The Shane & Peter Inc. Blog

Help us Speak at SXSW

shane — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 06:08:04 +0000

As you all know, SXSW is one of the pinnacle conferences of our industry. Hopefully we’ll get to meet some of you there. Drop us a note if you are going!

SXSW session picker voting has begun. Peter & I have two talks we are pitching, one on the business of technology and one of the business of people. We would really love your help in promoting them. Go sign up and vote. Leave excited comments. Ask questions. Send this to your friends. Tweet it. Facebook it….

Making Money with Wordpress (Without Working at Automattic)

Freelancers Are Slutty, But So Are You

Premium Events Calendar 1.1

shane — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:18:02 +0000

We have just released the 1.1 update to the WordPress premium Events Calendar plugin.

For those of you who haven’t checked it out: The Events Calendar Premium plugin for Wordpress enables you to rapidly create and manage events using the custom post editor. Features include Google Maps integration, iCal support as well as default templates such as a calendar grid and event list for streamlined one click installation. Check out the full screencast here.

DOWNLOAD PREMIUM EVENT CALENDAR

Premium Events Calendar release 1.1 notes:

Features

* Events Calendar widget
* Single event ical import. Uses sp_get_single_ical_link() (must be used in the loop)

Bugfixes

* is_home() no longer returns true on an Events view
* Debug mode introduced for users seeing wrong counts in the Events admin view. Turn on and ensure that start and end dates are set correctly before turning off. While debug mode is on, Events will not be sorted by start date properly.
* Some instances where the single.php template in your theme’s events/ directory would not load properly should now be fixed.

The Redirector Pro Wordpress Plugin

shane — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 00:40:02 +0000

Easily create vanity URLs on your WordPress site to redirect to any other url. For example, you can use this plugin to have http://www.myblog.com/iphone point to a link on the itunes store. Obviously you can also use this to point many urls on your site to the same post.

* Redirect from simple local urls to any url of your choosing
* Safely coded to prevent conflicts of url slugs
* Extremely clean premium quality code
* Install and use it in under 60 seconds!
* Perfect for all of your WordPress redirection needs

Download The Redirector Pro

Why Big Companies Use Freelancers

shane — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:12:12 +0000

These are not the designers you are looking for… Oh wait, no no we ARE the designers you are looking for!

This morning, the latest contractor to join our crew asked me: “Why does MTV want to work with us? They have amazing designers and are a huge company. What can we do that they haven’t completely mastered?” It was a fair question. Why does MTV outsource work? Or AOL, SAP, NBC or any of our other customers? Is it because any company with a three letter all-cap acronym can’t built its own technology? Nope, that’s not it at all. We’ve personally run into 6 different reasons. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were others, and I’d be stoked to hear all about it in the comments. Ok, let’s kick it off:

* They’re slammed.
* The idea/strategy was pitched and included your services.
* They are stuck.
* The internal team lacks a specific specialty.
* Politics prevent internal allocations.
* Accountability. We just get things done.

Read the full article On the eLance Blog where it was posted.

Premium Plugins for WordPress!

shane — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 01:59:59 +0000

Twitter Widget Pro for WordPress

Events Calendar Pro for WordPress

We’ve officially launched our first handful of Premium WordPress Plugins in partnership with Brandon Jones (EpicEra).

Check out the “Events Calendar Pro” plugin for all of your event management needs – a robust calendar system built specifically for WordPress 3.0. Also be sure to find the first premium “Twitter Widget Pro” for multi-user twitter feed management. Yep, that’s right, you can manage multiple twitter users from the same widget – sweet!

Wordpress 3.0 New Post Editor

shane — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 07:20:20 +0000

3rd in a series of wordpress admin patterns. The pattern is for the Add New Post screen (post editor) in Wordpress 3.0. Please not that while it is most likely feature complete, they are still fussing with it just a little bit, so I may have to fine tone it for the public release. Hopefully for all you devs out there about to crack open custom post types, this should give you a great foundation for quickly wireframing out your new plugin.

Download Balsamiq Post Add / Edit Pattern: Post Editor.bmml

Next up: media lightbox & widget management.

For updates, release information and tips about Shane & Peter’s open source wordpress plugins or redmine core ux/ui, ipad or the freelance lifestyle, follow Shane on twitter @justlikeair and visit http://blog.shaneandpeter.com.

Wordpress 3.0 Admin Comment List

shane — Sat, 29 May 2010 00:33:15 +0000

2nd in a series of wordpress admin Balsamiq patterns. This pattern is for the Wordpress 3.0 Beta admin comment list.

Download the Pattern: Comments List.bmml

For updates, release information and tips about Shane’ & Peters open source wordpress plugins or redmine core ux/ui, ipad or the freelance lifestyle, follow Shane on twitter @justlikeair and visit http://blog.shaneandpeter.com.

