Many of our clients request English and Hebrew websites and ever since WordPress 3.0 made WordPress Multisite a breeze to install, we’ve been using it so that clients can manage all their sites from one Dashboard.

Logically, our clients want the Hebrew website to have a Hebrew Dashboard. However, out of the box, WordPress Multisite defaults to English, and needs a bit of tweaking to localize the Dashboard into the language of your choice.

(Friendly warning: if you don’t change the Hebrew Dashboard into Hebrew, the post/page Editor is really problematic and usually messes up alignment and styling on the site.)

So here’s how to localize a site within WordPress Multisite into Hebrew, but you can apply the same general rules for any language.

1.

Download Hebrew WordPress from the Hebrew WordPress website and copy the language folder or use this zip file of the language folder (from WordPress version 3.2.1).  Upload the language folder into you’re site’s wp-content folder. 

2. Add the following to wp-config.php: define (‘WPLANG’, ‘he_IL’);

3. Go into your Network Admin Area by clicking in the top right corner on Howdy, YourName and click on Network Admin

4. In the left Navigation menu, click on Sites > All Sites

5. On the Hebrew site, click Edit

6. Once you’re in the Edit Site area, click on Settings

7. Once you’re in the Settings tab, search for the line “WPLANG” and fill in the language reference code such as he_IL.

Or, as Andrea pointed out, you can go into the Hebrew site’s General Settings and switch the language from there.

That’s it!

This post was originally published at How to localize a Hebrew website’s Dashboard with WordPress Multisite on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Our little baby is turning 7 – WordPress, my how you’ve grown! But the truth is, I remember when I first started using WordPress back in 2007, and it was pretty good then too. I think that shows how WordPress has strong foundations, even at the beginning.

When I first started looking for an Open Source CMS solution, I looked at Joomla, WordPress and some other systems. I quickly settled on WordPress for the following reasons:

• The content management scheme made sense to me. Pages, posts, categories. Posts could go in more than one category. It was clean and elegant.
• Community. Almost any questions I had, there was an answer somewhere out there. If I had a need, I could almost always find a plugin to fill it.
• The Codex. I think I can say that The Codex was my WordPress teacher. It’s such an awesome, community-driven resource.
• Comment moderation. Simple and useful.
• Easily upload media, even then.
• RSS feeds galore. For almost anything you can think of: site wide, categories, tags, all comments, per-post comments, authors, search results,
• Template tags. Genius. Even non-developers can wrap their heads around these commands.
• SEO. Out of the box WordPress is pretty good. With classic plugins like Google Sitemap XML and All in One SEO, you can do a pretty good job of optimizing a site for the search engines.
• The future. Every new version of WordPress added useful features. Some of the best were the addition of tags, one-click upgrade of plugins and core, installation of plugins and themes from the admin (bye-bye FTP!), better comment management in the admin with Reply to, Widgets (at first I didn’t like them!).

It seems timely that yesterday I was part of a panel comparing the three leading Open Source content management systems: Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. In my presentation, I emphasized the elegance of WordPress, and explained how the content management works. The tweets during my presentation indicated that people were pretty excited about what WordPress has to offer. Here are some examples:

Here’s the presentation. Click on Menu > View Fullscreen on the player to view in full screen. All images and underlined text are live links. I’d love to hear your feedback!

This post was originally published at WordPress turns 7. It was great then, it’s awesome now on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

The Visual Editor in WordPress is great for clients. It lets them feel comfortable adding content with Word-like buttons that they are familiar with.

But, what happens when they want more font styles?

Although you can find plugins that add Quicktags to the HTML view Editor, such as Oren Yomtov’s Post Editor Buttons Plugin, I wanted to make adding content as easy as possible for clients by putting the extra styles in the visual editor instead.

I wanted to add one style to the list of default format styles: h1, h2, etc. but every time I tried some new code in my functions.php, it just wouldn’t show up correctly.

