Codepal » Tutorials

WordPress Year in Review: The Best Tutorials of 2011

Sumeet — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:43:16 +0000

The following round up of tutorials is my latest article written for WPTuts+. It contains the following sections of tutorials:

Theme Development Related Tutorials
Plugins Related
WordPress Security Related
Data Analysis
Troubleshooting and Debugging WordPress
WordPress Post Management Related
Looking forward to 2012

Here is a preview of the article.

Theme Development Related

Deploy Your WordPress Blog to the Cloud

For the last decade, hosting a large scale web application has been a daunting task, reserved only for experts. Not anymore; when Amazon opened its server architecture, everything changed. Computer hardware moved to the cloud, and became available to any and all developers. In this tutorial, we will install WordPress in the cloud.

Tutorial Link

WordPress Security Related

Quick Tip: Backing Up Your Blog with VaultPress

As with almost every other web app, WordPress stores information in a database. There’s always a chance that your data could be lost or corrupted, and it’s wise to have a solid backup strategy in place. This is where VaultPress enters the scene to save the day, providing complete backup and security for your WordPress site.

Tutorial Link

Check out the complete list of the best tutorials of 2011 by visiting my latest article at WPTuts+. Also do leave your suggestions and feed backs. Would love to know what kind of tutorials and round ups you would like to read in the future.

Quick Tip: Backing Up Your Blog with VaultPress

Sumeet — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 19:21:21 +0000

Introduction

VaultPress is the latest product from Automattic (the creators of WordPress.com) which provides around the clock, complete backup of your WordPress blog. It performs a synchronization of every post, comment, media file, revision and dashboard setting across at least two separate cloud services.

If that is not enough, they provide continuous security, disaster recovery and also help you in the migration of your blog to a new host. All this sounds interesting, and if you want to start backing up and securing your blog right away, then this Quick Tip will have you set up in five minutes!.

This quick tip is one of my tutorials at WPTuts+ Check out the complete tutorial here.

40+ Stunning WordPress Portfolio Themes

Sumeet — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 06:41:25 +0000

This is my first round up ever. What better way to write my first round up post than to display a list of the best WordPress themes out there for portfolio purposes. This list consists of the most stunning WordPress portfolio themes both free and premium ones. This is also my latest post at WPTuts+

Boldly

Boldly is a beautiful theme for portfolio with an amazing slider at the top. It has all the qualities of a premium theme and has loads of customization options at the backend.
Preview | Download

Wordfolio

Wordfolio is an award winning wordpress portfolio theme. It has this unique innovative concept of displaying the featured work, which impresses the visitor within seconds. It’s totally worth the price.
Preview | Buy

To check out the remaining awesome 38 themes and their download links, visit my latest post at WPTuts+. Also do leave your suggestions and feed backs. Would love to know what kind of tutorials and round ups you would like to read in the future.

Quick Tip: Using Shortcodes in Theme Development

Sumeet — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 16:20:07 +0000

Envato just launched their latest tuts+ site WPTuts+. This site is completely dedicated to wordpress and I am sure I will be writing many tutorials there in the future . This is one of the quick tips I wrote for WPTuts+ which briefly explains how you can use the powerful shortcodes feature provided by WordPress.

Introduction

Shortcodes have many benefits if used properly in theme files. If you are familiar with preprocessor macros in C / C ++, then shortcodes can serve a somewhat similar function in WordPress. The basic purpose of using a shortcode is to replace the placeholder with your own custom piece of HTML code when the server sends the page to the client side. The steps involved in creation and implementation of shortcodes are as follows…

You can check out the complete quick tip at the new WPTuts+ site . Do share your comments and views regarding this quick tip and also any suggestions for tutorials you would like to read .

Create a Multi-Layout Portfolio with WordPress

Sumeet — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:12:20 +0000

My latest tutorial for NetTuts discusses about how we can use WordPress as a CMS and flex it to our needs to create a stunning portfolio with multiple layouts. In this tutorial, we are going to extensively use powerful features of WordPress, such as custom posts, custom taxonomies, and we’ll also write a function to fetch our own custom excerpts. This is what we are going to create

The multi-layout theme will function in such a way that the user can select between a grid and list layout.This is the basic design of how our portfolio site will appear in grid mode:

Once the user clicks on the list view control, the whole layout will smoothly change to a list view which will contain the title of the project, the tags associated with it, and a short description.

