phidgt.com

Karen Post for City Council

phidgt — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:10:53 +0000

A warm welcome goes out to Karen Post as our newest addition to the phidgt.com family.
She is the proud owner of a bright and friendly web site at karenpost.info. It is currently set up for her campaign for the upcoming Steamboat Springs’ City Council elections. Whatever the outcome in November, Karen will be able to adapt her web site to whatever her needs may be.

Welcome Yoga Rx Studio!

phidgt — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 03:42:06 +0000

I am extremely happy to welcome Victoria Strohmeyer and all of the wonderful instructors at the Yoga Rx Studio. Their new site has a calendar for everyone to view the class schedule. It was very important for the instructors to be able to edit the calendar themselves and not continuously have to pay someone else. The site also allows visitors to subscribe and receive updates via e-mail on any changes. It’s a very friendly and inviting site and I look forward to seeing it grow and evolve.

Contact Forms

phidgt — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 21:46:41 +0000

I have decided that I would like to have a spiffy form for visitors to fill out when they e-mail me. Just a simple thing to gather a bit more information on what kind of service someone might be after. This way I can be more prepared when I get back in touch with them. Once again, I find myself wading through the many plug-ins that are available. As always, I begin my search by going to the WordPress plugins page.

Contact Form ][: Sounded like a nice plug-in with a simple to use form. I didn’t try it. Here’s why: (this is a direct quote from the developer’s site)

Bugs - Features - Support
————————-
One word: No.

I offer this plug-in as-is. I don’t have time (for now) to fix bugs,
add features, help you, etc. I will, however accept and merge
patches that successfully address issues and/or limitations. Folks who
donate substantial amounts of money for my time will receive support.
Freeloaders won’t.

This is how open source works. You’re on your own. If you’re willing to help,
you’ll make me and other users of the plug-in happy. Freeloaders looking for
support will simply be ignored. Case closed.

It’s OK to ask for donations, but to call people who don’t ‘freeloaders’ is a tad rude. This is exactly what open source is not. Unfortunately, at this point, I don’t even care how good the plug-in may be. Go get a job with Microsoft.

Accessible and Secure Contact Form: This is a very nice contact form. It is very easy to configure and works right out of the box. There are a bunch of pre-made themes to choose from or you can customize your own. The only thing it doesn’t have is a way to save the info in a spreadsheet.

Secure Form Mailer: This plug-in allows for more customization of the fields. You can choose between using their already made standard form or you can customize the fields however you want. In order to customize the fields you have to manually enter the field set information which could be confusing for some. Again, there is no way to store info in a spreadsheet.

There are a couple more forms plug-ins available, but I didn’t feel like looking at any more for now. If you need a basic form any of the two I looked at will work just fine. If you want a form that has a lot more features I suggest using the cforms II plug-in. You can see it in action on the Contact page.

Friends of Wilderness

phidgt — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 22:10:38 +0000

I would like to welcome Friends of Wilderness to the phidgt.com family!

Friends of Wilderness is a non-profit organization made up of approximately twenty-five volunteers. These folks go out into the wilderness and make sure that the trails are clear of fallen trees, pick up trash, and provide information for other hikers. Their site required some members-only sections. Such as a calendar for scheduling and a customized form for their patrol reports. There was also quite a bit of automation involved in order for the site to be easily accessible for all of the volunteers. I think the look and feel of the site is very welcoming and its functionality will allow Friends of Wilderness to expand the site to having areas with public participation. A feature they weren’t able to utilize with their old site.

I would like to thank everyone at Friends of Wilderness. Not only for the opportunity to create a beautiful web site for them, but also for all of the hard work they do.

Restricting Access to Certain Pages and/or Categories

phidgt — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 20:35:03 +0000

These plug-ins restrict access to your site. One of our projects was to make part of a site available to the public and the rest available only to logged in users. While there are quite a few plug-ins available, none of them seemed to provide the functionality we needed. We installed nearly every plug-in under restrictions and they started to get all jumbled up in our heads. I decided to start jotting down some quick notes for future reference and to benefit anyone else.

Angsuman�s Authenticated Word Press Plug-in: Once installed, your site will only be viewable by registered users. The first screen that visitors will be presented with is a log-in box. After they log-in, users will be able to view your site.

Category Visibility: We couldn’t even test this one because it is not compatible with our version of Word Press. You need version 2.0 or lower.

Disclose-Secret: This plug-in didn’t have the right type of functionality that our client required. However, it does what it is supposed to do. By installing this plug-in you will be able to set who will be able to view each post.

Page Restriction: We haven’t tested this one yet. Mainly due to the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a way to download the plug-in.

Post Levels: Only available for Word Press site below version 2.0.

Registered Only: Same story as the Page Restriction plug-in. I can’t make heads nor tails out of the developer’s site.

Subscribers Only: Currently not available for download. It seems that the developer has been updating it for over a year now. Too bad because it sounded pretty promising.

Ultimate Excluder: It didn’t seem to do anything. Developer’s comment did state that it may not work in Word Press versions above 2.1.

ViewLevel2: Only works for Word Press 1.5.

WP-Members: This plug-in works by using the “more” command in a post. Everything in the post after “more” will require the user to be logged in to view it. It’s actually a very nice plug-in. After clicking on ‘Read more’ the visitor is taken to a log-in screen and once logged in, to the rest of the post. If the visitor doesn’t have a log-in, they can register.

The search continues for the ideal plug-in.

A Little Something About Plug-ins

phidgt — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 19:11:14 +0000

Word Press is purposefully light and compact. In other words, it doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles associated with it when you first get started. The purpose of this is to keep it small, manageable and easy for everybody to use. The fun part of Word Press is the ability to install plug-ins to add features to your site. A plug-in is similar to installing a software program onto your computer. Instead of installing anything onto your computer, the plug-in is installed directly into your site. A list of plug-ins is available at the codex page at Word Press. This is not a complete list and more plug-ins can be found by searching Google. However, by leaving the codex page, you may encounter plug-ins that are not free and not supported by the Word Press community.

Here are a few tips on using plug-ins:

Read all of the documentation associated with the plug-in before you download and install it.
Make sure that the plug-in is compatible with the version of Word Press you are using. You can find that information by going to your Dashboard. At the bottom of the page you will see your version of Word Press.
Read any comments left by others to see if there are any problems being reported and if the developer has responded. A plug-in that is no longer being supported may be one to avoid.
Read the installation instructions. Most plug-ins are very easy to install and get working. There are some, however, that require a bit more work and knowledge on php or html code. Depending on your computer skills, you might need some help getting it to work.
Some plug-ins come with very little information. Sometimes you just have to go for it. Maybe it’ll work; maybe it won’t.
Don’t be afraid to test drive plug-ins. In some cases you may have to install 3 or 4 plug-ins to get the right functionality that you are looking for.

Plug-ins can get quite addictive. Don’t be surprised if you suddenly find yourself spending hours at your computer.

Getting Started

phidgt — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 21:22:47 +0000

I have been working on the web for approximately six years. During this time I have seen a gradual change on the Internet and it’s ease of use. Therefor, I decided that I wanted to start helping people manage their own web presence. I feel that I can show people how easy managing a web site really is. More important than the ease, however, is that it’s actually a lot fun. I look at the Internet as a whole new frontier for creative expression and I believe that everyone should have the opportunity to experience it.

As I started to talk to friends about my ideas they got as excited as I was. In fact, the response has been so positive that I haven’t been able to work on phidgt.com. (There are worse things that could happen.) In the meantime, if you need more information on what I’m about please don’t hesitate to call me (970-846-3417 ask for Tery) or send me an e-mail.