Tim Elliott » Wordpress

How To Display A Flickr Pool On Your WordPress Site

Tim — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:37:21 +0000

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.Â 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

Using Flickr for your WordPress blog (wordpressguru.eu)

WordPress as a CMS

Tim — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:43:17 +0000

I’ve been using WordPress since late 2004 for my personal and client blogs but over the past year I’ve done a number of projects that use WordPress as a content management system (CMS). Previous to this, I always thought of WordPress as a “blog CMS” that could be used for creating simple websites but not really anything more. But a series of improvements to the core WordPress software and advancements in the plugin and theme ecosystem have made WordPress a significant alternative to Drupal and Joomla for complex websites. Since ecommerce is a deep subject that deserves more than a high-level overview, I’m going to save that discussion for a follow-up post.

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.

101 Techniques for a Powerful CMS using WordPress (listropolis.com)
WordPress plugins for functioning CMSs, redux (subjectverbobject.com)
WordPress: 5 Reasons to Use WordPress As a CMS (bigsexymedia.com)

How I Would Save The Star-Tribune

Tim — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:22:46 +0000

Image by afagen via Flickr

The newspaper business is on the ropes. Subscriptions and newsstand sales are down while advertisers move their money elsewhere. A new generation is coming of age hardwired to the internet, electronic distribution and social networking. They don’t read newspapers. And print production costs continue to rise.

Here in the Twin Cities we are still a two newspaper metro. The Star-Tribune on the Minneapolis side of town and The Pioneer Press on the St. Paul side. And like a lot of other papers around the country, the Star-Tribune is doing the worst of the two, has declared bankruptcy and is looking over some bleak prospects. Within a couple years, I think, we will be down to one paper here unless the economy improves faster than anyone is predicting or the Star-Tribune is bought by someone looking for a big tax deduction.

So what can the management of the Star-Tribune do in such a situation? Plenty from my perspective but it’s tough medicine.

Here’s my 5 point plan to transform the Star-Tribune into a profitable business:

Get Out Of The Print Business: Print is dying and it’s also a large part of the cost structure for the paper. Sell the printing department to someone else. Since the Twin Cities still has a good sized print community, this should be pretty straightforward. Now look for a print partner to do your production for the lowest price (this might be the same company who bought your printing department).

Cancel Weekday Hardcopy Editions: Yes, go down to 3 print editions a week from Friday-Sunday. You’ll take a hit on the subscription revenue but that’s the least of your worries right now. The savings in printing and delivery costs should make up for the shortfall.

Get Behind The Kindle: Electronic distribution is the future and the Star-Tribune should have a $5.99 monthly Kindle edition. Do a contest to educate readers on how great the Kindle is and give some away. Even consider working out some deal with Amazon for a Kindle discount in exchange for a 2 year electronic subscription.

Adopt Blog Software Online: Change the current website CMS to WordPress or Blogsmith. Run the online site like Engadget with a core of staff writers and a ton of freelancers. Post often and repost on all the social networks and messaging services. This will create more online traffic and more advertising revenue.

Embrace User Generated Content: There are a lot of good writers in town who would contribute to the paper in return for link-backs and/or a little bit of money. For niche content this would be a lot more cost effective than having staff positions. Encourage people to send their camera-phone pictures and videos of breaking news like CNN does. Good things will happen.

I really don’t think the Star-Tribune will do any of these things but some paper somewhere might. The news business is not going anywhere; the newspaper business is going away. Those who change now will still be around in 5 years. Hopefully one of these papers will be the Star-Tribune.

Minneapolis paper files Chapter 11 (msnbc.msn.com)
Hearst Newspapers Trying To Figure Out Where To Build The Pay Wall (paidcontent.org)
Hearst to launch wireless e-reader, potentially revolutionize print media (engadget.com)
SF Chronicle may charge for online content (vator.tv)

Removing Categories From A WordPress Feed

Tim — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:22:25 +0000

WordPress continues to amaze me with it’s ability to respond to nearly every feature request. While working on a client site this week, the requirement to block a category from the main blog feed was requested. A minute or two with Google turned up the Advanced Category Excluder plugin which gives you this feature and the ability to show your modified “recent posts” in the sidebar.

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.

I Have Seen The Future of The Music Industry…

Tim — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:41:27 +0000

…and it’s a lot like it used to be years ago but online.

As I write this post, I’m listening to R.E.M.’s new album Accelerate streaming from iLike.com. I like what I’m hearing so far and will likely end up buying the collection once it’s released next Tuesday.

It occurred to me how similar this experience is to the way music was promoted when I came of age in the 1970′s. At that time, any good record store played new records when they came out. I’d go down to Record Trading Center in Orange, California to listen and browse records. If they weren’t playing what I wanted to hear, I’d ask and they would switch records most of the time. This was the ’70′s equivalent to the listening booths of the 1950′s and ’60′s where you could sample music before you bought it. Even radio was hip to this with LP’s played in their entirety without commercial breaks on the day of release. I often taped these off KROQ and KMET to sample later.

