Nur Ahmad Furlong

Tag: Wordpress

  • My First WordPress Tut on wptutsplus.com – WordPress Training Wheels

    I’ve been teaching WordPress theme development for the past few years, not an extremely advanced curriculum, but the nuts and bolts. Yesterday I had my first tutorial published on envato networks new wptutsplus.com site. It’s great to see your work published in recogonised spaces. I hope to roll out at least another 8 – 10 of these tuts covering all the basic to intermediate aspects of building basic WordPress themes from scratch.

    One of the important aspects of the course is the Learning theme which I’ve labelled Training Wheels. It builds from a simple HTML template, and over the next few lessons will grow to contain all the major functions and templates required of a fully fledged theme. The Template will be fully commented to facilitate a slow transition into understanding the purpose of each WordPress function added to the HTML.

    If you’ve got HTML skills and have been wanting to learn WordPress Theme development this is gonna be just the tutorial series you’ve been looking for. I personally struggled from the beginning with tuts that merely dump huge chunks of code on you and say, “Paste Here”. This is going to be a step by step guide.

    I’m also working on setting up my offline WordPress Theme Development course located at wpbedouine.com.

  • New WordPress site for 2010 WorldCup Fan Accommodation

    I’ve hardly slept over the last week bashing my fingers against my keyboard trying to get this site out as quickly as possible. The site is called fani.am, (That’s Fan i am), which is a 2010 World Cup Accommodation site. This one really challenged me with some of the intricate post associations I had to string together, and with the addition of a couple of extra plugins to add some key features I’m really excited about this one.

    Take a quick look Design and I’ll explain a bit about what’s under the hood of this one.

    Homepage of the fani.am fan accommodation site
    Homepage of the fani.am fan accommodation site

    I really enjoyed designing this one and also trying out a few CSS3 features like rounded corners & Text Shadows. IE6 users, there’s a special treat for you as well. 🙂

    Custom Fields

    The most hectic part of this site by far was the wordpress wrangling which takes place in the background. Using loads of WordPress custom fields, some for data and some for associating certain post types like matches, with accommodations and with the teams playing the matches, we were able to weave separate categories of posts into an intuitive mixture of information. Custom field have been managed entirely by the flutter plugin’s write panels, which helped make this site extremely easy for novice user to populate with content.

    Fan i am Team Facts sidebar widget
    Fan i am Team Facts sidebar widget

    Conditional Statements

    Using WordPress conditional statements, as well as some conditional Custom field statements we were able to easily pull the correct set of posts for each team, venue or accommodation. The sidebar also gets populated with related widgets displaying content for each type of page you arrive on.

    Picture 71
    Associated Matches, accommodations & attractions

    Dealing with images

    I was a little disappointed about the current state of the built-in WordPress gallery system. You’re still not able to easily pull individual images based on their order in the gallery and can only really pull an entire gallery. The attached image plugin helped pull the first gallery image which was great. Flutter’s image management and upload functionality was ok but could do with the auto generation of thumbs & other sizes which the built in WordPress image uploading performs. Flutter’s image crop & resize functionality just doesn’t work at the moment, though the rest of it’s functionality, mainly write panels played a hige role in this website’s configuration.

    This site relies heavily on plugins for various features, which is one of the great things about WordPress. I know some geeky developers who swear they never use plugins, and that’s fine with me, though I or one love the fact that so much freely available functionality is just lying around ready to take advantage of.

    Plugins I’ve used & abused Include:

    • Flutter – custom write panels
    • Live Coundown Timer – counting down time to the Kickoff
    • My Favourite Posts – allows user to add their favourite accommodations to a sidebar bucket
    • Send to a Friend
    • Tweet News – Footer feed of tweets about FIFA
    • Google News – feed of news about the world cup from google
    • Twitter Widget Pro – Worked better than Twitter Tools
    • IE PNG fix – no need to fiddle with code
    • Sidebar Login – check the login panel top right
    • Cforms II – contact & booking forms
    • DISQUS – Advanced commenting system
    • WP Table Reloaded – Check the Match Schedule (quick & easy manageable tables)

    So far it’s been a really great project and Phase 2 promises to include some even more exciting social media additions. What do you think of this one?

  • WordPress Meetup – 28 September 09 – Bandwidth Barn

    For way too long I’ve been talking to alot of the WordPress guys in Cape Town about organising the next WPCPT meetup, but it seems everyone is completely snowed under and we’ve put it off for more than 8 months now. So Joe of Frogfoot networks has given us a jump start and gotten the ball rolling.

    The Event will take place at the Bandwidth Barn in Buitengracht street in Cape Town’s CBD.

    Date: 28 September 2009

    Time: 16:30

    Talks: offer to speak

    • Talk about the next WordCamp in SA
    • The evolution of BuddyPress & Child Themes – Ashley Shaw
    • WordPress & SEO – Rafiq Phillips
    • Intro to WordPress Coding – Nur (depends on interest)

    Still Need:

    • Projector
    • More speakers
    • Any sponsors (snacks etc)
    • Ideas for talks & activities
    • Help spreading the word

    We know there’s very little time left so we’re hoping you’ll all pitch in with the promotion over the next few days and also attend yourselves. Loads ave been happening in the WordPress world over the last year and there’s tons to talk about so it looks like it’s gonna be a real fin event once again.

