“Awesome Features”

CommentLuv Premium allows you to unlock advanced backlink features on 10′s of thousands of blogs. It has been shown to increase comments and traffic to blogs that install it and helps to make your posts go viral by integrating with twitter, facebook and google plus.

It combines 8 plugins in to 1 which all work in harmony to reduce spam, provide stats of where your links are being clicked, deny trackbacks from spammers, allow users to use keywords in their name, leave their twitter name in the comments, showcase your top commenters and more.

The plugin has many new features :

• Integrated anti spam measures that prevent almost 100% of botspam
• Dofollow readers links with advanced rules so you look after your most loyal readers
• Unique social enticements which helps your posts to go viral on Twitter, facebook and Google+
• Integrated twitterlink functions to allow readers to leave their twitter names on comments
• Improved version of Keywordluv with much tighter control over who gets to use keywords
• Integrates trackback validation with improved heuristics
• Exclusive top commentators widget with advanced display control
• Dashboard and advanced stats that show you where your links are getting clicked
• Free updates for life using the easy one click automatic update system
• more being added all the time!

You can find out more about CommentLuv Premium at CommentLuv.com

Warning! Geekiness ahead

Ok, so just had a wonderful time trying to set up a way to automatically backup my hostgator VPS to Amazon S3.

I did it with the help of some googling, head scratching and tricky bastardness so I thought I’d better document it here to remind me how to do it when I need to do it again.

I got most of the information from the post here and in the comments. Although, I had to piss about a lot to get it finally working. Mainly because of curly quotes in the original page, windoze line breaks and my monkey heritage.

(this is for VPS on Hostgator running Centos 5)

1. Create AmazonS3 bucket

Easy bit here, just create a bucket

2. Install S3 client for Linux

First need to install s3tools repo

cd /etc/yum.repos.d
wget http://s3tools.org/repo/CentOS_5/s3tools.repo

Next need to install

yum install s3cmd

Answer the questions with Y

3. Configure s3cmd

s3cmd --configure

Enter in the access key and secret key from Amazon Security Credentials

4. Enable daily backups from WHM

You can select which accounts by clicking the button marked ‘select’

If it’s already configured, find out the backup directory by typing

grep BACKUPDIR /etc/cpbackup.conf

5. Create the log directories

mkdir /var/log/backuplogs

6. Write a script to automate the backup and save it as /root/dailybackup.sh

You should change the email and bucket name to reflect your own values

#!/bin/bash

##Notification email address
_EMAIL=youremail@yourdomain.com

ERRORLOG=/var/log/backuplogs/backup.err`date +%F`
ACTIVITYLOG=/var/log/backuplogs/activity.log`date +%F`

##Directory which needs to be backed up
SOURCE=/backup/cpbackup/daily/*.gz

##Name of the backup in bucket
DESTINATION=`date +%F`

##Backup degree
DEGREE=3

#Clear the logs if the script is executed second time
:> ${ERRORLOG}
:> ${ACTIVITYLOG}

##Uploading the daily backup to Amazon s3
/usr/bin/s3cmd -r put ${SOURCE} s3://yourbucketname/${DESTINATION}/ 1>>${ACTIVITYLOG} 2>>${ERRORLOG}
ret2=$?

##Sent email alert
msg="BACKUP NOTIFICATION ALERT FROM `hostname`"

if [ $ret2 -eq 0 ];then
msg1="Amazon s3 Backup Uploaded Successfully"
else
msg1="Amazon s3 Backup Failed!!\n Check ${ERRORLOG} for more details"
fi
echo -e "$msg1"|mail -s "$msg" ${_EMAIL}

#######################
##Deleting backup’s older than DEGREE days
## Delete from both server and amazon
#######################
DELETENAME=$(date --date="${DEGREE} days ago" +%F)

/usr/bin/s3cmd -r --force del s3://yourbucketname/${DELETENAME} 1>>${ACTIVITYLOG} 2>>${ERRORLOG}

7. Grant execute privilege to the script

chmod u+x /root/dailybackup.sh

8. Set up a cpanel hook to run the script after the backup has completed

nano /scripts/postcpbackup

enter this as the contents

#!/usr/bin/perl
system("/root/dailybackup.sh");

make it executable

chmod u+x /scripts/postcpbackup

That’s it!

