Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with web and wordpress

Web template for cleaning business?

zeikka — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 06:39:17 -0800

Where can I find simple, yet professional and elegant web template/ Wordpress theme for cleaning business? I'm helping someone who's starting a small scale residential/ business cleaning service. I have domain and cheap hosting for her, but would like to find nice web template to use.

Wordpress theme would be ideal as I'm not very experience web designer or don't have experience with complex publishing system. Free would be great this as is very small scale.

Best place to find web designer to do a very simple one page design that I can maintain?

jcmilton — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:58:23 -0800

Best place to find web designer to do design/layout/code for a Wordpress static page that I can maintain? I maintain a Wordpress site with a few static pages. But my design/layout/code skills are pretty lame, so I'm looking for the best place to go to find a contractor who can make some of my static pages look... well... "designed" that would also work within my current, and any future WP theme I use. The pages also have to be able to be updated by a non-programmer (me) whose skills extend to basic HTML and image and text replacements.

I'm not looking for a new custom theme, or a site overhaul, or tons of custom CSS, I just need to pretty-up some static pages. My impression is that a lot of the online contractor sites are more geared to whole site design and bigger jobs, this should be a fairly small endeavor. Perhaps my impressions are wrong? Suggestions on where to go?

How cool can Wordpress get?

london302 — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:43:34 -0800

What is the coolest thing you have seen/done using Wordpress. Special relevance to a corporate website. Can I get it to do cool stuff for me like IP filtering and more? I am not a web developer or a designer but am willing to read and learn and any help will be appreciated.

The site itself will be hosted as a wordpress theme and the client will use it for updating it (CMS). What I was wondering was if there are any nice plugins/tricks which would allow us to do some of the following cool things:

1. Embed Google documents which can be shared either the whole world or in a password protected section (particularly interested in presentations and spreadsheets)

2. Can we present a different set of pages to visitors from different part of the world based on their IP addresses?

3. We are planning to use Dreamhost as our web host - any good or bad experiences with Wordpress/plugins?

4. Can we backdate postings in our press release section?

Is there a Wordpress widget that will automatically sort the links in my sidebar by date?

jeremias — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 05:46:27 -0800

Is there a Wordpress widget that will automatically sort the links in my sidebar by date? If not, how would I code one? Basically, I'm looking to duplicate the Waxy Links sidebar in a Wordpress theme. I'm currently building a theme in Wordpress 2.8, and the Links widget does about 80% of what I want. (Yes, I have asked this on the Wordpress forum, but the question was competing with the other 8 million questions and have recieved no feedback.)

However, what I'd really like is the following workflow:

I add a new link with the links widget (or alternative) and publish.

The link shows up in the sidebar under a header with the date. Any additional links posted that day would also show up here.

For bonus points, it would be nice if there were some auto-cutoff, so after 25 posted links or so, the oldest links would disappear as the new ones were added

I'm reasonably code savvy, so no fear of php, css, etc. I'm just hoping there's a canned solution that's easy to implement.

It worked a minute ago!

lilkeith07 — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:58:45 -0800

I am having a problem with some JavaScript and Wordpress. It worked a minute ago but now it seems broken. I am updating this site and it has a coda slider on the main page, I updated the slider to make it bigger then it originally was, and it seemed to work fine. Then I updated the images with the correct dimensions and now the images don't change. The arrow moves but the main the main window doesn't update to reflect the change. Ive been working on this since about 5 PM yesterday and can't seem to get it working right. Here is where it works right in a smaller scale. I'm not a real big JavaScript guy just mainly cut and paste from what I find online. If anybody can find out why it broke and how to fix it I would appreciate it so much. Thanks!

Pimp my CSS please. Before I kill myself.

miss lynnster — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:34:41 -0800

I'm a designer and usually people do programming for me. I'm trying to teach myself how to customize Word Press themes all by myself though... and I thought I was doing pretty well. But then I had people look at it in other browsers. Yuck. Apparently it loads slowly for other people at times, the slideshow doesn't go all the way across, just all sorts of crap. I tried to do verification and there are a bunch of errors. I need to figure this out and move on!

I just really don't know how to fix any of these things. I was already proud of myself just for figuring out how to do the new stuff I've already done. My head hurts.

