Tag Archives | WordPress

Using Transparent Images with WooThemes Canvas

By on March 8, 2012 in Quick Tips

I love WooThemes’ Canvas Theme. It’s so versitle and simple to use, which is why I decided to use it for Techinch’s redesign last year. Since then, I’ve tweaked it in a number of ways, mainly using just Canvas’ internal settings. No code, no mess, just simple settings and a quick Save and you’re done.

I was pretty content with the way everything was looking, except for images. Canvas puts images in a white box with a light grey border, which looks nice enough for standard photos but looks rather awful with full window screenshots that include shadows with transparency. But try as I might, there’s not an option to turn off (or tweak) the image background in Canvas.

WooThemes forums to the rescue. A quick search later, and I found the tiny line of code I needed to add. So, if you want to remove the Canvas image box background and border from your site, just add this line of code to Canvas’ custom CSS box in its settings:

.entry img, img.thumbnail { background:none; border: 0px;}

And that’s it. Full image transparency support in Canvas, so your site with a non-white background color or texture doesn’t look so odd anymore. And if you happen to still want a background and border behind some images, just add a caption, and you’ll still get the original styling. Works great so far for me.

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SupportPress: Customer Support, WordPress Style

By on July 8, 2011 in Techinch

If there’s one type of software that is hard to get perfect, it’s support software. There are dozens of popular customer support web apps, but it’s often hard to find one that fits exactly your needs. Some keep everything private, others keep all of your support public. Some work great with email, others work great for creating beautifully formatted documentation for your own app. But with hosted services, you’ve got to take what’s included, and often you’re not going to be perfectly satisfied with the feature set.

That’s why I’m excited that WooThemes has created a brand new support system out of WordPress: SupportPress. WordPress may have started out as a blogging system, but it can be used for far more than just that today. WooThemes is pushing the boundaries again by creating an advanced theme that uses custom post types and taxonomies to turn WordPress into a full features support center. You can manage support tickets, create beautifully formatted documentation, and update users on your site’s status, all from one simple WordPress install.

By default, support tickets in SupportPress are private, but you can turn them into public knowledge base articles anytime you want. Your customers will get customized emails when you update their support tickets, and the theme is designed to work great on any size browser, even a smartphone. And you can manage profiles, respond to tickets, send internal messages to other team members, and more, without ever opening the WordPress dashboard. It does so much, it’s easy to forget that you’re still using WordPress.

So, now with a free WordPress setup on your server and a $100 copy of SupportPress, you can have a fully customized support system for your whole team. No restrictions on the number of users or customers, no extra fees or even ongoing costs for updates. Want to customize the design, or change how something works? The whole theme is built on HTML5 and CSS3, so you can tweak it to your heart’s content.

I’ve been using it today on a test install at support.techinch.com, and have been really impressed with it. I’ll be writing up a full review of it on Web.AppStorm.net soon, but for now, feel free to check it out there and read more about it on WooThemes’ site. If you’ve been wanting a more customizable way to support your customers, or have wanted a cheaper alternative to the increasingly expensive support web apps, this might be just what you’ve been looking for. I’m personally very excited about the potential of app themes like this, and the new ways we can take self-hosted web apps farther than ever before!

Check out WooThemes new SupportPress app theme

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Artsy Editor: Turning WordPress into a clean writing environment

By on June 28, 2011 in Featured, WordPress

The more I write, the less I want in my writing apps. It seems crazy at first. Why in the world would you want less features?

Because sometimes, less is more. Less distraction means getting more done. Less features means more focus on the features that are most important. Less UI means more content.

That’s why I’ve fallen in love with focused writing apps, from OmmWriter to iA Writer to Simplenote, over the past few years. They take away the buttons, the settings, the features, and leave you with a space for your thoughts. They, they focus on the features that make a difference in your writing: a calming environment in OmmWriter, brilliant Markdown formatting in iA Writer, and powerful search and publishing in Simplenote.

Between these, I’ve got ways to write in an elegant manner on Windows, OS X, the iPad, and the web. But what about WordPress? WordPress has become increasingly cluttered over the years, and you can easily spend more time tweaking your blog than writing your posts. That’s why I often compose posts in another writing app, then bring them over to WordPress to add formatting and post them.

Not any more. For the past several weeks, I’ve been beta testing a new WordPress plugin that brings simplicity back to blogging: Artsy Editor.

Artsy Editor strips away the extra stuff in WordPress, giving you a focused writing environment right in your blog. Hit F11 to take your browser full-screen, and it’s almost as nice as iA Writer … except in WordPress in your browser. There’s a little bit of UI in Artsy Editor: a post button on the top right which also lets you see the HTML of a post, a settings button in the bottom left, an Upload button in the bottom right, and a close button in the top left. Start typing, though, and all of that disappears, leaving you with your content. Continue Reading →

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Win a Copy of “Digging into WordPress 3.1″ from Techinch and AppSumo

By on May 3, 2011 in Techinch

When you need to publish anything on the web, WordPress is just about the best solution for building your site. WordPress may have started out as just a standard blog publishing engine, but today, it’s powerful enough to let you create everything from complex real estate sites to an online eBook. Best of all, it’s still simple enough to let you make cute and easy to update Tumblr style blogs.

