One of my favorite WordPress plugins is Flickr Gallery. As the name implies, it makes a gallery of your Flickr photos inside your WordPress blog or website. You can use this to display a single image or video posted on Flickr or an entire photoset as a gallery. Like the best WordPress plugins, installation, configuration and use are very simple. But there are also several options that can be applied through shortcodes listed at the plugin website.

For a client project I needed to make a gallery page of photos in a Flickr group pool. So I used the search function shortcode.  Here’s the code I used on the page after setting up the plugin:

[flickr-gallery mode="search" group_id="1259494@N22"]

If you don’t know your group numerical ID then use this tool to find it. A very easy way to setup a nice image gallery that will automatically update as photos are added to the pool.

Posted via email from Marketing Technopologist

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But my trusty Firewire enclosure decided to not work so it looked like I was out of luck. Remembering that the Macbook Air has a remote disk capability, I Googled and found that Mac OS X Leopard has a similar feature built in to enable remote access to a DVD drive over your local network. To use this feature you need to have enabled DVD or CD Sharing in the System Preferences of both machines. On the machine that you will be installing on you run a couple lines in Terminal found on this post. Reboot that machine and you will see the remote DVD drive show up in your Finder devices list.

It took a little over an hour to install Snow Leopard this way over my home Ethernet network which seems to be about 50% longer than if you did this from a local DVD drive. Ironically, my 5 year old Power PC-based Mac mini hosted the Snow Leopard disk which can’t run the new operating system itself. But it worked great getting the new system onto my Macbook Pro. My next project will be to get this install image onto a 16GB flash drive.

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Inspired by Jon Gordon’s report yesterday about the Minimal Mac blog, I’ve cleared the decks and pared my Macbook Pro desktop down to the essentials. The dock has just my most used applications with some overflow in a stack to the right. XMenu is installed to get to the rest of my apps without digging through Finder. I’ve reduced the menu bar to the bare bones. Along the way I discovered a great script called Helvetireader and built a site specific browser in Fluid to create a very focused interface for Google Reader.

[singlepic id=1 w=320 h=240 float=center]

Yes, I’ve gone minimal.

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The first thing that made WordPress a website CMS are the management changes made since version 2.7. Prior to these versions, users had to administer plugin updates manually, which usually were not updated until something broke on the site after an upgrade. WordPress 2.7 introduced the ability to update not only plug-ins maintained in a centralized directory on WordPress.org, but also the core WordPress software itself. The WYSIWYG editor was also improved to a point where it’s very usable for anyone who can deal with Microsoft Word or other word processors. These advances alone would not have made WordPress a contender to Drupal or Joomla but it did provide a platform others could build on to close the gap.

The second major advancement was the release of the Thesis Theme in late 2008. Created by long-time theme designer Chris Pearson of Cutline & Neoclassical fame, the theme took a decidedly different approach than other commercial theme offerings. Instead of coding a few killer themes and versioning them for different vertical markets — like StudioPress does for example — Thesis is a theme framework on top of WordPress. It offers the ability for anyone who can write CSS to design and implement a website without modifying an existing or creating a custom theme. It’s like an erector set for building websites and is the best $87 you will likely spend as finding suitable WordPress themes is a time consuming business. My client work has standardized around Thesis as a result.

The final piece of the CMS puzzle are the plugins available to extend WordPress. This has been available for a long time but has advanced to a point where nearly everything you want to do on a website is available in some form and for free. Here are my top 12 WordPress plugins for website building:

cforms – an “outlaw” plugin not supported in the WordPress directory due to it not supporting the GPL license, this is still the best way to put any form on your website.
Events Calendar – want a calendar of events that matches your themes’ look and feel? Forgo the ugly Google Calendar embed in favor of this plug-in.
Exec-PHP – there are times when you will want to run PHP from within a post, page or on the sidebar. This plug-in lets you do this very easily.
Lifestream – all your social network status right in your sidebar.
MobilePress – want a mobile version of your site? No problem, just add this plugin. Even supports custom themes.
NextGEN Gallery – while the media support inside WordPress is very good, for serious photo galleries I use this plug-in that takes it literally to the next level.
WP Super Cache – improve site performance with this caching plugin. Very useful for large sites with a lot of content.
AddThis – a social network widget that gives you stats on usage, this is my go-to plugin for adding social sharing support to posts and pages.
WordPress Database Backup – everyone needs to backup their MySQL database regularly and this plugin allows for automated backups using on the WordPress cron or on demand.
Thesis OpenHook – if you use the Thesis theme, you will want this plugin to integrate the OpenHook function directly into the WordPress backend.
Featured Content Gallery – puts rotating content galleries on pages with some additional controls. Nearly all of this functionality is built into the Thesis theme.
All in One SEO Pack – although made mute by the Thesis theme which has built in SEO support, this plugin is still in my standard pack for the times I use other themes. It’s name tells you everything you need to know about it’s functionality, too.

I’ll be talking about this subject at this evening’s WordPress User Group meeting here in Minneapolis. I’m expecting that I might have some additional tips and recommendations to share after this session so stay tuned if you can’t make it to the meeting.

