leewillis.co.uk

WordPress 2.9 e-Commerce, has been published – the definitive guide to setting up an e-commerce site on your Wordpress blog using the WP e-Commerce plugin, of which I’m a bit of a fan.
This book provides an easy to understand, step-by-step approach to installing, configuring, and using WP e-Commerce to run your online store. [...]

One of the improvements in Wordpress 2.9 is native support for thumbnail images on posts. The API is pretty good – although it assumes that you want to return the whole IMG tag. In my case I wanted to return the URL of the image (So I could wrap the actual thumbnail in a lightbox-style [...]

I recently re-worked a site for a client. He was moving over from Joomla to Wordpress, so I started from scratch with his theme design. They liked the new theme I came up with – however I’d put the menu and other navigation (Links to recent articles, etc) in a right hand sidebar, and they [...]

Google has announced the launch of “Place Pages”. Essentially a local hub showing you relevant information from maps, search, business listings and so on.
It’s a fairly basic implementation right now (My local page doesn’t return any info just yet – not even businesses that I know are listed with Google) – but you can see [...]

I’ve been working with a few clients to move their email marketing to a new home after most of them outgrew the limits of what they could reliably send through their existing infrastructure / hosts. Now – marketing isn’t really my strong point, and I’m definitely no designer – however I recommended and helped move [...]

I’ve recently been doing some work for a family member on a Wordpress blog they run, and the need came up to build a mini-app. Now historically, I’m a Joomla kind of guy, and it’s fairly clear that for a Joomla site you would build a component to implement your app.
However, in Wordpress it’s a [...]

I wrote a previous post about how you could hack the excellent Twitter Tools plugin from Alex King to add Google Analytics tracking variables to the URLs posted to twitter when you posted a new blog post.
I submitted the patch upstream, and Alex kindly pointed out that rather than bodging around in his code – [...]

Taxonomy Support
I wrote recently about building a brand directory using a fantastic feature of Wordpress called “Taxonomies”. Now that that feature is live I’ve realised that a number of my favourite Wordpress plugins simply don’t support taxonomies.
Among the casualities were Google XML Sitemaps, and the otherwise excellent Headspace2.
Now, the beauty of open source is that [...]

Background
Wordpress lets you categorise your posts according to “tag”, and “category”. Which is fine. However, for some time now Wordpress has supported a concept called “Custom Taxonomies”. Which is a long winded way of saying “We’ll let you choose how your organise and present your posts – however you want”.
This isn’t something I’ve ever felt [...]

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but I’ve recently had to build a new Wordpress site from scratch, and I’ve also had a couple of friends ask my advice on how to get their own sites up and running – so I was spurred into action.
This list is my ten “essential” [...]