WordPress 3.1 may still be in the testing phases, but it doesn’t hurt to prepare! I was searching through the codex for the query_posts formatting tonight and found this about sticky posts:

Sticky Post Parameters

Sticky posts first became available with Version 2.7. Posts that are set as Sticky will be displayed before other posts in a query, unless excluded with the ignore_sticky_posts=1 parameter. Note that ignore_sticky_posts replaced the caller_get_posts argument in Version 3.1.

• array(‘post__in’=>get_option(‘sticky_posts’)) – returns array of all sticky posts
• ignore_sticky_posts=1 – To ignore (or exclude) sticky posts being included at the beginning of posts returned, but the sticky post will still be returned in the natural order of that list of posts returned. Note this parameter was introduced with Version 3.1 and replaced the deprecated caller_get_post.
• caller_get_posts=1 – To exclude sticky posts being included at the beginning of posts returned, but the sticky post will still be returned in the natural order of that list of posts returned. Note that this argument is deprecated as of Version 3.1.

Source: WordPress.org

So if you are currently using custom templates with sticky posts and the caller_get_posts parameter, make sure you switch that to ignore_sticky_posts when you upgrade to WordPress 3.1!

Flickr photo by Dylan Cantwell.

To that end, I’m going to try attaching a signature to all my posts here. I already tried it out with my latest post over at Oregon Treehugger, and I am happy with the signature itself. As this content-based closing could live on in Google caches indefinitely, I think it’s important to put a lot of thought about it and figure out what to say. Some important points to remember:

• Focus on what is most important. If you only have a few seconds to get across what is most important about you, make sure you are not rambling! Think of this in terms of your 7-second commercial — give us your unique selling proposition and get people interested in finding out more.
• Use three links or less. I went to a networking event last year and I was surprised at how many people were trying to tell people about many of their businesses/projects at the same time. If you want to lose your audience, link everything in your signature to all your various project. If you want to keep your focus, link one or two things so your readers have a clear direction to learn more.
• Tailor the closing to the content, or use them all for the same goal. If you are like other entrepreneurs, you probably have multiple pots on the stove right now. This leaves you with two choices — either tailor the closing to the content it is attached to, or use the closing of all your content to steer people toward the same end goal. For example, I write for a lot of sites but my main goal is always to increase business for myself here at That PHP Girl, and my current signature reflects that.
• Use simple formatting. As your CSS doesn’t always go with your content, use simple formatting for your signature, such as using italics and the small tag.
• Sell — or don’t. If you want your signature to be a commercial for your business, use it that way! Pitch a service like "Learn how you can double your income in just 6 months …" or "Get your free consultation today at …" If you would rather make it more of an about text, such as "Judy is a marathon runner and elementary school PE teacher in Fitchburg, MA…", that is fine as well. There are no set rules for every business. Just be careful about putting anything temporary, such as a monthly special, as the content signature could outlive the advertised special by far.

Nikole Gipps is a detail-oriented web developer, mud-loving Cornell Aggie, avid gardener, occasional iron chef, patient wife and fun mom of two. You can follow her work at That PHP Girl or see all of her feeds at NikoleGipps.com.

• Twitter for WordPress
  This plugin can be coded into your theme or used as a widget. It is a very simple plugin that offers customizable CSS for styling.
  
• TweetMeme
  TweetMeme easily allows your blog post or page to be retweeted. It provides a live count of how many times your post/page has been retweeted throughout Twitter, and is a very popular plugin for large brands like TechCrunch and Mashable. The tweets are tracked at TweetMeme.com.
  
• Lifestream for WordPress
  Obviously this plugin does a lot more than a twitter feed, but it offers several key advanced features like the use of custom themes for feed display.
  
• Tweetroll / Tweeple
  These tools give you customizable widgets to show your recent tweets, list your followers, and other stats. There is also an option to monetize your tweets.
  
• TweetSuite
  TweetSuite offers a whole host of features like tweet tracking, most tweeted, and retweets.
  
• Twitter Widget Pro
  Twitter Widget Pro properly handles and displays your Twitter feed in your blog’s sidebar.
  
• Tweet Stats
  Tweet Stats utilizes the TweetBacks plugin (above) to display "Most Tweeted" and "Recently Tweeted" widgets on your blog.
  
• Tweet This
  Tweet This adds "Tweet This" icons to your posts, shortens the post URLs, and automatically tweets new posts. Note: This plugin may or may not work in WordPress 2.9 — there have been mixed reviews on using it with the latest WordPress release. I’ve gotten it to work, but your mileage may vary.
  
• Tweetable
  Tweetable turns your WordPress admin into a Twitter client with status updates, URL shorteners, and the ability to tweet your posts as they are published.
  
