socialplasm

I spent a little time tonight looking over several WordPress blog themes/skins and noticed that several of them create a site-wide navigation on the blog based on the pages that the user creates in the WordPress admin section.

This is a great feature and saves tons of time from having to hard-code buttons that link to your pages.

Hiding Pages from the Nav

Tutorial Level of Difficulty: Medium

What if you want to hide a pages from the nav? How can you hide a page so it doesn’t become a nav button automatically?

Here’s how

1. In the Wordpress theme editor, open up the header.php file and find the following line:
<?php $children = wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=’);?>

2. We will be adding the following bit of code after the last ‘=’ sign:
&exclude=

3. Now the code should look like this (colors are just for display purposes):
<?php $children = wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=&exclude=‘);?>

4. Now, all you have to do is add the page ID numbers that you want to hide after the ‘&exclude=’… make sure to separate with commas.
Example: If I wanted to hide page ID’s 1, 2 & 3 from the nav then the code would look like this:
<?php $children = wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=&exclude=1,2,3‘);?>

How can I find my page ID’s?
By default, WordPress blogs create links for the pages you add. These links are each given a unique ID found in the URL. You can either use your browser or the WordPress ‘Manage Pages’ admin section to browse to a page you have created and copy/paste the ID’s into the code we just made.

What if I am using text links (pretty permalinks) instead of page IDs?
You can still find the page ID for each page by mousing over each page link in the ‘Manage Pages’ section of your WordPress admin.
The status bar is the bottom bar in your browser that displays the hyperlink when you mouse over a link on a page.
Don’t see the status bar? Turn it on by opening up your browser and going to View, click on ‘Status Bar’ if there isn’t already a check mark next to it.
Now that the status bar is turned on, go back to your WordPress admin and navigate to Manage > Pages, and mouse over the links to the pages that you would like to hide from the nav. The status bar will show the original hyperlink to that page including the page ID (look for the part of the link that says ‘ID=’ … the ID is the number that follows the ‘=’ sign).

Hiding pages came in helpful for me recently, hopefully a few of you find it useful as well.

This has been successfully tested on the following blog themes:

• Revolution Themes - by Brian Gardner
• i3Theme - by MangoOrange

Has it worked on your theme? Leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list.

written by socialplasm \\ tags: blogging, blogs, themes, wordpress

Companies have been sampling products to their potential customers for ever. When you can give them a nibble of your product or service and add to that a sense of urgency, you may be on to something.

Recently, Adobe released public preview versions of some of their upcoming programs that will be available in the Creative Suite 4 (CS4).

That they released preview versions of their software isn’t all that new … but the time-limit they put on the installed preview, before the program is disabled is quite surprising … two days!

With the standard software trial period being 30 days, or in some cases unlimited time - limited features, Adobe has played a unique hand that has many people in the graphic community scratching their heads; why offer a trial of their software that only lasts two days?

Exclusivity and Urgency

When google first released Gmail, they made it available to only a select few. Those that got an account were given a handful of invites to give out to their friends. You started with one invite and a little message above your invites indicated that you would get more eventually.

This limited supply caused the invites to be cherished like gold; you only gave them out sparingly. It also created an automatic digital divide between those that had, and those that had not. There was a sense of pride in the fact that you got a Gmail account and that through your mercy, you could freely share this rare resource with those you liked the most.

The demand and short supply fueled the social media fires; the word that Gmail was out became very viral.

Adobe has provided fuel for a similar type of fire by allowing a very short window of time to preview their apps. There is also a sense of hiearchy being built between those with registered copies of CS3 ( wo can enter in their CS3 serial numbers and keep the CS4 versions alive, and those who don’t have CS3.

Two days is a very narrow window to dig into a program, but the hope that it will generate some buzz, a sense of demand for the new features and more peviews to come seems to be working. The graphic community has brought it upon themselves to blaze, like Paul Revere, through every graphic forum, user group and chat room to announce that the betas are available.

written by socialplasm \\ tags: Adobe cs4, cs4

Part 1 in some of the new features in the latest version of Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 applications.

The new beta of Fireworks CS4 is giving us some insight into the upcoming features that will release with the retail version; not all features are present and you only get a 2-day trial to mess with it!
If you’re like me, Fireworks may not be one of your most common tools in your workflow. However, there are some new features that are making Fireworks a potential favorite for designers who are looking into breaking into Flex designing and speeding up their design process.