There’s only one problem: How are you going to figure out how to do all of this on your own? Sure, you could purchase a theme and some plugins, but if you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, you’ll have a much harder time customizing it to your needs. That’s where the excellent Digging into WordPress eBook comes in. This eBook takes you through everything you’ll need to know to understand the basics of building WordPress themes and plugins, and customizing the core software. It’ll even help you learn how to make your site more secure, and more that we covered in our review last year. The latest edition that was just released even covers the latest features of WordPress 3.1, including custom post formats and more. Continue Reading →

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Change Default Image Upload Sizes in WordPress

By on April 19, 2011 in Techinch

One of my biggest problems with WordPress is with uploading images. I try to keep all images a max of 640 px wide, but then link the images to the original size so you can click and see the full image with Fancybox. The only problem is, by default, WordPress sets large images to 1024 px width, then medium images are a tiny 300 px width. And if you go to change the image size in the default WordPress photo uploader, you have to choose a size percentage. Not an ideal situation, and it was frustrating enough that I’d started resizing images in Photoshop Elements before uploading them.

Continue Reading →

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VaultPress | Painless WordPress Backup

By on March 29, 2011 in AppStorm, Writing

My review of Automattic’s new VaultPress WordPress backup service is now published on Web.AppStorm. Short version: it’s the best backup service I’ve touched, period.

Techinch.com is now backed up with VaultPress, and it’s so much better than other WordPress backup solutions it’s not even funny. Now with Jetpack bringing all the other Automattic addons to WordPress, and Akismet keeping spam out of our comments (including the very odd comment spam we get daily advertising Bing and the Zune…), we’re all set!

Read the rest of my VaultPress review

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Send Tweets Directly From Your WordPress Site

By on March 26, 2011 in Quick Tips

BraveNewCode is one of our favorite WordPress developers, and their WPtouch 2 Pro plugin it what powers the awesome mobile and iPad versions of Techinch. One of their other, less well-known plugins is the equally awesome WordTwit. This simple plugin lets you automatically publish your new posts on Twitter without setting up a third-party service. I’ve featured it before in an article about Moving Your Tumblr Blog to WordPress, since Tumblr automatically tweets new posts by default and WordTwit gives you that same feature.

WordTwit just got a bit more awesome today with the release of the new WordTwit 2.6. This new version lets you configure your site as a custom Twitter application! This means, when you publish a new post, it’ll be tweeted immediately, listing your site as the app it was tweeted from. This is great for branding, and plus, for anyone who loves to tweak everything they touch, it’s a fun way to customize your site’s tweets.

 

And.... it works!

To enable this, you’ll need to register your site as a new Twitter application at http://dev.twitter.com/apps. Then, update WordTwit on your site, and enter your OAuth unique codes from Twitter. Finally, activate it with your account, and your site will now automatically tweet your new posts and let the world know they were sent from your site!

 

 

Can Techinch access my personal Twitter account? Sure!

For more info about the new features in WordTwit 2.6 and setting up the Twitter custom app feature, check out BraveNewCode’s blog post about it from today. There’s a new pro version of WordTwit that BraveNewCode will be releasing in the near future, so it’s especially neat they went to the trouble to add the custom app feature to their free plugin. Thanks, BraveNewCode!

 

 

 

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WordPress for iPad, Much Improved

By on March 17, 2011 in Quick Tips

If you’re serious about blogging, you’ll likely end up writing posts from almost anywhere. I’ve personally published posts from hospital waiting rooms, a home improvement store, numerous coffee shops and restaurants, and from the back of the car while traveling down deserted roads in the middle of nowhere (thanks to ubtiquous EDGE). Today, WordPress for iOS is a big part of that as I now use my iPad almost as much as my computer. The WordPress iPad app has traditionally been fairly frustrating to use, but today the WordPress for iOS team released the new 2.7 version of the app that fixes many of the problems and makes it much nicer to use, especially on iPad.

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The new WordPress for iOS uses Core Data to store your post info, and seems to be much more stable. Then, the post editor is fully revamped on iPad as you can see in the shot above. Now, when you start a new post, an editor pane will open above the app, much like the Mail app on iPad. Add categories and more with native selector panes, and even upload images right from the editor without switching back and forth between different screens. New pictures are automatically added to the end of your post without any extra taps, either. For this post, I took screenshots, rotated and resized them with OneEdit, then uploaded them directly with the new WordPress for iPad.

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Ready to schedule your post? You can still schedule your post or upload it as a draft. This has been changed slightly in the latest version, and now you’ll need to tap the gear button on the bottom of the editor to change the publish settings. This isn’s a problem though, as now it’s much easier to schedule posts as you want with the native menus. Plus, uploading draft posts still works great!