In case of disaster, copy the file from Amazon s3 with

mkdir restore
s3cmd -r get s3://yourbucketname/2011-02-32/filename.gz restore

Notes
I changed the bash script so it only copies *.gz files
I wanted to change the time at which the cpbackup occurs so I went to ‘manage plugins’ in WHM and put ‘install and keep udpated’ tick on ‘cronconfig’ and then went to ‘configure cpanel cron times’ and set the time I wanted cpbackup to run.

Weekend Warrior!

I’ve been working feverishly to get premium commentluv ready for beta testing over the past 3 weeks and to give me a break on the weekends, I’ve been working on another premium plugin that I’ll be launching to the warrior forums with my JV partner before releasing it to the wild.

What is it called?

It’s got a working title of WP Aweber Gate

What does it do?

It allows you to protect post and page content from being viewed and downloads from being accessed by readers unless they are on your Aweber list.

Why would I want that?

• Run a membership site without all the trouble of having members register to your site
• Offer ethical bribes to people to join your list and know that only people that have subscribed can access the bribe
• Prevent your premium content from being shared with non subscribers
• Add bonus materiel to your site for your list subscribers only
• No need to change your theme to a membership theme just to have subscribers only content
• No need to buy expensive plugins like wishlist or DAP (this plugin will be MUCH cheaper!)
• There’s probably a lot more reasons that I haven’t thought of!

How does it work?

Just 4 easy steps to get your subscribers only gateway working:

Upload, activate, authorize, configure.

1. Upload
   Upload to your plugins directory or use the plugins page link in your dashboard
2. Activate
   Ummm, click activate!
3. Authorize
   Click the link to authorize the plugin to access your Aweber account
4. Configure
   Choose your desired list (or set to check all) and what you want to happen to non subscribers (off with their heads!).
   • You can show them a message which can contain HTML
   • You can automatically send a subscription to your desired list
   • You can forward them to any page on your site
   • You can forward them to any URL on the web

Let me see!

Here’s a set of video instructions on how to rebrand my recent premium plugin called WP Mail Ads, you can also download a free bonus plugin for commentluv users called The Dashboard Luvver Widget which shows a list of last blog posts from the people that have commented on your blog so you’ve always got somewhere to go and visit to get some luv!

You can only access the videos and downloads if you’re an email subscriber to one of my lists. Chances are that if you have downloaded the commentluv plugin or seen some of my videos you are already so all you need to do is enter your email address in the box and click the button, if you are on my list it’ll show you the content and cookie you so you can access all the locked content and downloads, if you’re not on one of my lists then it’ll auto subscribe you and then you just need to click the authorization link that arrives in your inbox. Sweet huh?

When can I get it?

I’ll be releasing it in a week or two once all the sales bumpf and bonuses have been put together! watch out for it!

btw… I have installed premium commentluv to comluv.com. You can read about it here. Premium CommentLuv Beta Testing

Hey! did you realize that you’re leaving money on the table? If you have registrations enabled or subscribe to comments activated on your WordPress blog then that’s exactly what you’re doing!

This is my first paid plugin release and I’m putting it out there for a fantastic price. Go and see at the warrior forum

I’ve been using it for my own personaly profit for over 1 year and my launch partner convinced me to release it as a plugin so others can leverage the space in the emails that people always open, those are the WordPress generated emails that tell them there’s a new reply to their comment or for resetting their password or.. well, there are lots of plugins that cause your blog to send emails and WP Mail Ads will allow you to monetize each and every one of them!

Video Intro

Here’s a 3 minute video that gives you all the details

I’ve had a blast launching the new free version of CommentLuv and it occurred to me that I haven’t actually put a feature list out there so people know what’s changed in this new version.

So, here’s what’s new :

phew! that took a while…

just you wait until you see what’s coming in CommentLuv premium!

You can Download CommentLuv here

I’ve decided on a course of action for having my own products.. Rather than write an ebook which I wouldn’t do anyway because I just despise writing copy! and rather than try and convert my CommentLuv plugin to become a fully fledged big budget premium plugin (which I will do eventually), I am going to try my hand at releasing some smaller plugins for a very reasonable price.