And then I gave in and saw what the massive TinyMCE Advanced plugin had to offer. I was hesitant to use it since it has so many options and I just needed to add one style but it turned out to be a quick and really easy way to add styles to the Visual Editor.

How to add custom styles to the TInyMCE Advanced Plugin:

1. After you activate the plugin, go to the settings page and drag and drop the Styles dropdown to the row of buttons above.
2. Go to the plugin files and in the CSS folder, open the tadv-mce.css file. Follow the examples that are there and add your styles to the list. It then looks to your theme’s stylesheet for the style definition.
3. The styles then show up in the Styles dropdown in the Post or Page Visual Editor!

This post was originally published at How to add styles and buttons to the WYSIWYG Visual Editor in WordPress on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

We are constantly trying to find easier and better ways to create manageable blocks of content for clients.

Widgets

Widgets are only helpful up to a certain point since there isn’t a great plugin  for a WYSIWYG visual editor that I’m aware of. The Rich Text Widget and WYSIWYG Text Widget are buggy and aren’t compatible with 2.9.2.  Rich Widget is ok but requires too many clicks and is not so user friendly.

Custom Fields

Custom fields are only helpful up to a certain point – since once again there is no visual editor. Coding in your own add_meta_box to the functions.php to add customized,  user-friendly custom fields takes a fair amount of time and quite a bit of PHP know-how. Also, explaining to clients the concept of custom fields is not a super joy.

So, what is the solution for expanding WordPress CMS functionality?

Content Blocks

I investigated a few CMS content block plugins, and here’s what I have to say:

1. Page.ly MultiEdit Excited to try out a new plugin that would help with editable content, I installed the MultiEdit plugin with instructions here. MultEdit lets you flip between tabs to edit multiple areas of content! So exciting, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the content in each tab to save properly. It only saved the content in the last tab called “Right”. Sigh.

2. Multiple Content Blocks This plugin is insanely easy to use. All you have to do is add one snippet of code <?php the_block (‘newarea’); ?> to a page template and voila! you have another WYSIWYG text editor in the admin area. Whatever you enter into this new content area will show up on the page where the snippet is. Amazing. BUT, I couldn’t figure out how to use this code in the sidebar since the sidebar isn’t a page. Sad.

3. Page blocks I followed the instructions for how to use the plugin like a good girl, but I still couldn’t get it to work the way I wanted with additional editors in the editing page area.

4. Custom field template Bring out the champagne peoples! We have a winner! This plugin is the daddy of all custom field plugins. It lets you add whatever customization you want to the custom field and then add code into your template as if it were a regular custom field.

Here’s how to use it.

1. Install and activate the plugin. Obviously.
2. Go to the new tab in the admin area called Custom Field Template.
3. Modify the example they have. Here’s the one that I created:[ContentAreaName]
   type = textarea
   rows = 4
   cols = 40
   tinyMCE = true
   htmlEditor = true
   mediaButton = true
   This means that the custom field I created has a WYSIWYG TinyMCE text editor, an HTML view, and a media button so that the client can upload an image. There are tons more options explained in the settings page.
4. Add this code to wherever you want in your template files:

<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, “ContentAreaName”, true)) { ?>
<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, “ContentAreaName”, $single = true); ?>
<?php } ?>

or if you want to add it as a shortcode, use [ContentAreaName]

That’s all for now. If you have another content block CMS tip, please share!

This post was originally published at WordPress as CMS: 4 content block plugins with WYSIWYG editors on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

In the previous post, we discussed how to hack the search function in WordPress to have an additional search form that would search  subcategories. Now that you have 2 or more search forms on your site, you might need to customize the search results. Thanks to this solution, I learned how to create multiple search result pages.

Let’s say we have 2 search forms on our site:

1. General Site-Wide Search
2. Recipe Search – searches subcategories of the Recipe Category

The first thing we need to do is tweak the search.php template to use it as a filter that will recognize if a search is coming from the Site-Wide search form or the Recipe Search form.

