Egg Web Design

Wordpres sidebar image not showing up in ie problem – solved!

admin — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:01:32 +0000

Today I had a strange issue with an image in my Wordpress sidebar not showing up in Internet Explorer 7 but did show up in Safari and Firefox. Obviously it wasn’t showing up in ie 6 (spit!) either and this drove me nuts trying to figure out. At first I thought it was the path to the image in my css so I tried various direct and indirect url paths to the image. Nothing worked. Eventually I had a Eureka moment and decided to open up the offending image in Photoshop. Turned out the image was cmyk. CMYK images don’t appear in Internet Explorer but do in Safari and Firefox, hence my issue. Simply changing the image to RGB solved my problem.

Stop Google map disappearing in Wordpress post

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:16:34 +0000

When embedding Google Maps in your Wordpress post or page, you may have noticed the map disappears when you flick between Visual Mode & HTML mode in your editor. This is caused by the visual editor removing the iframe’s that surround the embedded map. This caused me much frustration until I came across a solution here. To solve it, simply add the following code to your functions.php file.

function add_iframe($initArray) {

$initArray['extended_valid_elements'] = "iframe[id|class|title|style|align|frameborder|height|longdesc|marginheight|marginwidth|name|scrolling|src|width]";

return $initArray;

}

add_filter('tiny_mce_before_init', 'add_iframe');

Remove auto image link and auto thumbnails in Wordpress posts

admin — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 19:54:08 +0000

When uploading images in Wordpress using the upload/insert option in the tinymce editor, Wordpress will automatically add a link to the image that when clicked will take you too a new window displaying the full image. Of course this can link can be removed before inserting the image into your post but having to do this every time you post an image on your site can be irritating to some people.

There is a simple way to get rid of this link however as well as the auto thumbnails that Wordpress creates when you upload and post a picture.

Simply go to Settings – Media and clear all the values and unclick all the boxes in there. Hit save and problem solved!

Different header image on each page in Wordpress

admin — Fri, 14 May 2010 19:18:22 +0000

I came across this lovely plugin recently which gives you the option to display different header images or even different flash animated banners on every page or post in your Wordpress website (or blog). You can add links to the images also as well as random images displayed at each login. Quite cool and handy plugin. Anywhere enough chit chat, here is the plugin.

Different page layouts in Wordpress

admin — Mon, 10 May 2010 20:49:37 +0000

Want to have a different header on each page? Different sidebar layout & widgets? Perhaps have wildly different layouts on every page? There is a cool method of acomplishing all these things and much more that brings Wordpress closer to a full fledged content management system. They are called Wordpress page templates.

Wordpress page templates allow you to create your own page layouts and override the default page.php file. You can even create a different header.php file and ‘call it’ in the new page template to achieve various things like different header images or even a seperate css file to create a completely different design for that page, if for some reason you wanted to do that.

How to create a page template in Wordpress

Open up your default page template in “wp-content/themes/your-theme/page.php”.
At the very top of the page paste in the following code:

Change “Your Template Name” to whatever you want to call your template, for example “home-template”
Now save the file into your “wp-content/themes/your-theme/” folder calling it for example home-template.php.

You can now edit this template any way you wish. For example add or remove elements like the sidebar or change the name of your content div to resize that. You can do just about anything really with the layout!

To apply the template to your page could not be easier. Simply edit your page and and on the right hand side of the edit page you will see a template dropdown. Select your template here and hit update. Your new layout will effect only that page or any other pages you select this template for. You can create as many page templates as you like.

Tinymce editor blank pop screen problem

admin — Sun, 09 May 2010 18:11:46 +0000

As you can see from my portfolio section I am designing and developing the brand new website for The Wallis Arms Hotel in Millstreet, Cork. Im using the Modx content management system for this website which uses the pretty standard Tinymce editor in the backend to allow clients to edit the content on their website.

This was working perfectly for me up until recently when I noticed an annoying problem. When I clicked on the html edit button or the image upload button I got a blank popup screen instead of the usual edit screen or image upload screen (see below).

Anyway, after much frustrating Google searching I came across a solution. The problem occurred because I had changed my site url from wallisarms.com to www.wallisarms.com (added the www) but my .htaccess file still read the site as wallisarms.com. Simply changing this to the latter (with the www) solved my problem.

If after you change the htaccess file the problem remains, try manually typing in the www before your site url and you log in again. Hope that helps someone!

Different Wordpress Sidebar Widget on each web page/post

admin — Sun, 09 May 2010 18:09:50 +0000

When designing websites in Wordpress its nice to have complete freedom with the website design. This was a problem in the past for me but not any more due to the discovery of some superb plugins and extending my knowledge of hacking into Wordpress code to perform whatever my client required for their website that wasn’t achievable ‘out of the box’.

One such problem I had was changing the sidebar on each page. So lets say I wanted a text widget on the ‘about us’ page sidebar but didnt want it to appear on any other page. I would need to hack into wordpress by creating another sidebar & calling it for that particular page.

That was until I discovered the widget logic plugin, a fantastic plugin that allows you to add different sidebar widgets on every page or remove them from certain pages. Enjoy!

The annoying Photoshop disappearing brush tool cursor

admin — Sat, 01 May 2010 08:59:20 +0000

I use Photoshop alot for website design obviously amongst other stuff like my photography and its a very cool and powerful tool. You learn something new with it every week. However one thing that had me flummoxed for weeks a couple of years ago was every now and then I would select the brush tool, select my desired brush size but somehow instead of the usual big or small circle to represent the size of my selected brush I would see a very annoying little teeny weeny crosshair!

Much frustration followed with me trying to paint in large areas of the canvas or get any detailed editing done. Oddly I never bothered to Google the problem until I had just about pulled every hair from my head. As with most things, the answer is frustratingly simple – my Caps Lock was on. Yes, that was it. I smiled to myself at how simple it was, then frowned at my stupidity at not figuring it out. Ah well, like I said, you learn something new in Photoshop every week.

Kerry District League website launch

admin — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 18:15:32 +0000

Last Friday I was honored to attend the launch of my latest website for the Kerry District League, the official soccer league for Kerry. As a Kerryman myself it was a privilege to design this website and I must say it was a pleasure to work with Murt and Sean throughout the project.

Things went smoothly from start to finish and the website was launched right on time for the big night. Photographers from the Kerryman, Kerry’s Eye and The Kingdom were there and we got a nice writeup about the launch also. Fair play to all the Kerry League for thinking ahead and going online. Its a great resource for fans to get the latest news, results and fixtures for the various leagues and cups in Kerry.