Blog

Read our latest blog posts, learn something new, find answers, and stay up to date.

WordPress Theme Wishlist

I have been working on releasing a WordPress theme for awhile now and I keep adding in new functionality instead of just releasing it into the wild. Since I create a lot of custom themes for clients – I am often exposed to a lot of really cool functions, ideas, and designs. Before releasing my initial theme – I wanted to ask for some general feedback.

  1. What is the number 1 thing you want from a theme? Ease of use (admin panels to manage your content), easily skin-able, simple, clean code?
  2. How many people plan to have a mobile theme to handle their content on mobile devices? Would you ideally like this as an option from the get go?
  3. Do you use “all” the theme template files (archive, links, etc?)
  4. What would make you really happy with a theme?

SDAC WP Plugin Update: SDAC Related Content v 2.1

We just updated our SDAC Related Content plugin to fix a few bugs and to also add in some additional functionality. You can now choose to show related posts by tag or by category. (No longer just category). This is a great plugin for anyone looking for related functionality on WordPress, WordPress MU, or VIP hosting as it does not make any database changes and it uses caching.

Check out the forum for any support issues or leave any feature requests and we will do our best to add them into future releases.

WordPress 2.8 New Features

With WordPress 2.8 beta 1 now available – there are some great new features that I wanted to highlight for the upcoming WordPress 2.8 release.

An exhaustive list of all the updates are available for review, but here are ten highlights for the end user.

  • Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
  • Don’t notify post author of own comments
  • Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
  • Improved Plugin search on Administration > Plugins > Add New
  • Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S
  • Support more than one gallery on the same page
  • “Choose a city in the same timezone as you” for Timezone in Administration > Settings > General
  • Add “Send this password to the new user by email” option to Administration > Users > Add New
  • In upgrade process, provide better explanation for database upgrade message
  • Add password strength meter to Add User and Edit User

Everything looks very promising and the developers are doing a great job with getting bug fixes in place, more options, and easier to user interfaces. Stay tuned for the release of WordPress 2.8 in the near future!

SDAC Forums Are Open

Over the past few years – we have been creating custom bbPress solutions for our clients and have been loving every minute of it. Since we wanted to showcase what is possible with bbPress (custom themes, bbPress/WordPress integration), as well as offer a support forum for our plugins and soon to be themes – we decided to put up a bbPress forum.

If you are a registered user for this site – you can use your login/password for the forums as well.

SDAC WP Plugin Release: SDAC Related Content

I am pleased to announce our first official WordPress plugin release: SDAC Related Content. This plugin was something I created as I had a need to have a related posts plugin for some VIP clients. The plugin had to not modify any DB tables and it had to use caching.

Version 1 of the plugin was a development version that I used for a few clients. Version 2 added an admin panel under Settings in the WordPress admin. This admin panel allows all kinds of customization.

Enjoy!

SDAC Inc. Is Hiring

Over the past few months we have been growing and adding more and more new clients into our portfolio and need some additional help with our ongoing and new web development projects. We are looking for someone who is is responsible, speaks english, is in the US (Chicagoland preferred):

  • excited about WordPress
  • has created WordPress themes
  • has developed WordPress plugins
  • loves the power and simplicity of jQuery
  • uses subversion
  • is available for 5-10 hours a week initially (more if it works out)
  • has a portfolio to back up the items in this list

    • If you are interested in working with us, please send an email to jobs@sandboxdev.com with your location, your availability, and a link to your portfolio.

Category Feeds

A number of my WordPress clients recently have been wishing for a way to offer multiple feeds with specific posts in them completely unaware that this is actually very easy to do with WordPress without any modifications.

You can simply accomplish specific content feeds by using category feeds. For example. If you have a WordPresssports site with 3 categories: Football, Baseball, Hockey and you want to offer a feed specific to each category – all you would need to do is to add “/feed/” to the end of the category URL.

Example: Your category feed is: http://www.sports.com/category/football. For this site – your category feed for football would be: http://www.sports.com/category/football/feed.

Advertising multiple feeds for your site can be very attractive for a few reasons:

  1. Better Focus You can offer subject specific feeds since not all people like to read about everything. (ex. A reader likes your site for your coverage on a certain subject matter – but does not really care or come back for posts about anything else. Ex. With category feeds – you can really let the user/reader decide what they want content to read about on your site.
  2. More Options = Happy Readers People like options. You would be surprised how many people get excited to pick and choose what they want to subscribe to vs. getting everything all at once. If they are forced to get all the content and only 15% of your content pertains to something they do not care about – they are likely to not subscribe at all or after awhile – stop reading your feed. If you offer some choice – people are more likely to subscribe because they will only get the content that they care about.
  3. Featured Posts If you want to offer a special feed for “featured” posts – all you need to do is make certain posts in a category called “Featured” and you then offer a hand selected featured posts feed to your readers.

If you want to list all your categories and their feed links, you can simply add this into your WordPress theme:

<ul>

</ul>

SDAC Recommends: WP Plugin: http:BL

Using Akismet for spam control has worked out really well over the last few years but I started seeing more and more spam get through (daily) so I decided I needed to look into something that would compliment Akismet. Once I installed the http:BL plugin – I have not had one spam comment get through. About the plugin:

http:BL WordPress Plugin allows you to verify IP addresses of clients connecting to your blog against the Project Honey Pot database. Thanks to http:BL API you can quickly check whether your visitor is an email harvester, a comment spammer or any other malicious creature.

If you are having any problems with spam getting through, check out: http:BL.

WordPress 2.7.1 is Released

WordPress 2.7.1 has officially been released. The update contains a number of bug fixes. For more information on WordPress version 2.7.1, read the official WordPress version 2.7.1 documentation.

Download the latest versions of WordPress: <a href="http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.7.1.zipWordPress 2.7.1

View All Options for WordPress

Ever need to view all options for all your plugins (and standard WordPress options like home URL, etc)?
You can view every option available (and edit most) by going to: http://www.yoursiteurl.com/wp-admin/options.php (assuming WordPress is in the root folder).

So now if you need to look at options, make changes, or see a particular value – you can do so on one page.