I came across this wonderful video where Steve Jobs is delivering his commencement speech to the graduates of Stanford University in 2005. In this talk he gives out three pieces stunningly simple yet great advice by telling three stories from his life and this stories are about getting fired from Apple in 1985, life & death. Don’t miss it!

For you who do not know Steve Jobs, he was born on February 24, 1955, he is the co-founder and actual CEO of Apple Inc. He was the founder of NeXT Inc. and the former CEO of Pixar Animation Studios.

Surfing the web today I came across this great video-slide speech of David Hansson from 37Signals, who is behind great services like Basecamp and Backpack and who has created the Ruby framework Ruby on Rails. This video accompanied by a slide-show presentation and is very inspirational for people that are considering going into business (like me). I loved it and I strongly suggest you watch it too, my friends.

I have been working on a lot of WordPress freelance projects lately, that’s I why I have been lazy posting. One of the most successful one is for sure JDMNagoyaAutoParts, a showcase website for Japanese cars in Canada. I say it was a success because the project consisted on a lot of out-of-the-box theme development techniques and a lot of features that turn this site into a really flexible, scalable, time-saving CMS.

Approach

I began developing this theme with three objectives in mind – I wanted to built a powerful, easy-to-use, automated CMS with WordPress. I can proudly say I fulfilled those objectives the best way possible. This approach required a set of wonderful features to meet the objectives. I am going to share with you each of them below.

Custom Write Panels

To make things easier, I developed a set of custom write panels for the client. Can you imagine how much time would it require to use the default custom field functionality to enter something like 30 fields for a post (the cars details)? That would take forever. This is why I implemented custom write panels, so that the time-saving and easy-to-use objectives get met. However, this is not all.

Automated Image Placement

This is a great feature that does not come by default with WordPress themes. It is sometimes tricky to make it work it right. But, using this feature on your site, after several months you will realize that his has not saved you hours, but whole days and I have no shade of doubt when I say that. Here is why. My client uses about 10 images per post that go to the gallery, one of the images must go the the homepage and another in thumbnail size must go the the category. Normally, that would mean 12 more custom fields for image links. You get what I am saying, right?

Galleria Integration

Galleria is one of the best JavaScript image galleries out there, written in jQuery. I have implemented it in many WordPress driven sites and I am very pleased with its results. As I pointed out in the previews point, the gallery is completely automatic – just upload the images in the media library of the post you are writing and they are at the same time at the gallery. It cannot be easier or more time saving.

Glider Integration

Glider is a great script that makes it easy to create a sliding component in a website. I love that script and I have been using it in several other projects too. It is fully automated for sure. In the site I am talking about it show up the first image the latest post of six car categories I have set to. It is a great effect to the site, in my opinion.

Suckerfish Menu Integration

Suckerfish drop down menu is a complete XHTML/CSS drop down menu invention, except for IE6 which needs to use a small piece of JavaScript to make it work right. It is quite well known now on the web right now. What makes it special in the site is the fact that it makes use of categories and pages at the same time, it has rounded corners and I find it cool.

Open Source Works

The last but not the least, what I cannot forget to say is that this site is completely developed with and on open source. It is built on Ubuntu, designed in Inkscape, developed on Bluefish and run on WordPress, my lovely combination of Open Source Web Development tools.

Have to Say

I would love to hear what you are thinking about what you just read. Your opinion is very much appreciated.

Today I read a great article of Matt explaining the way he works over at Automattic published  at Inc.Com: It is into two versions, Matt’s version and Inc’s one. Inc seems to write your words in first person their way. That is why Matt decided to rewrite it for his blog readers. I like more the Inc version, even though Matt says: “ but it’s a little misleading“. I am bringing bits here:

***

I go out for lunch whenever I can, which fits well with my preference for no meetings before 11 AM. There’s something very personal about sharing food with someone; it’s a deeper connection than shaking hands in a boardroom. Often when I’m in town I’ll have lunch with Toni Schneider, my CEO. He and I get along super well which is one of the reasons I think the business has worked. He brings gravitas because he’s a digital native but also has great startup experience including being the CEO of Oddpost, a webmail company Yahoo acquired in 2004. Sometimes we’ll go to lunch at 12:30 and stay until 5.