Can you help?

Oh, and the theme I customized for this was "Modularity" by Graph Paper Press.

Help me get the Wordpress audio player plugin to work? Please?

hifiparasol — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 08:19:35 -0800

I'm having trouble implementing the Wordpress audio player plugin on my website. Please help a baffled man. I've installed the Wordpress audio player plugin on my website, but for the life of me I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong -- it's not showing up on the page.

I'm writing the page using the "html" setting on the wordpress control panel, and I'm following the instructions listed under "usage" in the 1pixelout link above. The file I'm trying to play is definitely in the folder I'm directing the player to (I'm hosted, it's not just a WP blog); I can link to it conventionally (as in, without the player).

The only change I made was to change the audio files directory path from "/audio" to "/uploads." I've even tried checking the box (in the audio player controls on my WP control panel) that replaces all links to mp3 files with a player instance. Didn't work.

Can someone help me out here? I have a feeling there's some extremely minor thing I'm doing wrong, so don't think I'm too foolish. Thanks.

What's the right software to maintain and display a calendar of relatively infrequent future events?

gleuschk — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 11:49:49 -0800

What's the right software to maintain and display a calendar of relatively infrequent future events, as well as blog-like news postings? I maintain a website for specialists in my field of mathematics, and one section consists of announcements for upcoming and recent conferences. Another is for news announcements: a basic blog-style list of entries. Both are currently run by our 7-year-old Movable Type installation, in combination with a good bit of chewing gum and baling twine. I'd like to redesign the whole schmear, including the back end. Is wordpress (plus more gum and twine) the right solution? Is there some other system that makes more sense? Link.

Here's the current setup, which hasn't changed since launch in 2002: Movable Type runs two blogs: "News" and "Conferences". The former is your basic blog, except that we only show one entry on the front page, and generally have only an entry a month or so.

Each entry in "Conferences" is added when we learn about it, and post-dated to the first day of the conference. This system works ok, since most conferences are just a day or two, but there are some that are a week, month, or even a semester long, and this causes problems. When first posted, they're in an "upcoming" category that displays in one place, then changed by hand to a "past" category that shows up in another place when they're past. Drawback: I often forget to change the category, which makes me look stupid. We average about 3 conferences a month, though they tend to cluster in March, June, and October. Lead time is up to a year.

I'd like to redesign and bring it up to web-2.whateverwe'reuptonow snuff, both in front and behind. Wordpress seems to be the default these days. I could do the same acrobatics to get the conferences into wordpress, I guess, but it sure seems like there should be a better way. Do you know of one?

I run this out of my pocket and in my free time, so free and drop-in solutions are best, but if you've got good ideas, lay 'em on me.

Where to find a custom Wordpress theme designer?

Elminster24 — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:09:33 -0800

Help me find a professional and inexpensive Wordpress theme designer for my small law firm client's redesigned website. I can't seem to find one anywhere! I have a small law firm client that is looking to redesign their website. I'd like to have it created on the Wordpress platform to make it easy for them to update and add content on their own.

I've been checking on WarriorForum for freelance designers but so far no luck. Where can I go to find a good freelance Wordpress theme designer who has a strong understanding of what is needed to make a nice law firm site (and not some crappy theme I could buy for $5 off any old theme site)?

Of course there's a catch...I need this done cheap ($100-200 max) as I am eating the costs of this (long story, don't ask).

I would be providing the designer with a full strategic creative brief, architecture and direction throughout the project but want someone who can do a competent job on the coding and making it optimized for search.

Where can I send out requests? Also, if you fit the needs here, post a link to your portfolio and I'll be sure to take a look.

I'm not opposed to outsourcing this to India via Rentacoder or eLance or something like that, but I've never used them and have no idea how to tell if a company is reputable or not or whether they'll be able to do a good job and have a good understanding of english.

Ideally I'd like to find someone locally in Chicago but they'll probably charge a lot more.

Dealing with nested floats in CSS?

Wild_Eep — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 12:08:36 -0800

Care to help a CSS newbie with float-related positioning issues? I'm trying to add a form to my WordPress site via the FormBuilder plugin, but the form jumps below the two floated sidebars rather than directly after the post text. FWIW, I'm using the Cordobo Green Park theme.

