Introducing JobBoardr

August 5th, 2009

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Posted in CSS, PHP, WordPress | 11 Comments »

One of our recent personal projects called for a job board solution. There are quite a few non-wordpress open-source projects available, each with their advantages and disadvantages. In the end we decided to look for a WordPress solution, though, mainly because we wanted to be able to pick and chose from the huge amount of available plugins to extend our job board.

A quick look around the net brought up a good few options:

We actually went so far and bought a copy of JobPress (why re-invent the wheel?), it being a theme and thus giving us more flexibility, just to realize that this wasn’t exactly what we wanted or needed (bummer!). For one, it hadn’t been updated in quite a while. It seemed to be in a pre-WP 2.6 state. Just upgrading the theme to be able to utilize the power of 2.8 would have taken a full day.

We would have had to keep upgrading the theme ourselves as well. It doesn’t look like the author is interested in keeping JobPress up-to-date. It’s not what you’d expect from a product you paid money for. The code wasn’t written that efficiently and some features we wanted, like PayPal integration weren’t fully implemented. Also, JobPress is not GPL. In fact, it seems it doesn’t have any license attached. The author only told us that it was not GPL, but not, what it actually is.

In the end it boiled down to two choices. First, use JobPress, but heavily modify it (for all its disadvantages, it still does, what it’s meant to do). We wouldn’t be able to share the code, it not being GPL, but our job board would be up and running fairly soon, say a week. The other option would be to write our very own job board theme from scratch. It would take a lot longer, but we’d be able to do with it what we wanted, so we went with that choice and JobBoardr was born.

Basically, JobBoardr is a parent-theme, meaning that it can be modified easily through the use of child-themes. You can put all your changes into a separate theme that still uses the templates and functions of its parent-theme. This way none of your modifications get lost during an upgrade of the parent-theme.

There’s a bunch of other features as well, like localization, front-end accounts for both employers and employees, sending job applications as pdf to employers, premium job ads, 7 advanced widgets, an API (so other people can feature job ads on their site), automatic pdf invoice generation for companies posting a job, a complete backend for admins, through which many options can be changed and a few more…

Future features will include a lot of AJAX goodies, an affiliate programme and CV generation for employees, just to name a few. Plus, the job board engine will be GPL compatible. That’s the good news. The bad news is (for you anyways), that we will still need to charge for it. The price will be somewhere between €70 and €100. Our main reason for doing this is that job boards are making money for the people running it.

Here’s a little screenshot from what we have so far (things might change slightly):
jbr1

At the moment we still consider JobBoardr unstable. The current version is 0.7 alpha. Once it reaches beta stage, we will upload a public hosted version and invite everybody to help test it. As a little incentive, we will give beta testers a discount. The bigger the help, the better the discount.

If you’re interested in helping with the beta testing or just want to be notified when JobBoardr reaches beta stage, then go to JobBoardr and submit your email address.

NextGEN ImageFlow 1.3 Beta 1

June 29th, 2009

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Posted in WordPress | No Comments »

After the release of the 3rd beta of NextGEN FlashViewer it is now time to release the first beta of NextGEN ImageFlow into the wild.

The features are very similar between the two plugins, which isn’t really surprising. They do the same thing, basically, but just display things in a different way. Read the changelog in readme.txt (included in the download) for a full list of changes.

Again, please let us know if you have any problems, find any bugs or just want to tell us how absolutely fabulous we are… For all of that please use the forum by clicking the link below!

EDIT: You will need the latest SVN version of NextGEN Gallery. A tutorial on how to set up SVN can be found here under Option 2

NextGEN ImageFlow 1.3 Beta 1 NextGEN ImageFlow 1.3 Beta 1, 108.52 KB

Cheers, Boris

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NextGEN FlashViewer 1.4 Beta 3

June 28th, 2009

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Posted in WordPress | 28 Comments »

In this beta release I finally finished all the features I wanted to include. So from here on it’s only bug squashing. I’m hoping to realease the final version in about a week. Then I’ll update my ImageFlow plugin.

So what’s new since the last beta? Basically it’s two new features. The first one let’s you insert shortcodes much much easier. Up until now you had to either remember all the shortcodes or copy/paste them from somewhere. From the first beta there were a few new shortcodes available, so it got all a bit difficult to remember all the options. Now you can click on the media button in the editor toolbar above the editor and there will be a new tab next to the NextGEN Gallery one. Just enter all your options and the shortcode appears in your editor. It’s just like magic!

