Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

A friend of mine that is learning how to use both WordPress and Artisteer, the theme design software, sent me a question about what appeared to be a broken sidebar option within WordPress. 

John of TransformativeLifeCoaches.com asks

I am wanting to install an Aweber autoresponder Sign Up Box (for a Giveaway report and a series of autoresponder emails) on our site. 

I believe the best way to do that is to put the Sign Up box in Sidebar 2 which doesn’t appear to be activated on our TLCoaches site. 

I went  to Widgets on the WP control panel to drag the "text/HTML" widget onto Sidebar 2 but it wouldn’t drag nor do any other widgets. 
Can you tell me the best way to get the autoresponder box on every page of our site?

In reality, WordPress and the sidebars on the site were not broken.  Here’s a quick snapshot of the site as of the date of the question.

This particular site only has 1 sidebar programmed into the theme.  With Artisteer (as of Sept 2009) at most you can design themes with 2 sidebars.  You can add more than 2 sidebars to the themes after export but that is another topic for a different day.

In this case, with only 1 sidebar designed in the theme, when a user logs into WordPress, they can only activate/use/drag and drop widgets to the sidebar that actually is turned on an enabled within functions.php of the theme they have created.

Two sidebars do show up sometimes, but only 1 will work when your theme has just a single sidebar activated.

The Solution

In this case if John wants to utilize a second (new) sidebar, all he has to do, is open up his theme in Artisteer and make a 5 second change to his layout, adding a sidebar where he likes, and then export and upload the updated theme to his website.

Piece of cake!

UPDATE

If you read the comments below, you will learn that the original solution and trouble shooting didn’t quite fix this problem.  the solution was a little easier, but also more hidden.

To fix this, John learned that he needed to click on the screen options button at the top right hand corner of every wordpress admin screen.

Then

On WP widgets page, I went to screen options and hit “enable accessibility mode”-simple solution, just didn’t know it was there.

Brett Bumeter of Softduit Media joined a large group of attendees and presenters at Barcamp Chattanooga at Chattanooga State Community College.  Brett kicked off one of the first sessions by demonstrating how to create a WordPress theme in 10 minutes with no web design or PHP experience.

This was a live demo of Artisteer for both PCs & Macs and neither video nor slides were available from the actual event, but people can view are in depth video from a WordPress meetup in Charlotte covering WordPress Theme design for people of any skill level from novice to advanced.

Barcamp Chattanooga was a lively and busy event with close to 100 people registering for the event.  Chattanooga is rather unique as a city that has an extremely high percentage of citizen twitter users as well, so this strong turnout for a first year event was probably not a surprise for local visitors. 

People travelled from Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham and of course Softduit Media’s Brett Bumeter travelled in from Charlotte NC about 5 and a half hours away by car.

Chattanooga will also be the location of a future Palm Pre development meetup and Birmingham will host the next WordCamp in the SouthEast at the end of September with attendance currently projected between 150-250 people.

Pictures from Barcamp Chattanooga

Softduit Media moved the site Belize Business Guide from its old location on a sub domain to BelizeBuesinessLaw.com.  The migration of this site that was designed by Softduit using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) was relatively easy to migrate and users should not experience any lost pages or files.

Softduit provides WordPress CMS upgrade and migration services for many businesses and sites.  If your company has a website that is currently stuck on an old static html site that is difficult for business owners or users to update, a content management system can put your company back in control of your own site and destiny. 

Our migrations are both fast, efficient and very effective in terms of generating powerful SEO results as part of the migration package.  We can also plug in and or setup social media accounts as part of this migration or upgrade with Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn.

You can review our Website Solutions or get a general sense of our package offerings and prices, but we will happily provide your company with a customized estimate.

Since November of 2008, PC User’s have benefited from the WordPress Theme Generator called Artisteer and now that WordPress Generator desktop application is available for Apple / Mac users.  The initial Mac beta was just released and people that purchase/have purchased a PC license will also have the ability to use the license on a Mac or vice versa on a PC.

I have been giving demonstrations of WordPress as a Content Management System for several months which includes a demo of Artisteer and the first question that is always asked is, “Does Artisteer work on a Mac?”

Now the answer is YES!  Artisteer does work on Macs.

