local webhost. I was inquiring as to a client’s disk usage on their shared service because we were switching over from an existing Joomla site to a new WordPress one (heck yeah), and so I was touching base to make sure that the new WordPress install didn’t tip them over their limits (based on the existing site I knew it would be close).
I came away from the conversation irritated based on the following…(After the preliminary greetings and outline of my request…) |
Australian Address Fields for Gravity Forms
February 5, 2012 By 2 Comments
I’m making the mother of all web forms to create an online booking system for a client. Needless to say I’m using Gravity Forms* to build it, if for no other reason that it removes ALL the headache from creating forms… you just have to do the painstaking work of adding each field.
