SimplePie, Oh Yeah!

Yes, we are using the amazing SimplePie feed parser to aggregate feeds and give you fresh daily links, images, and even twitter updates with the ability to paginate all the content independently and at the same time. By “at the same time” I mean you can paginate one section and it will not loose the place of the other section. Just a little added bonus I thought might be good to have. Also, I opted to not use the WordPress plugin for SimplePie due to it’s restrictive feel, I needed to do some very customized code and the plugin was getting in the way.

I have to say that this was by far the most complex and interesting use of SimplePie I have ever created. Normally you would not use SimplePie to pull twitter updates because the RSS output is void of any links but with a little PHP string manipulation everything is working perfectly (I hope) and the main thing is we can paginate the updates; I’ve yet to see a JavaScript version that can paginate twitter forward and back.

Snapshot

Some Final Words

Well, I hope you enjoy the new site and I am very interested to see if the new larger design is going to be a hit or not. Also, to clarify only 8% of the users who visit Creattica Daily have a screen that is not 1200px or above. So, this was the perfect place to test out this kind of design.

After many months of hard work, Collis Ta’eed (design), Mathias Meyer (Rails), and I have reached the final stages in pre-launch testing for the new Freelance Switch. Within a week or two we will have thoroughly tested the staging site to account for what I’m hoping is almost all bugs. The site is the mashup of three different applications and a seriously cool plugin. Below I’ll let you in on what technologies we used to build this very awesome web site.

Blog & Plugin

For the blog and most of the sites regular content (i.e. contact, about, etc.) I built a WordPress theme that is extremely custom and sexy. In addition to the WordPress theme there are a number of custom & downloaded plugins but only one that really is worth mentioning, an improved version of the Community Links plugin you see at Psd.tuts+ or any of the other tuts+ sites. The plugin works in a similar fashion as the old one but allows the user to upload an image and associate a category with the link. Now everything will be categories and have a thumbnail next to it, nice right?

Forum

Here we used BBpress and a custom theme I coded to match the blog. However, I also had to re-create many of the functions that BBpress comes with to change the output because the theme was not going to show content in a tabular style so I had to un-table the forum. A bit of extra work but well worth it in the end.

Job Board & Freelance Directory

The very talented Mathias Meyer build the backend of this amazing Rails app, my job was to skin it. In the end the old job board got a new makeover and had a directory of freelancer added to it. Some amazing stuff, the addition of the directory is going to be huge in my opinion, but I’ll let you guys be the judge.

All Together

In the end, the Rails app and forum are bridged together so they will share user info between the two databases. As well, the search feature in the header is something I really enjoyed creating. You can choose from a drop down list of different section that you want to submit your search to and the form will will return the proper output based on your query. Basically, you can choose to search between the blog, forum, resources, jobs, directory, and podcasts. Anyhow, the site should be live very soon and ready for feedback and blissful enjoyment. This is really just a teaser to whet your appetite, so hold out cause the real thing is coming shortly to a computer screen near you.

I use this function on my site and pretty much on every other site I’ve ever built. However, the only different is this new code is leaner and will test many levels deep. A very handy tool for the custom type themes that seem to be popping up in the wake of what I am calling a WordPress feeding frenzy. The popularity of this platform has been growing exponentially and who can blame it, I absolutely love working with WordPress.

Anyhow, this is the first plugin I have submitted to be hosted in the Directory, mostly I just wanted to test out committing a plugin to the directory and this seemed like a logical place to start. If you’re interested in what was changed here is the code. Also, you can update the old functions code with this much better code.

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/**
 * The parameter can contain the page ID, or page name
 *
 * @since 1.0
 * @uses $post
 * @uses $wpdb
 *
 * @param mixed $page either int or string
 * @return bool
 */
if (!function_exists('is_page_or_ancestor')) {
  function is_page_or_ancestor($page = '') 
  { 
    global $post, $wpdb;
 
    // If is not numeric get page ID
    if (!is_numeric($page)) {
      $page = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_name = '".$page."' AND post_type = 'page'");
    }
 
    // Recursive search through page hierarchy
    if ( is_page($page) || ( is_array($post->ancestors) && in_array($page, $post->ancestors) ) ) {
      return true;
    }
    return false;
  }
}

Sample Usage

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if (is_page_or_ancestor('about')) { 
    DISPLAY SOMETHING
} else {
    DISPLAY SOMETHING DIFFERENT
}

Download File

• Version 1.1

Donations

• Make a donation and help keep the awesomeness flowing.

Disclaimer

The code behind this WordPress web site is very custom to say the least and I took every chance to build upon my personal WordPress functions library. Some of the code behind the site I will be sharing in a few articles over the next few weeks. But to give you an idea of what powers this site is a short list of features I have cooked up. But before I go to far into this I have to say that I removed probably 20 or so pages if you’ve been here before and are wondering, basically the whole services section was removed because most people, based on my analytics, only want to see the portfolio section anyhow. As well, I’m trying to focus mostly on WordPress based projects for a while. Not to say I will automatically turn something down it’s just what I excel at. WordPress themes, plugins, and functions with some sexy designs for good measure. Moving on.

