I just recently completed a mu theme project for a customer over at scriptlance. The brief was to utilize the sort of ‘newzy’ feel of le monde blogs but keep the theme extremely clean cut. The result of this highly functional wordpress mu home page theme can be viewed at the iKrumdy demo.

As always I work the project to the exact specification of the customer and this one was particularly happy with the end result. As designers we always want to push the boundaries and even though this theme is entirely written in valid XHTML (gravatar.com however won’t validate at this point in time) and CSS and tested to be compatible with Internet Explorer 7 & 8, Firefox 3, Safari (latest), Opera (latest) there is still a lot I’d like to do with this theme.

The back end needs a lot of work at the moment it’s using a range of different plugins to get it all working and each plugin has it’s own installation procedures, admin menu etc. So if this wordpress mu theme were to really become something I’d have to integrate all of the plugins under the theme function.php and then use php includes. This would also involve tweaking the back end so all of the menus fall under one main menu to edit the theme.

Some ideas I had for it were:

• Fancy header menu with sub page menus on mouse over
• CSS style choice in admin menu
• Optional display of blog avatars instead of links in the new and active blogs section.
• Need to beautify the search results a bit.

Wordpress Mu is still in desperate need of some great home page themes that can provide great functionality and news like results but still retain the “sign up now” type feel that is requested by many in this community. I’ll solidify a few more of my ideas and then sit down to see what I can come up with by way of releasing a dyasonhat mu theme.

–Dyasonhat

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Many people will be familiar with the popular Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress I use it on all of my wordpress installs and have been very happy with it. Until about a month ago when I was installing it over at accommodationsphere.com and it created a sitemap for me nicely gzipped and weighing in at only 1-2mbs but a whopping 92,000 urls.

Does google accept sitemaps with that many files? Not unless they’re split across multiple sitemaps which contain less than 50,000 urls each and utilize a sitemap index file.

So I organized a nice little php script that I’ve got loaded in a cron job that runs to split that large sitemap.xml.gz file into smaller .xml.gz files and creates an index file.

It’s a little crude but I’m hoping to get this included as a feature in the above mentioned plugin rather than expanding on this little scripts abilities outright.

You’re free to use it, modify it and do what ever, but be nice; if you develop a bit of extra features or usability for it why not send me the code for inclusion in the next version.

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We’ve just created a site for a client in SA medblogs.co.za. The site as it pretty self evident is an open blogging platform aimed at South African Medical Professionals and Med Students. We’re using the lastest version of Wordpress Mu and signed up with WPMUDEV Premium to make use of their fantastic out of the box solutions. Of course we went the tried and trusted ‘edublogs’ theme which was modded a bit.

Overall the project was quick one but it just goes to show how simple automattic has made out lives.

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UPDATE: After eagerly anticipating that this script would have been released by now; I’ve come across issues with the extensiveness of the SQL joins the script has been using, in a similar way to smart sort v1. All along I’ve wanted to avoid ‘adding’ or modifying WP in any way but in order for the script to work as I want I’m forced to utilize an “index” table with fields created during script setup in order for this script to have the type of functionality its meant to.

Final version should be released in December. Thanks to those who have left words of encouragement, smart sort v2 is on it way yet!

Thought I’d wet a few people apetites and annouce that I have an ALL new version of smart sort on its way. ETA should be in around a month but might release beta versions before then for testing and comments.

Some of the new features include:

• Display a drop down menu on category & search pages similar to the ’sort by’ box that is used on YouTube.
• Additional drop down list allowing the user the option of choosing how many posts per page they want to view.
• Utilize WP’s built in sort by hooks. The reason for this is to make it as compatable with other plugins as possible.
• Option to sort by any detected fields in the wp_posts table. (this allows for a modified posts table)
• Option to sort by any custom fields.
• Cacheable friendly

I’d like to keep the plugin free but its costing quite a bit this time to get it right so I might need to make it “donationware” but I’ll see closer to the time.

– Dyasonhat —

Posted in Wordpress Plugins | 11 Comments »

For those who are not familiar with TDO tag fixes, its a fantastic plugin that makes up for alot of wordpress’s shortfalls in what i like to call ‘filtering’ posts. It basically allows you specify exactly what posts you want shown based on category and tag. If you were reading here a few weeks ago you would have seen me playing around with the plugin a bit and creating some random posts in the process.

What I discovered was a minor flaw in the plugin that TDO hadn’t picked up on, the new version has now been released and it’s brilliant I modded it a bit for the accommodation site to include check boxes and as far a I’m concerned the plugin is worthy of ‘core’ integration *gasp*

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Well its been a LONG time coming, we first annouced this project under the name of Easy Map Info with the idea of being free to branch out it various avenues with. Since then we’ve scaled down the scope and increased the depth and pleased to annouce our completion of the the travel accommodation site Accommodation Sphere.

It’s currently running WP 2.6 with a host of custimized plugins, which I’ll write about in coming weeks. The site is straining it’s mysql database to bits right now so I’m anticipating a couple of crashes as it get crawled by the search engine.

But for now it live! *party*

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I’m developing a new plugins dealing with category subs and that is why this post is present.

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Here is a sample file for tamewasp of extracted 2000 records from google.co.za, searching only South Africa for “Estate agent”. Note Url’s have been truncated.

Download xls here Project canceled, violation of Google Terms.

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This plugin allows you to place a sort bar, with options to sort the list of posts by any custom field. You can place the sort bar above or below a list of posts in a category or archive or anywhere in your template.

Simple place <?php placesort() ?> anywhere in your template.

Options are set in the admin panel as to which custom fields to display in the sort bar.

This was originally coded by smartalien on scriptlance. He no longer develops it and I purchased the code from him. It works but I put it out there to be used and improved by the wordpress community.

There may be bugs; if you can’t fix them point them out, if you can send us the code fix.

This project is hosted with Google Code here

Latest Version 1.0:

Enjoy it.

To Do list:

• More pretty permalink URL
• CSS/HTML output options to customize display of sort bar
• Fix compatability with other plugins
• Display on main index page (currently only seems to be displaying on category and archive pages
• Tagging support

Version History:

1.0

• First Release
• A bit “buggey” but it works
• Waiting feedback on requests, issues and ideas
• Planned rapid deployment of 1.1 to tackle known bugs

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