***

For WordPress we’re trying to set up a community that will be around 10 to 30 years from now, one that’s independent from the whims of the market. My role is somewhat like Linus for Linux or Shuttleworth for Ubuntu, affectionately referred to as BDFL, and it’s my responsibility to meet as many users as possible and direct the software in a way that reflects their interest. Last year I probably met 5,000 or 6,000 WordPress users, about half of them who make their living from it. We want to be like Google, eBay, Amazon — they all enable other people to make far more money than the company captures. That’s ultimately what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to create a movement.

My Mom started a blog a couple of months ago. Six years into this, and we finally made it easy enough for my Mom to use. (She hates it when I say that.)

I enjoyed it very much. All I can say is: thanks Matt for giving us the pleasure.

Yes, I know I’m late, but I decided to write this post just for the sake of chronology. Not only has WP 2.8 been released with a lot of new great improvements, but it has been downloaded more than 850.000 times already. That’s amazing. As you now know, you can upgrade automatically your WP blog/site to the latest version (since 2.7) or you can download it at WP download section.

In the coming weeks and months WPlancer.com will be transforming itself. From its humble beginnings as a Professional Wordpress Freelancer’s showcase, the site will become the singular source of information on WordPress Freelancing on the Web. I have joined Baki (aka Banago) as a co-author and will be bringing you articles on how find your niche in the wonderful independent world of Freelancing.

Some things that you can look forward to:

Setting up shop as a Freelancer – How to have your own humble beginnings!

• Finding your niche in the world. You might have expertise on a certain subject or a special talent that is hard to find. We’ll show you how to take advantage of that as a Freelancer.
• Technical How-to’s. Even though WordPress is becoming an increasingly powerful CMS (Content Management System) it can also be quite technical. With articles and step-by-step tutorials we will be able to walk you through even the toughest of tasks.
• WordPress Themes. Our team will also be bringing you customizable themes for you to work with so you don’t always have to start from scratch as well as Premium themes ready to deploy for that time-pressed client.
• Much much more! We are open for suggestions and always welcome constructive criticism to make this the best WordPress Freelancing resource on the web.

To start things off though, we would like to tell you the simplest way to get started with WordPress is: JUST GET STARTED! The easiest way to begin your career as a freelancer is to just begin. By that we mean, get yourself a project, ANYTHING! Find yourself a friend in dire need of a decent website, offer to help him or her for a small fee (or even free of charge!) and then set him up with WordPress and a suitable theme and Ey Presto! You’re a Freelancer!

If you can’t find a friend with that sort of need then just create a need. Create your own WordPress site. Now there’s no need to go crazy and rush out and by the most expensive hosting and a professionally designed theme! Just set yourself up and get familiarized with the system if you aren’t already. Start writing about your specific niche and circulate your site around your interest groups. When someone asks who did your site, proudly proclaim that you did it yourself and that you’d be happy to do theirs.

It is actually quite simple to become a WordPress Freelancer, or any Freelancer for that matter! You just have to get started and get yourself noticed. Are you going to be able to charge hundreds of dollars per hour right away? No. But you will definitely get yourself on the path towards your goal, whether that is to be a full-time pro Freelancer or just some extra cash on the side.

Thanks for reading and we look forward to seeing you here!

When I needed to hack a WordPress theme and I got my hands dirty with CSS code, sometimes I came across with in-line written CSS code i.e. every CSS selector occupied only one row. I found this practice very ugly and not scannable. I was used to CSS written in the classic way where every value is written in a new line. So, I would often break the single lines into multiple ones to distinguish them better. But this did not last forever. What happened?