People want updates and support

From my own experience of my free plugins, one thing that I know people want when installing plugins to their site is somewhere to go for help when things go wrong or when other plugins don’t play nice.

Another thing they want is regular updates or at least the knowledge that their site isn’t going to break because they update their WordPress code and the plugin doesn’t play nice with the new functions.

If it is too big it’s too bad!

The biggest road block to me releasing the super duper update to CommentLuv that would take it into the realms of ‘premium plugin’ is the fact that it’s already grown to such a long list of source code and it’s functionality is already a headache when I start thinking what I’ll have to do it add this or that feature.

I’ve seen it with other premium plugin coders that are trying to survive on their own. Releasing something so big and so super duper that you can charge between 50 and 100 dollars for it means you have to really make it super duper and chock full of features. Then you’ll have to create a support site and probably forums where you’ll spend 50% of your time, the other 50% will be either coding the updates or marketing. Good luck if you want to release more than 1, you’ll need a team of coders, supporters and designers and marketers.

For he guys at premium.wpmudev.org it’s not a big deal but for little ol’ me? well, I’m going to try something different. Something that is maintainable and wont require a visit to Dragons Den or seek angle investors. Something that I can actually release more than one of.

Bring on low cost, great value blog bling!

My plan is to release a set of great value blog bling plugins at a price where people wont have to break the bank or hesitate for too long before buying. I’m going to integrate it with the existing comluv credits system which allows existing comluv affiliates to advertise them and earn a percentage from any credits purchases that result and I’m going to provide top level support that is exclusive to people who purchase the plugins.

They are going to be useful little buggers, these plugins -o -mine! And because they are going to be managable in size and updates, I’ll be able to release more than one. Here’s three very reasonably priced plugins that I have written and found to be really useful for my own sites.

Dashboard Tweeter

Price: – $20
A nice dashboard widget that greets you with your latest @replies from twitter and allows you to respond without ever leaving the dashboard area. The advantage is that you can set up your own twitter application so when your replies go out there, there’ll be a handy link directly back to your blog for people to click.

It also has Direct messages and your twitter stream to browse too. All links and hashtags are automatically converted to open in a new window links and all replies/DM’s will use the proper format so that they are fully compatible with the twitter api.

You can see what it looks like in action here – Dashboard Tweeter

Installation video, lifetime updates and support forum

future: this could be expanded to allow your recent posts to be tweeted from the widget and even notify users who have supplied their twitter username when their comment has received a reply.

Guest Blogger Notify

Price – $15
If you’ve ever had a guest blogger come to visit and write on your site then you’ll like this one. It will allow you to choose which meta boxes you want shown on an add new post page in your dashboard when it’s a contributor.

It’ll also add a user configurable message box to the write post page that you can use to let contributors know what your posting guidelines are direct on the page they’re writing on.

What sets it apart will be that it automatically emails the contributor when their post is published using the message you set.

No more support tickets or emails from contributors asking if their post is published yet!

Instructional video and premium priority exclusive support.

Future : this could be expanded to have a feature where guest posts will show an author box with the users bio description and links to their site.

Choose Full Feed Post

Price: -$15
This will be useful if you use subscribe to feed by email services by Feedburner or Feedblitz.

It will allow you, on a post by post basis, to choose which posts will show the full text and which posts will show just the summary in the RSS feed of your site.

Now you no longer need to choose one or the other, you can have both! If you have set your feed to excerpts only but you have a newsletter type post or something you would rather the reader sees fully in their feed read then you can. Similarly, if you have full feed posts set then a particularly long post can be set as excerpt only which keeps the size of the emails that are sent out down to manageable levels.

Same full exclusive support and instructional videos.

future: This can be expanded to have a feed only shortcode function so you can show text , images and links only in the feed. A great way to encourage people to subscribe.

Life time updates!

One of the advantages to me and to the purchasing user would be to have lifetime updates and priority support.

If I am getting paid for it then answering your support questions is a no brainer! I would be happy to exchange my time for your money

Updates to wordpress break the plugin? no problem! if you’ve paid for a plugin then it seems fair that I would make sure that it would be compatible with future versions of WordPress. Once you have paid, you will be guaranteed lifetime updates.