The second new big feature is a widget, that lets you add any viewer with any configuration to any widget-enabled area. These widgets are probably less suitable for your normal sidebar, but who says that only sidebars can have widgets, eh? Might be good for a header…

As with any of our beta releases, please let us know any bugs in the forums. If this is the first time you try a beta of version 1.4, then please take 5 minutes and read through the changelog in the readme. There is also an inline help page available (which probably needs to be brought up-to-date after a few more features).

EDIT: You will need the latest SVN version of NextGEN Gallery. A tutorial on how to set up SVN can be found here under Option 2

NextGEN FlashViewer 1.4 Beta 3 NextGEN FlashViewer 1.4 Beta 3, 208.55 KB

Cheers, Boris

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NextGEN FlashViewer 1.4 Beta 2

June 25th, 2009

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Posted in WordPress | No Comments »

So, it’s time for the second beta. Nothing much has changed, except that you now have a few extra variable values for $gallery to use in gallery templates. With these you can add links to all the various viewers on top of any gallery.

Option 1 – Changes by hand

First of all you will have to change something to a NextGEN Gallery core file, nggfunctions.php. Use FTP to get yourself a copy of that file and open it in your favorite editor, like Dreamweaver. Scroll down to about line 254 until you find these two lines:

254
255

// look for gallery-$template.php or pure gallery.php
$filename = ( empty($template) ) ? 'gallery' : 'gallery-' . $template;

Change these lines so that they look like this:

254
255
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// look for gallery-$template.php or pure gallery.php
$filename = ( empty($template) ) ? 'gallery' : 'gallery-' . $template;
$gallery     = apply_filters( 'ngg_gallery_object', $gallery, $galleryID );

Then upload nggfunctions.php to your NextGEN Gallery folder in wp-content/plugins/.

Option 2 – TortoiseSVN

Another way to do this would be to work with the latest alpha release of NextGEN Gallery, where Alex has made the necessary changes already. This can be downloaded via SVN from Google Code. First of all you need a copy of TortoiseSVN (Windows only, although I’m sure you could find something similar for a Mac). Install it and then create a new folder somewhere on your computer. Right click on it, scroll down until you hit “SVN Checkout”. In the next window, write this line into “URL of repository”:

http://nextgen-gallery.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

Leave the rest of the options like they are and click OK. This will compile the latest developement version of NextGEN Gallery for you.

It’s important to note that you cannot use this compiled version as is. SVN adds a lot of files that tell it about little changes in the files, so the next time you want to get the latest files it only downloads what actually changed. To get yourself a working copy you need to export the files like so: Right-click on the NextGEN Gallery folder->TortoiseSVN->Export… Then chose a folder into which to put the exported files and click ok. Now all those little helper files have been removed and you’ve got yourself a working copy which you can now upload to your plugins directory.

How to take advantage of those extra variable values…

Download gallery.php from whatever folder you keep your templates in (either ‘view’ in the NGG folder or ‘nggallery’ in your theme folder). The original looks like this:

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<?php if ($gallery->show_slideshow) { ?>
	<!-- Slideshow link -->
	<div class="slideshowlink">
		<a class="slideshowlink" href="<?php echo $gallery->slideshow_link ?>">
			<?php echo $gallery->slideshow_link_text ?>
		</a>
	</div>
<?php } ?>
 
<?php if ($gallery->show_piclens) { ?>
	<!-- Piclense link -->
	<div class="piclenselink">
		<a class="piclenselink" href="<?php echo $gallery->piclens_link ?>">
			<?php _e('[View with PicLens]','nggallery'); ?>
		</a>
	</div>
<?php } ?>

Now change it to look like this:

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<?php if ($gallery->show_slideshow) { ?>
	<!-- Slideshow link -->
	<div class="slideshowlink">
		<a class="slideshowlink" href="<?php echo $gallery->slideshow_link ?>">
			<?php echo $gallery->slideshow_link_text ?>
		</a>
	</div>
<?php } ?>
 
<?php if ($gallery->show_simple_link) { ?>
	<!-- SimpleViewer link -->
	<div class="slideshowlink">
		<a class="slideshowlink" href="<?php echo $gallery->simple_link ?>">
			<?php echo $gallery->simple_link_text ?>
		</a>
	</div>
<?php } ?>
 
<?php if ($gallery->show_piclens) { ?>
	<!-- Piclense link -->
	<div class="piclenselink">
		<a class="piclenselink" href="<?php echo $gallery->piclens_link ?>">
			<?php _e('[View with PicLens]','nggallery'); ?>
		</a>
	</div>
<?php } ?>

Lines 28-35 are the link for SimpleViewer. Of course you can add as many viewers as you like or change the HTML around. You can find the other variable values by adding this line to gallery.php and then refreshing your browser (don’t forget to delete this line later on):

<?php var_dump($gallery); ?>

Now, all you need is to download the new beta below and test some features. Of yourse, I’d like to know your opinions, any bugs or just what you liked. Please use the forum post for any bugs by following the link at the end of this post. Cheers, Boris!