Not very far in the past, I came across a article about single line CSS, where Steve Smith, the designer at OrderedList.Com had written of the same topic. He had gone thought the same dilemma I went and his conclusion is no different from mine. He says:

But imagine now that you have over 200 selectors, each with a laundry-list of attributes. That’s quite a mess to search through. My issue with CSS files like these is when they get large, it becomes very difficult to scan the document for a particular selector. They’re all separated by loads of attribute and value pairs. So what if we took out that separation, and put each selector, and it’s attributes and values all on the same line?

Let’s look at a live example taken from a site I have been developing lately. This is the way the code would look like if it was coded classically.

h1{
float: left;
width: 120px;
height: 40px;
margin-top: 35px;
}
h1 span{
display: none;
}
h2 {
padding: 0 0 15px 0;
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size:18px;
line-height: 20px;
color: #159089;
font-weight:200;}
h2 a {
color: #159089
}
h3 {
padding: 0 0 15px 0;
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size:16px;
line-height: 18px;
color: #159089;
font-weight:200;
}
h4 {
font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size:22px;
line-height: 24px;
color: #d21d1d;
font-weight:500;
text-align:left;
}
h5 {
padding: 10px 0 0 0;
font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size:16px;
line-height: 19px;
color: #4b4141;
font-weight:500;
text-align:left;
}

And this is actual code I have coded of the site using the single line method.

h1{ float: left; width: 120px; height: 40px; margin-top: 35px;}
h1 span{ display: none; }
h2 { padding: 0 0 15px 0; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:18px; line-height: 20px; color: #159089; font-weight:200;}
h2 a { color: #159089 }
h3 { padding: 0 0 15px 0; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:16px; line-height: 18px; color: #159089; font-weight:200;}
h4 { font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:22px; line-height: 24px; color: #d21d1d; font-weight:500; text-align:left;}
h5 { padding: 10px 0 0 0; font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:16px; line-height: 19px; color:#4b4141; font-weight:500; text-align:left;}

Note the length of the first sample and keep in mind that this is only less than 5% of all the CSS code I wrote for that site. Can you imagine how long the file would be if it weren’t in a single line and how difficult it would be to look for a certain selector to edit? You would spend more time browsing up and down thought the code rather than actually writing or editing it. That is why I chose to write all my CSS code in single line selectors method, so that I can speed up my work and spend less time looking for selectors in a super-long CSS file.

So, why not give it a try yourself? I think it is worth trying and I strongly hope you will get to love it as I do now. What do you think?

WordPress themes are being a great online resource for everybody to use, modify and share. This applies to GPL themes only though. However, in order to offer our online neighbors good themes that they will be happy using, theme developers, including me, should take care of some peculiar aspects in themes such as the use of CSS code. Along with WordPress theme evolution, some default CSS code needs to be included in very theme so that certain in-built features work well. This is mostly the case of images, but not only.

In WordPress 2.5 several classes for aligning images and block elements like DIV, P, TABLE etc. were introduced.Every theme should have these CSS classes – you can alter the style if need – in its style.css. The same classes are used to align images that have a caption, introduced in WordPress 2.6. Three additional CSS classes are needed for the captions, together the alignment and caption classes are:

.aligncenter, div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
.alignleft {
float: left;
}
.alignright {
float: right;
}
.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
/* optional rounded corners for browsers that support it */
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}
.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}
.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}

Additionally, there are a few more WordPress CSS classes that you may optionally wish to style because WordPress generates them by default. I make use of most of them in my themes and I suggest very body uses them in their themes. There they are:

.categories {...}
.cat-item {...}
.current-cat {...}
.current-cat-parent {...}
.pagenav {...}
.page_item {..}
.current_page_item {..}
.current_page_parent {..}
.widget {...}
.widget_text {..}
.blogroll {...}
.linkcat{...}

Did you find this information helpful? Do you have anything else to add? Your opinion is very much appreciated.