All of this for just a few dollars.

Would you pay ?

If you knew you were going to receive 1st rate support and guaranteed updates, would you consider paying between 5 and 20 dollars for a plugin?

your comments are welcome!

I’ve been reading xkcd and Explosm for ages and I’ve always dreamed of having a comic blog. Well, more specifically, being able to draw well enough to have a comic blog!

Now, I’m not gonna let a little thing like not being able to do something to stop from doing something. I mean, how hard can it be?

Any stick will do

I have seen some literally LaughOutLoud good comics that are nothing more than a few straight lines on my stumbleupon sessions and I can’t help but think that it should be a breeze to do the same. oo-er, famous last words eh?

Check out this strip, it’s simply drawn and it made larf for ages. I sent it to 3 people!

I tried to make one in this style and it was hard! I did manage to make a simple comic once before on this blog, I used an online stickman comic maker which made things easier..

I wonder if it’ll be easier this time?

Comicpress wooot!

Enter in Comicpress which is a fantastic bit of WordPress shennanigans that enables anyone to create and update a comic based blog without worrying about ftp and specific filenames.

It’s currently powering a huge number of comic blogs and has helped a lot of regular folks create gorgeous comics like Starship Moonhawk or Dakota McFadzeans’ Blog and I want in!

It wont be able to help your drawing skills or your humour bone tuning but it will leave you to only worry about the drawing, all the rest will be handled by the system. It can handle graphic novels, simple strip comics, multi columns, custom colours, fancy pagination and a whole lot more!

It’s mildly overwhelming how many options there are to choose from so I think my best approach will be to start with a simple default layout and get creating and publishing. As I get used to the system, I’ll know what I need to change or update.

Learn me and you some learns

I’m all set up to start doing some more screencasts on my super fast PC and the weather is getting nice enough for me to be able to stay at the main pc without my fingers becoming frozen so I think it’s time to make some tutorial videos!

What better way to generate blog fodder than to start a tutorial series! and.. what better platform to do it on than ComLuv? (and it means I can use it as a legitimate ‘work’ activity)

ComicLuv

I have done some testing and I am fairly confident that it will work just as well on the live server. So, over the next few days I will be installing it to the ComLuv site as a supporter only feature. Anyone with a fiver a month can have a comic blog too!

I will be creating the comic blog and using the blogging side of it for tutorials and tales of my progress as I figure out what I use to draw the comics and other important stuff like how to draw or what is funny?

Freebies!

I’d really like to hear from you if you’ve ever considered making a comic blog, It’d be awesome to be able to have someone to compare notes with and share the journey.

What do you think? fancy making a comic on the ComLuv site? In exchange for taking the plunge with me and being someone who can chat with me about comic making, I’ll give you a full supporter account with access to all the themes and comicpress addons and a bunch of credits to get things like extra URLs on your comluv account.

It goes without saying that your new comic blog will get plenty of promotion and be mentioned along with mine in as many places as I can fit it

Twice. In 1 week.

I lost my code and my awesome plugin edits when my hard drive crashed, I started writing it again and I formatted the wrong partition. Seriously gutted! I tried to recover the data with undelete apps but it was gone forever.

No worry no more!

Now, I don’t need to worry because I use Dropbox and have configured my local server to use it as the document_root of my dev site. That way, all the developing work I’m doing gets saved automatically online and is accessible on any of my pc’s.

I don’t even need to worry about being able to access the SAMBA share if I want to edit a file, I just open it from my dropbox on the pc I’m using and save it back there, it’ll get automatically updated on my dev server.

Oops no more!

Another advantage is the revisions feature. You can go online and see the updates that you made to a file and revert it back to an earlier save. This has already saved me from crying, I always forget to rename a file before I start trying to add updates and before I know it, the whole thing is causing an error and I can’t remember how to put it back the way it was! just luvin the revision feature!!

Get 2GB for FREE! (and help me out)

You can apply for a Dropbox for FREE and get a full 2GB to use to store anything from simple documents to executable files to database backups or like me, use it as your code repository and never go through the pain of a lost bit of awesome code again!