I've got FireBug installed and I've been attempting to determine what indeed is going on, but this problem exceeds my meager CSS skills.

I'm pretty sure that the 'clear:both' property is in here when it shouldn't be, but the form elements are floated-left, and I haven't found the proper combination

When I emailed the author of the FormBuilder plugin, I received this response:

"I've been looking at your site, and it seems to be related to a lot of quirkiness with your template system. The clear tags seem to be interfering with the display of the sidebars and affecting the content.

I tried messing around a bit with the CSS in firebug but wasn't able to get it to look quite right.

I suspect it might work better if you were able to put the comments div inside the entry div. Not sure though, just a thought."

Make my urls purty!

drjimmy11 — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:01:08 -0800

What's the best way for me to create human-readable urls for a Wordpress site? So I've taken a job converting a very static site to one that will use Wordpress as a CMS. A couple of key points up front:

1) We are 100% committed to using Wordpress. Thanks for respecting this.
2) I will NOT be making use of any wordpress theme or allowing users to go to any Wordpress pages at all. We are using it as a CMS on the backend, and on the frontend I will write custom php pages and queries to display what i want to display.

The site as it stands now has 1000s of articles in totally flat html pages. We want to get away from that for obvious reasons. My inclination is to create one page to use over and over again, so where the old url would've been like:

www.thesite.net/article_name.html

the new url would look like:

www.thesite.net/article.php?id=124

two issues with this:
1) the site is quite popular, so a lot of people have probably bookmarked old articles and I dont want those links to die when we remove all the flat html pages.

2) I would prefer people to see human-readable urls rather than ugly querystrings.

My first instinct would be to create a big redirect file (301), sending every old article url to the new format. This addresses point one but not point two, since after the redirect the user would still see the ugly url, right? (if not, please enlighten me!)

My other thought is to use the "ugly" article.php as an include inside a wrapper, so create "article_name.php" which contains nothing but a variable for the article id and a copy of the include which takes in that variable. problems with this are a) we still clutter up our server with 1000s of files, and b) I have non-tech people messing with code and ftp, which i'd rather not.

So, what is the solution? How does mefi get those awesome clean urls like "http://ask.metafilter.com/107722/Batch-Adding-Text-File-Name-to-JPEG-Images"?

I'm guessing "107722" and "Batch-Adding-Text-File-Name-to-JPEG-Images" are some sort of aliases and not literal folders on the server. Is this something automated that is beyond the power of Wordpress? I hope not.

thanks!

A Tool To Convert HTML to something importable into WordPress?

eustacescrubb — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 07:16:46 -0800

Need a tool to help me convert html files to something I can import into WordPress. I am converting a client's site to be run by WordPress. She has hundreds of articles, blog entries, and podcasts that have to be imported. But the site was manually managed and updated, so there is no current database. Am I looking at hours and hours of soul-crushing tedium? Or is there a handy tool that can parse through the pages, grab the content, and convert it to a WordPress-friendly import file?

I'm on a Mac, and have BBEdit; using Find/Replace hasn't proved helpful, because each page is slightly different.

Wordpress themes for legal websites

Elminster24 — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 13:05:40 -0800

Where can I find a free Wordpress theme to use on a lawyer's website? My father is a lawyer and I'm helping him redo his website. There isn't a ton of content on it, mostly just a couple pages of text and then some news items and some images.

Based on that, I figured it would be good for me to set him up with a Wordpress-based site to help make it easy for him to add/edit new pages and news items without me needing to update actual HTML files for him every time.

That said, can anybody recommend good places to look for FREE or INEXPENSIVE (that being ~$50) Wordpress themes that do not have animation/Flash components that would be good for a lawyer's website? I'm thinking simple and elegant.

He's an environmental/OSHA lawyer as well if that helps narrow things down.

I am able to modify the code to incorporate his images and make basic changes but I don't want to be redoing the entire layout. I need an easy way to add a Contact Us form on the homepage as well if anybody knows of any good Wordpress widgets for that.

Thanks for your help guys--I'm happy to answer any additional questions you may have as well.