And you know what happened? I bought a lot of records and cassettes. Later this changed to CD’s and just a few years ago, to digital downloads. Somewhere in the past 30 years the recording industry forgot that they are in the music business not the record, cassette, CD or digital file business.

Recorded music is a promotional sampler for discovering new artists and for selling concert tickets and other merchandise. Unfortunately, the powers that be forgot this fact. Looks like R.E.M. gets it, so I’ll head to Amazon next Tuesday.

In the meantime, check out the album over at iLike.

WP 2.5 RC1 + Postalicious = Incidental Posts

Tim — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:17:23 +0000

I updated this blog to WordPress 2.5 RC1 last week and activated the Postalicious plug-in I’ve been testing for the past few weeks as an automated way to post my Google Reader shared links each day. I didn’t check my settings carefully enough and had it previously set to auto post every hour. Several hours later I discovered the error but not before a bunch of posts had already gone out. Sorry about that…

BTW, this new version of WordPress is the most dramatically improved update since 2.0. So good, in fact, I’m surprised it’s not named 3.0. A full review after I have more time to find all the cool new features but the automatic plug-in update is my favorite so far.

Review: Mobileadmin for WordPress

Tim — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 02:44:56 +0000

There are times when you are away fron your computer but would like to post to your WordPress blog. For those who plan ahead, you can setup email posting directly in WordPress. Or you could set up similar access via your Flickr account.

But if you are like me, you’ll want to post via your mobile device of choice. In my case, it’s a Windows Mobile handheld that I’ve written this post with. I installed the Mobileadmin plugin and composed this via Pocket IE. And it works pretty well in a pinch. I’ll have to come back later on my Mac and put all the links in, however

Thumbs up…

WordCamp MN in the works

Tim — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 18:44:33 +0000

Jamie has floated the idea of holding a WordCamp unconference here in the Twin Cities later this year. As a WordPress developer, I think this is a great idea and have signed up on the event wiki.Â Looks like WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg might also attend so tell all your friends.

Yahoo! Shortcuts Ate My Post

Tim — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:30:00 +0000

Since I posted a while back about the new Yahoo! Shortcuts WordPress plug-in I thought I would follow-up and explain why I turned it off last week.

In a nutshell, I took 15 minutes to write up a short review of my new Sansa TakeTV the other day and noticed that Yahoo! Shortcuts found 7 links. That was the most of any post I’d done to date but I clicked the review button primarily to find a photo for the post. That’s when everything went blank, including the entire post which WordPress had been auto-saving the whole time. I immediately went to the plug-in section and turned Yahoo! Shortcuts off but left it there so I know when they post an update. Until then, I’d suggest the same for everyone else.

I will reserve my final judgment until they ship version 1.0… and I’ll redo my review which will be longer since I have a week of experience with TakeTV (verdict: thumbs up).

Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress

Tim — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 22:45:08 +0000

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.

What’s up with WordPress?

Tim — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 16:51:24 +0000

I’ve been using WordPress for almost 3 years now and implement it in my consulting work as the blog software of choice. Over the years there have been issues with upgrades (like the move from 1.5 to 2.0, for example) but the community always got the new version stable within a few weeks.

While it’s too early to tell at this point, version 2.3 seems to be the most problematic upgrade yet. After taking this blog up on the day it was released, I upgraded my wine blog a few days later. After a week of MySQL errors with plug-ins and various other misadventures, I restored back to 2.2.3 last weekend. I think I’ll stay there for a while but still keep this blog on the latest build to monitor progress.

There’s a lot to like about the new WordPress so I’m hoping Matt and the team get this one stable shortly.

Testing Feed Aggregator Plug-in

Tim — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 18:10:04 +0000

Just a quick test of the FeedWordPress plug-in. If all works well, a few wine reviews will be imported after this…

Update: Worked great… scroll down to June 14th to see the reviews from my Snooth feed. Will have to set this up on Winecast a bit later in the day.

How does Blicki work?

Tim — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 23:07:29 +0000

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…

Nice Work, Matt

Tim — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 23:58:43 +0000

I just made the jump to beta 1 of WordPress 2.1 and things seem to be working fine so far (no broken plugins, etc.). Maybe I’ll get really brave and turn back on the visual HTML editor

A review once I live with it a while but for WordPress folks this is a really big upgrade. Oh, and a new stable release of WordPress came out today so I’ve got another 4 blogs to upgrade to 2.0.6…

PS: Autosave of posts is wicked cool, man!

Tim Elliott » Wordpress

How To Display A Flickr Pool On Your WordPress Site

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WordPress as a CMS

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How I Would Save The Star-Tribune

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Removing Categories From A WordPress Feed

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I Have Seen The Future of The Music Industry…

WP 2.5 RC1 + Postalicious = Incidental Posts

Review: Mobileadmin for WordPress

WordCamp MN in the works

Yahoo! Shortcuts Ate My Post

Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress

What’s up with WordPress?

Testing Feed Aggregator Plug-in

How does Blicki work?

Nice Work, Matt