New Year 35 day Challenge: Declare your goal here......

[Saz Bailey]

Are you looking to gain some impetus for your WordPress project?  

Why not join our challenge taking place between the January and February Meetups?

If there is something specific that you want to focus on achieving or you just want to take the action you keep saying you will, or you want push through a block that's been holding your project up, or perhaps identify 3 simple things that if you complete will push your project forward significantly, this is the challenge for you:

• Decide by the January Meetup what it is that you want to achieve in the 35 days
• Declare what that is in MWUG's by posting right here under this thread
• Ask for the help or advice you need to achieve your personal challenge and offer it to others where you can
• Attend the January Meetup to get more support and camaraderie
• Get cracking on your personal challenge for 35 days
• be sure to update the group with your progress!
• Finally, attend the February Meetup to celebrate your achievements

Any questions just shout :)

To your WordPress success!

Good luck, Saz.

[Doug Lawrence]

Hello Saz

Better late than never ...

What it is that I want to achieve in the 35 days:

1) Finish my daughter's website iskralawrence.com 

2) Transfer my U-design template website on my douglawrence.org site to a Studiopress theme on my .com site

Help or advice I need:

1) I'm transferring my daughter's site to Studio Minimum theme and I’d like to know the CSS to make the background entirely black (using JetPack CSS editor)

I may be out of the county for the February Meetup but am happy to post the progress on this thread.

Best wishes to all for 2013!

Regards

Doug

[Saz Bailey]

FABulos Doug! - nice a simple - let's see if someone can point you in the right direction to do that :)

[Saz Bailey]

Okay so here's mine:

Revamp my blog http://SazBailey.com so that it represents what I'm up to - it's grown organically and unwieldy with no real plan behind it and has broken links and all sorts of messiness going on. To do that I want to:

1) Create a visually and functionally clear home page that takes visitors to my bog pages and other services. I'll need some design and code.  

2) Look at SEO: Create a good site structure - pages, categories, posts, keywords etc. I can do that. 

3) Generally tidy everything up: fix links, delete stuff. I just need a kick up the bum to do that. 

Oh, and then I really should remember to start blogging again!

:))

[Doug Lawrence]

Significant progress made on my first goal:

Thanks to Mike for another great meeting.

I immediately implemented Jetpack Carousel after Mike has shown its capabilities. 

I'm also grateful to the other group member (sorry didn't get your name) who showed me which bit of CSS I needed to change (using Jetpack CSS) to make the navigation bar background black.

This went a long way to completing my first goal. Finishing off my daughter's website.

She was loved the random tiling and the carousel, but wanted the text removed from below the each image.

Simon helped me find the appropriate php (jetpack-carousel.php). And I think he said the following was the function I should investigative:

$html = apply_filters( 'jp_carousel_add_data_to_images', $html, $attachment_id );

Ideally my daughter would like the text below the image not to show and comments not to be allowed either.

I'm not sure what to do next. Do I duplicate this php file and edit the statement in the child theme?

Any suggestions gratefully received :)

Thanks again to all those (including Madlab) who make these meetings possible

Regards

Doug

[Mike Little]

On 16 January 2013 23:21, Doug Lawrence <doug.r.g...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks to Mike for another great meeting.

You're welcome ;)

 

...

Simon helped me find the appropriate php (jetpack-carousel.php). And I think he said the following was the function I should investigative:

$html = apply_filters( 'jp_carousel_add_data_to_images', $html, $attachment_id );

Ideally my daughter would like the text below the image not to show and comments not to be allowed either.

I'm not sure what to do next. Do I duplicate this php file and edit the statement in the child theme?

Any suggestions gratefully received :)

The last thing you would want to do is modify one of the plugin files. That would give you real problems when it came to updating to a new version of the plugin.

Conveniently the Jetpack team have added filters and action in useful places so you can modify the behaviour of the plugin. As Simon found, the filter you need to hook on to is jp_carousel_add_data_to_images'.

 

You could either do this by adding code to your theme's functions.php file (but again that could lead to update problems), or you could create a plugin, add the code to that, and activate the plugin.

Because I needed to figure out what was going on to advise you, it was only a tiny step more to actually write the plugin:

Have a look here http://pastebin.com/6Q6jeCHi and save the code to a file called something like jp-tweak.php.

 

Upload that file to your plugins directory and activate it.

It should do what you want.

Mike

--
Mike Little
http://zed1.com/

[Doug Lawrence]

Thank you Mike

I downloaded the code, but received the following error on activating the plugin:

"The plugin generated 641 characters of unexpected output during activation. If you notice “headers already sent” messages, problems with syndication feeds or other issues, try deactivating or removing this plugin."

Thinking this might be file format error, I tried various combinations of saving the file using Notepad++,  Wordpad and Notepad as UTF-8 and txt and php (before saving a zip), all to no avail. I read the advice at http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_a_Plugin but I was unable to track the problem down there.