Check out the complete tutorial on Nettuts and get started on creating that cool portfolio you always wanted! Do share your creations, suggestions with us

Integrating Cloud Zoom with WP e-Commerce Gold Cart Gallery

Sumeet — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 09:56:43 +0000

Update 30th April, 2011: The WP e-Commerce Gold Cart Plugin got updated to a new version (v2.9.1). They did some changes in the gallery display method. Hence, I had to modify the code I posted earlier, so that it can work with the updated version of the Gold Cart Gallery.:

The Project

This project of mine required a gallery in the single product page and also the Cloud Zoom plugin enabled such that the users can have a zoomed view of the product's main image just by hovering over the image. The Gold Cart plugin for WP e-Commerce enabled the Gallery option but it provides the thickbox feature as the default option for previewing images.

The Problem

Even though the gallery was displaying the thumbnails perfectly well but there was some problem with it because after clicking on the thumbnail of the images in the gallery, the main product image was not being replaced. The Cloud Zoom plugin was activated on the main image of the product and without the option of the image being replaced by the images in the gallery, the whole point of implementing the gallery was pointless.

The Solution

So after doing a bit of research and finding no solution to replace the main image with the image being clicked in the gallery, I was forced to find another solution to the problem. Cloud Zoom is an awesome plugin and luckily it provides an option of implementing a gallery too, by just adding some classes and a complex rel attribute for the hyprlink tags of the images. This can be done in the following manner:

The details on the arguments for the Cloud Zoom plugin are provided here.

Now from the above example the main points to note are as follows:

Class cloud-zoom in the main image's hyperlink tag.
The href attribute of the hyperlink tag contains the link to the larger version of the main image.
The rel attribute in the main image hyper link which provides the primary arguments for the plugin, which defines how the plugin will work.
The hyperlink tag encloses the smaller version of the product main image.
The class cloud-zoom-gallery in the hyperlink tag for the gallery thumbnails.
The href attribute of the hyperlink tag contains the link to the larger version of the image.
The arguments in the rel attribute for the hyperlink tag in the thumbnail gallery. It contains the id of the main image hyperlink, the link to the small version of the image.
The gallery hyperlinks enclose the tiny thumbnail images of the gallery.

Hence, we basically need three versions of the images to implement the gallery.

Large Version to enable zoom: Provided by the Gold Cart plugin itself.
Medium version which is supposed to be the size of the main image for the single product page: We have to fetch from the database.
Finally, the small tiny thumbnails for the gallery: Provided by the Gold Cart Plugin itself.

Now I am going to describe how to integrate this with the Gold Cart plugin and the required hack. First of all, after installing the Gold Cart Plugin, make sure that you have uploaded some images for the product and enabled the gallery in the settings. Also disable the lightbox feature.

After that make sure that the gallery is being displayed in the single product's page. Now lets do some code modification. Make sure you have backed up everything, specially the gold cart plugin before proceeding. Edit the gold_shopping_cart.php file and search for the function to display the gallery i.e. gold_shpcrt_display_gallery. In this function, go to the section which displays the gallery for versions above 3.8. This should start from the line number 308 (if you haven’t done any modifications to the code already). This is the original version of the code which displays the gallery:

$output = '';
$product_name = get_the_title( $product_id );
$output .= "";
$args = array(
	'post_type'      => 'attachment',
	'post_parent'    => $product_id,
	'post_mime_type' => 'image',
	'orderby'        => 'menu_order',
	'order'          => 'ASC',
	'numberposts'    => -1
);
$attachments = get_posts($args);
$featured_img = get_post_meta($product_id, '_thumbnail_id');
$thumbnails = array();
if ($attachments) {
	foreach ($attachments as $post) {
		setup_postdata($post);
		$link = wp_get_attachment_link( $post->ID, 'gold-thumbnails' );
		$size = is_single() ? 'medium-single-product' : 'product-thumbnails';
		$preview_link = wp_get_attachment_image_src( $post->ID, $size);
		$link = str_replace( 'a href' , 'a rev="' . $preview_link[0] . '" class="thickbox" rel="' . $product_name . '" href' , $link );

		// always display the featured thumbnail first
		if ( in_array( $post->ID, $featured_img ) )
			array_unshift( $thumbnails, $link );
		else
			$thumbnails[] = $link;
	}
}
$output .= implode( "\n", $thumbnails );
$output .= "";
wp_reset_query();

Now this is the modified version of the above code:

$output = '';
$product_name = get_the_title( $product_id );
$output .= "";
$args = array(
	'post_type'      => 'attachment',
	'post_parent'    => $product_id,
	'post_mime_type' => 'image',
	'orderby'        => 'menu_order',
	'order'          => 'ASC',
	'numberposts'    => -1
);
$attachments = get_posts($args);
$featured_img = get_post_meta($product_id, '_thumbnail_id');
$thumbnails = array();
if ($attachments) {
	foreach ($attachments as $post) {
		setup_postdata($post);
		$link = wp_get_attachment_link( $post->ID, 'gold-thumbnails' );
		$size = is_single() ? 'medium-single-product' : 'product-thumbnails';
		$preview_link = wp_get_attachment_image_src( $post->ID, $size);
		// ORIGNIAL $link to Represent gallery images with thickbox
		//$link = str_replace( 'a href' , 'a rev="' . $preview_link[0] . '" class="thickbox" rel="' . $product_name . '" href' , $link );