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But the client also wanted to have a single category feed show up on the sidebar which proved to be a slightly more difficult problem to solve. But I was able to find another plugin, Archives for a category, which adds the ability to filter on specific categories in your WordPress archives code. Add the handy Executable PHP widget and then put in the code to display your category posts. In this case it looked like this:




But you can do the same thing for multiple categories like this:




Let me know if I can help you with your WordPress site.

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]]> http://timelliott.us/2009/01/25/removing-categories-from-a-wordpress-feed/feed/ 0 http://timelliott.us/2007/12/15/yahoo-shortcuts-for-wordpress/ http://timelliott.us/2007/12/15/yahoo-shortcuts-for-wordpress/#comments Sat, 15 Dec 2007 22:45:08 +0000 Tim http://timelliott.us/2007/12/15/yahoo-shortcuts-for-wordpress/ I’ve been using WordPress as my blogging software for three years now. It started when I began podcasting and I just followed what others were doing. But I’m glad I went down this path as the platform has developed into a very powerful CMS for both blogging and maintaining simple websites. One of the great things about WordPress is the extention of features using plug-ins. Most of these plug-ins are written by individual developers so when someone like Yahoo! writes one you know that this software is poised to go to the next level.

Yahoo! Shortcuts is a WordPress plug-in that automates creating links and embedding photos within posts on your blog. The built-in visual editor in WordPress makes this super easy to begin with so I didn’t think at first that this was that good of an idea. But in using it to draft this post, I think it has some potential to improve my workflow so it will remain activated. It has an interesting user interface that is uber-minimal. Once you copy the plug-in to your WordPress installation and activate the only thing you notice is a box on the upper right of your “Write” window in the administration interface. As you write your post, it polls Yahoo! for links to embed; for some unknown reason, it only detected one so far on this post (to WordPress). When you choose the “Review this Post” option (presumably when you are done writing) it slowly takes you to a screen to approve the link(s) and find and embed pictures from Flickr (ah, it found a second link!).

It works as advertised, abet a bit on the slow side, so I’m giving it a tepid and provisional thumbs up at the moment. I’ll post more as I use it here and on my wine blog over the next few weeks.

]]> http://timelliott.us/2007/12/15/yahoo-shortcuts-for-wordpress/feed/ 1 http://timelliott.us/2007/02/28/how-does-blicki-work/ http://timelliott.us/2007/02/28/how-does-blicki-work/#comments Wed, 28 Feb 2007 23:07:29 +0000 Tim http://timelliott.us/2007/02/28/how-does-blicki-work/ I’m looking for a very simple way to turn a WordPress page into a wiki for my wine blog so I came up with a couple possibilities, DokuWiki and Blicki. Since the latter is written by the author of WordPress I installed it and created a wiki page. After looking at the zillions of things on the options page and fiddling with the page I created, it appears to be working but the “edit” function is not showing up for some reason. All my web searching has turned up next to nothing on the documentation front even thought the plug-in is a year old. I’ll continue to futz around with this before trying DokuWiki…

]]> http://timelliott.us/2007/02/28/how-does-blicki-work/feed/ 0 http://timelliott.us/2007/02/07/my-search-for-dumb-simple-lamp-server/ http://timelliott.us/2007/02/07/my-search-for-dumb-simple-lamp-server/#comments Wed, 07 Feb 2007 19:29:58 +0000 Tim http://timelliott.us/2007/02/07/my-search-for-dumb-simple-lamp-server/ One of the other reasons I haven’t found the time to post in the past week, is I’ve spent more time than I wanted to getting a LAMP server set-up in my house for a project. Since it will not be accessed from the internet, security is not much of an issue so I thought it would be really easy to find a distro that would transform an ancient Celeron system into a development server.

All roads seemed to point to the Ubuntu server distro that promised a 15 minute install. I downloaded and burned a CD and within about 10 minutes I had an installed LAMP server; very cool. The only problem was that the interface for configuration was all command-line based, so I poked around and found Webmin that looked like a good solution for browser based configuration. Well it is, but I spend about 3 hours trying to get it setup and had a host of permissions issues.

So I did some more Googling and decided to try the Debian network install which allows you to choose the components you want to add at install (things like SSH, Webmin, ProFTPd, etc.). Since Ubuntu is Debian-based, I thought this would be a good solution. An hour and a lot of menu-driven configuration later I was looking at a webpage that could configure my new server. Very nice except I had all the same permissions issues that I had with Ubuntu.

Undaunted, I found a AMP installer called XAMPP that comes in Linux, Windows, Solaris and Mac OS flavors. Basically, this makes it easy to install Apache, MySQL, PHP and a bunch of other items to make a LAMP server. And, the standard install is completely open with no passwords or other permissions to get in the way. Exactly what I was looking for! So after a half hour of uninstalling the AMP elements on my Debian installation, I installed and ran XAMPP and browsed to their handy web admin panel and checked it out. Ten minutes later I had WordPress and bbPress installed and away I go on my project…

I’m surprised no one has published a Linux distro that takes all the pain out of configuring a LAMP server. Seems all the LAMP distros assume you are a command-line guru, which I am definately not. If I can figure out how to roll my own version of Linux, I might be able to contribute back something that will save folks a lot of time in getting their LAMP dev-box setup. But that will be much later…

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