Fireworks CS4 - 9 Slice

Fireworks CS3 introduced the 9 Slice (9slice, Scale9) functionality. In CS3 this feature was only applicable to vector objects. But in CS4 this feature will be extended to raster images as well.

Below, I’ll cover a couple of the attributes of this updated feature and how to get some predictable results from it.

9 Slice preserves your corners

One of the main reasons that 9 slice was developed was to preserve rounded corners in a more dynamic way than pushing around vector points.

9 Slice does this by preserving the scale and dimension of your designated corner areas. All other areas of your graphic are scaled according to the ’slice’ that they end up residing within. The graphic below shows how each slice is scaled when an image has 9 slice applied to it and then is manipulated:

9 Slice Limitations

Because 9 slice preserves only the corner slices and scales the other five slices it tends to work the best when used on an image or vector where there is a clean horizontal and vertical area that can be stretched/scaled and not look too warped.

In our example above, the fill area is a clean, horizontal gradient. If we were to rotate that gradient out of a horizontal or vertical alignment, apply 9 slice, and then change the horizontal scale of the object, we start to see how 9 slice affects the 5 un-preserved slices:

9 Slice for Images

However, if you are working with an image that can handle the scaling distortion, or you are looking to make subtle adjustments in scale to your raster image, then 9 slice is a great solution for an otherwise time consuming problem. In the example below you can see that Fireworks CS4’s 9 slice function can really come in handy when adjusting the scale or dimensions of certain raster images, while preserving the subtle corner shapes:

More to come soon on the new features of the Adobe CS4 suite!

Enjoy!

written by socialplasm \\ tags: Adobe cs4, cs4, fireworks, graphics, Tutorials

Recently I wrote about how many programmers would kill for the ability to work uninterrupted by clients.

Well, the flip-side of that is that not all business-type people think that working with developers is a walk down happy time lane either.

The truth is that there are distinct types of personalities that fit the role of programmer/developer and there are certain character traits that make up the general population of business-type people; both sides have exceptions to the rule, of course. But the generalizations do hold some water.

Fact of the matter? Most business people don’t have the time to learn the ins-and-outs of Microsoft Word let alone what it takes to put together a website. Most don’t have the capacity to learn to speak in one’s and zero’s; we’re talking about specialized skills on both sides of the line.

‘Tech’ was out of reach for many … until now

There has been a drastic change in the accessibility of web development since the introduction of blogging technology.

Blogs enabled anyone to have a presence on the web. Shortly after the concept took off, companies like WordPress made it even easier for those less technically inclined to get in the game.

WordPress and other content management systems (CMS’s) made it very easy to bridge the gap between having to know how to program and wanting to have a web presence.

In addition to the technology being easy for public consumption, many in the development world realized that there was a whole new niche of development to be had; develop programs open-source and give them away. The return for the programmer? High levels of visibility, access to new and unique projects and jobs based on the business community’s interaction with your free and accessible plugins and applications and a new working environment; a client-free development model.

What Does this Mean for the Non-Programmer?

The majority of the people in the blogging community are just regular people; not uber-geeks who can create things out of one’s and zero’s.

How did they get started? How do they make it look like they know how to build a website?

Here’s a recipe for building a FREE website:

1. Go and sign up for a WordPress account. A WordPress account will set you up with your own, free, easy to manage website.
2. Make it pretty by choosing a new theme for it. A theme is a fast and free way of ’skinning’ your site with a new look and feel. Log into your free wordpress account and you can search and install any one of thousands of free themes.
3. Log in start and writing blog posts.
4. There you go! You have a FREE Internet presence!

Thanks, but I am a little more motivated. I want my site to Rock!

Ok, read on…

written by socialplasm \\ tags: beginner, blogging, wordpress

I know many programmers who confess that the best business opportunity they could imagine would be one where they weren’t constantly bothered by their clients.

I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
-Ayn Rand

Enter, a new business relationship: coding for open source platforms. That’s right, programmers that have caught on to the vision that if they write code, plugins, themes or other elements for platforms such as WordPress … for free … that they actually make as much money, if not more, as they would working on a more transactional client-based list of projects.

The old school model of development projects for clients (client approaches developer, developer does work, client pays for work) is still strong, and probably won’t go away any time soon. This new client-free model can supplement, and in some cases, completely replace the project-to-project routine that many programmers and developers find themselves in.

The Programmer’s Pay-off

written by socialplasm \\ tags: beginner, blogging, wordpress