1. Open Search.php and delete everything.  Add the following code:

<?php
/* Template Name: Search Results */
$search_refer = $_GET["site_section"];
if ($search_refer == ‘recipe’) { load_template(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/recipe-search.php’); }
elseif ($search_refer == ‘site-search’) { load_template(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/site-search.php’); }; ?>

2. Open Header.php or wherever the General Site-Wide Search Form is located and add this line:

<input type=”hidden” name=”site_section” value=”site-search” />

The Site-Wide Search form will look something like this:

<form method=”get” id=”searchform” action=”<?php bloginfo(‘home’); ?>/”>
<div id=”search”>
<input type=”text” value=” ” onclick=”this.value=”;” name=”s” id=”s” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”site_section” value=”site-search” />
<input name=”" type=”image” src=”<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); ?>/styles/<?php echo “$style_path”; ?>/search.gif” value=”Go” />
</div><!–/search –>
</form>

3. Open Recipes.php or wherever your second search is and insert this line:

<input type=”hidden” name=”site_section” value=”recipe” />

You can change the value “recipe” to whatever suits your needs. Just make sure it matches the value in search.php.

The Recipe Search form for your second search will look something like this. In my case, this second search is meant to search the subcategories of the Recipe category.  See my previous post to learn about hacking the search function to search subcategories.

<form method=”get” id=”rsearchform” action=”<?php bloginfo(‘home’); ?>/”>
<div id=”rsearch”>
<input type=”text” value=”Recipe Search… ” onclick=”this.value=”;” name=”s” id=”rs” />
<?php $categories = get_categories(‘child_of=11′);
$catlist = ”;
foreach ($categories as $cat) {
$catlist.= $cat->cat_ID.’,';
}
$catlist.’11′;
?>
<input type=”hidden” name=”cat” value=”<?php echo “$catlist”?>” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”site_section” value=”recipe” />
<input name=”" type=”image” src=”<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); ?>/styles/<?php echo “$style_path”; ?>/search.gif” value=”Go” />
</div><!–/search –>
</form>

4. Customize the Search Results Templates

If you recall, in step 1, we added the following to the search.php page.

if ($search_refer == ‘recipe’) { load_template(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/recipe-search.php’); }
elseif ($search_refer == ‘site-search’) { load_template(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/site-search.php’); }; ?>

Create recipe-search.php (or whatever you named this template) and customize the layout of the results page to your liking. You can use index.php to start with and customize from there.

Create site-search.php (or whatever you named this template) and customize the layout of the results page to your liking. You can use index.php to start with and customize from there.

This post was originally published at How to Customize Multiple Search Result Pages in WordPress on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Recently, we had a client who wanted a special recipe search. There were 2 ways to extend the search functionality – manually or dynamically.

1. Search One or More Categories Manually

If we want to search one category, we could have used this solution which lets you manually add category numbers to the search function:

[Replace value="5" with your category number.]

<form method=”get” id=”searchform” action=”<?php bloginfo(‘home’); ?>/”>
<div>
<input type=”text” value=”<?php echo wp_specialchars($s, 1); ?>” name=”s” id=”s” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”cat” value=”5″ />
<input type=”submit” id=”searchsubmit” value=”Search” />
</div>
</form>

2. Search Subcategories Dynamically

However, we wanted to dynamically search only the subcategories of the Recipe Category. The reason being that if you’re already in the Recipes section of the site, seeing a recipe labeled as Recipes is not helpful. However, seeing a recipe labeled as Dessert (mmm..) and Breakfast is helpful. So, each recipe that the client adds will be in a subcategory of recipes (ex. Dessert), but they won’t have to check off the checkbox next to the Recipes category itself.

Anyway, I’ve been looking for this solution for a long time and now, thanks to Ilan Cohen, I present it to you.

[Replace the number 5 with the parent category.]