How to get my posts from Wordpress.com to Blogger?

reenum — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:07:18 -0800

I want to migrate entries from Wordpress.com to Blogger. Is there any easy way to do this? I made the Blogger to Wordpress.com switch a few years ago, but love the new Blogger interface. I find that being able to label posts is a lot less restrictive than Wordpress's categories.

Migrating to Wordpress was a flash. But, going the other way seems to be a problem.

I've tried to Google this, and most of the info out there seems to say that at the moment, this is impossible to do. I've found a couple of tools like blog2blog, but none have worked this far.

Oh technically inclined MeFites, please help.

P.S. I'm not technically inclined, so I really don't have a way to write a program or anything to do this.

wordpress template is screwed up

clockworkjoe — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 11:47:28 -0800

Wordpress/web design problem-my custom template is screwed up and I can't figure out how to fix it. Please help. I just started a wordpress site for my blog. I created a custom template for the page. However, while the code is right, the design is screwed up. The sidebar is at the bottom instead of being at the side. You can see it at raillery.tv/blog

What am I doing wrong?

You can see the code here http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2718078&pagenumber=26#post344233403

Bootleg Management with WordPress?

SansPoint — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 20:24:52 -0800

WordPressFilter: Can I do something like this site with WordPress? I'm the webmaster for Booji Boy's Basement, a Devo bootleg trading site. Right now, everything that is done on the site is handled through 100% static HTML pages. I tried coding a database-driven version of the site in PHP and MySQL, but my code-fu is weak. This is one reason why I no longer study Computer Science... anyway...

I realize that WordPress might be able to let me have all the functionality I need without the need for a lot of coding. I have some technical questions about how to go about it.

I know WordPress has support for custom fields, but would it be possible to have those custom fields visible at all times on the new post page? If I, or my co-conspirator Alex want to add a new disc to the collection, I would want the various fields that need to be filled in (Tracklist, Rating, Description, etc.) to be visible.

How would I sort by the disc identifier? (A001, S001, I001, etc.) Should that be a separate custom field?

Also, I have NO clue how to handle the DVD screenshots.

If you have any suggestions, or even better, an off-the-shelf thing I could use to do this, please let me know. It's already become insanely unwieldy to deal with all the HTML... I'm lost!

Free Wordpress hosting

daksya — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 07:30:52 -0800

Looking for customizable & free Wordpress (or other) hosting I've finally decided to restart my blog and have chosen Wordpress, given its pages facility and skinning.

I didn't find most themes at Wordpress.com very inviting and among the ones I did, there was at least some minor quirk. Now, it costs $15 annually to avail of 'Custom CSS' there and I'm just not ready to spend any money yet. So, I'm looking for either

1)free Wordpress hosting with ability to put up own skins and tweak the CSS
or
2)free webspace, where I can install Wordpress

I've searched this past week and can't seem to pin down this information. I don't require much storage (~50M) or much bandwidth, no MU capability. A subdomain would be nice. Lack of ads would be nice, but not required, as long as they don't scream or pop-up.

Also, if there's a free host with another blogging engine spotting similar features to Wordpress, I'd consider it, but no Blogger.

Finally, if there's a credible, updated directory or comparison of bloghosts and/or webspace, that would be helpful too.

How do I set up a remote website development/maintenance workflow?

namith — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:19:36 -0800

I'm seeking advice on how to mange small website development and maintenance projects with a remote contractor. For a long time, I've been an independent web developer. I do mainly small business 'brochure' sites. Most of the site's that I launch now are on Wordpress (PHP/MySQL) for a simple CMS. I recently started working with a remote contractor to help with my workload. As I result, I'm trying to figure out the best way to manage the development process.

Right now I develop on my local machine and then upload the code and the DB to the 'live' server when the site launches. Once a site launches, I usually end up making updates directly on the server. I know this probably isn't the best practice, but it seems easier then dumping the DB back and forth. For simple, non-DB sites, I usually do edit locally and then just upload the modified files to the live server.

So now I'm starting to work with the contractor and I have a feeling that my workflow could use some improvement. Right now, now when the contractor is editing a site for me, I pass along the FTP details and admin details to access the CMS and usually the details to access PHPMySQL. From there, the contractor logs in as needed and edits the site on the live server.