You can even install it on Linux which is super helpful when it comes to transferring files between a windows->linux network.

If you click this link and install your dropbox for free, we both get extra bonus space which would help me out a lot

If you’re lucky enough to have a subscription to Premium WPMU Dev account then you’ll have access to great monetization plugins like the Upgrades or Supporter which take all the pain out of providing a ‘pay for’ service that can handle payments through Paypal, Google or even Amazon gateways.

I downloaded and installed the upgrades plugin a while ago and I’ve used it to monetize certain parts of my ComLuv site. There’s the usual way of adding plugins to the Upgrades directory and configuring them to be used which I’ll go into in a future post but I wanted to use the system slightly differently, and that was to charge users for adding new URLs to an account or to add default links to their returned list of posts.

The advantage of premium

Some of the advantages to using wpmupremium plugins is the support you receive, knowledge that the plugin will be updated to keep it compatible with new changes and my favourite is, the quality of the code.

When you’re getting premium, you’re getting premium code which for me personally, has taught me a LOT about how wordpress works. Particularly custom hooks and actions and filters. That was always a mystery to me until I dissected the plugins I downloaded from their site so it was a breeze to modify the upgrades plugin to work for users who don’t have blogs and start using the internal functions in a daughter template to do what I wanted.

Modifying the upgrades plugin

I needed to allow the upgrades menu to show for regular users because not everyone who joins the Comluv site starts a blog. This was just a simple case of changing the user level so that everyone, not just blog owners can see the menu and buy credits.

There are two places to modify:

/mu-plugins/upgrades-framework.php
line ~ 197-200 (upgrades plug pages framework function)
change add menu and submenu calls to

add_menu_page($upgrades_branding_plural, $upgrades_branding_plural, 0, 'upgrades.php');
add_submenu_page('upgrades.php', __('Credits'), __('Credits'), 0, 'credits', 'upgrades_credits_output' );
add_submenu_page('upgrades.php', __('History'), __('History'), 0, 'history', 'upgrades_log_output' );

line ~ 1919 (upgrades_credits_output function)
change user check to

if(!current_user_can('level_0')) {

Creating the daughter template

Adding another page you can use as a template is pretty easy, you just need to create a new php file in your theme directory and make sure it has the correct remarks at the top to identify it as a template page.


/*
Template Name: ComLuv purchase url
*/


Next just copy and paste the main calls from another template, you’ll be deleting most of it like the loop to display posts and replacing it with your own hard coded form and text. Be sure to keep the divs that surround the content intact.

I wrote a description of the item being sold and added a form.
(DON’T copy and paste from this page, I had to remove the beginning < characters from the code so it displays properly)

form action='/member/additional-urls/' method="POST">
input name="addurl" type="text" size="30"/>
input type="submit" name="submit1" value="Submit"/>

/form>


I also added a finish_page() function which just closes the /div tags so I could easily break out of what I was displaying without rendering the rest of the custom code below it.

You set the action to the page slug you’re publishing the page as and put a nonce field in there so you can check it with the next bit of code to prevent a naughty user from trying to call the purchase directly.

Handling the purchase

Next, you need to handle the data that gets submitted by your form and do the magic with the users credits.

if(isset($_POST['submit1'])){
$nonce=$_REQUEST['_wpnonce'];
if(!wp_verify_nonce($nonce,'addurl1')){
echo 'Page request deformed, please go back and try again. (b1s1)';
finish_page();
}
if(!$_POST['addurl']){
echo 'Please go back and enter a value';
finish_page();
}
// check if user has enough credits
global $user_ID;
$credits = upgrades_user_credits_available($user_ID);
if($credits < 3){
echo 'h2>Error - Insufficient Credits/h2>';
echo 'p>You will need to purchase some credits to register another URL, you currently have strong>'.$credits.'/strong>';
echo 'p>a href="/wp-admin/upgrades.php?page=credits">Click here to visit the purchase page/a>';
finish_page();
}
// if we're here then everything is ok to provide service and deduct credits
$credits = upgrades_user_credits_available($user_ID);
$credits -= 3;
upgrades_user_credits_update($credits);
upgrades_log_add_msg($user_ID,'You paid 3 credits for an additional URl - '.$url);
do_add_url($url,$user_ID);
echo 'h2>Site added, 3 credits used on your account/h2>';
echo 'p>You have '.$credits.' credits remaining';
echo 'p>a href="/member/additional-urls/">Click here to refresh the page/a>';


