Zack Design

Colac IS is a one page Wordpress site which uses the NextGen gallery, some jQuery Colorbox and jCarousel Lite to fit everything nicely into one brochure-like interactive page. The client originally wanted to put all that content on three pages but my idea was the one they went with in the end, a single page ‘content blast’ rather than three or four extremely light pages which no one would probably visit all that often anyway.

So here we are, a slightly complex one page site heavily optimised with W3 Total Cache and running two carousels and a Flash slideshow.

As usual I load the contact page and their catalogue link via Colorbox, an extremely versatile and good-looking jQuery modal window plugin which gives that extra impressive layer of content delivery that users expect these days.

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After finding that many, many people were having trouble with 3.x of my plugin, I decided to try and make the change as blatant as possible by including a deprecation notice.

You cannot activate the plugin? You are probably using PHP 4. If you are using PHP 4 simply because of your host then your host needs to change. In this day and age PHP 4 is archaic.

If you have been running versions of the menu prior to 3.x you will almost certainly receive the following error upon upgrading to versions prior to version 3.0.8 and after version 2.3.7:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_css_dropdownmenu()

I’ve reintroduced wp_css_dropdownmenu as a function into version 3.0.8 with information on how to ensure that you do in fact upgrade correctly. I’ve also linked back to version 2.3.7 so that you can downgrade if needed. Hopefully this will fix a lot of the problems as I’ve noticed many, many websites are broken upon a quick Google search.

This is the text you will see if you have the old function still running as a menu:

Please visit the Installation guide to set up your menu properly as it has been changed (remember you can easily edit header.php).
If you can’t do it yourself visit Zack Design and contact us for help. Or, reinstall version 2.3.7

Lastly, my apologies for any inconvenience. I should have included the deprecated function from the start, but was hoping that the updated README information would suffice. Obviously, it didn’t, and I know what to watch out for in future. However, let me be by no means the last to say that automatic upgrades can be *extremely* dangerous and should only be undertaken with caution.

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RSS Image Widget 1.3 is now on Wordpress Extend

Note: If you’re upgrading and you made changes to the template I provided please note that the template is no longer in use. In that case maybe hold off upgrading if you’re not confident editing the actual plugin file. Let me know via comments.

I’ve removed dependency on the SimplePie plugins as Wordpress now ships with SimplePie by default. I’ve also upgrade PHPThumb to use the latest version which is much better. Images are browser cacheable now due to automatically generated and saved files inside the wp-content/cache thanks to PHPThumb.

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See Wordpress.org Extend for my latest plugin!

I’ve had the Cooliris plugin on the backburner for quite a while and finally decided to release it. The plugin supports shortcodes so you can embed it anywhere you like, and it also supports theming via a PHP function which you can call anywhere in your templates.

It’s quite heavily customisable for a .5 release and I’ve ensured that you can put multiple galleries in a page without HTML ID conflicts.

See my Plugin Showcase for an example of Cooliris in action!

Depending on demand and support version 1.0 may very well soon be in the pipeline with further Cooliris-specific options and any feature requests you can think of. As usual please remember to sponsor and support my plugins by donating!

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Hard on the heels of all the recent updates I’ve made to my plugins, I’ve decided to go and use CFormsII inside the Quick Shop checkout page. This was supposed to have been in 2.0, but didn’t make it in because CFormsII API was broken at that stage.

However, it’s working just fine right now, and is ready for download!

You can see the new form in action at my new plugin showcase, and download the updated plugin from Wordpress.org Extend.

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Since it’s hard for users to see how things might look I’ve created a Wordpress site which shows all my Wordpress plugins in action. Along with the plugins I’ve set up other author’s plugins working in tandem with mine so that you can see what’s possible.

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This is probably one of the largest sites Zack Design has ever built. I created 4 plugins for it!

These include a data monitoring system which hooks into the Sunny WebBox, and downloads the latest results from solar installations connected to Wordpress users and inserts the values in the database, a data graphing system which shows the monitoring results in graph format together with Fusion Charts and environmental data, a CoolIris plugin which shows a NextGen gallery album in a CoolIris slideshow, and an auto-login script which allows schools to connect to the portal automatically.

