Noel Tock - Web Design & Photography

Custom Post Types are not Posts

Noel — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:57:35 +0000

Custom post types are e-commerce products, books, real estate properties and many other things, but the last thing they are, are posts. So why do we continue to use the default posts interface to manage all this awesome additional information we’re storing? Data. I was wondering about this issue a while back, as we (Theme [...]

Ten paying clients later

Noel — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 19:18:32 +0000

The last few months have been an eye-opening experience, largely due to the fact that I’ve gone from selling products to striving to sell a service (in hopes of being able to provide an experience one day). As many of you know, I started Theme Force in 2009 selling WordPress themes (“templates” for the normal [...]

WP Admin is an Experience too.

Noel — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:12:56 +0000

Many of us working with WordPress on a daily basis focus all our creative energy on how our solutions interact with the user through the theme. But what about the admin area? According to W3Techs, WordPress is now running 15% of sites, but how many of them have an admin area that is tailored to [...]

Custom Post Types: FullCalendar & JSON

Noel — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 13:39:29 +0000

This tutorial builds on my previous how-to’s relating to creating & using Events with Custom Post Types (all within WordPress). With the first tutorial came a number of comments, a couple of which were looking to integrate the events custom post type with FullCalendar, an extremely well put together jQuery plugin created by Adam Shaw [...]

Review: Professional WordPress Plugin Development (2011)

Noel — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:58:46 +0000

Being a theme designer & developer, Professional WordPress Plugin Development is a breath of fresh air in a community where learning material is oftentimes scattered, fragmented or incomplete. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of great resources out there, but you’ll need to dig for them. Having a concise reference book and/or ‘best practices’ [...]

How-to: iCal with Custom Post Types

Noel — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 13:33:40 +0000

In line with my previous custom post type tutorials for events (backend & frontend), I’d like to show how easy it is to create an iCal feed of those events (download the full file here). There are a few iCal for WordPress plug-ins out there, but none that will handle custom post types right off [...]

How-to: Custom Post Types for Events Pt. 2

Noel — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 10:43:42 +0000

Now that we’ve handled the entire registration and back-end functionality (see Pt. 1) of our events custom post type, it’s time to move on to our design output (download the file for this tutorial here)! There’s no point in having fancy custom post types if you can’t display them properly. As you may remember, the entire reason [...]

Fast & Furious WordPress Theme Development

Noel — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 20:28:48 +0000

I’m somewhat of a productivity nut; I automatically track my time through rescuetime, try to automate my workflows and absolutely despise repetitive work. After all, life is short, why spend it doing the same thing over and over again (I’m also fortunate enough to be able to make career choices)? As a designer, coding has always [...]

How-to: Custom Post Types for Events

Noel — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 20:01:43 +0000

events custom post type series Back-end Front-end: Design & Shortcodes Front-end: iCal Export Front-end: Implementing FullCalender Chances are you found this page looking for a tutorial on how to create Events with Custom Post Types within WordPress. I will outline the entire process I’ve used for one of my themes that I’m re-coding (in order [...]

Tutorial – Search Cloud (Tagxedo & Google Analytics)

Noel — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 18:16:06 +0000

Over the past few months, my WordPress Theme shop has been getting a good deal of organic traffic. After having seen a cool render of one these word clouds for a political issue (using Tagxedo , requires Silverlight), I decided to give it a shot with some of my Google Analytics organic search data, this [...]