WordPress & Genesis Theme Development
There are a few blogs I follow pretty closely, and one of them predictably is Brian Gardner’s (predictably because he’s behind Genesis and I’m a bit of a fan). A while back Brian put together a tutorial about making a social media icon menu – I took it on board, I like rolling my own [...]
I’ve spent a large block of time recently working on a project for a new client, intent on proving just how slick it is to build sites from a really solid, clean, FAST platform (Genesis – affiliate link). BUT I found myself stuck on an issue with the front page development and realised just how much of a handicap it can be when you get so welded to a ‘way of doing things’ that you forget just what else is out there.
The site needs a paginated, slideshow for the front page (ok, not much of a problem, every site on the Internet*, has one of those…) whose images link to a specific URL and in which you can include a heading and descriptive text.
I was approached by a client recently who wanted a solution to display captured data on their website in the kind of way you’d need to do if you were creating an online petition and wanted to display signatories. In this case the client is creating a pledge form and simply wanted to create a page that lists the names of the pledgers, their age, city, state and country.
I googled around to find a solution and in the course of all of that I discovered that you could use Gravity Forms (and a handy dandy plugin) to create Custom Post Type entries. In its simplest setting, you create a form on your page and map the form so that it creates the post entries that we can then display in an archive template which regurgitates the relevant data and displays it in a list. It seems like the kind of thing other people might be interested in doing as well… here’s how I pulled it off.
This is the tiniest, most useful blog post ever.
This piece of code has made me look really intelligent more than once in the last few weeks, so it’s only fair I share it… I call it Mother’s little Theme Template Helper.
If you’re wanting to find out exactly which template the page you’re looking at is being built from, paste this little piece of code in your functions file
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.