I have a feeling that I should be using some type of version control system (i.e. subversion). I understand the basics, but I'm still not clear on how it works with DB-driven sites. Usually the files and the DB are getting modified. And then I worry that this is going to be complicated and add time to the process of making relatively straightforward site edits. I really getting hung up on this DB thing. (As a side note, I think it would be rare that the remote contractor and I would be working on a project at the same time.)

So after all that, I guess I'm just looking for some suggestions on how to set up a development/maintenance environment for my scenario. Basically I want to protect the integrity of the sites I manage and limit the access information that must be manually shared in my current scenario.

Thanks!

Fetching RSS Posts from within Wordpress

armoured-ant — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 08:52:57 -0800

I'd like to have a list of the most recent entries from several RSS feeds somewhere on my WordPress blog. How can I do this? For example, if I wanted to have the last post I made to mefi, the last post I made to askmefi, and the last post I made to meta (all of which are available as the first entry in their respective RSS feeds), listed in my WP blog template, how can I fetch them? Is there a plugin?

Additionally, is there a roundup RSS feed of all of the above, together as one feed, somewhere on MeFi, per user (ie. all of my posts, maybe including comments, in one feed)?

PHP class for externally posting to blogs?

frenetic — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 13:38:48 -0800

Anyone know of a decent PHP class or function library out there for externally posting to various weblog packages (Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type) via XML-RPC? I want to add "post to your blog" functionality to a website but I haven't had much success tracking something like this down. Pointers to anything helpful would be appreciated.

How to get individual (permalinks) to work in Wordpress?

TrueVox — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 12:02:40 -0800

WordPress Filter: I've set up my wordpress site in a hosted enviroment (SSH access, FTP OK, etc). I had it running as truevox.nfshost.com/blog while the domain was resolving, then recently I switched it over to just truevox.net. Now, the main blog comes up, but no indiviual pages. As usual, there is I've checked my .httaccess and as near as I can tell it's ok (I can include it if it would help anyone, it's pretty basic). For some reason, no matter what I set permisions to, Wordpress can't write to the .httaccess (even with 777, let alone 666, or better, 664!). I don't know if that would matter, because I think I just put what it tells me to into the .httaccess manualy.

Beyond that, I can't imagine what could be wrong. Is there anyone who can tell me?

Thanks! If need be, I may be able to give out temp. FTP access. Oh, and the host is Nearlyfreespeech.net, if'n it matters.

Viva la web revolucion!

Smarson — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 07:23:44 -0800

What is this web revolution I see before me? Over the course of the past year I have had a lot of time to surf the web and have come to the conclusion that a new era of web based communication is unfolding before my very eyes. It started when I stumbled across Lifehacker.com, which showed me a whole new side of the internet that I had never conceived of. From that point I began to discover websites that re-oriented the way I've come view information creation, distribution, and storage (Ask Metafilter being one of those discoveries). Some examples of websites I lump into this category are:

*Del.icio.us
*Metafilter
*Ask Metafilter
*Lifehacker
*Wikipedia
*Firefox
*Google (and it's all it's applications including Gmail and Gcal)
*Flickr
*Blogger/Wordpress/etc.
*Bloglines

The list goes on and on and is constantly growing (thanks largely to Lifehacker discoveries). Obviously Google and Wikipedia were known to me prior to my new found web exploration, but only as straight forward tools. It's only in the last 8 months that I've come to understand the potential of their design (e.g. Google Map Mash-ups and wiki-technology as a whole).

Among the above listed websites and others I identify in my "web revolution," I see common themes. The use of tagging is widely present as well as the concept of the blog (In reality Lifehacker and Metafilter/Ask Metafilter are just widely popular blogs with no single author and Flickr is essentially a collection of thousands of photo blogs). I guess even deeper than that is the theme of individual empowerment through the web. Most of these sites were not generated by large corporations (although they may later have been aquired by them), but rather created by a single individual or small group of individuals in order to address an existing need they percieved.

So my questions. Does anyone else see the watershed that I speak of, or is this normal web progression and my "revolution" is simply a personal one? If this is an actual distinct movement within the internet, does it have a name or other identifying characteristics similar or different to the ones I listed above?