East Bay WP Meetup

Jan 2012 Meetup Slides: Themes for Developers

Sallie Goetsch — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:47:42 +0000

Anca Mosoiu of Tech Liminal gave us an overview of how WordPress themes work, including the wp_posts table, the template hierarchy, the functions.php file, and the principles of creating a child theme. It was a lot to squeeze into 90 minutes, so you’ll want to go over the slides here.

Dec 2011 Slides: How to Save Your Hacked WordPress Site

Sallie Goetsch — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 22:53:44 +0000

Adria Richards gave a great presentation on what to do if your site has already been hacked. I’m embedding the slides here, but you should read her complete post, because it contains links to other resources mentioned in the presentation.

December 2011 Meetup Slides: Securing WordPress

Sallie Goetsch — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 18:33:52 +0000

Bill Davis led us through the basics of protecting WordPress sites from malware and other attacks.

November 2011 – WordPress 3.3 Feature Tour

Sallie Goetsch — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 19:38:30 +0000

At the time of this meetup, WordPress 3.3 was in Beta 2. As I upload the slides, it’s reached RC1, so it may well be available by the end of the year.

For some features I missed in the slideshow, see Aaron Brazell’s post, 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 3.3.

October 2011 Meetup Slides: Galleries, Slideshows & Photoblogging

Sallie Goetsch — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 03:55:52 +0000

Links to these posts are in the Handout.

October 2011 Meetup Handout: Themes & Plugins for Slideshows, Galleries, and Photoblogging

Sallie Goetsch — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 18:27:09 +0000

Gallery Plugins

jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries

Makes the native WordPress galleries use a lightbox script called ColorBox to display the fullsize images.

Extremely simple, but this plus the built-in (a.k.a. native) galleries in WordPress is enough for many purposes. See for example Around the World in 180 Days. (For a tutorial on using the native galleries in WordPress, see this post.)

Photonic

Photonic lets you use the WordPress gallery shortcode and ramps it up with a lot of added functionality. It adds support for several new parameters to enhance your galleries. It supports Flickr photos, Photosets, Galleries and Collections, along with Picasa photos and albums.

Used to produce a slideshow with a native gallery on Sallie’s personal blog.

Used to embed Picasa photos on the Congregation Beth Israel website.

Requires a Flickr API Key (easy to get). Also, you need to be sure to get your Flickr ID from http://idgettr.com/ and use that, not your Flickr username. Using it to display Stefan’s Flickr photos of me on my personal blog.

Awesome Flickr Gallery

Warning! Does not play nicely with Multi-site. (Or conflicts with something I have on my multi-site install, even if that isn’t activated.)

Installed a test link to my anemic Flickr galleries on the VQS Test Site. Note that even if you use the gallery post format with Picasa and Flickr, they don’t display as WordPress galleries (with a thumbnail and list of photos).

NextGEN Gallery

This is probably the biggest and most popular gallery plugin for WordPress. It has about a billion add-ons. I never got along with it. Weirdly, the plugin’s home page still uses Kubrick.

Portfolio Slideshow

Easily add a clean and simple javascript slideshow to your site. The slideshow integrates well into any design, supports fluid-width themes, and offers lots of options for power users, too.

Recommended by Steve Caramia.

Mouseover Gallery

Shows thumbnails on the right and the main image on the left: when you mouse over a thumbnail, it displays that image in the main image area. Ron Richardson installed it for his client Monica Mroz.

Bookmarks:

WordPress+gallery

Slideshow and Slider Plugins

WP Supersized

Rotates background images for your whole site or just a single page or post, automatically adjusting them to fill the browser screen. The plugin author’s demo site will make you crazy, because there’s another slideshow (in the header) and also a rotating text box, which is way too much movement. Pretty cool plugin, though. Requires keeping your background slides in a special folder, so you need FTP.

WP-Cycle

Dead-simple photo rotator. You can link photos manually to a URL. Used here in the Office Thieves page.

Easing Slider

Another dead-simple slider. Not many options, but easy, good-looking, and your clients can use it.

Flex Slider

One of the few responsive sliders out there. There’s a WordPress Plugin, Flex Slider for WP Rotator. It requires WP Rotator, which itself requires a custom post type or some other tinkering with your functions.php file. Not the most user-friendly thing on the planet. More should come along soon.

Header Image Slider

Uses Nivo Slider to create a slider of your header images. Adds this option to Custom Headers under Appearance. Not recommended for use with WP Supersized, unless you want your site visitors to get dizzy.

Featured Content Gallery

The standard plugin for showcasing your posts visually. Shows featured images, captions, post titles, and links to posts.

