The Wordpress Warrior

FREE INTERNET

The WP Warrior — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:23:31 +0000

Do you want to see your favourite sites be removed from the net by the US government? If not do anything you can to prevent your member voting to pass SOPA and PIPA.

If you live in the US you can sign the petitioning at http://americancensorship.org/ to send a message to your member, and everyone should sign the petition at avvaz http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_internet/?fpla. Every voice count.

FREE INTERNET is a post from: The WordPress Warrior

Using Robert Planks’ “Backup Creator”

The WP Warrior — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 07:29:36 +0000

Here’s a new backup plugin for wordpress written by Robert Plank that works as an alternate solution to iThemes “Backup Buddy“. Here’s a video on how to use it.

To buy backup creator please follow this link.

Using Robert Planks’ “Backup Creator” is a post from: The WordPress Warrior

Wishlist Member: Show Member Counts

Charly Leetham — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 01:32:34 +0000

On the Wishlist Insider Forum, a question was asked about how to the number of members for each level to display on a page or post.

As of today, there is no shortcode to do that but it is relatively simple to add your own shortcode using the Version 1.0 API of Wishlist Member.

The function call is:

WLMAPI::GetMemberCount

To use this API function call, you need to pass to the function the ‘level’ that you want to return the number of members for. This can be string be “all”, “nonmembers”, “pending”, or a comma-delimited string of level SKUs or names.

For example, the following code would display the total number of members on a site:

To display the number of members for a level called “Paid”, the following would be used:

This is all very good and well, but creating a shortcode so you don’t have to mess with php in the post / page, is a much better idea.

To create a shortcode, you could add something like the following in your themes functions.php file:

You could then add the shortcode to your post or page:

Free: [ showmemnums memname="Free" ]

Paid: [ showmemnums memname="Paid" ]

To display the number of members for different levels, change the name between the double quotes – they need to exactly match the name of your membership level.

To display the Total Number of members, those pending and those who registered to WordPress but don’t have access to any Wishlist Member levels:

Total: [ showmemnums memname="all" ]

Pending: [ showmemnums memname="pending" ]

Non Members: [ showmemnums memname="nonmembers" ]

Note: I’ve put spaces after ‘[' and before the ']‘, these need to be removed.

Wishlist Member: Show Member Counts is a post from: The WordPress Warrior

Adding Code To The Wishlist Member Registration Page

Charly Leetham — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 06:14:05 +0000

I was asked a question on Ask Charly Leetham asking ‘how to’ add Google Website Optimizer code on the appropriate Wishlist Member (WLM) Registration Page.

The Registration Pages on WLM are generated dynamically, and can’t be edited but the ability to add the appropriate script(s) on the page to check the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

However, WLM have provided a number of actions and filters that we can snag. The actions/filters are available at http://wishlistproducts.com/api/hooks/

There is a filter: wishlistmember_registration_page which allows a site owner to add ‘extras’ to the page. In this case, output the script required for Google Website Optimizer.

To utilise this filter, you would need to write a function and use the standard WordPress add_filter function to ‘call’ it when the registration page is called. The function you write would be added to the theme’s functions.php file.

To use the wishlistmember_registration_page filter to display a script, the function would look like:


script stuff here
';
return $content.$scripttoadd;
}
add_filter ('wishlistmember_registration_page','addgwo');

The script can be added conditionally as well…

Assuming you want to have a different script run on different registration pages (i.e Level 1 and Level 2) – the following can be done.

Step 1: Get the individual SKU’s for the different membership levels.

Through the WLM Dashboard / integration screen, locate the ‘SKU’ for each level. In the example below, the SKU for level 1 is 1276259610 and the SKU for level 2 is 1276259625.

The code is an example Google Website Optimizer code.

Step 2: Create the function

To display a different ‘code’ for each level add:

function addgwo($content) {
if ($_GET['reg']=='1276259610′) {
$ua = 'the UA provided by Google';
} elseif ($_GET['reg']=='1276259625′) {
$ua = 'the UA provided by Google';
}
$scripttoadd = '

';
return $content.$scripttoadd;
}
add_filter ('wishlistmember_registration_page','addgwo');

If you only want to display the code on one registration page, you could do the following:

function addgwo($content) {
if ($_GET['reg']=='1276259610′) {  // test to see if the code should be displayed
$ua = 'the UA Provided by google';
$scripttoadd = '

';
return $content.$scripttoadd;
} // End if statement
}
add_filter ('wishlistmember_registration_page','addgwo');

Remember:

1. If you are using the Google Website Optimizer function, you need to use the registration url provided in the Wishlist Member Dashboard -> Membership Levels.