EDIT: Please go to this post to download the latest beta release!

NextGEN FlashViewer 1.4 Beta 2 NextGEN FlashViewer 1.4 Beta 2, 299.02 KB Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

NextGEN FlashViewer 1.4 beta 1

June 23rd, 2009

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Posted in WordPress | 1 Comment »

WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '' at line 1]
SELECT * FROM sh_ngg_pictures WHERE 1=1 AND exclude<>1 ORDER BY pid DESC LIMIT 0,


Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Invalid arguments passed in /www/htdocs/w00a617e/shabushabu/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/lib/ngg-db.php on line 628

WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ') AND tt.exclude<>1 ORDER BY tt.galleryid ASC' at line 1]
SELECT t.*, tt.* FROM sh_ngg_gallery AS t INNER JOIN sh_ngg_pictures AS tt ON t.gid = tt.galleryid WHERE tt.galleryid IN () AND tt.exclude<>1 ORDER BY tt.galleryid ASC

After a long time of no updates I have a first beta available for testing purposes. Depending on the feedback I receive, there will maybe be another 2-3 beta releases until the final version 1.4. As far as I am aware version 1.3 works well with WordPress 2.8 and the latest NextGEN Gallery, so there is no need to rush this release.

There are quite a few new features available. Some aren’t fully functional yet, but that shouldn’t interfere with the normal operation of the plugin. Here’s a short list of new features:

  • Settings can now be overridden through custom fields (This doesn’t work for some settings yet!)
  • Any viewer can now be set as default NGG slideshow
  • 8 new album templates for use in themes (situated in folder /view)
  • Notification about new versions
  • Color Picker for the backend
  • New shortcodes:
    • [fv-thumb id="" width="" height="" viewer="" link="" title=""]

Features that might make it:

  • Add viewer links on top of galleries, like (View with SimpleViewer). For this I will need to add a filter to NextGEN Gallery. Alex will add the changes to the next NGG version. This feature will become available depending on when this will be released.
  • Some extra smaller usability stuff in the backend.
  • Reply to this post and suggest a feature. I will pick one and include it!

So far there has been only some rudimentary testing and some things might not work yet as advertised, so installation on a production environment is not recommended. If you would like to test the new version and help us out a little, then you can download it here:

EDIT: Please go to this post to download the latest beta release!

NextGEN FlashViewer 1.4 Beta 1 NextGEN FlashViewer 1.4 Beta 1, 314.46 KB Join the forum discussion on this post - (2) Posts

Ignite Theme Framework

April 27th, 2009

Posted in WordPress | 2 Comments »

Logo For the last few months I have been studying all the various theme frameworks that are available for WordPress users at the moment, like Thematic and Hybrid. No doubt, all of those frameworks are excellent. Personally, I think the use of child themes is the way to go in the future. My own reasons for creating Ignite, a new theme framework, which will be released into the wild in maybe 1-3 months, was to learn more about the internal psychological workings of the fantastic publishing platform that is WordPress.

First I was just gonna redesign my personal travel blog Travel-Junkie.com. The more I looked into how WP themes worked the more I realized that themes are just like plugins. Just bigger and in some ways even better. When you start utilizing your functions.php file your theme isn’t only a theme, it becomes a plugin as well.

cache view

So, at the moment Ignite is at version 0.1, just at the start of its life. By the time it will be released it will have grown to maybe version 0.3 and be fit to power your WP blog without any major glitches. By the time we have reached version 0.5, hopefully all of those left-over glitches will have been removed and we will release our Ignite Theme Club, which will be built on BuddyPress, bbpress and obviously WP. Basic membership will be free. Premium membership will cost you a little bit (actual price hasn’t been set yet). There will be a community, forums, child themes, Ignite components to download and a fuzzy warm feeling in your stomach.

