You’ll find custom fields in your admin panel under all post and page text areas. These custom fields allow you to add extra information, technically termed meta-data, and allows you to add jazz up your posts or pages. Here are a few examples of how custom fields can be used:

Add a style to your header

Navigating through the various topic of one of our latest projects, “The Challenge Series” you’ll notice that the sustainability section has a green title, while history is orange, policy red and design concepts blue.

This was achieved by doing the following:
1. Adding a custom field called Colour and assigning it a value of green, orange, red of blue.

2. Editing the code in my index.php as follows:
<h1Colour"; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></h1>

3. Setting up the appropriate styles in my CSS as follows:
h1.orange {background:#F26F21 }
h1.green {background:#5D9632}
h1.red {background:#B22217}
h1.blue {background:#00728E}

Insert an image outside your content area

During the build of the latest version of the Crisis Centre website, the design required that a unique image be inserted in the top right hand corner of each page. Inserting the image within the main content entry would have required me to fiddle with the padding of my paragraph tags. Instead I opted to use a custom field and added this piece of code to my index.php template:

<div id="photo"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/photos/<?php $key="photo"; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>" alt="" border="0" /></div>

This line of code, simply pulls the image specified in the custom field and inserts in a div tag which has its own unique style.

Although custom fields, can get a bit tricky, especially when using more than one per entry, they allow you to enhance your site and give you much more design freedom.

Following the upgrade and applying the latest patch CForms failed to work properly and the following error popped up:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class cf_mail in .../public_html/wp-content/plugins/cforms/lib_email.php on line 3

I did a quick search on Google, deleted and re-installed the plugin, but because I was in a hurry and didn’t want to leave the site without a working form, I simply decided to ditch the plugin and opted for Contact Form 7 instead. CForms has worked very well for me in the past, but I’m a bit uneasy and confused with the fact that they are no longer in the WordPress.org plugin repository, so I think that I’ll just stick to Contact Form 7 from now on.

When upgrading other websites that use CForm, I opted not to go through the plugin upgrade and will deal with those some other time.

Both My Category Order and NextGEN Gallery required an additional step once the update was applied. Following the My Category Order upgrade, I noticed that the categories were gone from the sidebar. I simply went to the Posts > My Category Order tab in the admin and clicked the button to re-order the categories and bingo, that did the trick.

Similarly, with the NextGEN Gallery, following the upgrade, I noticed that my slideshows no longer worked. Navigating to the Gallery section in the admin revealed a final step. Once the upgrade complete, the slideshows reappeared.

When building websites I try to minimize my use of plugins and always delete unactivated ones, but once live who knows what plugins will be installed by the client. Having said that, when looking at the list of plugins used on 47 sites, I’ve been impressed with their compatibility so far. All of the following plugins work perfectly:

• Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button
• Akismet
• All in One SEO Pack
• Audio player
• Blubrry PowerPress
• Custom Query String
• Digg This
• Email Immunizer
• FeedBurner FeedSmith
• Fuzzy Recent Posts
• GD Star Rating
• Get Recent Comments
• Google XML Sitemaps
• is_child
• Kimili Flash Embed
• My Page Order
• Ozh’ Better Feed
• pb-embedFlash
• Post Content Filter
• Quotes Collection
• Redirection
• Revision Control
• Robots Meta
• Secure WordPress
• SlideShare
• SEO Slugs
• SEO Title Tag
• ShareThis
• TinyMCE Advanced
• Transpose Email
• What Would Seth Godin Do
• WordPress Database Backup
• WP Audio Player
• wp-cache
• wp supercache
• WP-FLV
• WP-PostViews
• WP-SpamFree
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
• ZenphotoPress

All in all this was a good day.

This morning’s session was opened by two keynote speakers and left me inspired and eager to learn more about the Open Source community.

The first keynote was given by Rick Falkvinge on one of Sweden’s political party, the Pirate Party, whose platform is to reform laws regarding copyrights and patents and other civil liberties issues. The Pirate Party succeeded in gaining popularity and attention simply by using the Internet and very little money. In fact their campaign budget during the last election consisted of only $50K. As a result of the communication tools and methods they’ve used, they are now the political party with the largest percentage of voters 30 years old and younger. This of course as alarmed other politicians who have never been able to reach out to this age group.

Now that the Pirate Party has secured a seat in the European Parliament, it will be interesting to see if other political parties start discussing issues such as privacy and file sharing. Just like Al Gore has put Global Warming on everyone’s mind, Rick Falvinge is spreading the word about what needs to be done to create a better online world for all of us and he deserved the standing ovation which followed his presentation.

Following this great keynote, came Angie Byron who spoke about Women in Open Source or rather lack of. I was a bit surprised that this topic was chosen and discussed. I’ve been working as a so called “geek” for a over a decade and never experienced any sexism at work or conference and Angie admitted herself that until she started researching the numbers, didn’t think there was a problem either. Turns out the percentage of women in Open Source is staggeringly low. The reasons and solutions that were discussed were obvious and applicable to all minorities, not just women. At least they felt obvious to me, but a few hours later, I read about the incident at Flashbelt’s conference just a few days ago. It seems like a lot of boys think that the saying boys will be boys still stands and should simply be accepted.

Angie provided great advice on how to create a safe and inviting community and how to stop tolerating bullshit. The gem, for me, were her views on contribution to Open Source. Having worked with Open Source during all of my coding years, I’ve realised that I’ve used the stuff, but never really contributed. Providing contribution whether it be marketing, documenting, designing and of course coding, is a great way to empower yourself and feel like you are part of the team.

I look forward to learn more during tomorrow’s event.

I recently came to the same decision when building a website for the Challenge Series which is a celebration of the planning, design and building of Vancouver’s first sustainable neighbourhood – Millennium Water: The Southeast False Creek Olympic Village.

Published as an online book, the first of eight chapters was recently launched and, just like The Ford Story, uses WordPress as a CMS to deliver a wide variety of static content, downloadable documents and photos. Future issues will also include videos. When I was first introduced to this project, I instantly thought of WordPress as the CMS for this website, but wondered if perhaps Drupal or some other CMS might be a better platform. The design of the home page alone proved somewhat challenging and uses a large number of custom fields, but with proper training and the use of simple HTML, I think that the website is fairly easy to maintain and look forward to seeing how it progresses and develops. Finding out that companies like Ford also choose WordPress has convinced me that I’ve made a good decision.

• Liz Gaige from Market Navigators will address marketing inquiries
• Mhairi Petrovic from Out-smarts will be on-hand to speak about social networking
• Ryan Thompson from Twin Fish Creative will provide answers about branding
• while I’ll be discussing web design and development.

These panels are casual and informal. Simply register, show up and join the conversation. Organized as round-tables, we like to keep these small, so that you have the chance to ask your questions and hear what others have to say. These are ideal for budding entrepreneurs, individuals wanting to launch themselves in a new venture or existing companies who may be stuck and not sure where to go next.

We are currently holding a 2-for-1 promo, so bring a friend or colleague along. Hope to see you there.