Better yet, existing Artisteer users already know that when you purchase a license, that license will receive free upgrades for a year.  I have personally created almost 100 WordPress themes since purchasing Artisteer last fall, and I have significantly benefited from many many upgrades to the software.  This latest upgrade ads more Avatar support for WordPress, ads support for Dot Net Nuke and past upgrades provided support for Joomla & Drupal templates and much much more.

here’s the latest news release from Artisteer about the Mex Mac Capability

Artisteer for Mac (Beta) has arrived!
Artisteer 2.2 for Mac (Beta) is now available by clicking here. Couple interesting facts:

• Artisteer for Mac joins the family of products based on cross-platform .NET framework known as Mono.
• Artisteer might be the first product for Mac OS utilizing the ribbon interface first introduced in Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows.

Technical notes and known issues for beta testers:

• Artisteer for Mac runs on Intel based hardware with OS X version 10.5 (Leopard).
• Artisteer for Mac requires X11 which is usually installed by default on OS X 10.5.
• Artisteer may require approx 1 minute to start the first time after installation.
• The "Open" and "Save" dialogs display Windows style folder structure and may require additional navigation to desired Mac folders.
• The top Mac menu bar does not offer an option to quit Artisteer. Use the Artisteer menu, keyboard shortcut ‘Command’+'Q’, or the red window close button to quit.
• Keyboard shortcuts stop working after clicking anywhere within the web design preview area.
• Certain amount of instability and limitations (as above) are expected due to limitations of the current Mono framework 2.4.
• There is a slight chance that your Mac computer may freeze when using Artisteer (this happened once in our tests). Please save all your work often in case you need to reboot your computer.

Customers who purchased an Artisteer license can use it on both PC and Mac computers (one each) during the beta period. An official release date of the Mac version will be planned after receiving detailed  issue reports from our beta testers and determining how much work is needed to resolve those issues.
Please send feedback and report reproducible issues to our support via the Contact Us page.

Artisteer version 2.2 update
We are releasing a new update to Artisteer 2.2 to resolve a few recent issues reported in the previous version 2.2 Beta.

• Artisteer: Added "Options" button in the export dialog.
• Artisteer: Added DotNetNuke Skin export announced below.
• Artisteer: Fixed a bug with the font size being altered by changing Articles -> Line Height.
• WordPress: Improved compatibility with Avatar List plugin.
• Joomla: Resolved custom footer not showing up.
• Joomla: Resolved centered menus not shown correctly.
• Joomla: Resolved a problem with the text "’30′, ‘height’ => ‘30′ near h2" showing on some pages.
• Joomla: Fixed incorrect path to spacer.gif in script.js file in Joomla templates.
• Drupal: Fixed an issue with broken image appearing instead of a logo uploaded in Drupal.

The new version 2.2.0.17297 can be obtained by clicking here and may become the officially released version 2.2 after additional testing.

This is quick list of wordpress plugins is an addendum to go with my fast speech at WordCampRDU 2009.

In addition to the plugins below, I used Artisteer 2.0 and highly recommend that program (does have a free trial download offer)

• Sitemaps for visitors PS AutoSitemap -  ps-auto-sitemap
• XML Sitemap – sitemaps for bots – if setting up WP for a CMS set a higher priority for pages as opposed to posts (especially if you will only rarely updated posts – wordpress-sitemap-plugin-set-it-right-for-maximum-seo-benefits
• Redirection – redirection
• Akismet – Its obvious but essential for small business
• Search Everything – enables searches of pages, not just posts
• All in one seo – Or HeadSpace or a couple others that include all in one
• Exec PHP – exec-php lets you install php code in content sections of your site
• PageMash – Pagemash
• Add the Multi-Level Navigation Plugin (son of suckerfish) -  multi-level-navigation-plugin
• Multiple Widgets – From time to time, you need to run different sidebars on different pages, so you will need to configure many multiple sidebars, which might require using the same widget on more than one sidebar, you’ll need the Multiple Widgets Plugin

Presentation file from WordPress as a CMS by Brett Bumeter – zipped MindManager Mindmap –

Presentation file from WordPress as a CMS by Brett Bumeter – PDF Copy