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

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!

Announcing the release of a new plugin for WordPress (single and multisite) that will allow you to use your purchase of aMemberto protect your posts and/or pages very simply, easily and best of all – do it for FREE!

Download the plugin at the wordpress site here

Download aMember 30 day trial here

How to install

• Download the file from the official WordPress page or visit your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins/Add New and search for “easy amember protect lite”.
• If you downloaded it, extract the folder from the zip file and upload the whole folder to your wp-content/plugins/ directory using FTP
• Activate the plugin

How to configure

The plugin assumes that your amember installation resides in a folder called amember in the root of your wordpress install. If your installation uses a different folder name or is in a different location you will need to set the correct location in the settings page.

How it Works

You should already have some products in your aMember setup and the PHP_Include plugin activated (it should be anyway).

The plugin will use the product ID number from your aMember setup as the value of the custom field you add to the posts or pages that you want to protect.

The aMember product you want to allow access to

Once you know your product ID, add the custom field to the post you want to protect.

If you want to allow access to more than one product, add a new custom field for each product.

Format your post with –more

If your blog shows the whole post in the archive view or blog post list, you need to use the < !--more--> tag after the text you want everyone to see. Once someone clicks on the title of the post or the link to read more, they will get redirected to the amember login page (if they aren’t already logged in).

the more tag in HTML mode

The more tag in wysiwyg mode

Have fun!

With a bit of imagination and time on the amember forums, you should be able to get your own premium content membership on WordPress site up and running in next to no time!

Notes

This plugin is not a replacement for the official amember wordpress plugin, it wont create a new user on WordPress or allow you to log in to both sites. It simply allows you to protect a single page or post from being seen by someone unless they have an active subscription to one of your amember products.

This plugin is provided ‘as is’ and is free for you to use any way you wish.

Hire me to do your dirty work!

If you want support, modifications and/or custom code then you can contact me on the amember forum (my username there is Andyb) with the details of what you want and request a quote. Prices range from 20$ for telephone support, 50$ for a simple mod, 100$ for custom coding additions and up to and over 250$ for more complex requests. (quotes are free and it costs nothing to ask!)

If you want to try out aMember before you buy, you can download a fully functional 30 day trial for free here. I recommend it if you need a quick solution to add a paywall to your site or you want to charge people to download an ebook, zip or other file.

It always amazes me how much time and effort that people will put in to SEO tricks and tactics, how they swear that they know Google will ‘see’ this or ‘know’ that based on some rumour of a overheard bit of gossip written by a black hat SEO guru. Lol, what is a SEO guru anyway?

It’s an emperors new clothes designer that’s what! If someone tells you that they know what the Google algorithm wants then they are feeding you a line of BS because no one knows and if they did, Google would change it so it would be old news very quickly.

Is all SEO hopeless or even real?

Of course not! there are things that you can do that are known as ‘best practices’ or more commonly known as, ‘common sense’ and you can find out about them from Google itself from their webmaster pages and blog.

A good friend of mine who has successfully got his clients to the number one position on Google for their chosen terms recently wrote an interesting article on SEO and is it real?. He spends his life on and around Google search and even he says that you can try too hard.

The human factor

I recently had emails go to and fro with a colleague and she was quoting another SEO guy who said to bold this term and only do it once and how that is how the Google algorithm ‘knows’ what the article is about.

That makes me lol! Google algorithm ‘knows’ nothing! it can’t ‘see’ anything either, it can only trawl text and html source. It doesn’t look at images, it only stores what they’re name is and whether or not it has a caption and what that caption is.

Here’s a little experiment I want to try to prove that last paragraph..

I’ve started coding the upgrade to my CommentLuv plugin, it’s going to be called CommentLuv 3.0 (original huh?)

More features than you can shake a stick at

This time around I want to do it all again from scratch and I’ve already got a good idea of what I’m going to add to it.

• Dofollow
  Just for the last blog post link and it’ll be configurable like Lucia’s linky luv plugin
• Keyword luv (sort of)
  This will allow a registered comluv user to have their registered site name next to their real name in their comment.
• Custom CSS
  How many people have been asking for this? lol, it’ll be in the new version!
• Use the new comment meta table
  I’ll store the last blog post, user id and request id in the comment meta so the comment text doesn’t get mangled and every link will be identifiable by the info panel. no more ‘cannot find member’ messages.
• Auto registration
  Why not allow the blog that installs commentluv to click a button and be registered straight away? yey!
• Premiumness
  I would like to add premium options, one would be to allow you to give your registered users a full 10 posts to choose from when they comment.

If there’s more you want to add, let me know in the comments…

[edit] I’ve just realized, this post is number 300 on this blog. Synchronicity. mmm Yummy.

What a load of bollox! This seems to be the week I experience maximum crashage.

Hard times/drive

First, my shop pc had a hard drive crash. A massive one. The drive wouldn’t even spin! I tried the usual methods found on a Google like putting it in a plastic bag and putting it the freezer which is supposed to fix a jammed disc.

nope.

Then I tried what this page tried. Basically, swapping the logic board from an identical drive to the faulty one. That actually got the drive spinning and recognized in windows but unfortunately, it was completely trashed. Every sector screwed and no matter what software apps I threw at it, it wouldn’t play. (so I took it apart to see how it works)

Lost code

All my backups of my server where on that disc. All.of.them!

In a great wave of relief, I found that 99% of it had been updated to the live server only the day before. The 1% that didn’t just so happened to be my awesome edit of the pay-to-blog plugin which I was about to put on ComLuv. dammit, that was some good coding I added to the plugin.

It would have allowed me to set a free time limit on new blogs of say 30 days and when that runs out, the next time the blog owner tried to log on, they would be presented with a page where they can pay a piddly 5 USD to have the blog enabled for a year. If they didn’t want to or couldn’t pay then they could request a free blog and that would notify me by email and list the request on my admin page.

I’ll have to rewrite the code and I bet I can’t remember how I did it!

New install, new problems

I managed to grab another hard drive and put it in the box to replace the poop one. Installed Ubuntu 9.10 and vwmare and got all the shop POS software working with the ancient equipment we have. Sweet! until… only 24 hours of nice working, it went pooooop. Something to do with i810 video drivers missing. Cue 5 hours pissing about with sudo apt-get and other linux bollox until at last, it is working again.

And then Vmware decided to stop working with the serial port via USB. Pleh!

More sudo apt-get and 2 hours later, I found an old vwmare image for the win98 system and copied over the contents of the .vmx file and ta-da! it worked again.

No more please!

No more. thanks. done it now.

New Wheels

Even these got delayed by 3 days. Next day delivery bleeeeuuurrgh!

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.

Version 1.0 (updated 11 Feb 09)
Requires: WordPress 2.6 (could work with lesser)
Tested up to : WordPress 2.7b3

This plugin is no longer supported, please download TwitterLink-Comments which will do a much better job and will still be able to use the existing database table and labels.

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