		// Fetching Medium Image and modifying $link w.r.t the Cloud Zoom jQuery Plugin options to display gallery
		$link = str_replace('attachment-gold-thumbnails','',$link); // removing the class from the img tag because its causing a conflict with the cloud zoom plugin
		$small_image = wp_get_attachment_image_src( $post->ID, array(337,437)); // returns an array
		$rel_options = "useZoom: 'zoom1', smallImage: '".$small_image[0]."'";
		$link = str_replace( 'a href' , 'a rev="' . $preview_link[0] . '" class="cloud-zoom-gallery" rel="' . $rel_options . '" href' , $link );					

		// always display the featured thumbnail first
		if ( in_array( $post->ID, $featured_img ) )
			array_unshift( $thumbnails, $link );
		else
			$thumbnails[] = $link;
	}
}
$output .= implode( "\n", $thumbnails ); // Imploding Array element as list items
$output .= ""; // Ending list
wp_reset_query();

Now you can see from the above code that all we need to do is fetch a smaller version of the image (to display in the main image section) and modify the rel attributes such that the cloud zoom plugin activates the gallery feature too.

To enable the Cloud Zoom feature, edit the wpsc-single_product.php and modify the code where the image is displayed in a hyerplink tag. You can search it by the class product_image. You need to modify the rel attribute and add an id and a class to the hyperlink enclosing the image.


                       " alt="" title="" src=""/>

This is all you need to do to integrate the Cloud Zoom jQuery plugin with the WP e-Commerce Gold Cart Plugin's gallery. Also if you want to enable the jCarousel jQuery plugin on the gallery images, then you need to enclose the gallery hyperlink tags in list elements. For this you need to modify the code slightly such that the hyperlink tags are enclosed in an unordered list.

$output = '';
$product_name = get_the_title( $product_id );
$output .= ""; // Adding li tag to start implode array elements as list items
$args = array(
	'post_type'      => 'attachment',
	'post_parent'    => $product_id,
	'post_mime_type' => 'image',
	'orderby'        => 'menu_order',
	'order'          => 'ASC',
	'numberposts'    => -1
);
$attachments = get_posts($args);
$featured_img = get_post_meta($product_id, '_thumbnail_id');
$thumbnails = array();
if ($attachments) {
	foreach ($attachments as $post) {
		setup_postdata($post);
		$link = wp_get_attachment_link( $post->ID, 'gold-thumbnails' );
		$size = is_single() ? 'medium-single-product' : 'product-thumbnails';
		$preview_link = wp_get_attachment_image_src( $post->ID, $size);
		// ORIGNIAL $link to Represent gallery images with thickbox
		//$link = str_replace( 'a href' , 'a rev="' . $preview_link[0] . '" class="thickbox" rel="' . $product_name . '" href' , $link );

		// Fetching Medium Image and modifying $link w.r.t the Cloud Zoom jQuery Plugin options to display gallery
		$link = str_replace('attachment-gold-thumbnails','',$link); // removing the class from the img tag because its causing a conflict with the cloud zoom plugin
		$small_image = wp_get_attachment_image_src( $post->ID, array(337,437)); // returns an array
		$rel_options = "useZoom: 'zoom1', smallImage: '".$small_image[0]."'";
		$link = str_replace( 'a href' , 'a rev="' . $preview_link[0] . '" class="cloud-zoom-gallery" rel="' . $rel_options . '" href' , $link );					

		// always display the featured thumbnail first
		if ( in_array( $post->ID, $featured_img ) )
			array_unshift( $thumbnails, $link );
		else
			$thumbnails[] = $link;
	}
}
$output .= implode( "
", $thumbnails ); // Imploding Array element as list items
$output .= ""; // Ending list
wp_reset_query();

Conclusion

This method works pretty well for integrating the Cloud Zoom plugin with the WP e-Commerce Gold Cart gallery. But one drawback is that we are modifying the actual contents of the gold cart plugin and all the changes will be lost the day we update the WP e-Commerce gold cart plugin. Hence, I will try to make a plugin which enables this functionality rather than hard coding it in the plugin files.

Disclaimer: The above tutorial is meant to enable the Cloud Zoom jQuery plugin with the WP e-Commerce Gold Cart Gallery. I am not responsible if anything goes wrong and the shopping cart does not behave in the expected way. Please take proper backups before messing with any code of the theme or the plugin files.