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As before, you can edit existing posts and pages from WordPress for iPad, as well as manage comments on all of your sites. This works the same as before, but everything feels much faster and more stable in the new version. WordPress for iOS is still not perfect; I’d love to see either a WYSIWYG editor or an extended code editing keyboard, as right now, adding links or HTML formatting to posts is very frustrating. Also, I’d love to see support for the new WordPress post formats, as well as direct integration with WordPress.com Stats, VaultPress, and more. But, the new changes are encouraging, and they show that the Automattic team isn’t wasting time in trying to get their apps improved. The changes in this version set the stage for more features in future versions, and it finally works good enough that I’ll definitely be using it more. If you’re using WordPress on your iOS device, make sure to update or download WordPress for iOS today!

Download WordPress for iOS (free, universal app)

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Tumblr2WP: Move Your Tumblr Blogs to WordPress the Easy Way

By on February 25, 2011 in Featured, Techinch

Would you like to move your Tumblr blog to WordPress, but think it’d be to hard to get everything moved over? Not any more! We ran an article a couple months ago about How to Move Your Tumblr Blog to WordPress, but it was still rather complicated. You had to export your site, import it into WordPress, then manually change each of your posts to the new WooTumblog post formats to keep everything working the same as before. If your Tumblr blog had many posts, it could be a daunting task!

Thanks to WooThemes, it’s now incredibly simple to move your Tumblr blog to WordPress. They’ve recently created the Tumblr2WordPress exporter that will export your entire Tumblr site into format that will work great with any Tumblog WooTheme such as Canvas, Crisp, or the new Auld theme. It’ll also work great with any theme customized with the WooTumblog plugin. Here’s what you’ll need to do.

Get Your WordPress Site Ready

First, you’ll need a website with WordPress and a WooTumblog compatible theme setup to import your site. Check out our details on the original post for more info. If you’ve already had the site setup for some time, you’ll need to upgrade your WooTheme to work with the new post formats. Check this support article from WooThemes for more info on upgrading your theme. Once it’s upgraded, you’ll be able to use the new WordPress 3.1 Post Formats for your Tumblog.

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Export Your Tumblr Site With Tumblr2WP

Now, head over to the new Tumblr2WordPress site to get your Tumblr blog exported. Enter your Tumblr blog address; even if you’ve added a custom domain, make sure you use the original yourblog.tumblr.com address. Then, choose your settings; the defaults usually should be fine. Click Export when you’re finished, and save your export file to your computer.

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Finally, go back to your WordPress blog and import your posts as your would from any other blog. After a few moments, your Tumblr posts should all be in your WordPress blog, with the correct post formats and all of your content, just as your Tumblr blog was before.

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That’s a ton easier than the other method! Thanks to WooThemes, you can now move your Tumblr blog to WordPress much easier than before. So why wait? Move over today and take advantage of all of WordPress’ advantages without losing any of your content you’ve added to Tumblr!

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Add Shortcodes to Your Posts with WooThemes the Easy Way

By on February 3, 2011 in Techinch

Would you like to add more features to your blog posts without having to hand code them in HTML? All WordPress themes from WooThemes include shortcodes to make it easier for you to add quotes, buttons, download links and more to your blog posts. The only problem is, you’ll still have to remember all of the codes to add the shortcode features to your posts.

That’s all now changed as WooThemes has now incorporated a great visual shortcode generator into their theme framework. This was first created as a third party WordPress plugin by developer Rico Gundermann, but now it’s been baked into the latest WooFramework. All you’ll have to do is update your theme and you’ll be ready to start adding features from shortcodes in two clicks. Here’s how to do it.

Add Shortcodes the Easy Way

First, make sure your site is running a WooTheme with the latest version of the WooFramework. You can check this from the Update Framework button under your theme settings in your WordPress dashboard. If it’s out of date, click Update and seconds later, you’ll have the latest features.

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Now, head over to your post editor to start writing a new post. You’ll notice a new Woo button on the visual editor toolbar. This opens a menu with options for all the different shortcodes you can use to add buttons, icons, multiple columns in your text, quotes, social media buttons, and more. Select the one you want to get started.

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A box will now open with the options for that shortcode. Enter any text that will be included, choose your styles, and preview the whole thing on the right. Click Insert when you’re finished, and you’ll be able to see the actually shortcode used along with any modifications. Even if you prefer to simply enter raw code, this is a great way to discover your theme’s shortcode features.

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You’ll likely find features you didn’t know your theme had. Below is a preview of the WooThemes tabbed box with a quote inside, all made with shortcodes on my secondary, WooThemes powered site http://maybring.com/.

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Want to try out the Shortcode Generator without having a WooTheme installed on your site? Just head over to the WooThemes Playground where you can try out all of the WooThemes features without having to purchase and install a new theme on your site. Here’s more info about the WooThemes Playground: http://techinch.com/2010/10/08/testdrive-woothemes-for-free/

Conclusion

Shortcodes aren’t unique to WooThemes; in fact, most professional WordPress themes include them nowadays. ElegantThemes have actually included shortcode buttons in the post editor for a while now. The only problem is, they end up making the editor too wide for small screens, and there’s no easy way to remove the buttons from the editor. WooTheme’s integration just works better than any other I’ve tried previously, and having everything in a menu makes it very easy to use. Plus, since the original plugin is opensource, hopefully other developers can use it to add great shortcode integration for their themes as well!

Does your favorite WordPress theme include shortcodes, and do you find yourself using them often?

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