Tag Archives: Development

09.11.11
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WordPress Google Form Settings Bug

The WordPress Google Forms settings page makes use of tabs to show information about the plugin and set its options.  It appears that the theme I was using, which I am in the process developing, is the culprit.  It loads some new jQuery functionality from Google’s API that apparently allowed the tabs to work as I expected.  I am not sure yet why the builtin WordPress jQuery functionality isn’t working correctly as I expect it should.

Now that I know where the problem is, I think it should be pretty straight forward to fix it.

09.09.11
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WordPress Google Form Plugin

For the past couple of days I have been working on a new WordPress plugin I am calling WordPress Google Form.  This morning I received the approval for adding it to the WordPress plugin repository so I will be doing that over the next couple of days.  I spent much of the last two days on an airplane so the plugin is currently in a state where I have it modified to work offline but I’ve done enough online testing that I am pretty confident I have something working.

My interest in Google Forms stems from the work I am doing on a site for our Middle School.  We have a need to collect information in the form of Booster Club memberships and while there are a number of Membership type plugins, none of them really do what I want.  Ultimately what we need is a spreadsheet of names, addresses, and phone numbers and Google Docs will work well for that.  Putting a Google Form on the front end will allow us to capture the data online.

I thought integrating the Google Form with our WordPress site would be pretty simple, Google offers the ability to embed a form using an IFRAME.  Unfortunately the ability to style the form is pretty limited and the Confirmation page even less so.

I have been using the Google Inline Spreadsheet Viewer plugin to display the data from our Google spreadsheets, I was somewhat surprised to find that there doesn’t seem to be anything similar for Google Forms.  So I decided to write one.  Borrowing some ideas from the Google Inline Spreadsheet Viewer plugin, I have created a plugin that defines the shortcode gform.  The gform shortcode takes a Google Forms URL and extracts the FORM body content, cleans it up, and outputs it for WordPress posts, pages, and widgets.

There are a number of attributes that can optionally control the output, the most significant is the confirmation page which can redirect to a page within the WordPress site instead of the default Google conformation page.

More details to follow soon and I hope to have an example up and running later today.

08.31.11
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Displaying Google Spreadsheets in WordPress

As I continue working on my School Sports project I am discovering some pretty cool stuff when it comes to displaying content on Google Docs as part of a WordPress based site.  I am particularly interested in this because lots of people make lists in Excel and making lists in Google Docs is basically the same process just done via a Web Browser instead of Excel.

Our Middle School has 10 sports (6 girls, 4 boys) teams.  Each has a different coach and along with one or more parents who help coordinate things like concessions, team banquets, weather updates, time changes, etc.  If you’ve been involved with youth or school sports, you know how much things change and information needs to be communicated to parents and participants.

I cannot envision training 12-20 people to manage content on a web site and have any prayer of the content keeping any sort of consistent look and feel.  I need a solution that is low touch (for me) but simple enough that anyone who can create a spreadsheet can keep a fair amount of content up to date.

Which brings me to Google Docs.  It turns out Google makes it pretty easy to publish content from Google Docs (documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.) in a form that can be embedded on another web site.  This will allow me to have content owners have to do nothing more than keep a couple spreadsheets up to date in order to keep the web site updated.  While this works pretty well, the downside of this solution is the control over the look and feel of what Google will allow you to embed is pretty limited.

There are a couple of Google Docs plugins but it looks like Google Inline Spreadsheet Viewer will do exactly what I want.  This plugin allows you to add Google Docs spreadsheets to your pages and posts using a shortcode.  The resulting output has a plethora of CSS classes which means styling the spreadsheet content (which is displayed as a table) to be consistent with your theme is pretty straight forward.

The only issue I’ve encountered so far is empty cells on the spreadsheet don’t seem to be output at all, not even as an empty table cell.  I think this only happens when the empty spreadsheet cells are at the end of a row of data.  If there are populated cells later  in the row it seems to work fine.  This was a minor issue for me, one I fixed by simply populating the spreadsheet with a reasonable value.

08.30.11
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My Thematic project is progressing

The more I play with Thematic, the more I like it.  I have been working on a Thematic child theme for a few weeks now.  I have the basic functionality up and running (see GoLufkin.com).  I still need to do some tweaking to clean up a few things (e.g. I want the post date formatted like a small calendar box) but for the most part, I am pretty happy with what I have.

I’ve been playing with CSS3 drop shadow and gradient features – they work fine with Chrome and Firefox.  I have not tested with Safari but the BODY tag gradient doesn’t seem to work on IE.  I am speculating that i have an error somewhere but haven’t chased it down yet as I find it hard to believe IE would implement gradient support for some tags but not others.

I am planning on reusing the custom header code I developed for my Sandbox-LEGO theme as the Dashboard part of it should work with minimal changes leaving me with just some work to do on the header.php file.  The code I did for the Sandbox-LEGO theme allows a user to choose a left, center, and/or right header image from their existing media library and add some CSS overrides to tweak placement.

The integration with Google Calendar is working pretty well, I think it is the right call for this sort of site.  It will be easy for people to add events to the appropriate Google Calendar and have them reflected on the site.  I may look into some jQuery to dink with the GCal style as I still would like the calendar to better integrate with the theme.

The theme color scheme (skin) is currently hard coded for the GoLufkin site but ultimately choosing a color scheme will be possible through the theme options panel.

08.24.11
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Moving forward with Thematic

I haven’t had much time to work on any of my theme projects but in the last week or so I’ve been trying spend some free cycles on something I am called “Middle School – High School Boosters Club” theme.