• TwitterCounter
  TwitterCounter allows you to easily integrate and customize TwitterCounter.com followers and stats widgets for your sidebar.
  

Good luck and happy developing!

Nikole Gipps is a punctilious web developer, marketing-minded writer, enthusiastic gardener, improvisational cook, loving wife, and fun mother of two. Read more about her work at That PHP Girl or follow all of her adventures at the nhgnikole mashup.

Why is this important, you may ask? It’s simple: Your current work is the best source you have for new work. How am I going to talk about the different versions or things I did to certain sites if I don’t have the screenshots of the earlier versions? You’d think I would have learned my lesson after I kicked myself over this last week, but no … I went and did it again. I realized I should have taken version screenshots of Rockstar Wedding Planner LIVE while I was rebuilding my portfolio on this site, and today I sat here adding some great new features to Cherry Tree Occasions without taking a screenshot of the existing site before I started.

Your take-home lesson for today: Remember to take lots of pictures. It doesn’t matter what industry you do, or what your product is, it is better to have too many pictures than to realize you have none. If you work with digital files, take screenshots. If you are a wedding planner, take pictures of the wedding. If you do teleseminars, save all the recordings of your calls. Don’t just save the final product, too — save the process, take notes of what happened, and gather testimonials about the event/product. The work you do today (and the people you work with) will always be your best source of future work, so don’t forget to beef up your portfolio and talk about your projects at every chance you get!

P.S. Thank you for the magic that is TextWrangler because I used about 700 undos to get the site back to the original on 4 files, saved as a backup version copy, used that for a screenshot, and then put the new version up again.

Why Use WordPress for E-Commerce?

I have yet to find an e-commerce solution that I really like and that will do everything I need. Most of them are very complicated to do custom design on, or they are limited in terms of custom design in order to maintain functionality. The time-consuming nature of customizing e-commerce software is what makes an e-commerce site so expensive to make … and to be honest, most people don’t need a full-blown e-commerce solution because they won’t use most of the functionality, and/or they have very few products. Many people also don’t want a real store—they just want a way to throw in a few products into their content. So for those reasons, along with the ease of use and development of WordPress, finding a way to make WordPress work for e-commerce purposes makes sense.

Anatomy of a Products Post

Rockstar Wedding Planner has two main shopping areas: The products section and the coaching section. The products section is just a category listing disguised as a page — it uses WP_Query to pull all the posts from the products posting category and orders them by title. The loop then starts to display all the posts.

The first section is just a simple call to the the_title(); function in an h3 wrapper:

The second section calls the_content();, using the <!–more–> quicktag to control what is displayed on the page and what is displayed after the link.

The third section calls a price for the product, and a description for that price if it is available (which it is when there is more than one price option). It starts out by finding out if a price is listed using a custom field, displaying the description if there is one, and then displaying the price.

The code for that looks like this:

<?php if (post_custom(‘bundle_price’) == true) { ?><p><?php if (post_custom(‘bundle_price_descrip’) == true) { ?><?php echo post_custom(‘bundle_price_descrip’); ?> | <?php } ?>Price: <?php echo post_custom(‘bundle_price’); ?></p><?php } ?>

The fourth block is the actual add to cart button. Because the button and the surrounding code for the display stays the same for all products, I opted to just pull the link for this button from a custom field. The admin for the site simply pulls the store link for this product from their payment processor and adds it to the custom field.

Code:

<?php if (post_custom(‘bundle_link’) == true) { ?><div class=”btn-buy”><a href=”<?php echo post_custom(‘bundle_link’); ?>”><img src=”http://www.mcssl.com/netcart/images/cart_buttons/cart_button_12.gif” style=”border:none; background:none;” /></a></div><?php } ?>

The final block is a learn more link, which could possibly go to the rest of that post, or it could go to another page entirely.

This is also accomplished through custom fields, using an if statement to determine if there is a special link, or if the_permalink(); should just be called:

<div class=”btn-continue”><?php if (post_custom(‘bundle_learnmore_link’) == true) { ?><a href=”<?php echo post_custom(‘bundle_learnmore_link’); ?>”><?php echo post_custom(‘bundle_learnmore_text’); ?><?php } else { ?><a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”>Learn More<?php } ?></a></div>

The coaching section pretty much follows the same functionality, with the biggest exception being that no link is display if a learn more link is not entered as a custom field, instead of using the_permalink(); as the else alternative.

Want a code-free version?

