Author: noel saw

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Plugin of the Week: Sharedaddy plugin

A few weeks ago we looked at Automattic’s Jetpack plugin which adds a plethora of new features for WordPress. One of the more useful plugins incliuded in this swiss army knife of plugins is the Sharedaddy plugin which adds “share” buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and others onto your WordPress site. Did you know you can get Shareaddy as a standalone plugin too?

Once you install the Sharedaddy plugin (alone or as part of Jetpack), you’ll need to configure which types of sharing you’ll want to show on your WordPress site. You have your choice of Stumbleupon, Facebook, Twitter, Email, Digg, Reddit, and Print services.

Here’s where our (two) tips/tricks comes in:
You’ll notice two areas below where you can drag the type of sharing services you want to enable. If you drag the sharing service icons to the left, they’ll be shown in order exactly as you see on the screen. If you drag the icons over to the right, the services will be hidden under a main “Share+” button.

This part might be confusing for users so here’s a quick diagram. You can see the results of this on the bottom of this actual post.

Sharedaddy services

If you’re an advanced user looking to customize the plugin, we converted Sharedaddy into a shortcode plugin for use in one of our client’s custom themes and it has worked well so far. We were able to use CSS to add a colored background and make alignment modifications without much problems.

We were previously fans of the Sociable plugin but with the total lack of paid support provided by WPMU (Inscub) and the developer, we have moved on to Sharedaddy. It is probably the best out of the box solution out there for easy content sharing on your WordPress site.

Update plus 2nd tip: The biggest issue we ran into is that once the plugin is installed and activated, it doesn’t automatically turn on a set of default sharing buttons. So if you just activate it, you still need to define the social networks you want to show up.

We can see a situation where a user may just activate the plugin and forget to actually add popular networks like Facebook and Twitter. So our second tip, is that if you’re moving your site to another server, don’t forget to check and add the services manually otherwise you won’t notice they’re not there until you’re reading your published pages. Yes, we learned this the hardway! Also this would most likely apply to the version of Sharedaddy bundled with Jetpack.

Get it: Sharedaddy plugin

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Quick Tip: The foundation for a great WordPress theme: HTML5

We recently had one of our readers ask “what are the best practices for cross browser design coding?” It seems almost like an uphill battle when we run into problems when our web pages look differently in various versions of Internet Explorer versus Firefox versus Chrome.

We think if you’re going to code a WordPress theme from scratch and not use an existing framework like Genesis, Headway, WP Mosaic, or Pagelines, you should start with a robust and well supported HTML5 framework and insert the necessary WordPress hooks. WP Mayor has an excellent roundup on HTML5 frameworks and how to get them to work with WordPress. There are at least three WP themes specifically built around HTML5 (Toolbox, Roots, and Twentyten Five) that you’ll want to take a look there.

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New version of P2 Reloaded theme

We’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback about our P2 Reloaded theme on P2Reloaded.com. Thanks for all the support including feature and bug fix requests. We’re happy to announce a beta version of 2.7.

  • Updated postform.php to prevent crashing when notifications in theme panel is turned off
  • Hide “Notify” checkboxes on home page
  • Added post box tip about using “@user” – disappears via AJAX
  • Hide Tags field on home page
  • User selectable color schemes
  • 404 missing page error

Download here…

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Review: OnSwipe plugin/theme for iPad

A few days ago we mentioned that OnSwipe released their plugin/theme combo to easily make an iPad friendly version of your WordPress site. We took a look at it today and we’ll fill in some of the blanks that aren’t obvious until you actually try it and look around the UI. Basically this plugin will almost “auto-magically” convert your existing WordPress site into an iPad friendly site.

Still confused to what this will do for you? If you’re using a modern WordPress theme, this plugin will automatically “convert” your WP site into something that looks like it’s custom-made for the iPad. People visiting your website on a regular desktop/laptop browser will continue to see the regular WordPress theme and people on an iPad  (it doesn’t work on iPhone yet) should see a special version of the site.

Let’s walk through a typical installation. For this example, we’ll use a test site for one of my clients, “Beautiful Day Photography.” I am currently converting her site from Flash to WordPress (yay!). On this project for now I am currently using the Graphpaper Press theme Modularity.

So once you’ve downloaded, installed, and activated the OnSwipe plugin, you’ll go to Appearance and select the OnSwipe options. You’ll see a control panel like this:

Onswipe ipad wordpress ui

We tried to upload a transparent PNG logo but it didn’t like it until resized it exactly to 200×200. You can choose which image to display on the home (“launch”) page. You can also select from a set of non-standard web headline fonts and a skin background color. There are no other options on the backend other than this panel. One thing we noticed is that there isn’t a way to specify an iOS home page bookmark/launch icon in this interface.

So what will your visitors see? Your custom logo will appear on the splash page of the site when a visitor goes to the site on an iPad. The user will have to swipe their finger right to left to “open” the page.

