Image Courtesy of jairoagua

However, as clients got bigger, and their requirements got greater, well, running things on multisite started to get a little, well, sketchy and I’ve come to the conclusion that while you CAN run things like this, maybe there are times when you shouldn’t.

If you want to run a hosting business, I think you should take it seriously. Get a reseller account with a quality host like Crucial Paradigm (affiliate link) and set your clients up each on their own site, with their own cpanel, their own database… and relax a little… because if one site goes down… well, hopefully it’s just the one site…

It also makes backing up easier… which brings me to the genesis of this post…

I use Backup Buddy (yep, that’s an affiliate link too) for my peace of mind. I love it because it makes backing up and migrating sites easy. I wouldn’t develop sites without it quite frankly, but I noticed something disconcerting when I updated it over the weekend.

Backup Buddy has been fine on all my standalone sites… but after this latest update it hasn’t been fine at all on the multisite and this is disconcerting given that there are 15 clients on that installation… if I don’t have backups I feel very vulnerable.

The issue was that once I’d upgraded, I was able to see the Backup Buddy box in the dashboard, I was getting notifications that the cron job was running and doing backups in the background but I had no access to the Control Panel, in fact, if I clicked on the dashboard link I received the following notice

‘You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.’

I did some googling, and came back without too much useful information.  I then went onto the iThemes site and sure enough, the answer is there…Backup Buddy has removed default multisite support, but you have to be a member to see that info… so just in case you’re not currently subscribed, here’s what’s happening.

IMPORTANT: In an upcoming version, Multisite functionality will no longer be enabled by default as it is experimental and should not be used for real world purposes [Link].

It seems that this latest update is the one that removes the multisite functionality by default.  I get the reasons behind it, and having gradually come to the realsaition that just because you CAN run multisite as a hosting platform doesn’t mean you SHOULD.

In any case, to resolve the issue I added this line to my wp-config

define( 'PB_BACKUPBUDDY_MULTISITE_EXPERIMENT', true );

This will get me back on track long enough to export each of my sites, one by one, and putting them on their own little patch of the web.

I still think multisite is fantastic, and if you were wanting to run your own blogging community, like the one I started blogging on years ago, well then multisite is a great way to do it… but as for me and my sites, we shall be diverging away from multisite, and growing up and standing on our own two feet…

The post Backup Buddy has Removed Default Multisite Support appeared first on The Web Princess.

However, if you’re making things to distribute, you should think about it… because if  you want to make some money out of your theme or your plugin and/or if you want a lot of people to know about your theme or plugin you have some decisions to make about just how you allow that software to be distributed or reused.

WordPress itself and the core of the whole story, is licensed under GPL (GNU Public License¹). In short, this means that if you’re using WordPress you have the following four freedoms

• the freedom to use the software for any purpose,
• the freedom to change the software to suit your needs,
• the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, and
• the freedom to share the changes you make.²

This is the essence of free software (free as in speech (libre) not to be confused with free as in beer, (gratis)³).

Now, this is where it gets tricksy, because the letter of the GPL actually allows for some content, such as javascript, CSS, and images that you’ve made for your theme or plugin to be licensed separately. So in the minds some theme developers and distributors, there ought to be room to allow people to exert a little bit of control of those aspects of their work. These are the section of people who’d like to license their WordPress code with the GPL and their ‘other bits’ with some other kind of license that perhaps may not allow quite the same freedoms, but which potentially avoids some of risk having all of their products out there in the universe, not making them any return for their hard work and creativity.

This kind of licensing is called a split license.

However, in the other camp is the WordPress Foundation, who assert that if you’re making things for WordPress you should in fact extend those exact same freedoms to the products that you’re making, be they themes or plugins.⁴  Frankly, it’s their prerogative to make that guideline part of the conditions of creating for WordPress  (just as it is the prerogative of creators to choose other licensing, that’s the nature of freedom) and the outworking of that is that if you want to add your theme or plugin to the repository, assigning a 100% GPL to your submission is a pre-requisite. (Actually, if you want to get involved in WordCamps or other WordPress branded endeavours, you also should be adhering to the 100% GPL guideline as well). I should point out, there’s still room to profit here, you are not restricted from selling your products under the GPL, but you do need to allow people the freedom to do with your product, exactly what they want once they’ve purchased it.

