WPmadesimple.org

How to embed YouTube video into your posts and pages

Josh — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:55:50 +0000

Find the video you wish to embed on YouTube
Click the Share button
Click the Embed button and copy the displayed code to the clipboard
Edit the post or page (on your website) you wish to add your video to
Add some temporary text where you want to position the video
Switch to HTML view (using the tab – top right, above content)
Replace your marker text with the YouTube embed code (paste from clipboard)
Switch back to Visual mode if desired, the use the Update or Publish button to finish.

Your video is now in place.

NextGen Gallery Sort Order drag and drop problems

Josh — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 21:35:38 +0000

Has anyone noticed problems with the dragging and dropping of gallery images during sort ordering? The I bar positioning cursor seems to be offset to where it should be, making things quite fiddly and awkward. I’m currently investigating but any … Continue reading →

WordPress and e-commerce

Josh — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:33:32 +0000

E-commerce websites provide visitors with the facility to purchase products directly from a website. A shopping cart allows the seller to list their products (usually in a hierarchy of categories), providing full details of the products (including multiple images, descriptions, sizes, colours, shipping charges, taxes, etc.). The user adds products to their cart (or basket, as we say in the UK) which can be managed easily, allowing addition and removal of items. Finally, the user proceeds to a checkout where they may have to register an account, but certainly have to provide delivery information before making their payment. All of these facilities demand a reasonably high level of complexity, and therefore time to develop and design. A high level of care and attention is needed to ensure that the user has the confidence to buy. Any inadequacy or slight scruffiness is enough to put the user off purchasing. In comparison to the requirements of a brochure website, powered by a content management system (and often running a blog), there are usually many more complexities to be dealt with when it comes to e-commerce. Whilst some web design companies use their own bespoke shopping carts (developed by themselves), the majority will usually choose from one of the many popular ‘off the shelf’ shopping cart systems available. These include popular systems like Magento, Zen Cart and PrestaShop. But what if your website is powered by WordPress? Is there an option for integrating a shopping cart into WordPress? Our conclusion is no – well, not at the moment, unless the requirements of your shop are extremely basic (e.g. if you’re only selling a very small range of products). Our opinion is that although there are plenty of WordPress plugins for e-commerce available, none of them yet offer the reliability and full feature set offered by the dedicated shopping cart software packages. We recently road tested the WP e-Commerce from Instinct (GetShopped.org) plugin and were extremely disappointed with the results. WP e-Commerce wouldn’t allow us to present size options for products in the order of our choosing (e.g. small, medium, large). They had to be presented in the order that the options were added to the system. Despite paying for premium support, our support ticket went unanswered for 3 days, only to be then informed that the ability to sort variations was coming in a future version. This type of requirement isn’t a ‘nice to have’, its essential. This was a horrifying omission to discover from such an supposedly mature plugin. Added to this, their forum is peppered with complaints and problems, with users being flatly ignored. This is not the reliability you require from a shopping cart, especially if it’s to form the back bone of your business model. It’s a great shame because it showed so much promise and is one of the oldest WordPress e-commerce plugins around. Two other popular choices include Shopp and Cart66, but judging by the online reviews and experiences available, these also seem unlikely to meet expectations unless you have anything other than very basic requirements, especially if you’re not a ‘coder’. So, in conclusion, for anything other than very simple e-commerce operations, a full shopping cart system seems to currently be a better choice than using a plug in for WordPress. Indeed, the requirements of a shopping cart exceed those of a CMS/blogging tool so this should hardly come as a surprise. And, maybe the best course of action is to ‘bridge’ a dedicated shopping cart with WordPress for the best of both worlds. Although the many e-commerce plugins for WordPress demonstrate a lot of promise, they don’t yet match the functionality of a dedicated stand alone shopping cart, though this may change. With WordPress so popular nowadays, there’s a huge demand for a successful ecommerce plugin. But in our opinion, it doesn’t yet exist…

Set image links to open in a new window in WordPress

Josh — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 18:21:46 +0000

Both text and images can be linked to a web address of your choice. But sometimes we like to set the link to open in a new window (making it easier for the user to return to your website). It’s easy to do this when setting a text link as below: But, there’s no option to do this when inserting an image. Here’s the answer: After inserting the image, click the image and press the Edit Image button (top left corner). Go to the Advanced Settings tab where you’ll find the option near the bottom (as below). Click update to complete. We have suggested that the option to do this when inserting the image is added in a future version.

