Wordpress

For the last few months I’ve been neglecting this blog and my publicly available plugins. Thats because 200% of my time has been tied of in this very large projects - the mySears Community and myKmart Community for Sears Holdings Corporation. This matching pair of Q&A style customer service sites have been migrated from a third-party host known as Viewpoints, and onto a self-hosted WordPress Multi-Site installation. Today I’m happy to say that we’ve launched both. ...

A few months ago I received suggested it might be a good idea to allow the gallery shortcode to retrieve attachments from a category as part of my Media Categories plugin. So here it is, Media Categories 1.2 extends the native WordPress Gallery Shortcode to allow you to select a category to display via a newly added category parameter which can take either a term_id OR a slug. ...

Yesterday we launched a huge update and redesign of the Kmart BirthdayClub website for Sears Holdings. Not only does the new theme look a lot better, the content is much better organized, and its more usable that it previously was - both from an end-user perspective, and from a content management perspective. Kmart BirthdayClub was originally migrated to WordPress approximately 7 months ago from its previous static and flash-based templates hosted on a WebSphere platform. The site attracted a decent amount of traffic and so some additions were made. The existing theme however was ill-equipped to handle the various new sections of content. The new theme solves most of the usability and information architecture problems that were present in the previous theme, looks a lot better, and leverages jQuery and CSS3 features like gradients, and box shadows to avoid unnecessary flash elements and imagery. ...

Download Category Template Hierarchy Version 1.3 from the WordPress Plugin Repository I’ve release an update to the Category Template Hierarchy plugin, a particular bug report prompted the update but there are a couple of other changes as well. I use this plugin for three sites I’ve worked on for Sears / Kmart, so over time I make minor changes to resolve issues I notice or improve how it works, but I don’t always have time to release those changes publicly. ...

Download: WordPress Plugin Directory This plugin was create to work around a problem that -I have to assume- only occurs after a database migration, where certain configurations in MySQL lead to several odd symtoms including but not limited to: Loss of ability to create new posts Loss of ability to update posts Admin interface reverts to lowest settings such as the ‘Publish’ button says ‘Submit Draft’. Errors regarding invalid timestamps In addition, this problem is often accompanied by an error like the following: ...