Screenshot

Now, lets have a look at some of the features:

Plugin Architecture
Ignite comes with an in-built basic plugins system, that works similar to WordPress plugins. Some of those plugins will be included with the theme, others you can download as you need them. Ignite plugins aren’t the same as WP plugins, they are just little add-ons, some of them even for WP plugins, like image or video search. Ignite will be extremely modular. So far there are 25 plugins that extend Ignite functionality.
Plugin Support
Ignite supports a wide range of popular plugins, like WordTube, NextGEN Gallery or All In One SEO.
Only one CSS/JS file!
88 Ignite lets you add all your CSS/JS files (theme and plugins) into one gzipped, minified file. This means less HTTP requests, which means that your site will respond faster. Should you chose to implement all .htaccess recommendations Ignite will score an 88 (out of 100) with a primed cache at Yahoo’s performance test for fast websites (tested with Firefox’ YSlow extension). The only way to score more is to use a CDN, like Googles AJAX Libraries and reduce HTTP requests by using less background images or combining them in css sprites.
Widgets
Custom built widgets that replace the default WordPress widgets to offer you more options. In addition to that there are 3 more widgets that add other functionality, like post series or postmetadata.
Templates
Many custom templates to make it as easy for you as possible to add extra pages, like an author or category overview.
Special Templates
A templating system that lets you modify almost anything without having to wade through murky code. We have tried to remove as much code as possible from the depths of the Ignite files. These template files can be copied over to your child theme, where you can adjust them without any loss during an Ignite update.
SEO
In-built SEO, from titles, descriptions and keywords to clean URLs, stop words and canonical links.
Hooks & Filters
Almost anything can be hooked into or can have filters applied to it, making Ignite extremely flexible.
Multi Language Support
Ignite is not only fully localized, it has also in-built support for many popular multi language plugins like qTranslate, Polyglot and Language Switcher.
Post Image
Ignite has various methods of ensuring that no blog post comes without an image to display on index and archive pages.
Dropdown Menu
A menu you have full control over. You decide which pages to show in it!
Theme options
Options that help you rather than slow you down and make your site bulky. Less is more, so the most basic version of Ignite ships only with 12 options, all adjustable through the backend. Ignite plugins can add their own admin page and their own options.
Website Speed

By the time the first version of Ignite will be released there will be 5-6 sites (all our personal and commercial sites) to check it out (including this one). All of these themes will have been realized through child themes and will have been redesigned. As we will release these themes we will post about them and how we turned them into Ignite child themes here.

We will also compile a vast documentation about the inner workings of Ignite, the use of child themes and other relevant points of interest, so adjusting Ignite to what you want it to do will become very easy. For everybody not comfortable with PHP, HTML or CSS there will be the premium theme club membership.

We hope that this little taste of Ignite has got you drooling as much as it has us :) We certainly are very excited about the possibilities that Ignite will offer us. Who knows, by the time the first release comes about there will probably be more features for you to get excited about…

Yours truly,
Boris

ShabuShabu-Webdesign Plugin in ‘PC Praxis’

February 20th, 2009

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Posted in ShabuShabu-Webdesign in the Press | 1 Comment »

ShabuShabu in the Press – PC Praxis Cover

We hereby proudly announce that one of ShabuShabu´s WP-Plugins found its way into the print media. The current “PC Pr@xis-Sonderheft Nr. 3 – OpenSource – Magazin für freie Software” is totally dedicated to Wordpress, being one of the most popular OpenSource Content Management Systems (CMS). On 98 pages the reader finds among other things an introduction to Wordpress, its history, hints for professionals, hosting solutions as well as a short overview of the vast amount of existing plugins increasing the functionality of this fantastic CMS.

On page 51 the author is describing NextGEN Gallery, a plugin written by Alex Rabe and NextGEN FlashViewer, a plugin for NextGEN Gallery, written by Boris Glumpler, co-founder of ShabuShabu-Webdesign. The reader gets to know that NextGEN FlashViewer is “very helpful” for “advanced webmasters for implementing interesting flash effects like picture sliders or a rotating carousel”. He is also getting informed, that NextGEN Flashviewer can be downloaded at Wordpress.org while a corresponding installation guide can be found at travel-junkie.com.

ShabuShabu in the Press – PC Praxis Article

As you probably know, we have forwarded the above URL to ShabuShabu-Webdesign, leaving travel-junkie.com to its original subject: travelling the world on low budget.

The PC Pr@xis article can be found here as a pdf-file (a profound knowledge of German language would be quite useful).