Guide for using the WordPress Formatting Toolbar now available

Josh — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 11:42:19 +0000

Good news – our guide for using the WordPress Formatting Toolbar is now available to download and print as a PDF.

This 2 page document runs through all the toolbar buttons available when editing posts and pages. Colour coding is used to identify which buttons are recommended and which to avoid.

View/download our Guide to using the WordPress Formatting Toolbar.

Josh.biz goes 100% WordPress powered

Josh — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:54:41 +0000

It’s been a while since we last posted. Sorry for the delay. We had temporarily paused making any new posts until the Josh.biz website had been fully converted into a WordPress powered website on new servers. Up until now only the blog section of our website had been WordPress powered.

WordPress is now our favoured content management system. Many of our clients are already using WordPress to update their web pages (and blogs/news pages) themselves. It’s a powerful system and most importantly, it’s easy to use. We now even have our own dedicated support website for WordPress users: wpmadesimple.org. The remaining core tutorials should be online by Christmas.

As a safeguard, the Josh.biz website is now hosted on a server entirely separate to our clients. This means that in the event of a service issue or incident, clients will still be able to access our website, check our announcements page and email us (assuming they have access to a working email account).

With our website converted, it’s much easier for us to update the page content and to post new stories on the blog. We can even update the entire website from an iPhone app!

Using NextGEN Gallery

Josh — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 19:51:45 +0000

At last, our first WordPress guide hits the press. Due to popular demand, we’ve gone for one of the ‘more advanced’ subjects to cover first – using the WordPress NextGEN Gallery plug-in.

Displaying galleries of photographs is a common requirement for many websites. Business websites often have a need to show off portfolios or show sample products.

Josh.biz chose to use the NextGEN Gallery plug-in by alexrabe.de. This is a great plug-in (with some impressive advanced options) and offers the user and easy to use interface for updating images. Keeping galleries up to date should be performed frequently and keeps a website feeling fresh.

The NextGEN Gallery is a great option but there aren’t many really easy to use guides available. So, here’s our own.

If you know of any other handy guides, tutorials or resources for NextGEN Gallery, please let us know so we can pass the information on.

Managing Galleries using the NextGEN Gallery WordPress Plug-in (pdf)

To view documents in Adobe PDF format you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer. This is available free from Adobe.

Change of Address

Josh — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 22:16:41 +0000

Just as our website was about to burst with content, I happened to be reading Matt Mullenweg’s blog last week (Matt is the the founding developer of WordPress) and to my surprise I discovered that using ‘WordPress’ in a top level domain is strictly not permitted (you can read the full rules here).

So, we’ve done the honourable (and legal) thing. We’ve moved across to a new domain – wpmadesimple.org. We hope the new website name is just as catchy. In many ways I think it’s more accurate to our purpose.

Moving WordPress from one domain to another is fun – quite an operation, but joyously satisfying once complete. It was almost fun at times but there were definitely a few moments of intense cursing.

I hope you like the name of our new home. The old one didn’t last long. And we haven’t even launched yet…

Coming soon…

Josh — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 19:08:37 +0000

Sorry for the prolonged delay with the all important content for this website. We’re nearly there!

We have determined the subjects which will be initially covered (and later expanded). Sample subjects include:

Fundamentals - Understanding what WordPress is, the difference between pages and posts
Responsibilities - understanding the responsibilities of running a WordPress website
Posts - how to add posts to your blog
Pages - how to add pages to your blog
Text formatting – what’s available and what to avoid…
Using images – preparing images for your website and how to add

WordPress 3 coming soon

Josh — Sat, 29 May 2010 13:01:43 +0000

Clients running WordPress (content managed) websites will be pleased to hear that a major new release of WordPress, version 3 is due for release any time now. It offers lots of new features, allowing web designers to do even more with WordPress. This popular CMS (content management system) and blogging tool just keeps getting better! Clients effected will be contacted if and when necessary.

Once WordPress version 3 is released, we’ll be completing our in-house WordPress online user guide.