The website includes a forum (Simple:Press), and uses my Wordpress CSS Dropdown Menu plugin for the tabbing system. It is also aggressively cached using the W3 Total Cache plugin. For PDFs I suggested my client use Issuu and Colorbox modal windows, which work extremely well together!

W3 Total Cache has been a massively useful tool which I’m installing on all large production sites these days. Using a combination of Firebug and the Google Page Speed plugin together with W3 Total Cache I’m able to dramatically increase the speed of page loads in Wordpress. Just using the minification and CDN (or parallelisation options) that W3 Total Cache offers often increases a website’s Page Speed score by 10. Depending on its usefulness, I also implement page caching (though this can lead to problems with authentication so I’ve disabled it for Bright Future).

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Get the latest and greatest code from the Wordpress.org Extend Plugin Directory!

Demo of the menu is on the Utah Utes Gameday site.

See the Changelog for information about the new code. Also please read the installation guide especially if upgrading.

I would like to thank everyone for their comments and ideas ever since I released the first version of this plugin. Even though I cannot reply to all the posts and emails I get I at least read them and try to remember and keep lists of features people want/like.

IMPORTANT

When upgrading, you will need to modify your <?php wp_css_dropdownmenu(); ?> code. I’m using PHP classes in this version of the plugin, and have outlined all your options in the installation information. If you don’t the theme will issue an error and your menu will disappear.

Other than that, I hope that this release is much easier for the lay person to get working and that it will be relatively simpler to get the menu working in different theme areas. Unfortunately to get the most out of this plugin you still do kind of need to have CSS skills!

And lastly, as usual please remember to donate via the link in the sidebar! I’ve spent most of my Christmas Eve and several extremely late, caffeinated nights to bring you this plugin. None of which I am paid for!

This plugin is brought to you in part by the Victorian public transport system, the Zune, Foobar 2000, an Asus laptop, LOTS of coffee, Count Basie, Dragonforce, Opeth, and countless blues songs including those released by the great Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Have a very merry Christmas from Zack Design, and a happy New Year!

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I have something very exciting to share with you – the new 3.0 version of the CSS menu system will shortly be arriving!

This will be a complete rewrite of the way things work. Because so many users have been after an easier-to-install and run plugin (especially with the new Wordpress plugin install system which hides a lot of the README), I have decided to cut down on all the annoying support requests by providing you with a brand new, re-imagined, install process for this plugin. And, I’ve gone and thrown in all the heirarchical Wordpress elements!

Exciting new features:

• Widgetised dropdowns!!! No more annoying PHP code -  but you can still use it the old way!
• Along with the widgetised dropdowns, flyout code designed to fly out to the right or left depending on your orientation choice. Straight from Stu’s labs!
• A javascript sub-plugin using Superfish that can be added for those wishing to use JS timed hovers. This will be (minimally) configurable for this version.
• The plugin will intelligently check for a menus.css file in your existing theme directory. If there isn’t one it’ll include its own.
• Easier setup – quick links to different menu styles, options, and more
• Verified to work with QTranslate
• Links and link categories are now optional!
• Post Categories are now optional also!

This is a massive feature set and one which will take me a further week or two to finish up with. Remember, I’m doing this for you for free. If you would like to donate to support this project, please see the sidebar.

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See your Wordpress.org Plugin updates for the latest and greatest code! I’ve gone ahead and incorporated some interface and logic improvements to the plugin:

• Using the new Wordpress 2.8+ widget class I made the widget use instances to support multiple category widgets
• A new widget form for editing in the Wordpress widgets area
• Title, excluded categories, and search types are configurable via the form (you can remove the user configurable search type altogether if needed)

As usual donations are welcome, and please remember that I did not get paid to offer this plugin update to you! Also, if you need any website work or coding done please let me know via the contact form, not via the comment area.

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