Adding Code To The Wishlist Member Registration Page is a post from: The WordPress Warrior

Paypal: Letting subscribers update their Recurring Payments

Charly Leetham — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 15:01:53 +0000

On Wishlist Insider (which is a great community!), there has been a lot of discussion about how to manage membership upgrades, when using Paypal as the payment processor.

Until today, my position has been that the BEST way to handle this is to setup a new subscription payment and then manually cancel the ‘older’ subscription through the paypal interface.

Today, that changed. In the process of updating my Enhanced Paypal Shortcodes plugin, I came across the “update” parameter for Subscription buttons – and after a little testing, found that it should be perfect for allowing members to change their existing subscription payments with you.

Introducing the Paypal Modify Subscription button

The Paypal Modify Subscription button will let subscribers modify their active subscriptions through a paypal button on a website.

This is perfect if you offer different subscriptions levels – your subscribers can upgrade to a higher level without an interruption in service.

Modify Paypal Subscription buttons let subscribers accept a new set of subscriptions terms and pricing for their current, active subscriptions. Just perfect for our Wishlist Member websites.

A Modify Subscription button can allow subscribers to:

Modify their active subscriptions, or sign up for new subscriptions
Modify their active subscriptions only

The code required to add this button is reasonably straight forward (once you know what you need to do).

If you don’t mind pasting html into your webpage (I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this for WordPress because the Visual editor can mess with the paypal code), you can use the code in the next section otherwise you can use my Enhanced Paypal Shortcodes plugin to do the work for you (I’ve added the necessary parameters into the code today)

Modify Existing Subscription ONLY button

the code to setup a paypal button that only lets purchasers modify existing subscriptions looks similar to this:

When subscribers click on the button created by this code, they will be prompted to login and then asked which Subscription with the merchant they want to modify to be $69.95 every 6 months. Below is a screenshot similar to what your purchasers will see:

Modify Existing Subscription OR Create new subscription

If you don’t mind pasting html into your webpage (I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this for WordPress because the Visual editor can mess with the paypal code), the code to setup a paypal button that only lets purchasers modify existing subscriptions looks similar to this:

When subscribers click on the button created by this code, they will be prompted to login and then asked which Subscription with the merchant they want to modify to be $69.95 every 6 months, or given the option to sign up for a new subscription.

My thoughts are this isn’t quite as simple to navigate for purchasers as I would like – particularly the small “Sign Up For A New Subscription” at the bottom of the screen – I think most new purchasers will miss this.

However, using the first method above on an “upgrade” page within your membership site could be incredibly effective and certainly much easier to manage than trying to sign up for new subscriptions and cancel existing ones….

Paypal Enhanced Shortcodes plugin

We’ve just released version 0.5a of the Paypal Enhanced Shortcodes plugin and implemented the ‘modify’ parameter.

If you don’t want to mess around with cutting and pasting HTML code into your WordPress editor – try the plugin instead.

Paypal: Letting subscribers update their Recurring Payments is a post from: The WordPress Warrior

Wishlist WL Post Login, Themes & RSS

Charly Leetham — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 11:55:58 +0000

As a Wishlist Insider, I am really fortunate to get access to the plugins the Wishlist Products team create to help us manage our membership sites better.

The June 2011 Bonus Plugin is called WL Post Login – and can be used to direct a member to a specific Page or Post after they have logged in using a specifically created login URL. A suffix is created that when added to any URL of a site, it will display a login form that when filled in and submitted will reveal the protected content immediately.

You can grab this plugin for a short while, if you are a Wishlist Insider…

With the current implementation of the plugin, a site owner needs to append the ‘suffix’ to the link they wish to share when emailing members, if they want their members to view the content as soon as they login.

It doesn’t add the link to the RSS feed – which was causing me a bit of grief as I use AWeber’s Blog Broadcast feature to share my ‘members only’ content via Email.

After a few hours research, I found a way that the new suffix can be appended to the permalink and then fed through to your RSS feed. I even addressed an issue I had with FeedBurner. The three videos below demonstrate how to do this.

Introduction

Special Thanks goes to WP Candy for the code to achieve the functionality I was after.

