Stupid WordPress Tricks

To totally bang home my love for WordPress I wanted to share a nice page that breaks down a lot of useful expansions on the basic WP functionality: Stupid WordPress Tricks

There’s a lot there, in fact there are 76 tricks to peruse. Most of it is somewhat technical as far as how to implement it, but I wanted to share because sometimes examples of what you can do with a tool gives you that “Aha!” moment to really add on some cool stuff to your own projects.

So peruse that list. Find some cool stuff to do, and know it can be done so you can ask for it.

One thing I think I may do with that list is show examples of how to use that added functionality in your own project. First up Meta Descriptions without a plugin. This is a pretty easy one, and you can see it in action on the LegalOut.com site that I set up in WordPress. Outside of just the meta description we set up several custom fields to display different content on different pages.

I’m definitely looking forward to pulling a lot of added functionality ideas from this list.

Ordering lists, UI example

jQuery is definitely my javascript library of choice.

Easy to use and you can spit out awesome stuff pretty quickly and easily.

My latest conquest is drag and drop ordering. Basically what I wanted to do was have two lists. Then you can drag options from one list to the other, and order items within each list.

Here’s a demo of the drag and drop functionality in action

Originally I built this to use in a WordPress plugin I was writing. The point would be to give users some options and let them order the options they selected.

The nice part of this is what goes on behind the scenes. When a user moves an item around (either from one list to the other, or within the list itself to reorder things) the code fires off an ajax call and stores/updates the list in a database.

This is the pretty basic instance of this functionality though. The plugin comes with a lot of options that you can use to really customize the user experience.

Some other options you have is triggering an event (an alert, popup, changing colors on something, etc.) when a person selects an item, when they drop the item, when they put one item above or below another item (before or after they drop it there, warnings anyone?). It’s a nice way to give a lot of feedback to the user as they are interacting with the page and the lists.

And the effects don’t have to stop there. By re-ordering a list on one part of the page could effect layout or content or any other number of things on a page.

A Constant Contact “Case Study”

Yeah I put case study in quotes. Not sure if this really qualifies as an official case study, but definitely worth a post.

Recently did a quick job with a client to update some of their mailing lists.

In a nutshell they needed some custom data added for each contact. The data was created using an algorithm provided by the client, but relied on some unique information from each subscriber.

So the process in pseudocode:

1. Connect to Constant Contact’s API
2. Get all of the contacts in a specific list
3. For each contact get some of their information such as the user id, email address, etc.
4. Build a string based on this data
5. Update the contact’s information in Constant contact with this new data

Simple process, but a nice challenge.

Here are a few fun facts I learned:

• Constant Contact returns its contact data in paged lists. So you can’t just ask for all of the contacts in a specific list and get one result set. You have to ask for each page. Yay recursive-ness.
• There are limits to how many characters you can put in a field. Since the url that got built didn’t really fit logically in any of the provided fields I decided to use the custom fields CC provides. Fun fact: you can only put 50 characters in each custom field.
• From the sending side of things, Constant Contact only allows you to enter subscriber fields into an email if the email is XHTML. And you must have valid XHTML or no dice on even getting the email out of draft stage.

All in all it was a bit frustrating, but successful. Which adds up to a fun programming day. And I got this nice little code sample I can post for you guys which includes a PHP class provided by Constant Contact, and my own custom code to use that class to do stuff to subscribers in a list.

If you’re interested in the code you can check it out here: download Constant Contact Class and case use files

Maker’s and Managers

I found this article by Paul Graham about maker’s schedule vs. Manager’s schedule.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

It’s a good read, and I found a lot of good points especially from the maker’s side of things.

Mostly he talks from the angle of meetings, but for me this goes for any type of interruption. Conference calls, emails, IMs, tweets, text messages, letter, anything.

Anyway, it’s a good reference, especially if you’ve called me and I’ve seemed a bit distracted on the phone ;)

What’s the good word?

About two years ago my wife and I bought a house here in Atlanta. Since we weren’t super familiar with the area and how much things cost we enlisted the help of a realtor. No big deal right, just your standard realtor/buyer relationship.

I don’t know how we found her, but she was great. I mean she really earned her commission, answering our noob questions, finding great houses based on our wants/needs (and not based on her commission or what she wanted to sell). And there was a happy ending with us finding the house that fit us and our budget.

So of course when a friend started their house hunt we recommended her. She did a great job for us, and we knew she would do a great job for them as well. Which turned out to be true.

A few weeks back our realtor asked to take us out to dinner to thank us for the referral. Apparently that one referral had turned into 3 more listings and sales (one of which she was both the buyer and seller agent!) and led to a contact which got her out from under a terrible boss and under someone she really respected as a mentor!

Basically the one referral had taken her business to a whole new level.

And at dinner she kept saying thank you thank you thank you. And I kept saying that she was the one who did all the work. But without our referral she wouldn’t have gotten those leads. But without her hard work we wouldn’t have referred her.

It was round and round the whole dinner!

I don’t know if she ever got what I was saying but I made the realization later that just because you do great work doesn’t mean you will get a referral. And sometimes people who don’t really do great work get referrals. But when that combination of great work and a good referral happens it can be great.

Are you doing both great work that deserve great referrals and referring great work?