SOPA also known as the ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ is an attempt by Hollywood & U.S. corporations to pass through congress a bill which will allow them to punish sites who allegedly are ‘dedicated to the theft of U.S. property’.  But this bill isn’t going to just aim at peer-to-peer sharing sites in Iran, but will also clamp down onto many American sites and web companies potentially creating huge ramifications that will effect everyone’s use of the internet.  Sites like Twitter, Tumblr, and other social media networks as well as Cloud Computing could even be effected by this law.

At Think Up! We’re really scared about how this bill will impact freedom of speech and equal rights to information on the internet.  A wolf in sheep’s clothing, SOPA will give huge power to corporations and anyone who feel’s their rights have been infringed upon, to choke out and block access to sites which have supposedly been at fault.

Have a look at the video below for more information

Notice the nice ‘Stop Censorship’ notice that is blocking our Logo? If you run a website and are worried about you rights, please find out how you can add a censorship notice to your site and how you can help spread this information to others so that this bill will be turned down. Find out how you can help here!

For more in depth reading on the hazards of SOPA,  read the following articles..

• SOPA: Hollywood finally gets a chance to break the internet
• Protect the Internet
• House takes Senate’s bad Internet censorship bill, tries making it worse

So the logical next step was to create a series of simple tutorials which cover WordPress basics for the new user (unfortunately called a Dummy).  So I’m proud to begin this series that will help many of my clients and hopefully other bold new WordPress users who find their way to Think Up! Design via the intraweb.

Please feel free to leave a comment if this was helpful, or maybe a suggestion if you feel something was left out.

Thanks for stopping by!

Ok, so the website is up?  What do I do now?

This basic WordPress tutorial is to help people take their very first steps with their new Website.  After watching this brief tutorial you’ll be ready to sit in the comfy chair of your very own Website Control HQ.

What is so great about these widgets?

I could see widgets being quite useful on sites which required small areas of content ‘widgetized’ into the layout of the page, but the main drawback I saw was that widget’s appeared on every page, post and template.  Unless some template customization was made to include or exclude the widget area they were a continuous part of the site.  The time spent to modify the template structure to include or exclude widgets seemed to null the inherent easy plug n play nature of widgets. Until I discovered  Widget Logic.

Quickly my qualms about widget use dissolved and the full power of WordPress widgets was unleashed. Only one question remained…  Why isn’t this plugin built into the WordPress Core?

Fig. 1 - The Widget Logic field

Thanks to the friendly folks over at the Themeshaper forums I stumbled upon the powerful and simple Widget Logic.  Widget Logic is a simple and easy to use plugin which adds a small field to all WP widgets (fig 1). The widget logic field allows you to specify which pages, posts or templates that you’d like your widget to appear on.

The Widget logic field can accept full PHP and/or WordPress conditional tags both of which need to output a ‘TRUE’ value for the widget to appear. Using some basic PHP operators (&& = And,  ||= Or,  !=Not) you can create some powerful logic to help your widgets display just where you want them.

Here’s a few common examples..

Testing for Homepage

is_home() 

Tests whether or not you’re on the homepage and returns a TRUE value to display the widget only on the homepage.

!is_home()

This displays the widget on all pages EXCEPT the homepage.

Testing for Page and Child pages

Although WordPress doesn’t currently have a ‘test for sub-page’ conditional tag, you can use the following PHP to test and return TRUE for all sub-pages of the specified Parent page. To accomplish this on multiple pages and their corresponding sub-pages see the last example.

global $post; return (is_page('holistic-care') || ($post->post_parent=="12"));

This tests and display the widget on page ‘holistic-care’ and on all sub-pages of holistic care (page ID 12)

Testing for Category Archives & Single posts

is_category('testimonials') && is_single()

This tests and displays the widget on all single posts in the category ‘testimonials’.

Testing for Specific Page and or Posts

is_page('locationhours') || is_single( array( 2, 'chiropractic', 'Chiropractic Therapy' ) )

This displays the widget on page with slug ‘locationhours’ or a single post with ID 2, a post_name of ‘chiropractic’ or a post_title of ‘Chiropractic Therapy’

Testing for Multiple Sub-pages of Multiple Parents

A big thanks to our developer Wiz Kevin for sorting this one out. The code below test’s and return’s TRUE for all sub-pages of Parent pages ID’s 2 & 13.

global $post; $ancestors = get_post_ancestors($post); $show_widgets_for = array(2, 13); $show_widgets = FALSE; foreach ($show_widgets_for as $child) {   if (in_array($child, $ancestors)) {     $show_widgets = TRUE;     break;   } } return $show_widgets;

The host of  options available with WordPress’ Conditional tags can be referenced at the WP Codex. I hope this has been a handy post for the budding WordPress professional.

After implementing a jQuery carousel developed by Jan Sorgalla, an example can be seen here I ran into a small issue. The jQuery plugin worked great in all browsers, EVEN IE6! but for some reason in IE7 the script wasn’t firing.

After extensive searching into deeper and deeper pages of Google results I found a small post outlining the problem.

Comma’s kick my butt.

Most jQuery plugins offer customization via different parameters which can affects how the Javascript functions on the page. In this case I was passing the parameters you see below, you can see my error highlighted on line 7.

The Error

 jQuery('#mycarousel').jcarousel({
       vertical: false,
	   scroll:1,
	   initCallback: mycarousel_initCallback,
	   auto:5,
	   animation:700,
	   wrap:'last',
    });

Just like CSS selectors, when you use multiple selectors you need to place a comma after each selector which is followed by a subsequent selector. Like so..

Just like CSS

.sf-menu li,
.sf-menu li:hover,
.sf-menu li.sfHover,
.sf-menu a:focus,
.sf-menu a:active
 {
	background-color:transparent;
}

But when the final selector, or in the case of jQuery, the final parameter is listed it should not be followed by a comma. CSS breaks immediately when you do this, so it’s not a hard time to troubleshoot. But most modern browser’s and even IE6 handle this error when it’s passed with Javascript. But IE7 doesn’t. It breaks, and when all else is working, it can be hard to track down this issue.

The correct code for the parameters above should read..

The Right Way

 jQuery('#mycarousel').jcarousel({
       vertical: false,
	   scroll:1,
	   initCallback: mycarousel_initCallback,
	   auto:5,
	   animation:700,
	   wrap:'last'
    });

I hope this will alleviate some headaches for the jQuery beginner out there. See you next time!