WordPress is built upon the structure of categories, posts and pages. Most modern E-Commerce software is built with categories, products and extra content pages. So why can’t "products" just be posts in the category of "products"? If you want to simplify this whole thing, you could just purchase an existing theme (or use whatever you are using now), and create a category of products. Inside this category, you would use a new post for every one of your products including the description, price, and a Buy It Now button. (Buy It Now buttons can easily be created through services like Google Checkout, PayPal and 1ShoppingCart.) Once you have all your products in, your "store" would then just be your category listing, for example /category/products/.

One note: Depending on your version of WordPress and how you edit your pages, it may not work to paste in button code for the visual editor. To solve this problem, enter your text into the visual editor, save the post, and then click on the HTML editor to put the button code in, clicking update post after you are done.

Hopefully I have given my readers some good ideas about what they can do with their own sites, but remember—if you get stuck, I’m always here to help!

Coming up: Part 2 will be on using WordPress with a custom, on-site cart solution. Part 3 will be about using a plugin to create a shopping solution.

Of course, if you do get stuck, I’m always here to help. And Mark, go ahead and tweet your heart out now.

I make a lot of sites that use WordPress as a content management system (CMS) but not with the blog as the front page. For these, I use posts and categories to make various sections of the site using custom templates. My latest example of that is the Blog, Q&A and Latest News sections of the site Hear Florida. For this, I wanted to make an archive page which lists all the categories, subcategories, and posts in what is technically the blog. I am sure someone is going to tell me that a plugin exists to do this thing, but as I tried two that didn’t work well, I had decided to give up and just use PHP. I also wanted to use as many standard WordPress calls as I could instead of just writing all my own functions.

In this exercise, this is what our final product will look like: All Blog Posts Archive » Hear Florida Audiology Group. It was created in a custom template called "All Posts Archive". I will be breaking this down by parts and explaining what each part means to help my readers not only see the code, but to know what each part does. I will break this down piece by piece, but as a preview our final code will look like the chunk below.

<?php
   $all_cats = wp_list_categories(‘hide_empty=0&echo=0&title_li=&exclude=1′);
   $cats_list = explode("<", $all_cats);
   $build_cat_structure = array();
   $array_counter = 0;
   foreach ($cats_list as $value) {
      $string_start = substr($value, 0, 3);
      if ($string_start == "li " || $string_start == "/a>" || $string_start == "/li") {
         continue;
      }
      elseif ($string_start == "ul ") {
         $build_cat_structure[$array_counter] = "start_child";
         $array_counter = $array_counter + 1;
      }
      elseif ($string_start == "/ul") {
         $build_cat_structure[$array_counter] = "end_child";
         $array_counter = $array_counter + 1;
      }
      elseif ($string_start == "a h") {
         $cat_name = explode(">", $value);
         $build_cat_structure[$array_counter] = $cat_name[1];
         $array_counter = $array_counter + 1;
      }
   }
   echo "<ul>";
   foreach ($build_cat_structure as $value) {
      if ($value == "start_child") {
         echo "<ul>\n";
      }
      elseif ($value == "end_child") {
         echo "</ul>\n";
      }
      else {
         $category_id = get_cat_id($value);
         echo ‘<li><a href="’ . get_category_link($category_id) . ‘">’ . category_description($category_id) . "</a></li>\n";
         $children = wp_list_categories(‘echo=0&child_of=’ . $category_id . ‘&title_li=’);
         $find_me = stripos($children, "No categories");
         if ($find_me !== FALSE) {
         echo "<ul>\n";
         $the_query = new WP_Query(‘cat=’ . $category_id);   
         while ($the_query->have_posts()) : $the_query->the_post(); $do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>
            <li><a title="<?php the_title(); ?>" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
            <?php endwhile;
         echo "</ul>\n";
         }
      }
   }
   echo "</ul>";
?>

The first part pulls the categories and puts them into a list. If you wanted to shape the final outcome of the display, you could change the settings of wp_list_categories() here. For example, setting hide_empty=1 instead of 0, you could hide any categories that you have without posts. I have chosen to exclude the Uncategorized category (category #1), but if you wanted yours listed just removed the exclude=1 part. Or, if you would like to exclude other categories, just list them by number (exclude=1,5,6 for example). The echo=0 is important here because it puts the results into a variable instead of displaying them.

   $all_cats = wp_list_categories(‘hide_empty=0&echo=0&title_li=&exclude=1′);

Once the result of wp_list_categories is dumped into the variable all_cats, it is broken apart into text chunks using the character < as the divider.

   $cats_list = explode("<", $all_cats);

This basically puts every html chunk into it’s own entry in an array. (If at any point you want to see your results, feel free to do a var_dump($last_variable); and it will show you what you are working with.) I do this to set up the processing of the information in the next set of steps.