The first bit gets the nonce you created and checks it and displays an error message if it doesn’t match
Next, check the field you’re expecting and spit out an error if it is empty.
Next, check the user has enough credits and spit out an error if they don’t.
If everything is fine, continue.

use $credits = upgrades_user_credits_available($user_ID); to get the users current credits total
use upgrades_user_credits_update($credits); to set the users credits total to $credits (after you deduct what your item/upgrade costs)
use upgrades_log_add_msg($user_ID,’You paid 3 credits for an additional URl – ‘.$url); to add a message to the users Credits history page so they know they used some.

That’s it, easy peasy! Here’s an idea, use credits to sell digital downloads on another page, just check and deduct the users credits before allowing a dowload.

I’ll post a follow up to this soon on how to use the upgrades plugin to add a new package that enables the RSS widget for a blog (I’ll show you how to disable the rss widget too)

You can get over 100 plugins and themes of premium quality at http://premium.wpmudev.org and they all help to make your wpmu site better than the jones’s

Some of you may know that I run a Chinese takeaway and delivery shop in Lancaster, UK with my partner and her brother. My role is strictly ‘front-of-house’, customer service, chief geekster and go-and-get-stuff-from-Preston’er (among other things like doing the weekly books and tracking the cost of goods sold etc)

I can’t for the life of me go in the kitchen where it’s all fire and wok but, I can do all the other great things like come up with great marketing ideas, develop online solutions for advertising, answer the phone and understand the myriad of different accents you get when you run a delivery orientated business in a two University town.

Pretty Vs Useful

One of the things that was inevitable for me to do was, The Website.

Now, I class myself as a developer not a designer. The difference? to me, a designer designs. They take an idea and take it from nothing more than a think in the head to a pretty thing you can see in front of you. They make things that are pretty.

A developer (to me at least) is someone who develops things. They take something that is partly tangible and make it better/bigger/more. In essence, they get something and develop it. They make pretty things useful

Obviously, there’s more to it than that but you get my drift.

From little acorns..

This is the site the shop used to have..

You can see it’s very basic, it had to be because it was made a looong time ago on something like MS frontpage or other ancient artifact invented by Margaret Thatcher. There’s nothing wrong with simple, simple works because, well, it’s simple! You don’t need a degree to navigate it and the menu display used a fancy bit of javascript that kept the categories stuck to the left wherever you scrolled on the screen… (that was high class DHTML at the time)

It did the job, people used it and found what they wanted to eat without having to search behind the fridge or sort out the over stuffed kitchen drawer for a dog eared menu.

..bigger acorns grow

It was obvious, inevitable, ordained that I, master geek, should take this website and make it mine!

The first thing I had to play with was the logo. I couldn’t change it because the shop signs and menus et al were emblazoned with it already and any designer/developer worth his salt will be able to tell you lots and lots about brand recognition and the pitfalls associated with making any dramatic change to the shape or flow of an existing brand.

Look at the history of the Coca Cola® logo at Andrew Keirs’ blog. Barely any change at all.

So, this logo needed updating but it also needed to stay recognizable..

What could I do? My options were,

1. outsource
2. fudge it in photoshop
3. ask the internets

Outsourcing was out of the question, I’ve tried that route before and always regretted it. Probably because for the price I was willing to pay I had to settle for second best or go through 3 or 4 fifteen year old middle men who couldn’t speak enough English to fully understand what I wanted so, that was option 1 gone.

Fudge it!

I’m no stranger to Photoshop, more realistically, I’m no stranger to Layers and Blending options. You can pretty much do anything with the filters, layers and blending options on Photoshop. (real designers and ‘shop experts are experiencing skin crawling sensations right now)

The first thing I did was grab the low-res image as a screen grab (alt + prt scr) and paste it into a new layer, add a text box and click the ‘blending options’ menu item. A couple of copy/pastes later, I had this..