<form method=”get” id=”searchform” action=”<?php bloginfo(‘home’); ?>/”>
<div id=”search”>
<input type=”text” value=”Search… ” onclick=”this.value=”;” name=”s” id=”s” />
<?php $categories = get_categories(‘child_of=5′);
$catlist = ”;
foreach ($categories as $cat) {
$catlist.= $cat->cat_ID.’,';
}
$catlist.’5′;
?>
<input type=”hidden” name=”cat” value=”<?php echo “$catlist”?>” />
<input name=”" type=”image” src=”<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); ?>/styles/<?php echo “$style_path”; ?>/search.gif” value=”Go” class=”btn” />
</div><!–/search –>
</form>

The code searches through all the child categories of Category 5 (Recipes). Then, you’ll see we added an additional “5″ in this line: $catlist.’5′; just in case the client puts a recipe in the Recipes category, and not one of its subcategories.

This post was originally published at How to Hack the WordPress Search Function: Search Categories and Child Categories on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

You can manage multiple sidebar widgets in WordPress. To do so, you go to the Widgets page in the Admin, and select the Sidebar you want to manage. If you have 1 widgetized sidebar, the name “Sidebar 1″ is not a big deal for managing it. But what if you have 5 or more, and they’re named Sidebar 1, Sidebar 2, etc. Ah yes, now what was that wily sidebar 3 for?

Why would someone have so many sidebars to begin with? Well, remember that you can also add widget-ready sidebars to WordPress footers or anywhere in your design, to give extra content management options to clients.

Recently, we had a client with way too many widgetized sidebars to keep track of, so we had to find a new solution to change the standard widget sidebar names like “sidebar 1″ or “sidebar 2″ to something more meaningful like “Left sidebar” and “Right sidebar” in the admin area. I dug around the web and found 2 very helpful posts:

• How to use widgets with more than one sidebar on your WordPress blog
• How to design a variable sidebar WordPress theme with widgets (by guest blogger Daria Black)

Here’s what I learned:

1. Go into your themes’s function.php file, or if it doesn’t exist, create it.

Add the following code:

<?php

if (function_exists(‘register_sidebar’))

{

register_sidebar(array(

‘before_widget’ => ‘<li>’,

‘after_widget’ => ‘</li>’,

‘before_title’ => ‘<h4>’,

‘after_title’ => ‘</h4>’,

‘name’ => ‘Left sidebar’

));

register_sidebar(array(

‘before_widget’ => ‘<li>’,

‘after_widget’ => ‘</li>’,

‘before_title’ => ‘<h4>’,

‘after_title’ => ‘</h4>’,

‘name’ => ‘Right sidebar’

));

}

?>

2a. Add a widgetized sidebar to your theme. Open up your theme’s sidebar file (for exampe, l_sidebar.php) and look for the first <ul> or <ul id=”sidebar”> or something similar, and add the following code:

<?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(‘Left sidebar’) ) : ?>

2b. If your sidebar is already widgetized, find the following code

<?php if ( function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) && dynamic_sidebar(1) ) : else : ?>

and replace it with

<?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(‘Left sidebar’) ) : ?>

Then, find the closing </ul> at the very bottom of the file, and immediately before that, place

<?php endif; ?>

3. Now, if you go into your admin panel, under Design>Widgets, you’ll see the new names like in the image below.

Now you can easily manage your Widgets without trying to guess which one is which.

This post was originally published at How to rename widgetized sidebars in WordPress on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Recently I posted about why I think WordPress is a CMS. This led to a pretty interesting discussion in the comments on the topic, but it was unresolved.

Here’s some more fuel for the fire: I just came across Josh Byers’ blog, thanks to his amazing Custom Admin Branding Plugin. He has a post there that lists the plugins he uses to transform WordPress into a full-fledged content management system (CMS). Aside from the fact that it’s good to know about the plugins he mentions, it’s interesting to note that by adding a few plugins, Josh feels that his WordPress sites can be considered CMSs, as opposed to just blogs.