That’s the guts of it, when you’re creating add ons to WordPress and you plan to distribute your creations via the WordPress repository, you need license 100%GPL,furthermore,  the foundation would love it if everyone everywhere licensed their WordPress creations 100%GPL, but as with any freedom, you are also free to choose a split license if you prefer.

So, what do these issues look like at a practical level?

How and where you distribute your theme or plugin

On one hand you have the WordPress repository where pretty much all of us started off. Finding free themes and plugins that people have made available for download and which are accessible right there in the dashboard, is one of the totally awesome things about WordPress. It’s just so easy to extend the basic install with awesome free stuff and to use that awesome free stuff as the base for creating your own awesome free stuff.  All of the content in that repository be it a theme or a plugin is made available under the condition that you have the 4 freedoms above to do with it whatever you wish. In the WordPress repo all the content is free as in beer as well as free as in speech. So if you want to distribute your theme here, you have a huge audience as it’s often the first place people go for themes, but clearly, the themes are up there gratis.

On the other hand, if you want to make some money from your theme or a plugin you are free to sell your creation either on your own site,⁵ or at commercial marketplaces. Just be mindful of the license you’re offering and be clear about it what that means for your users, and what it means for you and your place in the WordPress ecosystem.

There are other marketplaces out there as well which don’t offer 100% GPL and which may be distributed in other ways but which doesn’t allow for the four freedoms outlined above.

What you can use in making your next theme or plugin for redistribution

Here’s the bit that people don’t always take into account when they’re creating for WordPress, particularly when you’re designing up your latest and greatest theme and including elements in that theme that have been built by other people.

If you want to make sure that your theme will fit nicely into the WordPress repository and as such are releasing your theme 100% GPL, before it gets approved, make sure that all the content in your theme is also fully compatible with a 100% GPL license.

This relates to images (backgrounds, icons, demo images), CSS and Javascript (bootstrap, responsive grids, or any other code someone else may have made that you want to include), and fonts (be it for headings, body text or icon fonts).  Make sure, before you submit your site for approval that the code you’re building with is licensed with a GPL or compatible license and note that Creative Commons content, even if it’s released for commercial and remix is not GPL compatible as it will likely still require attribution (even Creative Commons suggest you don’t use CC licensing for software)⁶  So, background patterns released under CC licensing may not be GPL,  free icon sets you may have downloaded might have a request for attribution and may not be free to use for redistribution.

Check first!

There are a number of resources to help you assess if your content is compatible with the GPL… Start at WordPress.org

http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Review#Bundled_Resources -

or then go to http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses

Happy Theming! If there are thoughts I’ve missed or you’ve anything to add, please chime in below!

Sources

¹ http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html
² https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
³ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
⁴ Matt Mullenweg on the GPL
⁵ Commercial GPL Theme shops
⁶ Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_apply_a_Creative_Commons_license_to_software.3F

The post WordPress Theme and Plugin Licensing appeared first on The Web Princess.

In the meantime I’ve updated the previous post by adding in Pete’s code and rezipping the new code up into the download file. If you’re interested to see how much better the CSS looks now, head over for a peek.

The post Improving Code with CSS Specificity – a revision appeared first on The Web Princess.

So, given that I’m putting together a new ‘site image’ for rolling out new sites quickly and easily (that’s a post for another day) I thought I’d make up the CSS that will put a whole lot of social media icons at my finger tips for making out social icon menus/links for my clients.

There are any number of free social icons sets out there and I found that this one that was pretty comprehensive… Thanks to Orman Clark from PremiumPixels.com for making them so freely available! I’ve added in a couple of my own in his style as well (pinterest, getglue, and viggle) just because there’s ALWAYS one you want that isn’t there!!