I’m sure I’m doing something very silly and would appreciate and pointers 

Regards

Doug

[Mike Little]

On 18 January 2013 10:41, Doug Lawrence <doug.r.g...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you Mike

I downloaded the code, but received the following error on activating the plugin:

"The plugin generated 641 characters of unexpected output during activation. If you notice “headers already sent” messages, problems with syndication feeds or other issues, try deactivating or removing this plugin."

Looks like I had a missing '<' at the beginning of the file ( I must have accidentaly deleted it!). I've corrected it on paste bin now.

It should now work -- just use the download link above the code. It will prompt to save as a .txt file but you can change the extension.

Mike

[Doug Lawrence]

Thanks Mike

It does indeed work now! :)

It doesn't work with the media setting "Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic."  

I don't want to take advantage of your kindness, but I have to ask is this a small fix?

If not I'm happy to contact you off-line and contract you directly.

Regards

Doug

[Neil Andrew]

Hi Saz,

 

Sorry it's a bit late but I'd like to enter the 35 day challenge (probably a good few days less now!)

I have a WP site selling an ebook  product.  The sales page is a page on a blog site . I'm planning to sell the ebook through a 3rd party site- in this case Paydotcom.com

 

Most of it is completed but need help/advice on the following.

 

1. Setting up a Thank you page where customers can download the product (I can probably use the Sales page template again for this)

2. Make the Thank You page secure so search engines don't index and people can't easily find without paying
3. Where on the site do I upload the product to, so customers can download from the Thank You page?

 

Also, if putting up an ecommerce site, what pages have to be included to make it legally compliant?

 

Thanks to everyone for any help offered.

 

Neil Andrew

 

 

On Friday, January 4, 2013 3:07:16 PM UTC, Saz Bailey wrote:

[Mike Little]

Sorry, Doug, not had chance to look at this yet. I'll try and get a few minutes later today.

Mike

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[Mike Little]

On 20 January 2013 09:46, Doug Lawrence <doug.r.g...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks Mike

It does indeed work now! :)

It doesn't work with the media setting "Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic."  

I don't want to take advantage of your kindness, but I have to ask is this a small fix?

If not I'm happy to contact you off-line and contract you directly.

Regards

Doug

Hi Doug,

I had a quick look at this: whilst I can see that the tiled gallery outputs the thumbnails using a different method overriding the carousel output, its output is not filtered so I can't use the same trick here. 

I also looked at just hiding the extra stuff with CSS, but incredibly, Jetpack outputs the carousel and tiled gallery css *after* the custom css, so you can't override JetPack's css with it's own css tool!

It looks like it might be a more involved job. :-(

Mike

[Steve Potts]

> Jetpack outputs the carousel and tiled gallery css *after* the custom css,
> so you can't override JetPack's css with it's own css tool!

Not seen the code myself, but perhaps overriding JetPack's CSS could
be achieved using higher specificity selectors.
Or !important
<cringe/>

[Saz Bailey]

Hi Neil, it's great that you've set some clear achievable goals.  If you don't get your answers here then we will review at the next Meetup and have you completing your challenge.

I have a thank you and download page for the video give away on my site.  I set up the page as private under the publishing section (I attach a screen shot).  When a visitor inputs their email address to my auto-responder they get an email giving them the link to the page. You can also just have the page original page redirect if you want to.

You'll need to upload your product to the Media Library in your WP admin menu bar.

Hope that helps move you forward :)  Others may be able to clarify further. 

Best, Saz.

[Saz Bailey]

On Tuesday, 22 January 2013 09:37:54 UTC, Neil Andrew wrote:

[maria silvestri]

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Hi all,

I am Maria, we saw at the last Meetup at MadLab.. the Italian copywriter, do you remember?! Yes of course you do!

This is just to let you know about my 35 day challenge: WordPress website for my freelancing as SEO copywriter. 

I am late as well in posting it here :) 

Bye see you now.

Maria

[Saz Bailey]

Hi Maria - Yes of course I remember you, I'mm looking forward to having a proper chat at the next Meetup :)

Regarding your 35 day challenge, it will help you massively to break that challenge of creating a website down into just some simple steps to be clear about what it is that you can achieve in that time.

I don't know how far you have got but perhaps identify 3 things that you will do like, get your URL, install WP onto your hosting, choosing a theme.  

Post those things here and ask for any help you need to achieve them then keep us updated with how you are getting on or if you are struggling.  

Best of luck with your challenge & see you in February.

Saz

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[maria silvestri]

Hi all,

I am Maria, we saw at the last Meetup at MadLab.. the Italian copywriter, do you remember?! Yes of course you do!

This is just to let you know about my 35 day challenge: WordPress website for my freelancing as SEO copywriter. 

I am late as well in posting it here :)

See you now.

Maria

 

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[Neil Andrew]

Thanks Saz,

 

I'll have a look at your site and follow your suggestions.

 

Kind Regards.