The XHTML/CSS

100% valid, if you find a page that doesn’t validate please I encourage you to let me know. I am a big stickler for valid semantic code and do my best in client projects but you can’t always control what people do after you build the thing. So for that very reason I make damn sure my site is valid. I always write my code in XHTML 1.0 Strict. It’s very important to me that you separate the content from the presentation and only use tables for tabular content. However, you will find that I use some CSS3 that will not validate but I keep it in a file names invalid.css which is basically the rounded borders you see scattered around the site.

The WordPress

In the functions.php file for this WordPress theme you’d find some serious hidden gems. I have for example, a function that queries my portfolio page and finds all of it’s children and allows me to dynamically pull information from them and display it back as a gallery of thumbnail images, titles and a short descriptions for each child. In addition to never having to update my portfolio page because it’s completely dynamic, I can also use the same code to show the last two projects in my portfolio on the home page. Basically, it drastically reduces the amount of work needed to maintain a portfolio web site without turning my pages into blog posts like many of the other themes you find on the internet. I think it’s important to separate your blog posts from your pages. It’s just seems unnatural to me to try and fool your blog into being two things at the same time., but that’s just my opinion.

Another great feature that I wrote a while back and refined into what it is now, is the ability to know if you are on a certain page or any of it’s children, including grandchildren. With that, you can do some pretty sweet conditional stuff like show only certain scripts on a set of pages or maybe a different sidebar than regular pages have. Also, I did the same thing for categories. The functions are: is_category_or_sub() and is_page_or_sub() and work just like their WordPress counterparts is_page() and is_category(), but just with the added ability to check if it’s a child, as well. Something that I think WordPress is seriously lacking and should consider adding to the core.

There is tons of things I could go into that make up this theme and it’s very custom little bits but I’ll save some for a tutorial or two very shortly. If you want to see the is_page_or_sub(); functions I wrote about that the other day.

The JavaScript

Oh yes, I use a lot of custom written JavaScript piggy backed on the fantastic jQuery library. It’s such an awesome library that you would have to be blind not to see how fantastic it is. Anyhow, The forms are AJAX driven with a custom tooltips script that displays a little extra info to direct my users and help to make the form data a little more meaningful. And the form will work with JavaScript turned off, which is extremely important if you want to make sure people can contact you regardless of if they want to be anti awesome or not.

A feature that I’m really proud to have on my site is on the home page. It’s not blindingly noticeable but if you click one of the three large images in the header they rotate in both right and left directions. A very sweet effect if I say so myself. Subtle, but if for some reason you get the feeling to click one of those images you’re not disappointing.

In summation I love the new site and am extremely happy to roll it out for everyone to critique and hopefully enjoy. I hope you love it as much as I do and if you don’t, well that’s just OK, I can live with that.

Now when you sign up for the plus program you only pay $9 per month for access to all three of the available sites that participate in supplying the plus program with content. Or you can get three months at a time for only $22. The best thing is that the price isn’t going to change when they add more sites to the mix. So when Ae, Audio, or even the Flash sites start adding content to the plus program you will just get even more for your money. Awesome!

Anyhow, go check out the dashboard and if you have any question on how I built it, feel free to ask or just comment that it’s awesome and you freakin love it!

Collis Ta’eed, Chris Moyer and I successfully launched the new Psdtuts+ web site today!

Wow what a Wordpress theme that was. Thankfully everything went off without a hitch and the new theme has found a home on the net. Apparently when I turned off maintenance mode the Psdtuts+ community was waiting, comments have been rolling in all day about the upgrade and it seems to be an overwhelmingly positive response to the changes Collis and I made to the themes design and functionality.

If you are not familiar with Psdtuts+ or the Envato TUTS network of web sites then the basic run down is they are awesome tutorial sites for us design and web types. The network is made up of a Photoshop, Illustrator, Internet and Audio tutorial repository for the most creative of us to get lost in and with talks about a few more additions to the family things are going to get pretty hectic over at Envato expanding and adding new authors and services for people to enjoy on a daily basis, wow that’s a lot of work. But hey, that’s what it’s all about, right? Growth is the single most important part of having a business, so cheers to that.

Added Options

Here are a few of the upgrades and changes to Psdtuts+ that made it freaking awesome.

• Tabbed Navigation
• Breadcrumbs
• Author Profiles
• User Link Feed
• Relating Posts with images
• PSDTUTS Login on the Page
• Free downloads section
• Video tutorials

There are more little tweaks here and there that really set off the way the site works from a usability standpoint that just makes it better overall. It truly is an improvement over the last version, but if you didn’t ever see it you can see some screen shots of the last three versions before this one in the launch article Collis wrote regarding the theme switch.

Well, I’m off to get some work done and suggest you head over to Psdtuts+ for a few lessons on getting to know Photoshop or check out Nettuts+ for some great web related tuts.