Denver Web Design & Denver SEO - The Katz Web Design Blog

Turn off da captions, turn off da funk!

I’ve found that many who found my previous article about removing caption from the All In One SEO Pack are interested in disabling the WordPress 2.6 captions altogether. This is very simple to do.

Futureproof way to disable captions

From Otto:

Add this to your theme’s functions.php file:
function no_caption($deprecated, $attr, $content) { return $content; };
add_filter(’img_caption_shortcode’, ‘no_caption’, 10, 3);

[Edited: Updated with better solution from Otto]

If you have any questions, revisions, or…comments, leave a comment!

Starting in WordPress 2.6, they’ve added captions to images that are automatically generated and use the Shortcode API to make it happen.  One side effect is that All in One SEO Pack isn’t set up to strip the caption from the automatically generated META tags, so you may end up with in your description.

Thanks to a WordPress Trac entry, I got the right regular expression to strip all shortcode in All in One plugin. (more…)

If you find this article helpful, please share it, or Digg it!

In Part 1 of Building a real estate website in WordPress, you learned about a plugin called FreshPost that we used to set up the basic structure of your real estate website.  Using this article, you will be able to display a single listing page that has all the content your real estate website will need. (more…)

This is for everyone who’s been trying to find out how to get the medium image size of a post attachment in WordPress:

You’ve got to send the function the ID you’re trying to get the medium images for.

$medium = wp_get_attachment_image_src($picture->ID, 'medium', false);
$med_url = $medium[0];
$med_width = $medium[1];
$med_height = $medium[2];

There are a lot more things you can find out by analyzing wp-includes/gallery.php.

I use LesterChan’s Download Manager plugin, and it’s great. Good interface, simple purpose. 

I recently found out that after upgrading a client’s site to WP 2.5, WP-DownloadManager was no longer working.  I followed the documentation on the plugin website, including resetting the permalink structure, but nothing worked.

For some reason the re-write wasn’t working properly: all the downloads were giving 404 errors.  I couldn’t figure it out, so I dove into the code.  I found the part of the plugin that rewrites the download links, and found the problem. (more…)

I am designing and creating a real estate website with WordPress, and I’m going to be writing a few articles that detail how it’s done.  This article will get you started — please leave feedback with any questions or topic requests for the next installment. Real estate using WordPress Part 2 is now available!

A little background — why use WordPress?

I’m working with a Denver company on a real estate website. Their goal is to showcase their listings in an easy-to-update CMS.

I’ve worked with Open-Realty, and — to say it bluntly — it’s a huge pain in the ass.  When you scratch the surface of OR, you begin to realize how cobbled together it is. Customizing the code to work as it should requires a steep learning curve.  The templates are relatively simple to work with, but the administration section is horrible.  The Open Realty user experience is just awful. 

WordPress is my CMS of choice currently, and it’s so easy to develop for that I recommend it to many of my clients. (more…)

A picture [of my cat] is worth a thousand words.

I’ve been waiting for WordPress.com to update the administration panel so that I can have galleries.  That is the main feature that I’ve been waiting for.  Now it’s here, I can finally upload pictures of my cat (and my wife )  

This will also allow simpler embedding of video, audio, et al.  I’m glad it’s finally live.

EDIT: There seem to be a few kinks still with this feature — instead of having thumbnails, the site was loading the full images. This is obviously an issue. Until then, you get a thumbnail of my cat in the grass.

Auto-tagging is good too

2.5 also recommends what tags to use based on tags you’ve used in the past. Unfortunately, that part is less responsive than I would like.  It’s still neat to have available.

Much better text editor

The previous text editor for WordPress.com was so terrible, every time I tried to make a word bold, it added some round-about Safari-specific hack ( or something like that).  Now it uses the proper code (strong), and I’m quite grateful. Now, I can actually write posts online, instead of writing them in Dreamweaver and then pasting the code in to WordPress. Very much improved.

The text editor still does not create paragraphs when you view the HTML code; it displays paragraphs as line breaks.  This is frustrating, because in the past it often lost all formatting.  At least in this iteration, switching views between Visual and HTML keeps the formatting intact.

Very pleased with this update

The editor is a LOT more functional, the gallery is great, and well, what can I say?  It’s a great success.

Just wondering: who would want to use Blogger.com?

Before this update, WordPress was just VERY superior to Blogger.  Now it’s outright in a league of it’s own.  I used blogger when it came out because, well, it was the originator of simple blogging.  But man, it’s really outdated.

Blogger is owned by Google, so you think it would be cutting edge, but every time I try to work with it, I end up hitting myself over the head.  What advantages does Blogger have, if any?

The plugin has been updated. The multitudes may celebrate fewer clicks!

As sad as it is to admit (since the plugin has saved me thousands of clicks), Admin Drop Down Menu by Ozh breaks the WordPress image uploader. If you’ve tried everything WordPress tells you to do in order to fix that Image Gallery feature and multiple image upload capability in WordPress 2.5, and disable this plugin.

WordPress 2.5 help pages

• Image/Media Uploader Problems
• Internet Explorer 7 problems with 2.5 Gallery
• WordPress 2.5 Plugin Compatibility List - Warning: it was wrong about the Admin Drop Down Menu, so who knows what else it’s wrong about!
• WordPress 2.5 Theme Compatibility list

After following each step recommended, I had to disable the plugin. What a shame!

Usually, WordPress is a very simple system to code for, so I was surprised when all I wanted to do was get a random post from a category. There were a couple plugins, but I didn’t want to use them; it’s generally accepted that the fastest way to work with an optimized application like WordPress is to use it’s built-in functions.

I also wanted to have the testimonials as a category in WP, rather than as a separate plugin. This code will work for any type of category, not just a testimonial.

Here’s how I created a random post item in my sidebar:

(more…)

Customizing under the hood

I was talking with one of my clients who is a mechanic, and he was telling me about how he used to do a lot of car customization and performance enhancing, and that he really loved it.He told me that the problem with customizing cars is that when you start tinkering around under the hood, every little change presents new problems that need fixing, and soon, the project becomes unmanageable.

I’ve done my deal of modifying code (check out this custom XHTML osCommerce installation) and let me tell you: it doesn’t pay. My clients generally don’t care about how the site is tableless, CSS/XHTML valid, et cetera. They want to know that it works properly.

WordPress is beautiful and talks sweet to me.

WordPress is my dream in that regard: it’s beautifully coded out of the box so that creating templates is a logical, simple project. They make functions such as is_page() that allow you to simply ask “Is this the page I think it is?,” then continue to make progress. WordPress is my love. I will continue to be her bedfellow codefellow.

Both my mechanic client and I agreed: customizing is great fun, and very personally rewarding in the end. However, it’s a huge pain in the ass, and the rewards rarely (if ever) equal the effort.