My wife is the president of our Middle School Boosters Club this year and much like the swim team was years ago when I got involved, the Boosters Club has no web presence and just about everything is done on paper.  Bleh.  She has asked me to build a web site for the Boosters Club so I am  using it as an opportunity to choose a new theme framework (I’ve settled on Thematic) and see how much stuff I can leverage from Google Apps to build them a solution that doesn’t require me to babysit it all the time. We’ll see how that goes!

As I noted in a prior post, the Wicked WordPress Themes book has been a good resource to get me going with Thematic.  I also found a Thematic Child Theme called Byty which caught my eye and I decided I wanted something similar.  The downside of Byty is a lot of the nice gradient effects have been achieved with images as opposed to CSS.  That is understandable as gradients were not available until CSS3.  However, I want whatever I build to be fairly modern so I’ve decided to go down the CSS3 route.

I am specifically not building a theme for our school but instead and building one which can be tailored for any school by selecting a color scheme.  We’ll see how well I accomplish that!  These are some of the requirements that I am working against which I suspect would be similar for any other school boosters club that may want a web site.

  1. Online Store with PayPal/Credit Card Payments
  2. Support for Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages
  3. Color schemes
  4. Custom Logo(s)
  5. Calendar(s) for game and practice schedules
  6. Sport specific pages featuring just the posts relevant to that sport

Since Google Calendar is dead simple to use and with so many people using Gmail already, it seemed like the logical choice to base the calendar solution on.  Google Apps is free for organizations like a boosters club to  use to registering our domain with Google Apps was the first thing I did.  This also makes it easy to create e-mail accounts for the various people associated with the club (president, secretary, etc.) so they can perform their task without polluting their personal email.

Once Google Apps was configured, I created a Calendar for each of the sports we will support (Football, Volleyball, Boys and Girls Soccer, Softball, Boys and Girls Basketball, etc.).  These calendars can be viewed separately or combined making it easy to view the whole calendar or just the calendar for a specific sport.  Even better, WordPress supports Google Calendar vias oEmbed turning a Google Calendar URL into a Gcal short code!  About the only downside I have found so far is it is very hard to style the Google Calendar, I’d really like the light blue Google uses to be a different color to match the rest of the site but I will live with it based on how easy managing the calendar will be!

I’ve decided to use Simple Twitter Connect and Simple Facebook Connect, both from Otto, for Twitter and Facebook integration.  I’ve used them before so they were familiar to me.  Based on the recommendation from the Wicked WordPress  Themes, I also tried AddThis but it is a  bit more invasive than I want so I went back to SFC and STC.

For an online shop, I am going with eShop which is a very simple shopping cart plugin.  Since we’re selling just a few items (e.g. t-shirts, sweatshirts, etc.), we don’t need anything complex and eShop looks like it will do what we need.

The site isn’t online yet so there isn’t anything to see but hopefully I will have a demo up and running fairly soon.  I need to do some more CSS work and get the custom page loops I want.  I am impressed with how easy Thematic has been to work with.

12.11.10
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Calendar-Plus renamed to Enhanced Calendar

I just received the approval from the WordPress plugin repository for Enhanced-Calendar.  The WordPress plugin I previously called Calendar-Plus will now be known as Enhanced-Calendar.  Once I get the code all checked in and the proper structure, it should be available from the plugin repository.  Hopefully that will happen in a day or two.

06.16.10
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wp-SwimTeam v0.2.488 – bug for scratches

There was a bug in the scratch process where if you started on the Meets tab when the Scratch action was selected, there was not a list of swimmers presented for the user to scratch.  When starting on the Roster page and selecting a swimmer to scratch did work properly.  The bug has been fixed and v0.2.488 is now available for download and both paths, starting with a meet or starting with a swimmer, now work correctly.  The same bug would have affected Opt-In meets as well.

04.29.10
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wp-SwimTeam documentation?

Like a lot of projects, documentation for wp-SwimTeam is severely lacking.  It has been on my to-do list for a long time and I have been thinking about it recently.  I was heading down the Wiki route recently and actually got one set up.  I’ve never been a big Wiki fan but I do see their attraction for certain types of projects.

I personally prefer “real” documentation and by “real” I mean something you can print and read away from the computer.  I’ve always like the model that used by Version Control with Subversion has used.  The source is in DocBook format which means it can easily be produced as web pages, a PDF file, or an actual book.

Right now I am leaning toward using the DocBook format.  At a minimum I am going to try it and see how it goes.  Stay tuned!

03.10.10
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Sandbox Swim Team Theme

This evening I posted a new Sandbox based theme called Sandbox Swim Team.  This theme is designed for Swim Team web sites.  Like the LEGO and Soccer themes I have done recently, this theme is widget ready and has styling for a number of plugins I use regularly.  This theme has a number of options to support custom header images, color scheme choices, and themed login pages.  You can see this theme in action on the MacGregor Downs MacDolphins web site.

image  image

02.15.10
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Sandbox-LEGO theme update

Sandbox LEGO ThemeThis afternoon I posted an update to my Sandbox-LEGO theme.  In the process of developing my CASL Soccer theme I had figured out how to do a couple things which I have wanted to incorporate into Sandbox-LEGO.  It wasn’t a lot of work but I also decided to spend the time to re-write the Bourne Shell script which I use to generate CSS files for the various color schemes.  Instead of duplicating a bunch of code I implemented it as a series of functions which are called with the various color settings.  Fairly trivial looking back on it, not sure why I hadn’t done it in the first place.  It should make adding a new color scheme much faster.