I don’t really want to go too deep into the nuts and bolts of how to do this, it’s more of a giveaway than a tutorial… but you can get the gist of the tut if you like from Brian. However, the method briefly is as follows …

1. Create a Menu called Social Menu (in Appearance >> Menus) (if you don’t call it this the css won’t be accurate… if you do call it something else, change the css id selectors accordingly).
2. Create External links in your menu for the social sites/profiles you want to link to.
3. Add a class to each link in the menu (Here’s a how to, just in case you’re unsure). For ease of use the classes are all the names of the social sites… facebook, twitter, linkedin – all lower case, all conjoined words… no spaces.
4. Add the Custom Menu to a widget area.

Now, I’m presuming at this point you’re using Genesis… if you’re not then you may need to tweak some of the selectors in the CSS to suit how your theme is structured. In my version I’ve tweaked the CSS that Brian provided so that you could put this Custom Menu in any widget area, Brian’s was focused on the header.

The other thing I’ve done is created a sprite of the icons, rather than having a whole lot of individual images slowing down your site with erroneous http requests… this is a.good.thing to do, you should do this with all the repeating images you use on your sites. (If you don’t mind me saying so, it’s quite pretty isn’t it (in an early 90′s webdesign kind of way)!!)

Here’s the CSS code for your stylesheet. Yes, it is very long.. there are a lot of icons to account for (actually there are two or three on that image that I don’t have css for (email, share this, add this) you can write CSS for those if you think you need it. You don’t have to use all of them, and if there are ones you definitely don’t need you can take out the relevant lines of css to no ill effect.

Custom Social Menu in the Footer Widgets

Custom Social Menu in the Primary Sidebar Widgets

Custom Social Menu in the Header

Get Straight to the Good Stuff

Finally, below is a zip file of all the above PLUS the PSD file for the sprite, just in case you need to add others images.

EDITED::

Following on from the above I was approached by Peter Wilson with an offer of alternate code that reduces the volume of CSS required to pull off exactly the same results.

I was floored.

I’ve heard Pete talk about CSS specificity before and he makes me acutely aware of a huge gap in my knowledge in the area, so I’m prevailing on him to write up a blog post about it for everyone’s benefit (I’ll let you know when it’s done). In the meantime I’m posting his revised code below, I’m sure you can see just how much cleaner and easier it will be to manage the code when this is what you’re looking at instead of the code above (I’ve left it up there for reference).

Get the Totally Revised Good Stuff

By the way, the basics of this will work on any site with custom menus even though the css in this is a bit genesis specific. You’ll just have to edit some of the code to reflect the ids in your theme.

The post Freebie Social Media Icon Menu appeared first on The Web Princess.

The post This is a Test Page appeared first on The Web Princess.

Here’s the problem.

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.

Here’s what I brought to the problem. I’m so used to using Genesis plugins that I defaulted to tricking out the Genesis responsive slider to do what we needed… BUT, this was dumb… because while it’s a great plugin in it, each sliding image is linked to a post, and in this scenario we actually only wanted images with links to wherever we direct. To get the Genesis slideshow to go where we wanted would have involved 301 redirects… inelegant, and slow. (Ok, I’m not proud of myself here. But I’m telling you so that you know that it’s OK to be an idiot about how you solve a problem so long as you are open to changing your mind, and changing the plan to do the best job in the long run (and yes, it meant working on the weekend!)).

So, I did a bit of digging to find a better solution, looking instead just for a slideshow in which you could link the images to any arbitrary URL.

Predictably, there are a LOT in the WordPress repository, so the right solution was going to take some time to get to… and while I could regale you with tales of dreadful products, some that even required installing things like Adobe Air to get going, I will, instead, keep this short(ish) and tell you what I found…

Now, Meteor Slides, out of the box isn’t the TOTAL solution, but because it is built on custom post types and because the developer has cottoned on to the fact that there are savvy devs like me (and you) out there who might want to be able to make his plugin go further, he’s built it so it’s extensible and so that we can make it be even more awesome than it already is… So we’re going to customize meteor slides with Advanced Custom Fields (a fabulous plugin).

