position: relative;

I use NextGen Gallery for WordPress often, I think it’s a fairly solid solution with a few quirks that I can work around.

Today I’m working on a multilevel gallery for a local architect. I have a number of galleries within each album, and I wanted to show the album name and gallery name for each of them to help the visitor keep track of where they are in the stack.

To do this, go into /wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/view/ and open gallery.php.

Add this line to the very top of the page:

<?php $album = nggdb::find_album( get_query_var('album') ); ?>

Then, scroll down to about line 72 and just before the thumbnails section comment, add this:

<?php echo $album->name?>: <?php echo $gallery->title?>

This will give you a nice-looking, dynamic headline like:

Album Name: Gallery Name

This morning I’ve been hunting around for a solution to a client’s problem – getting internal links to work within a scrollable div. It was more difficult than I thought it might be.

The problem was that when you click on a link to an anchor tag within the same page, the entire page wants to scroll up so that the anchor tag is near the top of the browser window. Because my client’s design is a pretty small content area in the middle of the screen, that didn’t work well. I needed to find a solution that would only affect the content within a single scrollable div.

I looked at a number of jQuery options that didn’t really pan out. About 10 minutes ago I found a little free script called SoftDivScroll. It was extremely easy to install and configure, and it works beautifully in FF, Chrome, Safari/Win, Opera, and IE 8/7/6.

I just sent the author a little donation for this timesaving script.

Today I installed and set up AjaXplorer for an illustrator client who needs to allow his own clients to easily upload and download documents from his FTP site.

The install was very fast; setup was longer – it took me a little while to get exactly what I needed to be doing in setting up repositories/file directories, but in the documentation I found simple instructions for creating user-specific directories on the fly.

So you create one repository for all client files, and folders are created automatically per username. Very nice.

The backend is clean and pretty intuitive, moreso on the client side than the admin side. Setting up users and directories is easy and the documentation is fairly thorough. I did find an active forum which is usually a good sign with open source software. I’ll use AjaXplorer again.

We spent a few days in the Albuquerque – Santa Fe region of New Mexico this week, including Petroglyph National Monument and Kasha-Ketuwe Tent Rocks National Monument. Here are a few shots from both.

Last year, sometime in February I think, a couple of design/marketing friends and I got together for coffee and one of the things that came up in conversation was an idea for a particular type of website that’s not represented in our region of the country. Let’s call it Idea X, just for kicks.

I was intrigued by Idea X – I’d been playing with the concept for a few months, but when it was also mentioned by someone else, I really couldn’t get it out of my head.

I started doing some research into how to implement Idea X in a website. I wound up installing a copy of Joomla and spending time looking for the right combination of plugins to build my site. Months later, I’d spent a lot of time on this project – a huge amount of time customizing the plugins’ styling, and learning how to build a custom template for Joomla. But it just wasn’t working the way I wanted it too, and I was at a standstill on getting help for the main plugin that formed the glue of my site.

I had a few colleagues test the site, and the results were not good. Last summer, I wound up walking away from the project for awhile.

Enter WordPress

Then, around July or August, I got a couple of WordPress projects back to back. I didn’t know how to theme WordPress at that point, so I hired someone to do it for me. To make an icky little story shorter,  my designer totally missed the mark and failed to deliver. That turned out to be a huge blessing in disguise – I was forced to sit down and learn how to theme WordPress myself. The first one took 10 hours; now I can do it in 2-3, pixel-perfect.

So after a few more months and a lot more WordPress work, I once again found myself thinking about Idea X. I wondered if it could be implemented in WordPress?

The short answer: not easily. The long answer: how much time do you have and are you willing to spend a large amount of it hunting for obscure answers on Google?

I jumped back into it and set up a WordPress site. I found some really intricate and well-written tutorials about doing Idea X in WordPress, pretty cool stuff, although most of it was not up to date.

I recreated the site, plus a few extra features, in WordPress. I translated my custom Joomla template over to WordPress, added in the recommended plugins, then got my hands dirty learning how to do programming to customize the plugins according to the tutorials I found.

This version of the site took less time than the Joomla one. When I sent it out for testing, the results were mixed, but better – it was clunky, but it was a good idea. It didn’t do ‘y’ or ‘z’ the way it was expected too, but my testers could see the value of such a site.

Some of the things that were problematic for the testers were issues that I couldn’t resolve – they were products of the outdated plugins, and I didn’t have the programming knowledge to fix all of them. And I was beginning not to like the template anymore.

Frustrated, I walked away again.