There are new versions of NextGEN Gallery, NextGEN FlashViewer and NextGEN Imageflow out now. If you haven´t upgraded to them yet, now would be a perfect time of doing so.

Cheers!

NG ImageFlow 1.2

February 1st, 2009

Posted in WordPress | 5 Comments »

NextGEN ImageFlow v1.2 is now available. This version fixes an important bug with getimagesize, so upgrading is recommended. Have fun!

Upgrade and installation procedures can be found here

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

FlashViewer 1.3

February 1st, 2009

Posted in WordPress | 7 Comments »

A new version of NextGEN FlashViewer is now available. Version 1.3. There are a few new features, notably support for Shadowbox and for another couple translation plugins. For more information please read the changelog in the plugin files.

UPGRADE

Upgrading is fairly easy. Move all the SWF files into a folder called ‘nggflash-swf’ in the wp-content folder (…/wp-content/plugins/nggflash-swf/viewer.swf for example). Delete the old files and upload the new files.

INSTALLATION

Please refer to this post: NextGEN FlashViewer

SUPPORT

For support please use our new support forum

Join the forum discussion on this post - (15) Posts

WP-Plugin: NextGEN ImageFlow

May 27th, 2008

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in WordPress | 199 Comments »

Description: Finn Rudolphs picture gallery for NextGEN Gallery. Digital animation for thumbing through a physical image stack.

Latest Version: 1.2 – Changelog – TO-DO

Author: Boris Glumpler

Requires at least: WP 2.7

Tested up to: WP 2.8-bleeding-edge

Download: Click here for the zip!

IMPORTANT: Please note that the use of ImageFlow for commercial websites is NOT for free. Have a look here for what exactly constitutes a commercial website. Licenses for commercial websites can be purchased here.

Check out NextGEN FlashViewer, another add-on for your NextGEN Gallery!

NOTE: If you have translated NextGEN ImageFlow into your language, then please send me the .po and .mo files and I will include them in the next release. Thank you!

Installation

  1. Upload all files except reflect.php to wp-content/plugins/nextgen-imageflow
  2. IMPORTANT: Upload reflect.php to your Wordpress root folder
  3. Activate the plugin
  4. Go to Gallery->ImageFlow and change the options to your liking

Update

  1. Delete the old files (don’t forget the old reflect.php in the root)
  2. Upload new files to the nextgen-imageflow folder using FTP
  3. Upload reflect2.php and reflect3.php to your WP root
  4. Check to see that everything works…
  5. Done!!

Usage

This one is fairly simple. There’s only one tag to use, so all you need to do is find the correct gallery ID, so it’s basically failsafe.

[imageflow id="1"]

Frequently Asked Questions

  1. I installed everything, but I don’t see any images. What am I doing wrong?
    Check if you have uploaded reflect2/3.php to your Wordpress root folder (the directory where your wp-config.php file is in).
  2. I set the thumbnails to be displayed by Highslide, but it doesn’t $%*&$§ work?
    Highslide needs to be installed already. All the plugin does is include the necessary compatible files for use with Highslide.
  3. My images don’t seem to get cached?
    For the caching to work you have to use the NGG default paths, as NextGEN ImageFlow uses the same cache folder as NGG. So that would be wp-content/gallery/cache.
  4. But I changed that path. What can I do?
    Open reflect.php, go down to line 82 and adjust the path. Alternativley you can disable caching by setting $_GET['cache'] in reflect.php on line 33 to 0.
  5. ImageFlow works perfectly on my posts, but not on my index page. Why is that?
    According to the ImageFlow homepage you can only use ImageFlow once per page. An object-oriented version of ImageFlow may come in the future though. It is probably best to use ImageFlow below <!–more–> to avoid any problems. Also limit ImageFlow to one occurance per post.
  6. Anything else I should know?
    Well, now you can use a reflection with any image on your blog that is not part of your NextGEN Gallery. Instead of referencing the URL of your image you can now write something like this:src=”path/2/WP-root/reflect2/3.php?img=rel/path/2/image.jpg”.

The Future

Over time there will be more options available in the admin section and I am planning to add more effects to open images in as well as open the whole gallery in.

Bugs and other insects

If you encounter any problems, bugs or annoying mosquitos, please head on over to our forum and I will come running with my can of 100% deet…

Credits and Thanks

The idea for this plugin came from Martin Meier. He helped quite a bit with the testing as well, so thanks, Martin.

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