In this case the top page on the navigation bar was called Galleries, which is the parent page for sub-pages with galleries for wedding photos, wedding videos etc. He didn’t want a main galleries page, but instead he wanted it to be a kind of folder for categorizing the various galleries he was going to have on other pages in his site.

Since we are using wp_list_pages, we can’t unlink each page on an individual basis since the navigation bar is dynamically formed. So I needed some way to keep using wp_list_pages so that the client can control the navigation bar, but unlink the top Galleries page.

I found the answer on what I think is one of the best forums around of internet and computer experts and people who are eager to help one another: Digital Point.

After a few suggestions from people on the forums, I finally got an answer from the awesome bvraghav.

In the header.php section of the file I embeded a javascript code that looked like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery(function($) {
    $("li.page-item-283").children("a").attr('href', "javascript:void(0)");
});
</script>

This is how it works:

• The  jquery (a javascript framework) is used to replace the value of href property in the required html node ( <a href=”your-galleries-link”>…. </a> in this case) with “javascript:void(0)”.  Looks like this:  jQuery(function($) {

• The following code selects the li element with: $(“li.page-item-283″). In this case 283 the page number that we want to void the link for (in our case the top Galleries page).

• The next part is the  children function which selects all immediate children with tag a: children(“a”) . This relates the child pages to the gallery pages and keeps their links.
  

• After this I had to change the attribute href to “javascript:void(0)”, which looks like this:  .attr(‘href’, “javascript:void(0)”); This turns the gallery link into void so it won’t direct anywhere.
  

All this comes together to look like the code above.

If you want to make all top level links unlinked, use the following code:

<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery(function($) {    
    $("li.page_item").children("a").attr('href', "javascript:void(0)"); });
</script>

What I’m wondering is if the new WordPress navigation system allows users to include items in navigation bars that don’t actually lead anywhere. Anyone know?

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!

I’ve been searching for a no-frills, easy to use ad management solution for WordPress for ages, and never managed to find one. First, I tried Google Ad Manager but I needed 20 tutorials and still didn’t have their system down with all their terminology and complexities. Plus, I needed to make it client-friendly by setting up lots of blank ad spots in case the client got ads in the future so I wouldn’t have to continue to be involved by adding code to their theme files. I timed myself, and setting up the Google Ad Manger for a client took at least 8 hours.

Later, we started looking around for an automated advertising solution for our own site, WPGarage. I looked through other sites that were offering ads, and a bunch of them were using the OIO Publisher system. I tried looking for the plugin in the WP Plugin Directory, but to no avail. I then went to the OIO Publisher site and realized it’s a premium plugin for (gasp) $47. But, what choice did I have? Burnt out from Google Ad Manager and the free WordPress ad manager plugins that always manage to be missing some major feature, we decided to try it out.

And here’s what I learned about the OIO Publisher Ad Manager plugin:

Total setup time: 3 hours.
Basic setup involves setting up ad zones for banner, text, sponsored posts, or custom ads through the admin setup panel and then entering the ads for each zone. Then, you take the output code of each ad that they give you and add it to your theme files.

Admin Setup Panel: It took a little while to get used to the admin panel. For example, where are the statistics hiding? I eventually found the stats under Purchases > Banner Ads > Active. Not so intuitive and it would be nice to have a separate stats section that is easier to access.

Automated: I think one of the best things about the plugin is that you can set it up to act as a sales manager, taking orders from advertisers, and processing their orders. You can see it in action on our site. OIO accepts PayPal, Google Checkout, and a bunch of other payment options.

Here’s a screenshot of the Advertise Page on our site:

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!

The advice I found in the WP Support Forums were mostly related to WP Database Prefixes.  I had changed the prefixes, so I thought this was the problem.

But, after numerous exports, imports, and hair pulling, I started reviewing everything I had done during the database transfer. And, I remembered a very tiny detail.  The  UTF-8 tag in the wp-config.php file.

Before moving the database over, I modified the wp-config file and removed the UTF-8 tag. BIG MISTAKE. You only need to remove the UTF-8 code to get Hebrew to work on an English installation of WordPress.  Since this time it was  a Hebrew installation, I didn’t need to remove the UTF-8 tag.  And, like magic, once I put the tag back in, I had sufficient permission to enter the site and be on my jolly way. Thank Goodness!