Eventbrite for The Events Calendar 1.6

shane — Fri, 28 May 2010 07:40:58 +0000

We have just released a significant update to our companion Wordpress plugin Eventbrite for the Events Calendar. The plugin allows you to:

* Sell tickets directly from your post
* Extensive template tags for customization
* MU Compatible
* Many of the amazing features of Eventbrite – directly from Wordpress
* Use shortcode to place any event ticketing on any post

New features for Release 1.6:

* Import event info from Eventbrite by event id number.
* Payment options now specified from post edit
* Improved error handling and reporting
* Updated to new Eventbrite logo

Over the next weeks, we will watch the forums and do a few small dot releases to fix bugs. Please don’t post requests for help here (I’ll ignore them), use the Wordpress Forum.

Wordpress Events Plugin 1.6 Released

shane — Thu, 27 May 2010 07:10:53 +0000

This release was quite the adventure and a major work for all the contributors. Huge thanks go out to Justin Endler and Kelsey Damas took the role of batman so that I could play Robin. The community was super active and we thank you for all your support, bug reports and more. For all you who predominant speak other languages, we got quite a few new translations submitted. Over the next weeks, we will watch the forums and do a few small dot releases to fix bugs. Please don’t post requests for help here (I’ll ignore them), use the Wordpress Forum.

This will be the last major open source release on this plugin for a short while. We are exploring the possibility of converting this to a premium plugin and will let you all know quite soon what we decide. Work on 1.7, which will be released as a premium plugin (custom post types and more) is under way.

To Download: The Events Plugin 1.6

Features

* Child Theme support
* iCal Feed of all events now accessible using http://.com/?ical
* Setting to include / exclude events form general loop
* Subcategories in events now behave properly! (and include some css for your creative endeavors)
* Get Events function no longer starts its own loop (significantly reduce conflicts with other plugins)
* Added class to current day
* PHP versions older than 5.1 will fail gracefully
* Uninstall file
* Calendar grid view now honors ‘posts_per_page’ wordpress setting.
* Calendar grid view now has “previous” and “next” month links
* Widget now has options to control behavior when there are no events to display
* Updates to widget layout (links to events and “read more”)
* It is now possible to select no default country for events
* Added a setting to control “pretty urls” to the events vs using query args (reduce conflicts with other rewrite rules)
* Default times for new event updated (all day, starting tomorrow)

Translations

* German [Felix Bartels]
* Brazilian Portuguese [Thiago Abdalla]
* Dutch [Sjoerd Boerrigter]
* Spanish [Los Jethrov]
* Updates to Swedish Translation [Kaj Johansson]
* Updates to German Translation [Andre Schuhmann]
* Danish [Carsten Matzon]

Bugs

* Improvements to field validation
* Fixes Embedded Map HTML URL Encoding so its w3c compatible (Thanks azizur!)
* Usability issue: Is this post an event? Yes/No — now you can click the text and it will select your choice. (Thanks azizur!)
* Fixes drag/drop issue (Thanks azizur!)
* State vs Province meta values were not mutually exclusive
* HTML was not properly escaped in the template
* Fixes PHP short tag issue in one of the templates
* in single.php, the Back to Events link no longer strictly goes to the grid view, but adheres to the default few option -pointed out by azzatron on the forum
* google map link is now produced with minimal information, complete address is no longer needed, W3C-compatible output
** tec_event_address() added for easy echoing of the event address
** thanks to AntonLargiader and azizur on forum
* improvement and debugging of entire error catching and displaying system
* Fixes upcoming/past sorting issue (Thanks Elliot Silver for the support!)

Wordpress Admin Balsamiq Patterns

shane — Tue, 11 May 2010 09:05:41 +0000

DOWNLOAD WORDPRESS POST LIST BALSAMIQ PATTERN

I have been having a great time working with balsamiq to quickly push out wireframes for projects. We have a few large wordpress plugins in the works for customers which will really take advantage of 3.0 custom post types.

Up till now a lot of UI work when designing plugins was a bit of the wild west. With Jane heading up the UI/UX team and Tracy working on a design and ui standards doc, I was inspired to build some patterns which would help our crew build cleaner and easier to use plugins. I wanted to start by being better in line with the wordpress UI. So I am working on a simple Balsamiq pattern for the most modified parts of the wordpress 3.0 admin.

Peldi, the lead over at Balsamiq saw the news of my computers demise and offered out to help (now that’s customer service). I’ll post more as they come up. He might also post them (with my blessing) on mockupstogo.net.

These are not pixel perfect. For that, we would need Peter’s discerning eye, but for the wordpress plugin developer who wants to have a nice wireframe to start from, its a nice tool.

For updates, release information and tips about our open source wordpress plugins or redmine core ux/ui, ipad or the freelance lifestyle, follow me on twitter @justlikeair.