Next they’ll see a page like this:

Onswipe ipad wordpress

As you can see this plugin was able to take the home page content using the Graph Paper Press theme and reformat it automatically for the iPad’s screen size. It even displayed the NextGen photo gallery on inner pages as well. Unfortunately there’s no swiping support built into NextGen gallery plugin yet so the experience isn’t seamless as it could be.

One of the things we noticed is that for now OnSwipe plugin isn’t going to do anything for iPhone 4 Safari or Android web browsers yet. We’re surprised that this plugin doesn’t support iPhone Safari since it’s essentially the same thing as an iPad.

If you’re looking to set up a quick and easy iPad experience for your WordPress site, you can’t beat OnSwipe and best of all it’s now free. If you’re site happens to be on WordPress.com, you’ll notice that Automattic has already added this plugin for you.

Get it: OnSwipe theme/plugin

Update: Here’s a quick preview plus video of the newest version of OnSwipe coming in late June!

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Breaking News: OnSwipe switches to free model for iPad theme/plugin

Last year we were fascinated with OnSwipe’s WordPress theme/plugin called “PadPressed” that made our WordPress blog look like an iPad optimized magazine viewer. We had our share of issues and frustration with it, but we thought it had a promising future.

Today Automattic announced that OnSwipe’s plugin/theme was being made available for WordPress.com hosted sites and that OnSwipe was now giving away the plugin for free for self hosted .org sites.

It’s interesting that this being listed as a plugin rather than a theme in the WP.org repository.

Get it: OnSwipe WordPress iPad theme/plugin

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WP Plugin of the Week: Import Blogroll With Categories

A few weeks ago we showed you how to export your blogroll to a file so you could import it into another WordPress site. One of the things that frustrated us was that when you ran the standard WordPress plugin to import the links (aka blogroll) into the new blog, all the categories defaulted to one category and it didn’t retain the original settings.

It was frustrating to say the least in our situation, considering that we had over 30 links that were spread out over 5 categories. We were not looking forward to re-assigning the categories. We knew there had to be an “app” errr plugin for that. Luckily we found a plugin called “Import Blogroll With Categories” (by The Doubtful Rebel) at the WordPress.org directory.

Blogroll import categories

There’s not much to it other than installing the plugin and clicking on the “import” link under “links.” You’ll see an interface like the one above and the best option’s already selected for you. We uploaded our file and it worked like a charm on WordPress 3.1.

Get it: Import Blogroll With Categories

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Quick Tip: Link up up a post to page

Here’s a quick tip for the day you want to point one of your WordPress blog posts link up to a static page. There’s a plugin for that and it’s aptly called “Page Links To” by Mark Jaquith. We’ve been using it for over a year now and it works like a charm. We think it’s one of those over-looked WordPress plugin gems that people forget about it but it’s become an indispensible tool in our arsenal.

Page links to

If you haven’t had the need to do this yet, you might ask why would anyone want to do that?

Here’s example one, if you had a contest page (like our MarsEdit tweet contest page) and wanted to maintain an easy to remember permalink URL as a static page. That way you could have an entry (headline) show up in your blog (or news) section but the target link would be a static page URL (www.yoursite.com/contest/) versus a blog URL which would be a longer URL.

Another use for it would be if your WordPress theme had a photo gallery slider on the home page that was setup only to link to blog postings and not static pages. You could use this plugin to link up the blog postings to pages versus hacking the theme.

Get it: Page Links To

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Sociable Pro Plugin customer service: FAIL

One of the first social sharing plugin tools for WordPress was Sociable. It’s a plugin that adds a bunch of little icons at the bottom of your posts so your readers can share it with their friends on various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious .When WordPress 3.0 was released, developer “tompokress” took it over. He/she currently offers a “Pro” upgrade package sold through WPPlugins.com/WPMUdev.org.

I recently made the mistake of upgrading to Sociable Pro version for $10ish which includes a quarterly support subscription through WPplugins.com/WPMUdev.org. After I had problems getting it to work on Genesis child themes and Caroline theme, I attempted to contact the developer through WPMUdev.org but I then saw he hadn’t answered anyone’s questions for a month.

So I asked WPPlugins.com/WPMUdev.org to help facilitate communication with the developer, their answer was “it’s not our job, you should try to contact the developer yourself.” I find it kind of funny it was their job to take my money and setup a quarterly subscription but they think it’s not their job to make sure their developers are responsive to paying customers in a timely manner?

At this point it’s not the $10 but the attitude that irks me of any company and/or customer service support representative that tries to pass the buck.

I admit I hate it when I get bad customer service from a company “associated” with the WordPress platform. I have gotten great support from Graph Paper Press, Elegant Themes, various ThemeForest authors, StudioPress and more, so it steams me when companies don’t follow through on their commitments.  End of rant.