[Mike Little]

On 30 January 2013 21:24, Saz Bailey <saz.b...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Neil, it's great that you've set some clear achievable goals.  If you don't get your answers here then we will review at the next Meetup and have you completing your challenge.

I have a thank you and download page for the video give away on my site.  I set up the page as private under the publishing section (I attach a screen shot).  When a visitor inputs their email address to my auto-responder they get an email giving them the link to the page. You can also just have the page original page redirect if you want to.

Hi Saz,

This won't work. Private pages are only visible to admins, editors, and the author of the page (who normally will be at least an editor). So, unless your sign up form registers users (and I know it doesn't) and makes them editors, your method won't work.

You can password protect a page and give out the password in your thank you email.  But a better method might be to look into a plugin like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/email-before-download/ or http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/download-manager/

Mike

[Saz Gmail]

Thanks Mike :)

Sent from my iPhone

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[maria silvestri]

Hi Saz,

thanks a lot for your advice. It was actually the point where I was stuck: wondering about thousands things before starting. 

Splitting the challenge in milestones that I can achieve helped me to take action:

1. Get an URL

2. Install WP into a hosting

3. Choosing a theme

Great! Everything seems to be clearer. I have been searching for the right domain and a reliable host that support WP. I came up with some options for the domain, but I don't have a clue about hosting and the forum are controversial..

Any tips in this respect? I might need some help to install WP as well.

Thanks a lot.

Maria

[Andreas Andrews]

Going along with the 'better late than never' ethos and pushing it to it's limits I'd like to declare my intentions for Wordpress projects before the next meet-up:

Yesterday I registered www.incameraarts.com and I'm creating a website that will showcase and promote the monthly meetings (at MadLab) for photographers that want to create art, are interested in photography and want to experiment. I'm working with Jenn Brookes who founded the meetup and hosts the group and I will be giving my first talk on long exposure photography on the 14th. I hope to have the website finished by then. I'll be using a WooThemes theme and hopefully incorporating some kind of featuring system as well as listing the future events and information. Perhaps hosting online tutorials and more useful content for visitors as well as potentially a user sign-up system or members area in the future (to be decided).

I also have the domains: www.clubsandgigs.com and www.bandphotography.eu and I hope to do something with these soon too, as well as doing a complete re-design of my main website www.andreasandrews.com.

Clubs & Gigs: Is all about live music and events. It's first aim was to separate my clubbing and music event photography from my main commercial and corporate business. I have a page set up on Facebook: www.facebook.com/clubsandgigs which has a growing fan base and plenty of content. It could potentially become a portal for live music event information and blog posts, but for now it will simply feature my own photography and words. I do have a vision of bringing people together to work on this, but for now it's on the back-burner. 

BandPhotography.eu: This website became defunct and so it's time to re-launch it. I hope to quite simply showcase the photography I have done with bands and provide information on the services I offer. I'm not sure if this should all come under my main website to centralise things (and have this domain forward to www.andreasandrews.com/bandphotography ) but either way I'll have a separate wordpress install.

Now that might be a bit too much to cram in at this late stage, so maybe just focussing (excuse the pun) on the first project. I'm hoping to work fast and get at least something up and online, but I'm not sure what specific problems or help I need at this stage, however getting feedback on my projects will be fantastic and I can of course offer the same to others.

As for the 3 specific things I need help I'll come back to that when I've gotten my teeth stuck in and get perhaps bite off more than I can chew!

Looking forward to seeing the other projects!

Cheers,

Andreas

On Friday, 4 January 2013 15:07:16 UTC, Saz Bailey wrote:

[Saz Bailey]

Tanks Muchly Mike :)

[Saz Bailey]

HI Maria. Well done on getting clear!  Did you get any of this done yet?  

Yes hosting can be a bit of a mine field and you need to consider what media you are using in terms of how large.  If you jump on YouTube you'll find videos to help you install WP.  And regarding a theme, don't forget if you stick with a particular brand you can always change out and move the content to a new theme at a later date so don't let that prevent you from moving forward.  

To your WordPress Success!  Saz.

[Saz Bailey]

Andreas, your site looks great! Well done on the progress.  

Do you have 3 things that you want to resolve before the next Meetup? 

Best, Saz.

[maria silvestri]

Hiya,

happy to share that I've got my URL and finally I decided the hosting provider, it is Seeoux.com 

I am currently working on the content and.. yes I have to install WP. I will look for some tutorial as you suggested.. it must not be to difficult. 

About the theme.. I am not too worried at the moment, just matter of browse the directory with a clear mind. 

Thanks a lot. 

Maria

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[Saz Bailey]

Hi everyone

So we had a grand total of 4 people take part in the 35 day challenge!  5 including myself :)

Those that took part created some clear goals and I'm hoping have managed to make good progress with them.  

We plan to review them tonight so those of you that attend with anything outstanding we will see if we can resolve and complete your 35 day challenge on the spot. 

How's that for getting things done?

Hope to see you this evening. 

Best, Saz.