   $build_cat_structure = array();
   $array_counter = 0;

This sets up an empty array which we will fill in the loop below, and starts our array key counter at 0.

   foreach ($cats_list as $value) {
      $string_start = substr($value, 0, 3);
      if ($string_start == "li " || $string_start == "/a>" || $string_start == "/li") {
         continue;
      }
      elseif ($string_start == "ul ") {
         $build_cat_structure[$array_counter] = "start_child";
         $array_counter = $array_counter + 1;
      }
      elseif ($string_start == "/ul") {
         $build_cat_structure[$array_counter] = "end_child";
         $array_counter = $array_counter + 1;
      }
      elseif ($string_start == "a h") {
         $cat_name = explode(">", $value);
         $build_cat_structure[$array_counter] = $cat_name[1];
         $array_counter = $array_counter + 1;
      }
   }

This is where I have it to loop through the array I made by the earlier explode() command to set up the final array which will produce the display. By taking the first three letters of each array item as a seed, I can see where the html is going and reflect that in the final build. If the string starts with something that doesn’t influence the final outcome (the start of a list item, the end of a list item, and the end of a anchor tag), the command continue is issued to loop forward on to the next item. If hierarchy is detected (the start or end of an unordered list), a designation is added into the array and the counter advances. If the start of a link is detected ("a h" is the start of a href), it breaks apart that line using explode to pull out the name of the category. The category name is then added to the array and the counter is advanced.

These last parts are where I put it all together and display the data by looping through the array I built earlier ($build_cat_structure). You could probably do this differently or combine the above and below parts instead of looping through twice, but I liked it like this so I could use the data in other ways if I wanted to.

   echo "<ul>";
   foreach ($build_cat_structure as $value) {
      if ($value == "start_child") {
         echo "<ul>\n";
      }
      elseif ($value == "end_child") {
         echo "</ul>\n";
      }

This makes/ends a nested unordered list If it hits my start/end child marker, which makes the category hierarchy work. This is also a good chance to add specific styling to the inside nest lists, if that is what you want.

      else {
         $category_id = get_cat_id($value);

The start of the else tells the script what to do if it encounters the name of a category, or something that is not the start or end of a nested list. The next line converts our category name to a category ID using the get_cat_id() function.

         echo ‘<li><a href="’ . get_category_link($category_id) . ‘">’ . category_description($category_id) . "</a></li>\n";

This displays the category in a list item with a link to the archive of that category using get_category_link(). I use category_description() here because my template is set up where the category name is a shorter version that is used for the sidebar and the category description is a longer version used for display. If you wanted to use the name instead, just replace category_description($category_id) with $value.

         $children = wp_list_categories(‘echo=0&child_of=’ . $category_id . ‘&title_li=’);
         $find_me = stripos($children, "No categories");
         if ($find_me !== FALSE) {

This special handling function checks to see if the current category is a parent of other categories. For example, on my final page (All Blog Posts Archive » Hear Florida Audiology Group), there is a main category of Blog for which I don’t want the posts listed. I want the posts listed under their sub categories, so it skips the post by post listing if the current category is a parent of other categories. A category that is not a parent of others will have something like "<li>No Categories</li>" as the result of the above wp_list_categories(child_of=) call. The ($find_me !== FALSE) part creates a situation where the posts are only being displayed where the phrase “No Categories” is found.

         echo "<ul>\n";
         $the_query = new WP_Query(‘cat=’ . $category_id);   
         while ($the_query->have_posts()) : $the_query->the_post(); $do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>
            <li><a title="<?php the_title(); ?>" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
            <?php endwhile;
         echo "</ul>\n";
         }
      }
   }
   echo "</ul>";

This last part creates another nesting with all of the posts for each category using WP_Query. The posts are displayed with their title and permalinks. Then everything is closed up and all the unordered lists are given end tags.

Overall I am pleased with my results and how it turned out in terms of giving the user a clear way to look through older posts by category and view all posts as a whole.

Customizations made to the base them include:

• Adjusted the CSS for the div columns for the front page slider to allow for more text and less image space at a 300px height slider.
• Removed the image resizer and link from the front page image. Swapped out the Woo Themes image function for get_post_custom_values($key) to pull the correct image.
• Took out subscription widget and added my own sidebar links to the blog using the Woo Themes Hand-drawn Icon Set.
• Removed date-based archives in blog sidebar for a recent posts widget.
• Added hard link to Portfolio category of the blog into the header; changed exsiting code to highlight Portfolio instead of Blog when the user was in the Portfolio category of the blog.
• Creation of a custom contact form and response thank you page.
• Added Read More, Testimonial, and Recent Posts widgets to the bottom of the front page.
• Removed footer/widgets from the blog (for now).