Round 3

But I came back over Thanksgiving weekend – I scrapped what I was doing, installed a fresh copy of WordPress with none of the old plugins, and reworked the template until I was happy.

I read a chapter in a book that taught me how to build a job board (one of the extras I’d planned) from scratch – I happily followed the tutorials and then spent a few weeks customizing it. It’s cool, it looks pretty good and it works – and I learned a lot in the process, learning to work with some of the tried-and-true WordPress plugins like TDO Miniforms.

I did more research on Idea X and WordPress, hoping to find something more current. I thought I had – I purchased a plugin, installed it, was very pleased with it right out of the box and spent, again, a lot of time customizing the look and feel.

Until the developer dropped off the radar in March. He took down his forum and stopped responding to any support requests. Custom fields entered using his plugin are not saved to the WordPress database, and I lack the time and inclination to fix that.

Today I found another plugin – current, with an active forum and support ticketing system. I more or less like the look of the showcase sites and the demo, and sent a list of questions to the developer to see if this will be my holy grail for getting Idea X off the ground. I’m not opposed to switching again, but I think this will be the last time I do it, if it turns out that this plugin will indeed do what I need it to do.

At least for a few months.

Last week I was asked by a client why he wasn’t seeing the https: prefix in his URL (and the little lock icon in the bottom of the browser window) when he was logged into his WordPress site. That got us into a discussion about SSL and we wound up installing an SSL certificate on his hosting account, as well as making some additions to his WordPress installation to make it less appealing to hackers.

I learned a number of useful things about securing a WordPress site, so I’ll share them here with you.

Forcing administration over SSL is easily done by editing the wp-config.php file. You can enforce either:

• All logins over SSL
• All logins and admin pages over SSL (the backend pages are all https:)

We installed an inexpensive SSL certificate on the server, one that resolves to his domain name. We needed to enforce the use of SSL on all pages since there is a login box either in the template or in a widget on all pages (it’s a pretty small site). Having a login on an http: page that resolves to an https: page may or may not be secure. Forcing all pages of a site to use SSL can bog it down, but in this case the difference was very minimal. For a larger site with more traffic, I’d probably not have a login box on every page to avoid this; rather we’d link to one secure login page.

A few other plugins we found to be useful:

• Limit Login Attempts – makes brute force attacks fairly impossible by blocking an IP after too many login attempts
• Secure WordPress – performs cleanup work on the site after installation, removing vulnerabilities
• Threat Scan – checks the installation and database for ‘things out of place’

And finally, a few resources that I bookmarked…

Increase Your WordPress Blog’s Security by Running it Through SSL

9 Best WordPress Security Plugins

I hope this helps someone else – I was pleased to find that it’s actually quite easy to put a few reasonably strong security measures in place for any WordPress site.

I spent a few hours this weekend going over my website, Red Kite Creative, making some changes to improve readability and better show what I can do for clients. I haven’t really done this since the ‘new’ site went up about 15 months ago (not to the whole site, anyway)… it’s ironic that it’s hard to keep my own site up to date, as a web designer. Sigh.

So, I made some changes:

• Cut back the text quite a bit on many pages, including the home page. I replaced blocks of text  with lists when possible, or put them into blockquotes to set them apart from regular paragraphs. Less wordy, more concise.
• I removed the ugly little email newsletter sign up form from the top section of my site and moved it into the sidebar, above the fold. I redesigned it to be smaller, but with a big obvious ‘Sign Up’ button. Before it wasn’t so obvious, and I haven’t had a lot of registrations for my newsletter in the past.
• I added information specifically about WordPress – WP is really becoming my platform of choice lately and I want to promote my skills. I added a block of content on the home page about it, and a brand new page just for WordPress.
• Created a new services page; the old one was way too long.
• Replaced the old services menu with a new one that always shows subpages.
• Replaced the old ‘website makeovers’ page with a new redesign page – I’m using HighSlide to show before-and-after screenshots of redesigned sites.
• Created a new page for custom portfolio and gallery design. I’m a landscape architect by education, and I work with a number of architects, designers, photographers and artists. I really love building imagery-focused sites and want to make this a more prominent part of my business. I showed a few example screenshots from some of my portfolio projects on this page, too.

I’m happier with the site now – it’s much cleaner-looking and there’s not as much reading required to get the point across. I hope prospective clients agree!

I was hunting around this morning for a Javascript text rotator – this jQuery tutorial looks quick and easy and the demo shows just what I wanted, so I’ll be trying this one today to add some content to my hosting site.