How To Sell Things Using WordPress and Paypal And Still Look Like A Pro
E-Commerce on your own website is a pain in the ass. There. I said it.
WordPress and other CMS’s and frameworks are great tools for speeding up website development, but when it comes to integrating shops into websites, the options stink. You can go with plugins like WP-Ecommerce, but it’s such a pain in the ass there are professionals who do nothing but get that plugin running for civilians. You can pick e-commerce framework CMS thingies like OSCommerce or ZenCart, but they’re a bear to get working and a bitch to make look nice. I’m a developer, which means I’m kind of lazy and want to do things the easy way whenever I can, and make the computer or website I’m working with do as much of the work for me as possible.
Most self-hosted e-commerce solutions are overkill for most people, but the other end of the spectrum, the humble Paypal Buy It Now button, isn’t quite enough. It works, but it’s not especially professional looking. Here’s a good compromise that I love: using custom fields, you can integrate a Paypal shopping cart into your WordPress theme. Read more…
SimpleViewer, SWFObject, Flyout Menus, and Z-Index
Animated flyout menus? Nifty. Flash slideshows? Also nifty, and SimpleViewer Pro is one of my favorites. I was about to throw them both out the window tonight, though, because I could not for the life of me get the flyouts to, well, fly out *above* the SimpleViewer on the main page of a site we’re working on. No matter what z-index I threw at the containing divs, it wouldn’t budge. Found a number of recommendations for adding the ‘transparent’ parameter thusly:
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />But since we’re using the swfobject embed method for this particular SimpleViewer implementation, that wouldn’t cut it. Fortunately, I eventually ran across a post in the SimpleViewer forums that implemented the same parameter in a slightly different way, by adding ‘params.wmode = “transparent”‘ to the header script. Here’s the script pulled from my updated header:
<script type="text/javascript">
var flashvars = {};
flashvars.baseURL="gallery/";
flashvars.galleryURL = "gallery.xml";
var params = {};
params.bgcolor = "FFFFFF";
params.allowfullscreen = true;
params.allowscriptaccess = "always";
params.wmode = "transparent";
swfobject.embedSWF("gallery/simpleviewer.swf", "flashContent", "505", "300", "9.0.124", false, flashvars, params);
</script>
Et voilà – SimpleViewer behaving nicely and obeying z-index rules.
Super-Sweet jQuery Slider
I love jQuery. Hard. I’m not as good at it as I probably should be – I bang my head against the wall over jQuery issues more often than Internet Explorer issues, it seems – but it can do some really nifty things.
Right now, I’m working on a minor redesign of our website. I say minor because the colors and structure will remain the same, while the content area – and possibly the back end – will be changing. I wanted to incorporate a bit of flashiness (not capital-F Flashiness!) into our portfolio, so I started looking around at all the jQuery slideshows, scrollers, carousels, and galleries out there. I wanted something lightweight and customizable – both things that jQuery excels at – and something that wouldn’t scream “this site was designed in 2010″.
I found a *fantastic* little jQuery plugin called Tiny Carousel. It works off an unordered list, as most sliders/carousels do, and has a good amount of options for such a wee little plugin (just over 2 kb!). Bonus? It works (and looks fantastic) on my phone.
Bottom line: if you’re looking for a kick-ass jQuery Carousel plugin, check out Tiny Carousel.
WordPress Custom Post Types Fail
Indulge me while I rant.
One of the big freaking deals made over WordPress 3.0 was the introduction of Custom Post Types and its partner in crime, Custom Taxonomies. These are amazing wonderful things that will help make WordPress even more customizable! It’ll be even more like a CMS! Amazing! New! Oh Frabjous day! It’ll be so easy!
“That’s funny,” I thought to myself when I installed WordPress 3.0 for the first time, “I can’t find anything in the admin area anywhere about Custom Posts or Custom Taxonomies.” So I Googled these amazing new features to see where they were hidden, because surely they couldn’t be missing from the interface.
Turns out, I was entirely wrong. These features were missing from the interface entirely, because they’re not supported natively in WordPress 3.0. In fact, if I wanted to play with these “new features”, I’d have to hack core with entirely new code to make them work.
Whut?
Why don’t we take a closer look at these “features”? Read more…
Featured Project: Pottstown Cluster Rebranding
The Pottstown Cluster of Religious Communities is an interfaith organization that supports our former community, Pottstown, Pa, in a number of different ways, including a food pantry, clothes closet, and providing community meals. When they contacted us in January regarding a logo redesign, they’d already tried redesigning internally several times, but didn’t feel that any of the results met their goals or communicated their mission.
Challenges
This project presented a wide range of challenges beyond a typical logo/brand design project (if there is such a thing). The original logo, shown at right, was well-liked by board members and committee members, but there was a fair amount of dissenting opinion regarding why the logo needed to change, if at all. We worked with the committee to focus on the reasons for undertaking an organization-wide rebranding. Read more…