Code To Add To Theme

Click Here To Download the code used in the above video and add it to your Themes’ functions.php file

Issues With Feedburner and WL Post Login?

Wishlist WL Post Login, Themes & RSS is a post from: The WordPress Warrior

Ajax and WordPress: Cool Resource…

Charly Leetham — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 15:40:05 +0000

My latest read…. I guess this makes me a true Girl Geek…. WordPress and Ajax.

You know how you can be on a webpage and submit a form, click a link or simply interact and the content will update without the page having to reload? Well, that’s most likely due to Ajax…. and I want to know more.

I’m not a ‘big’ reader of tech manuals- I prefer to ‘do’ and ‘try’, rather than ‘read’ about it. However, this book is pretty cool.

The WordPress and Ajax e-book is a comprehensive view on using Ajax with WordPress. The book lays the foundation for you, and then walks you through three real-world examples of how to use Ajax within WordPress.

I picked up the book as a free download – in fact I’m reading it on my iPod from www.wpajax.com but you can also purchase a ‘hard copy’ of WordPress and Ajax from Amazon.

If you’re serious about creating top notch WordPress Plugins and functions, this is a great reference point.

Ajax and WordPress: Cool Resource… is a post from: The WordPress Warrior

Can WordPress Run Javascript

Charly Leetham — Wed, 04 May 2011 01:20:40 +0000

A really interesting question – but it does get asked….

Being really pedantic in my response, I would say that Javascript is actually executed on your computer, not the webhost.
When a webpage loads, it ‘calls’ a javascript that is downloaded to your computer and then executes locally through your browser.

The reason I’m being particular with this response is if the browser viewing your site does not support Javascript, or has javascript support turned off, the javascript called on a webpage will not execute.

WordPress can be configured to call javascripts.

Javascript is used for a number of things including:

Displaying Navigation menus
Creating dropdown functions on nav menus
Shadow box / light box functions for images and videos
Sliders
Displaying opt in forms on pages
Interacting on a page like:
- accordian menus
- dynamic responses via forms
- changing the styling elements on a page based on user preference
- change the elements (images, videos, text etc) based on user preference
Live Search functionality

Really, what can be achieved with javascript is never ending….

Many wordpress plugins use Javascript. WordPress, itself, calls a number of javascript functions. However, playing with javascript is not for the faint hearted – and if your javascript uses jQuery (a javascript coding framework) there are additional considerations, like using the WordPress No Conflict method to reference your code.

So the ultimate answer to the question is Yes, WordPress can CALL javascript.

Can WordPress Run Javascript is a post from: The WordPress Warrior

Facebook Thumbnails: Using A Woo Themes Custom Image or WordPress Post Thumbnail

Charly Leetham — Mon, 02 May 2011 23:54:43 +0000

When I wrote my last article, Facebook Send: Adding A Button To Your Theme, I noticed that the thumbnail wasn’t being set. On AskCharlyLeetham.com, I noticed the thumbnail was being set to a random image from my page! This has been a big issue for many wordpress website owners, as the image displayed often appeals to the reader or attracts as much attention as the headline or the words…

The question was, how to fix it! My next dilemma was how to use the custom image that was applied to the post, as I use Woo Themes which has a custom image per post…

Thanks to the people over at iTechBlog (who found the solution at Ashframe) I found a very simple solution to the problem – although I did have to make some mods to the suggested code to get it to work with the WooThemes custom image setting.

That also led me to consider how I would modify the code to take advantage of the WordPress Post Thumbnail functionality…..

The suggestion was to add the following code to the themes “functions.php” file:

/**
* Function which sets the first image of the post as the thumbnail which shows up on FB like and share – http://blog.ashfame.com/?p=888
*/
add_action( 'wp_head', 'fb_like_thumbnails' );
function fb_like_thumbnails()
{
global $posts;
$default = 'http://blog.ashfame.com/wp-content/themes/ashfameblog/images/ashfame-logo.png';
$content = $posts[0]->post_content; // $posts is an array, fetch the first element
$output = preg_match_all( '//i', $content, $matches);
if ( $output > 0 )
$thumb = $matches[1][0];
else
$thumb = $default;
echo "\n\n\n\n\n\n";
}

In the above code, change the line:

$default = 'http://blog.ashfame.com/wp-content/themes/ashfameblog/images/ashfame-logo.png';

To point to the full location of the default image you want to use.
The code will display the first image in a post or a page.