First, I tried this tutorial: How To Make a WordPress Events List and calendar plugins, but the tutorial wasn’t comprehensive enough and the plugins were too complex to start messing with.

The solution

I found this wonderful date field plugin which lets  you sort posts by the date entered in the custom fields.  Here’s what I did:

1. Upload the plugin and activate it

2. Opened the lettersarchive.php page template I created and added a query. The query checks for posts in the Letters category that have a date filled in and the orders it from oldest to newest.

<?php query_posts(‘category_name=letters&meta_key=date_value&orderby=meta_value&order=DESC’); ?>

3. I replaced a typical date function within the loop <?php the_time(‘j M Y’); ?> with

<?php echo date(“l jS \of F Y”, get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘date_value’, true));?>

4. I created a new post,  assigned it to the Letters category, and selected a date from the date picker box that now appears below the editing box in the post area.

I noticed that the Date Field plugin only lets you select a date up to 5 years ago  so I had to hack the plugin file on line 125 to  reflect selecting dates from 80 years ago.

for($currentyear = date(‘Y’) – 80; $currentyear <= date(Y) +5;$currentyear +=1)

Here’s a screenshot of the archive from The Forgotten Letters site.

I found a solution for simply listing the pages in 2 columns, but it did not suggest how to modify the code to include custom fields.

So, thanks to our coding hero Mark Kaplun who supplied the below code, although he admits it’s a “dirty hack”. The sort_column is so that MyPageOrder would work properly for this listing.

<?php
$args = array(
‘post_type’ => ‘page’,
‘numberposts’ => 40,
‘sort_column’ => ‘menu_order’,
‘child_of’ => 84 // any parent
);
$attachments = get_pages($args);
//print_r(“attachements:” . $attachements);
echo ‘<div style=”float: left; margin: 0 10px 0 0;”>’;
?>

<?php
for ($i =0; $i<count($attachments)/2; $i++) {
$post = $attachments[$i];
//    foreach ($attachments as $post)  { ?>

<a href=”<?php echo get_permalink($post->ID) ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php echo $post->post_title; ?></a>
<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, “NameofCustomField”, true)) { ?>
<?php
echo get_post_meta($post->ID, “NameofCustomField”, true);
}
?>
<?php } ?>
</div>
<?php
echo ‘<div style=”float: left; margin: 0 10px 0 0;”>’;
for (; $i<count($attachments); $i++) {
$post = $attachments[$i];
//    foreach ($attachments as $post)  { ?>

<a href=”<?php echo get_permalink($post->ID) ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php echo $post->post_title; ?></a>
<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, “PracticeArea”, true)) { ?>
<?php
echo get_post_meta($post->ID, “PracticeArea”, true);
}
?>
<?php } ?>
</div>

<input id=”gwProxy” type=”hidden” /> <input id=”jsProxy” onclick=”jsCall();” type=”hidden” />

I found one article online that said it was an FCK / wysiwyg editor problem so I thought maybe the issue was related to my beloved CMS friend,  Custom Field Template plugin, that I have installed (and love… swoon.. too much?).

However, I was relieved to find this article which said that the problem (freakishly enough) is the Firefox Highlighter addon which was adding the code into the WordPress WYSIWYG editor. So, I removed the Highlighter addon and that seemed to solve the problem. It didn’t remove previous instances of the weird code so I had to delete them manually.

I tried using the FCK fix plugin, hoping that it would remove previous instances of the weird code that were in the site, but it didn’t, so I deleted the plugin.

Recently, one of our clients wanted to change the slug, or permalink, from “about-2″, back to just plain ol’ “about”.  I tried changing the slug from the “quick edit” mode. I tried to Edit the Permalink from the Post Page. No luck, it kept reverting back to about-2.  After doing a few searches, I noticed that others had experienced this problem as well.

The Solution:

So, I finally found this post on the WordPress support forum which suggested I check the Trash folder. Sure enough, I found a page called “About” hanging out in the Trash. Once I permanently deleted the page from the Trash, I was able to save the permalink successfully.