Hurray!

The hurray didn’t last long though, it looked better to my eyes (of course it would, I made it) but, it didn’t print well. It looked ok as a tiny teeny logo on the corner of a menu but it looked bloody awful on a 300dpi glossy proof.

Have no fear, The Internet is here

I turned to the internets to see what I could find.

I discovered I could get the logo turned into a vector image by a design shop = £200 please, um, no thanks.

There’s software you can buy to do tracing that turns an existing image into a vector = £lots. No way dude.

And then, Vector Magic. A website that offers a free, online, 2.0, do-it-yourself service that takes a bitmap (or other format) image and gives you real time tools to turn it into a vector based no-jaggy image.

Gawd bless them for their free-ness, this is what I got from the low-res jpeg grab and a bit of jiggery pokery in ‘shop..

Loooaaads better! It was vector so I could blow it up to any size I wanted and it would still retain the curves and straight diagonal lines it had when it was little. Awesome, 300dpi no problem. Menu printing – no problem.

Procrastination, the best way to pretend to do work

After pissin about with the logo and menu redesign for what seemed like a few seconds but turned out to be about 3 months I started working on the website.

When I’m confronted with a do-it-from-scratch project. especially if it’s a you-better-not-spend-more-than-a-hundred-quid type of thing then I try to start with something that exists already and see if I can turn it into a working site.

I first searched for wordpress themes with the word “restaurant” or “takeaway” or “Chinese” associated with them. Zip, nada, zilch.
The best I could find was the oriental theme for WordPress which after a quick browse just wouldn’t do. It’s a nice theme for a blog but it didn’t have many options for turning it into a proper takeaway website.

WordPress is awesome for it’s ability to create non-blog sites, I pretty much use it exclusively for making any kind of online publication. It just wasn’t awesome enough to turn this simple theme into what I wanted.

Back to the drawing board?

oh dear, would I have to actually PAY SOMEONE to do it for me? bwahh, that’s not gonna happen for less than a monkey (Brit speak for 500 quid). This did seem to be the only option though.

This website was designed when I used an Indian oursourcer company once before to help for a website I got commissioned with for a pretty fancy pants place in Milton Keynes. The budget was a lot larger and even though the site looked beautiful and the client was impressed, I didn’t have the backing to do it this way for us. Besides, what if we sold the business? What options would the new owner have to edit and update their prices and menu? None, that’s what (unless they were a geek like me, unlikely though).

WordPressMu and Premium Theme awesomeness

And then, I perchanced (real word, honest!) on a CMS theme called WPMu-Dixi from the guys at wpmudev.org . I had it installed on my WPMu site at The ComLuv Network as a premium theme available to supporters (a plugin from premium.wpmudev.org that opens up a paid monthly subscription to users).

WPMU-Dixi.
An awesome CMS type theme that can be edited through the admin page.

It’s been there a while and it was only by chance (yup, procrastinating) that I looked at it again but this time, with the eyes of someone wanting a way to completely customize a site without editing template files AND keep the usability and power of a WordPress theme. Mainly, tags, categories, RSS feeds, easy editing, instant results and googleability (another real word).

It’s benefit was the home page feature, it was completely widgetizable which meant that I could remove all the standard blog type things and replace them with takeaway type things. You can also change almost everything about the theme using the admin settings page, fonts, colors, backgrounds and header images. Yey! rock on, make it so Mr. Data…

All on one page please

One of the things that I didn’t like about the old website was the fact you had to go clicky clicky all over the place just to find the telephone number or location and something I felt was needed for a new one was a single place to find all the information you need.

As a savvy web user, I have no trouble using my common sense to look at an ‘about’ page for location, clicking on a ‘menu’ link to see the menu seems like a no brainer but, to a ‘quick, I want it now’ internet surfer that seems too much to ask.

You have to think why a user is at your website. As a Chinese food takeaway and delivery business, the main reason someone is at my website is because they just searched for a Chinese takeaway in Lancaster (woot! number 1) and the last thing I want them to do is to spend more than a few seconds figuring out if 1. we actually deliver to their area and 2. we are open. So, you see, in my opinion you should be able to see the phone number, the location, the type of food served and opening hours all on the first page you come to when visiting a website (a site for a takeaway that is). If you can’t have it all, the very least is the location and telephone number right there in your face.