Customising for Woo Themes

However, I wanted to use the Woo Themes custom image as standard…. so some mods were required.

To do this, I had to find the custom name applied to the image field in the posts. In Woo Themes, this is done in the “theme-options.php” file… in wp-admin -> Appearance -> Editor, locate theme-options.php in the right hand column and click on it.

Scroll through the file and locate the section (near the bottom) that starts with

// Woo Metabox Options

It will look a bit like this:

From this section, I now know the name of the custom field that I need is called image (all lower case).

I modified the above code as follows:

add_action( 'wp_head', 'fb_like_thumbnails' );
function fb_like_thumbnails()
{
global $post;
$default = 'link to my logo';
// get the post image
if ( get_post_meta($post->ID, 'image', true) ) {
$imgsrc = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'image', true);
} else {
$imgsrc = $default;
}
echo '';
}

Note: change $default=’link to my logo’ to a full web link to the image you want to use if a post image doesn’t exist!

The ‘get_post_meta’ function retrieves the link to the custom image. If the functions returns ‘something’, the post image is used and if it doesn’t, the default image is used.

Using the WordPress Post Thumbnail

Using the WordPress Post Thumbnail requires a few more lines of code and big thanks to Lee Willis for the code to retrieve the Post Thumbnail url.

The Post Thumbnail has several ‘sizes’ associated with it, I recommend you choose something other than the ‘thumbnail’ setting, as WordPress will generally crop the thumbnail to 150px by 150px (but that depends on your wordpress settings).

In this example, we’re going to use the ‘large’ size.

add_action( 'wp_head', 'fb_like_thumbnails' );
function fb_like_thumbnails()
{
global $post;
$default = 'link to my logo';
// get the post image
if ( get_post_thumbnail_id($post->ID)) {
$image_id = get_post_thumbnail_id($post->ID);
$image_url = wp_get_attachment_image_src($image_id,'large');
$imgsrc = $image_url[0];
} else {
$imgsrc = $default;
}
echo '';
}

Taking Effect

Once you’ve added this code to your themes functions.php, the code is effective immediately BUT Facebook will ‘scrape’ a page once every 24 hours so your new image may not show immediately. You can try the Facebook url linter to have your page ‘re-scraped’ immediately.

Facebook Thumbnails: Using A Woo Themes Custom Image or WordPress Post Thumbnail is a post from: The WordPress Warrior

Facebook Send: Adding A Button To Your Theme

Charly Leetham — Sun, 01 May 2011 22:58:45 +0000

Whilst there are dozens of plugins available to add a Facebook Like / Send button to your wordpress website, you may want to code the button into your theme.

There are two reasons you may want to code the button into your theme:

To place the button EXACTLY where you want it to appear… not all plugins give you that flexibility
To reduce the number of plugins being loaded on your website and improve load time.

Adding the button is a matter of a couple of edits to your theme.

Adding the Facebook Like / Send button…

The important thing is to decide where you want to place the Facebook Like / Send button! Generally, the button is placed at the end of posts, but it can be placed just about anywhere in the post and if you have some CSS Skills, you’ll be able to format the placement more effectively than I’m sharing here.

Let’s assume that we’re going to place the button just under our Post Headline.

For this example, I’m going to add the Facebook SEND button to the individual post pages on my site – however, the instructions can be adapted for any page template in your theme.

Go to wp-admin -> Appearance -> Editor

In the list of files, shown on the right hand side of the editing box, locate the file called single.php (if single.php is missing, then it’s likely that index.php will be required) and click on it.

Locate the ‘loop’ section within that file – the start of the loop will look something like:

This is the part of the post that actually gets the information for the post from the database and displays the ‘elements’ on the screen.

‘the loop’ ends with the part:

Next, within that loop, locate the part that displays the headline (because we want to display our SEND button under that area).

In most themes, that will be the part that looks something like:


[gcode]
(each theme will have a variation on this, but essentially you're trying to find the bit that shows the_title())
On the next line in the code is where we'll work out magic to insert the Facebook Send button.  Copy and paste the code below:
[gcode]

Save your update by clicking on the update file button, and you’re finished.

Test the button by viewing a single post and watching the Like and Send button appear.

For more customisation on the Like and Send button, checkout the Facebook Social Plugins – Like Button page.

Have you implemented the new SEND button on your wordpress website? How did you implement it, and if you used a plugin – which one did you use?

Facebook Send: Adding A Button To Your Theme is a post from: The WordPress Warrior