OK, here’s the tut, I know you’ve been waiting for it…

What you’ll need.

1. WordPress installed (Genesis optional)
2. MeteorSlides plugin
3. Advanced Custom Fields plugin (trust me, you’ll thank me for this one)
4. Slideshow Images

1. Install and activate the plugins

You don’t need me to show you this bit, right?

2. Create your slideshow, and upload your slides to it.

I’m actually not going to show you how to do this here either, because you can get a ‘how to’ about Meteor slides on the plugin page, there’s even video. What I will point out here is that I have named each slide with the Heading (title) Text we are going to want to display later.

3. Place your slideshow in your site…

I did this using a Widget Area, but you can also put shows into posts, or pages, or can hard code it into your templates if you like. Now – I’ll point out here that this is the point where I tweaked the CSS code to get the pagination where I wanted it and so on, so that the slideshow is looking like I want it to before we get to customising it.

4. OK, here’s where it gets interesting!

We want to include the title of the image to the slideshow… and because the plugin dev knew we’d need to do such things he’s made it so that you can copy the meteor-slideshow.php template from the includes directory in the plugin files and save it into your theme directory. Now you can tweak the template all you like and A) your changes won’t be overwritten when the plugin is upgraded and B) there is no B.

Here is the code taken from the template that affects each individual slide, now on mine the line started at 103, but yours could be different… the important part is that last line

<?php endif; ?>

</div><!– .mslide –>

[php firstline="102" toolbar="true"]

<div class="mslide mslide-<?php echo $i; ?>">

<?php // Adds slide image with Slide URL link

if ( get_post_meta( $post->ID, "slide_url_value", $single = true ) != "" ): ?>

<a href="<?php echo get_post_meta( $post->ID, "slide_url_value", $single = true ); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_post_thumbnail( ‘featured-slide’ ); ?></a>

<?php // Adds slide image without Slide URL link

else: ?>

<?php the_post_thumbnail( ‘featured-slide’ ); ?>

<?php endif; ?>

</div><!– .mslide –>
[/php]

In the first step I just added in the normal WordPress the_title(); wrapped in header tags and placed it after the endif;.

[php firstline="117"]
<?php endif; ?>
<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>

<!– .mslide –>
[/php]

You could also wrap it in a hyperlink too (below), so that clicking the title will take you to the page the slide is linked to (I just copied the relevant code from the template where the images get linked to the custom urls we set… no sense in writing code you don’t have to!!).

[php firstline="117"]
<!–?php endif; ?–>

<h1><a href="<?php echo get_post_meta( $post->ID, "slide_url_value", $single = true ); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>

<!– .mslide –>
[/php]

Then we need to add in the CSS code to your stylesheet to make the Heading show up on your slide – you can tweak all these attributes to suit your slideshow

[css]
.meteor-slides h1 {
position: absolute;
top: 20px;
left: 25px;
width: 400px;
font-size:24px;
font-weight:300;
}
[/css]

Here’s the result.

5. Adding the Description

Now we need to add in the description… And you may have noticed that there’s no field in the slider settings that allows for such a thing. This is where Advanced Custom Fields(ACF) comes in. Because ACF can be applied to any kind of post type, and because Meteor is made out of a Custom Post type we can simply use ACF to add a custom field called Description to our slides.

1. So open up ACF and create a Field Group. I called mine Slide Descriptions and assign that field group to your Slides post type.

2. Then Add a Field. Predictably, mine is called Slide Description with a field name of ‘slide-description’. Close and save and return to your slides.

Now, when you go back to edit your slides you’ll see we have a nice shiny new field called Description. Type/paste your relevant descriptive text here.

So the only thing that remains is to then call your description in the slideshow template… which we do as follows.