Edit, paste, tweak, finangle it and gawd bless Firebug

I use firebug all the time, it’s wonderful to be able to inspect any element on a page with a simple F12/click and change its’ css in real time to see what it will look like in a different size or remove it entirely.

After just a couple of days of spare time (the bits between rushing to Preston to buy mushrooms and spending whole afternoons trying to get the ancient Win98 order system to work on a Linux box) I was able to experiment with Firebug and completely transform the Dixi theme into this..

You can see it’s got a BIG telephone number displayed which is the number one reason people are searching for the site (from research). The location (number two reason) and a downloadable menu (third reason).

But, that’s not all! I spent literally days and days entering in all the menu items as posts using categories, tags and descriptions. With over 200 individual items, that was quite a challenge (to my boredom threshold). And, while I was there I thought I might as well add custom fields to each post – the price of the item and the item number for future use.

It works quite nicely and because I took the time to tag every item and categorize it, a user can click on one of the tags and see every item that contains chicken or is classed as spicy. Clicking on the title of any one of the items in the list takes them to the single post page where they can see a picture (if available) and a description of the item and because it’s on a wordpress site, they can leave a comment or review of the dish being displayed. Bloody good wot!?

Extending it even further

I could have left it like that, it was enough but, being a geek and serial tinkerer, I wanted to make it do more and show off what can be done with a few extra bits like a custom plugin and some jquery’ness as well as provide a showcase of what can be done with a supporter account on The ComLuv Network (ever the promoter that I am) (and worried that the server the site runs on might use up all my spare sweet money before I get enough paid customers).

The click to see a list of items that have, for example, chicken or cashew nuts was ok but it showed the excerpt of each post in a format that meant the page went on and on and on. A solution that came to mind was a custom child template but I couldn’t figure out a way for it to take over from the existing tag display code without editing the template to put an if/else catch.

Not good, I didn’t really want to go that way because 1. it was time expensive and 2. I wanted others to be able to use the template for things other than as a takeaway site and, I wanted to be able to upgrade the theme if necessary without having to redo all the custom code.

jQuery, and WordPress filters/actions – I love you

I dug up some code for how to use the custom fields in a post and researched the_title() wordpress filter and added some jQuery-after-the-fact-code to change the css for the template. Loving it! with just about 30 lines of code stuck into a plugin wrapper, I was triumphant at being able to take the tags and archive and search results page from this..

which makes the page a very very long one, to this…

which shows the item number, price and shrinks everything down to a ‘consumable by impatient surfers’ level. I did some other magic with jQuery to change the “leave a comment” to “leave a review” and changed the title of the tags to “see X dishes containing Y”. Other simple search/replaces on terms that are used primarily for blogging were done too. Easy peasy with jQuery!

I am super pleased with how it turned out, just about the only thing I could have done more is “add some frickin lasers”

What’s next?

• Online ordering.
  Simply done so anyone can do it just by activating a plugin. That’s what’s next, I already have some bits of code that should be able to turn any post that has a custom field of “price” in it and insert an “add to cart” button on it. Combine that with an AJAX shopping cart and paypal gateway and there’s no reason it can’t be a fully functional online ordering system within a week or so.
• A do you deliver to me plugin.
  A customer should be able to enter their postcode and find out if we deliver to them. (kind of already done using my delivery worksheet/google maps api stuff)
• More pictures of dishes
• A package to allow any ComLuv supporter to add these things to their site at a click of a button
• An email course explaining in more detail each step I took to make the site number 1 on Google for our chosen search term
• A video series showing how to turn Dixi template into your own business site
• I’d better stop here or I’ll think of so many things that I wont have time to do anything else!

Take a look at The Fired Wok Chinese Takeaway website and let me know what you think, remember, it’s a wordpress template using only 1 custom plugin and no template file editing. I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself but I know there are things that only someone who isn’t me will see so feel free to leave a comment (here) with feedback.

Holy crap, this was only supposed to be a little quick post. 2500+ words and a few hours later, ahem.