SSP Director Tools

Formerly SlidePress, this is the WordPress plugin for SlideShow Pro Director, a cool tool for building slideshows. The plugin is free; SlideShowPro Director costs $59 for a single user and the SlideShowPro Player for Lightroom costs $35 for a single user.

Bookmarks:

Photoblogging Themes

Graph Paper Press

Free themes include Mansion, Modularity Light, Work-a-holic, Visualization.

Photocrati

Gorgeous premium theme for photographers. Includes a built-in shopping cart for selling your photos, and copy protection as well.

Autofocus 2.0

(Previously Autofocus+, a child theme of Thematic).

Free (lite) and pro ($25) versions. Based on an 800px, 8 column grid. Automatically arranges your images, which are also your posts.

StudioPress photography themes

Bookmarks

September 2011 Meetup Slides: Connecting WordPress to Social Networks

Sallie Goetsch — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 04:02:57 +0000

Here are some screenshots of plugins for connecting WordPress to social networks, or embedding content from Facebook, Twitter, etc. in your WordPress site. For links to the plugins, see the Handout page.

September Meetup Handout: Connecting WordPress to Social Networks

Sallie Goetsch — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 17:46:04 +0000

A brief overview of social media plugins for WordPress.

Twitter

Twitter Widget Pro (Displays your latest tweets in a widget, with lots of options.)
Tweet Old Posts (Posts links to your older blog posts to Twitter, with optional prefix or suffix. Can be used to post recent posts, too.)
WP to Twitter (Occasionally problematic with the newest version of WP; used to post links to
Blackbird Pie (Attractive HTML display of tweets you want to quote)

Facebook

Embed Facebook (Great for embedding Facebook galleries on your WordPress site.)
Wordbooker (Posts from WP to Facebook, including featured images.)
Simple Facebook Connect (Not really that simple: you have to create a Facebook application to get it to work. Used to allow people to sign in to your WP site with their Facebook login.)

Sharing Plugins

Share and Follow (puts links to your social profiles in a widget or floating box; adds sharing links to end of posts)
Digg Digg (nice display for Tweet, Like, etc buttons, vertically beside or horizontally above your posts; shows count of tweets, likes, shares, etc.)
Social Media Widget (simple clean display of your social media profile links in a widget.)
Social Plugin for WordPress (allows people to log in to comment using Twitter and FB; integrates with MailChimp)
AddThis plugin from AddThis (collects your information, but gives you statistics)
AddtoAny Share/Bookmark/Email (provides an expanding share button at end of posts)
Sexy Bookmarks (animated icons for sharing sites)

Outside Services

Twitterfeed (posts any RSS feed to Twitter)
LinksAlpha (publishes RSS feeds to multiple social networks)
Ping.fm (updates multiple social sites at once)
Hellotxt (updates multiple social sites at once)

JetPack

A plugin bundle from Automattic that includes the Wickett Twitter Widget and ShareDaddy, as well as other WordPress.com tools. (Oh, and if you don’t want JetPack and it’s nagging you, uninstall it via FTP: just delete the directory.)

WordPress 3.2 Feature Tour

Sallie Goetsch — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 01:41:08 +0000

The East Bay WordPress Meetup Group

WordPress 3.2 is due out at the end of June. (We’re at RC 1 as I write this on June 20th.) Based on past performance, it ought to be ready about in time for WordCamp SF in August. As usual when there’s a new release of WordPress, we’ll walk through all the new features. A good session for those new to self-hosted WordPress, or to WordPress at all.

Most of what we’re promised in WordPress 3.2 isn’t flashy, but the admin interface is a bit different (I’ve looked at the beta) and the new Twenty Eleven default theme is both attractive and functional. It includes not only post formats but responsive design (it changes layout automatically for different kinds of screens), which is the hot new trend in web design. I may well be setting up some sites on the RC prior to launch, so hope to have a decent amount of experience by the time we get to this demo.

Oakland, CA 94612 – USA

Sunday, August 21 at 1:00 PM

Attending: 18

Fee: Price: USD 5.00 per person

Details: http://www.meetup.com/Eastbay-WordPress-Meetup/events/22910041/

July 2011 Meetup Slides: From a Fireworks Comp to a Genesis Child Theme

Sallie Goetsch — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 01:29:15 +0000

It’s always hard to read code projected on a screen, so you’ll want to take a look at these to get a better idea of where we got hung up with this design and how to put background images behind dynamic content.

If you want the actual theme files to look at, just contact me through the site’s contact page.

From a Fireworks Comp to a Genesis Child Theme, Step by Step

View more presentations from East Bay WordPress Meetup