[php firstline="138"]
<?php endif; ?>
<h1><a href="<?php echo get_post_meta( $post->ID, "slide_url_value", $single = true ); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>
<p><?php the_field(‘slide-description’); ?></p>

</div><!– .mslide –>
[/php]

I’ll make a note here for other Genesis users, you can achieve the same result as above using the genesis specific genesis_custom_field() tag as follows

[php firstline="140"]

<?php genesis_custom_field(‘slide-description’); ?>

[/php]

Finally, you need to edit your stylesheet to display the description how you wish.

[css]
.meteor-slides p {
background: transparent url(”) repeat top left;
top: 70px;
left: 30px;
color: #000;
margin: 0;
padding: 5px;
position: absolute;
text-align: left;
width: 400px;
}
[/css]

SO, in short.

1. Install Meteor Slides and Advanced Custom Fields
2. Create a Slideshow in Meteor Slides
3. Insert the slideshow into your theme
4. Style it to suit your theme
5. Copy the meteor-slideshow.php to your theme directory
6. Edit meteor-slideshow.php to include your title();
7. Style your Title in your CSS
8. Create a Field Group for your slides custom post type using ACF
9. Create a Description for your Slides
10. Edit meteor-slideshow.php to include your Custom Description Field
11. Edit your CSS to display the custom field as you wish.

Enjoy!

*total exaggeration.

The post Customize Meteor Slides with Advanced Custom Fields appeared first on The Web Princess.

I truly hope you have a blast, that you meet and make friends who you’ll spend the time between this WordCamp and the next tweeting, Skyping and supporting as you play together in the WordPress space.  I hope you’ll get tools to make your WordPress experience better, either as a user or as a designer/developer. I hope you’ll meet people who will help you grow your business beyond anything you could have dreamed or imagined. And, above all, I hope you’ll do everything you can to get everything you can out of this event.

I also hope you

1. Be kind to one another
2. Share what you know
3. Ask questions about what you don’t know
4. Help those who need help
5.  Participate
6. Won’t be afraid to be a n00b, we’ve all been one before
7. Talk to people
8. Listen to them too
9. Tweet the heck out of everything you hear
10. Take lots of pictures and share them with everyone
11. Note that this event took 8 months to organise and was made by your community, not an events company so empathize before you criticise, and…
12. You are part of the solution if there should ever be a problem
13. Support the speakers, they’re users like you or  me, not pro speakers, so applaud them like they’re rockstars… they are to us!
14. Make friends
15. Don’t go home with regrets – What do you want to do? Who do you want to meet? MAKE IT HAPPEN

The post WordCamp Sydney 2012 appeared first on The Web Princess.

I googled around to find a solution and in the course of all of that I discovered that we could use Gravity Forms to create Custom Post Type entries (with a handy dandy plugin) . 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.

What you’ll need:

WordPress
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types plugin – get it here.

Having installed the plugins and activated them, first you actually have to create your custom post type. I create all my custom post types using this code snippet (embarrassed to admit, I don’t know where I found it) – it’s a really easy generic way to do it… all I have to change at any time is the variables for each $type.

[php]
// ADDING CUSTOM POST TYPE
add_action(‘init’, ‘all_custom_post_types’);

function all_custom_post_types() {

$types = array(

// Pledge Items
array(‘the_type’ => ‘pledge’,
‘single’ => ‘Pledge’,
‘plural’ => ‘Pledges’));

foreach ($types as $type) {

$the_type = $type['the_type'];
$single = $type['single'];
$plural = $type['plural'];

$labels = array(
‘name’ => _x($plural, ‘post type general name’),
‘singular_name’ => _x($single, ‘post type singular name’),
‘add_new’ => _x(‘Add New’, $single),
‘add_new_item’ => __(‘Add New ‘. $single),
‘edit_item’ => __(‘Edit ‘.$single),
‘new_item’ => __(‘New ‘.$single),
‘view_item’ => __(‘View ‘.$single),
‘search_items’ => __(‘Search ‘.$plural),
‘not_found’ => __(‘No ‘.$plural.’ found’),
‘not_found_in_trash’ => __(‘No ‘.$plural.’ found in Trash’),
‘parent_item_colon’ => ”
);