How to Create a FAQ Page with WordPress and Custom Post Types

Sumeet — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 18:46:52 +0000

I wrote a tutorial for NetTuts about how to use the ever popular Blogging/CMS platform WordPress, to create a dedicated FAQ section in the back-end using ‘Custom Post Types’. Then fetch those custom post types and display in the front end in a spiced up manner using jQuery and CSS3.
This is what the end product will look like.

When the user clicks on any of the FAQs, the page will scroll down automatically to the respective answer and highlight it.

Check out the complete tutorial on Nettuts and create some cool, interactive FAQs page for your own site. Do share your creations with us

Creating a Neon Blink Effect for your Forms using CSS3 and jQuery

Rakesh — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 17:07:00 +0000

Well thanks to the bright new kid on the block, CSS3, spruced up with a bit of jQuery, I will show you how to build a nifty effect to enhance your forms.

Am sure that this cool Neon blink effects in forms are going to be useful for a lot of purposes so don’t miss my tutorial on 1stWebDesigner.com.

In this tutorial, we have made use of @-webkit-keyframes which works only in browsers using the Webkit layout engine like Chrome and Safari. For browsers like Firefox and Opera, where there is no alternative, we will have to gracefully degrade the effect, which in this case will be just a box-shadow on focus. Internet Explorer ( till version 8 ) cannot render most of what we will learn here, but IE 9 does seem to be very promising from what I’ve seen in the recent platform preview.

How to Create a Cool Slide Out Panel with CSS3 only

Sumeet — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 11:43:47 +0000

I wrote a tutorial for 1stwebdesigner.com It is about how to use CSS3 to achieve goals which were only possible using javascript libraries like jQuery and Mootools. In this tutorial, we create a slide out subscribe panel.

Once the viewer hovers over the subscribe button on the top right hand corner, the whole hidden panel will come sliding down with a very smooth animation effect revealing the subscribing options to the visitor. All of this will be done by just using CSS3.

Don’t miss my tutorial on 1stWebDesigner.com if you want to bypass using javascript to achieve this cool sliding effect.

The ‘Select’ Problem After Using jqTransform and its Solution

Sumeet — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:33:08 +0000

The Project

In this recent project of mine, I was required to construct a landing page. In this landing page, there would be a list of languages and after the user selects any particular language, the homepage of the site would open automatically in the respective selected language. It was also required to style the select list box in the way it was given in the design of the landing page. So I opted for the jqTransform jQuery plug-in, which I used once to style some forms. jqTransform is very nice plug-in to customize the forms in a very easy way and the end product is no doubt beautiful. But in this case, it became a minor speed breaker to my progress.

The Problem

The drop down list control of the html form contains the ‘select’ tags which enclose the various ‘option’ tags. Here is a form which I am using in this tutorial to explain the problem:


	Select Box Without jqTransform
	
		City

What jqTransform does is, it scans the whole ‘select’ tag and creates an unordered list containing hyper-links of the options in the drop-down-list. It then hides the original ‘select’ tag and its content.


	Select box with jqTransform and normal select change method
	
		Name
		
			
				Batman
				
			
                        
				Batman
				Robin
				Superman
				Spiderman

This does not create a problem when we use the ‘select’ tag generally for selecting a particular value and then performing the form submission by using a submit button. It creates a problem when we want to perform some function when the value of the drop down list is changed.

This is normally achieved in javascript by using the ‘change’ method of the select control. The ‘change’ method captures the value-change event and we can access the value selected by the user in the following manner.

// Capturing the change event of the Non-Transformed Select Box.
$("#box-city select").change(function(){
	var value= $(this).val();
    alert("Value Selected = "+value);
});

But after using the jqTransform plugin, the ‘select’ tag is no more there to apply the change method on.

The Solution

The solution to this, is a very simple one. We can simulate the change event for the jqTransformed drop down list by applying a click function to the hyper-link element within the unordered list. Then we can have the selected value by accessing the text of the span tag where the selected element is set or displayed.

// Capturing the change event of the Transformed Select Box using the modified method of capturing the value change event.
$("#box-age div.jqTransformSelectWrapper ul li a").click(function(){
	var value= $("#box-age div.jqTransformSelectWrapper span").text()
	alert("Value Selected = "+value);
	return false; //prevent default browser action
});

Conclusion

This is one way of simulating the change function for drop-down-list boxes after using jqTransform to customize them. The other option is to modify the jqTransform plugin itself to properly access the onChange event of the ‘Select’ boxes. I hope the jqTransform plug-in developers can fix this problem in their next release of the plug-in. Though this is not a very important or common bug but I do hope that this was of some help.