Here are some of the plugins that he says he uses to make WordPress into a CMS. Visit his blog to see the rest of them, and read his concise descriptions of each one, and why he uses them:

• Custom Admin Branding Plugin - this plugin is his creation
• Clutter Free
• Custom Admin Menu
• Custom Write Panel
• Dashboard Editor
• Post Template
• Search Everything

Here are a few more tweaks and plugins that I think help make WordPress into a great CMS:

• The WordPress static home page option – obviously. The fact that the home page of your blog can be a static Page by selecting a single option in the admin changes WordPress from a blog into a CMS. I don’t know why people always ignore this.
• Page Links To Plugin: gives more flexibility to WordPress Pages by allowing you to link them to other pages, like category pages.
• Role Manager Plugin: better and more precise role management in WordPress
• Future Posts Calendar Plugin: this plugin is a savior. It gives me an overview of the days when posts are scheduled to be published, so I can make sure that posts are spread out evenly across the week, instead of all of them ending up on Tuesday (for example).
• Admin Drop-down Menus Plugin: also a life saver (not the candy). Can you imagine getting to the Write Post page with just one click, instead of clicking on Manage, waiting, and then clicking on Post? Will, this plugin turns everything into drop-down menus, so submenus are just one click away.
• All in One SEO pack, Google Sitemaps Generator Plugin and Meta Robots WordPress plugin: just upload and activate these WordPress plugins, and you’ll have a serious SEO advantage over so many other sites.

I think that the whole argument over whether WordPress is a CMS boils down to the lack of an exact definition of what a CMS is. So, according to my definition of a CMS, which holds no weight whatsoever, WordPress meets the criteria.

This post was originally published at 13 plugins that will make WordPress into a CMS on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Larry Dignan over at ZDNet writes about the media’s relationship with CMS systems, particularly his own past experiences with custom-built CMS systems. He says that “when it comes to ease of use, a blog platform beats or [sic] average CMS hands down.” So he asks why it is that he’s always getting stuck with some clunky, Frankenstein-like CMS system when he could happily and easily use something like WordPress. And he basically asks if people in the media industry will ever figure out that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel, since it already exists.

But what struck me the most about this article was the Update at the end, where he says that he was corrected by Dennis Howlett, who pointed out that WordPress isn’t actually a CMS.

This is something that I really don’t get. WordPress manages content, does it not? Then why isn’t it a CMS? How come I can call the awful, clunky systems that I used before WordPress CMS systems, even though they don’t have even half of the functionality and features of WordPress.

This post was originally published at ZDNet says WordPress not clunky, but also not CMS on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Sorry for the confusing title, but there is an issue that we face over and over when using WordPress as a CMS, and have not been able to solve. When we are using WordPress as a CMS, our Blog page doesn’t pick up the current_page_item class and therefore its link on the nav bar isn’t highlighted like the other pages are. How can we get it to change?

I know that the above might not make sense, so here is a detailed description of the problem:

If you use WordPress as a CMS, you generally create the Pages you want to appear on your nav bar under Write > Write Page. One of those Pages is the Home page, for example, and you create another Page for your blog posts called Blog. Then, you go to Options > Reading, and select one of those pages for your front page from the drop-down list, in this case you would select the Home page, and another page for your blog posts, in this case the Blog page.

You create a style in your style sheet called current_page_item which causes the current page that the viewer is on to appear differently in the nav bar or list of pages. For example, you want the background color of that page on the nav bar to change from green to purple.

Now, here’s where the problem lies: all pages on the nav bar change from green to purple when the user is on that page…except the Blog page! For some reason, that Blog page does not pick up the current_page_item class.

So my question is: does anyone know of a solution to this problem?

Thanks!

This post was originally published at WordPress challenge: getting class current_page_item to work when home page is not blog on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.