$args = array(
‘labels’ => $labels,
‘public’ => true,
‘has_archive’ => true,
‘publicly_queryable’ => true,
‘show_ui’ => true,
‘query_var’ => true,
‘rewrite’ => true,
‘capability_type’ => ‘post’,
‘hierarchical’ => false,
‘menu_position’ => 5,
‘supports’ => array(‘title’,'editor’,'thumbnail’,'custom-fields’,'excerpt’)
);

register_post_type($the_type, $args);

}

}
[/php]

The next step is to create a form. Easy done with Gravity Forms.

Choose Forms from the Dashboard Menu, and predictably, create a new form. This will automatically add the Form Settings field into the form editing window. For this pledge form we pasted the text of the pledge (in HTML format) into the description section of the Form Settings Properties and in the Advanced section selected the Anti Spam Honey pot, to save us having to use a Captcha field.

The plugin also creates a new list of form options in the right hand column. The one that’s relevant to our interests in this case, is the Post Fields.

So we need to add a Title from this list of Post Fields. I actually called it Name in this case, because that’s the primary information being captured.

This will in fact, be the title of our Custom Post and calling it Name actually directs the site user to add in the correct data.

For the settings, select the relevant status (Published/Pending Review/Draft) for the ‘Post Status’ field and then the ‘Default Post Author’

Click the advanced tab, and in that section chose the post type you want the form to map to from the drop down menu.

We then need to create our other fields for the form, and map them to custom fields from the Post Fields menu.

So, click on the Custom Field button in the Post Fields box and then edit the details in that field as follows – because I hadn’t already created the custom fileds for the post types I allowed Gravity to create them, so selected New – if you already have custom fields then chose existing field and name them in the same way as your existing custom fields.

Repeat this for all of the fields you want to display. In our case we did Age, City, State, Country. Save the form.

So now we have the infrastructure we just need to create the pages to display the form and the template to display these custom post types.

I’m confident I don’t need to show you how to create a page and add in a form… Gravity makes that all incredibly easy. But we do need to create a template for our archive page… so let’s just touch on that quickly…

I’m not needing a single post-type template, so we’re only displaying an archive. I created a archive-pledge.php file, coded it up in the theme of the site and added the following code to display the loop of pledges.

[php]

<div class="block">
<ol reversed="reversed" class="pledge-item">
<?php

$args = array( ‘post_type’ => ‘pledge’, ‘posts_per_page’ => 100 );
$loop = new WP_Query( $args );
while ( $loop->have_posts() ) : $loop->the_post();

/* with sprintf() you make a "pattern" first using %s and some other possible symbols then you define them with php functions/variables */
printf( ‘<li>%s,&nbsp;%s,&nbsp;%s,&nbsp;%s,&nbsp;%s</li>’,
get_the_title(),
get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘age’, true),
get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘city’, true),
get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘state’, true),
get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘country’, true)
);

endwhile;

?>
</ol>
</div>
<!–end block–>

[/php]

If you’re interested in the finished product, you can see the pledge form here http://menofhonour.com and the finished Pledge Honour Roll, here http://oxygenfactory.com.au/pledge/

The post Using Gravity Forms to Create Custom Post Type Entries appeared first on The Web Princess.

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

[php]
//Show Template code
add_action(‘wp_head’, ‘show_template’);

function show_template() {
global $template;
print_r($template);
}
[/php]

This will print the url of the appropriate template in the head of your page so you know exactly which one you should be editing. Or, it will help you figure out where you’re going wrong in your template hierarchy if the template url being displayed is not the one you think it should be.

If you need help on the template hierarchy front, check out the Codex, and believe me, the more you play around with these things the more that codex page makes sense, I confess, it took a while to sink in, but with the codex, and that handy dandy little code above, naming and accessing templates is now smooth sailing around here.

The post Theme Template Helper appeared first on The Web Princess.

Share and Enjoy!!

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