    Add your name to the wiki – http://wiki.geekdinner.org.za/wiki/WordPress.org.za_Meetup_4

    Come join the fun and meet the community, have your say and maybe learn a thing or 2.

  • Latest Work here at nomad-one.com

    The last few months have been really hectic for me as I posted here before with a few setbacks but I’m glad to say I’ve bounced back and things have returned to normal. I’ve completed a few nice little WordPress design projects all with their own interesting twists to them. I’m always amazed at just how many really great WordPress plugins exist to fill in the extra functionality needed.

    www.strictlyhalaal.com

    strictly-halaalc2a0c2a0live-the-lifestyle_1238479170803

    The first of them, a site which hasn’t launched yet but is pretty much completed is www.strictlyhalaal.com, which serves as a listing/directory site for “halaal” certified businesses.

    Strictlyhalaal.com uses a few great free plugins:

    Next up is Learningcurve.co.za

    learning-curve_1238479659317

    Learning Curve is a dedicated education technology supplier, representing premium brands such as Adobe, Apple, Dell, Autodesk and Toonboom. This was the first time I have setup an e-commerce website using WordPress and proved to be quite a challenge to begin with but also turned out to be a really valuable learning experience, no pun intended.

    To power the e-commerce side fo things I used the wp-ecommerce plugin, which is a really powerful yet free plugin system allowing you to turn your WordPress site into an online store in a few clicks. Customizing the online store’s appearance was a bit of a mission for starters but it’s worth learning the ins & outs of this plugin, developed by the boys at www.instinct.co.nz.

    I can’t unfortunately divulge the sales figures for the first 2 months, but lets just say I was more than pleasantly surprised. It’s great to see your work directly benefiting your client’s bottom line, especially immediately after it’s implementation.

    Last but not least is Duomarketing.co.za

    duo-marketingc2a0c2a0some-things-work-better-together_1238479702156

    This is the first time I make use of a Woo Theme to develop a client site. I’m very impressed with what the guys at WooThemes are up to, and even more so when I took a little lookie under the hood of one of their themes. The theme options part is really well done, some of the code still boggles my mind a bit, but it allows the user to easily switch stylesheets for a change of colour and style.

    The widgetized areas on the homepage works out quite well also allowing you to add pages into certain block of the homepage layout. The cost of the premium theme definitely adds value to the mix as it allows the client to aquire some really great features for a fraction of the cost of cutom development.

  • Skye News WordPress Theme by Elevate & nomad-one

    Earlier in the year, a well known premium wordpress theme developer(Nathan Rice) announced that he would be embarking on an open source wordpress theme project and that he was looking for designers who wanted to collaborate with him. Of course as a wordpress nut I jumped at the opportunity and offered my services.

    I whipped up a this quick design and zipped it through to him a little later. Since then Nathan has been quietly busy getting his ducks in a row with what has now launched as www.elevatethemes.com, a freemium theme project.

    The design I sent Nathan has formed the basis for what was released as the first elevate theme called Skye News. Nathan has significantly simplified the design, but has packed some really great features into the coding of this new release which can be demo’ed here.

    I think what I’m going to attempt is to download this baby and try to style it to look a little closer to my original design which I will then send to Nathan to add to elevate themes as a Skye News alternative.

    Go check out elevate themes yourself and if you’re a bit of a theme design why not chip and and send some designs of your own or offer to code up someone else’s design?

    Check out www.elevatethemes.com and gime a shout if you like the theme and need some theme customization.

  • WPREMIX theme gets a well deserved overhaul

    A few weeks ago you may have noticed a very disgruntled post on my blog regarding a theme I purchased. The Theme is called WPremix and since my post a number of developments have taken place.

    Firstly R. Bhavesh, the theme developer responded to my post and refunded my purchase. We then started a discussion regarding my gripe, that being the wordpress templates not being editable through the admin post/page edit interface.

    I recommended Bhavesh use custom fields but I agree as he said, that it would still be a bit of a mission for the average user to edit many custom fields for each template.

    Bhavesh subsequently contracted a plugin developer to fix up the template editor he had initially sold along with the plugin. After a few rounds of Beta testing, which I was part of it seems the new WP Remix 2.0 is strides ahead of version on and truly a great tool for turning wordpress into a customisable CMS.

    wpremix

    One of the downsides is the styling of the new version, though changeable through various theme options is a little less slick than before, though that’s not too much of a problem for someone with a little CSS knowledge. WP Remix is a great developer tool for web designers working with wordpress and wanting to rapidly develop custom sites for their clients.

    The new version comes with even more templates, 50 I think which are coded to comply with web standards and browser differences.

    WP Remix 2.0 – the only theme on the net that offers WYSIWYG page template editing.

    Over 50 page templates to choose from. Web standards, Colorschemes, Usability, grid, typography… you ask for it, it has all in it!

    g1  h1-blue   home4

    in-12    home2

    Only one problem for me is my AVG anti-virus keeps recognising the advanced plugin editor file as a virus and either deletes is or puts it into my virus vault. Something Bhavesh has not managed to resolve yet. I believe it has been tested using Kaspersky and is free of viruses, but some part of the coding seems to show up suspicious by AVG Free.

    I have a new project which I think this theme would be perfect for and will post up a link once it’s done for testing and showcase purposes.

    Bhavesh has also promised all add-ons and additional templates will be provided for free to buyers. So far so good and I think this project is gonna be one to watch as it grows.

    I’d love to see this level of theme templating mixed with Woothemes’ slick coolness.