Award-winning web development since 1995
Written: June 26, 2014
Trever Dougan and his partner are starting up a brand-new parts catalog company called ICDT and asked me to help them get it up and running this month. For the Content Management System I selected WordPress, because it is the #1 CMS now with some 70,000,000 users. Trever wanted his clients to see all of the electronic parts he offers, but not actually order them, instead they can request a quote. I choose a catalog plugin and then added the quoting feature. Here’s a photo gallery to give an idea of how a prospective buyer can find their part and request a quote:
After a training session Trever is able to add new parts to the catalog, upload photos, add PDF specifications, along with updating any page or writing news articles. The theme for this website is responsive, so it works and looks good on the desktop, tablet and mobile devices.
I wish the team at ICDT all the best in their startup company.
Tags: plugin, theme, WordPress
My new WordPress site uses several useful plugins and I’ve enjoyed having Easy Nivo Slider on my Home page to rotate four Posts, however with the WordPress 3.2.1 update this plugin plain stopped working.
I did some quick searching on the WordPress support forums and found out that I was not alone. Others had seen Javascript errors, so I browsed my Home page using Firefox with the Error Console turned on. Sure enough, in the Javascript for this plugin I found an error which was breaking it. My first response was to just comment out line 97 in a file called:
plugins/easy-nivo-slider/3rd-party/jquery.nivo.slider.js
That simple hack made Easy Nivo Slider start working again.
Hopefully the author will read the Forums, find the bug, fix it, and I can get an officially updated and supported plugin.
In the meantime my Home page is working with a sequence of four rotating images that can be clicked.
Tags: bug, Easy Nivo Slider, hack, plugin, WordPressGreat fix! I too use Nivo Slider in both Joomla and WordPress installs. It’s great to see someone sharing the fix rather than just the problem.
Keep up the great work!
Charles
Daniel Payne says: Charles,
Glad to help out. Google is a wonderful way to find out about a problem, then a little ingenuity to fix this Javascript glitch in Nivo Slider.
Chris Raymond says: So what is the code at line 97 to comment out? I don’t have a text editor that shows line numbers.
Daniel Payne says: Chris,
I’ve stopped using this Plugin and instead coded up a Custom page template for my Home page where the slider is, then used jQuery and the Nivo Slider code from http://nivo.dev7studios.com/.
I’ve been integrating client web sites with a popular WordPress plugin in called “Events Manager” that allows me to show show events in my sidebar:
I can also show events as a one month calendar:
One feature that was really missing from this plugin was search. There simply is no integration with the powerful search capability in WordPress for this plugin because of how this plugin was designed, it doesn’t use Posts therefore WordPress doesn’t know what to search.
My solution was to update the search.php file in my theme template by adding the following PHP code to search the custom table used by this plugin:
Line 13 is the name of the database table used by the plugin, in my case: wp_em_events.
Line 14 is where we get the search string that our web visitor has typed.
Lines 17 to 19 are where we query the database table looking for any matches with the search string in the event name or the event notes.
Lines 21 thru 27 will display all the events that match our search. On one client site the results look like this:
For my search.php file I inserted the custom code just above The Loop.
I love the power of re-using a WordPress plugin to enhance a web site however sometimes I have to get in there and do some PHP and database coding to get the feature that I need to complete the plugin.
My new client is the Tualatin VFW and they wanted an Events Calendar feature so I installed a popular WordPress plug-in called The Events Calendar.
I’m using widgets on each page and modified a template file (events-list-load-widget-display.php) so that it produced a list layout consistent with my theme:
I also updated a template file (gridview.php) so that it matched my theme:
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Nice article! Day by day I am personally learning a little more about NodeJS. It is definately the only real language to educate yourself on long term. I have finished the BackSpace.Academy Amazon web services (aws) Certified Developers path. They have opened a different Realm of apps for myself. Now I need to find the time for getting coding!
what catalog plugin did you use?
Mike, I used the plugin at: https://implecode.com/
All the best to you.