Create an Image Gallery in WordPress

1 Sep
2011

If you don’t want to use wordpress’ default image gallery (and I’m assuming…if you’ve spent any time at all with it that you don’t), I would recommend using the NextGen Library plugin.

Here’s how to install and get up and running:

Step 1: Download the NextGen Library
Click here to download the plugin from wordpress. Put in “/wp-content/plugins”. Activate the plugin in the plugins section.

Step 2: Create a new gallery
At the bottom of your left sidebar in the dashboard you’ll see a “Gallery” tab. Click that to add a new gallery. From here you can upload single or multiple pictures.

Step 3: Insert into blog post
By default, many blog posts won’t show the images on the home page, because your blogs are only showing the excerpt. So either remain happy with that and find another way to let people know there are images in your blog, or change the code so the front page shows the full body text of your blogs.

Here are three of many options when it comes to putting a gallery in your blog post. You’ll see a new icon on the far right. That’s how you insert an image gallery into the blog post. But here’s the basic code:

slideshow: [slideshow id=1]
image browser: [imagebrowser id=1]
image list: [nggallery id=1]

That’s it! Pretty straightforward. As usual, let me know if you have problems.

Recurring Calendar setup in Drupal 7

1 Sep
2011

What you’ll need:

Drupal 7.x
Ctools
Views
Date (includes date_api & date_views)

  1. Download the three modules (Ctools, Views, & Date). Install the modules and activate. Note: the Date module requires that you set the timezone and first day of the week settings. If you haven’t, it should alert you of that when you install the modules.
  2. Once you install these modules, you will see nothing different right away. No new content types are created…nothing useful that you can see. However, click on Structure > Views, and you’ll see what the Calendar module has done. You can see it has created a “Calendar” view. This calendar view includes a block, a feed, and a page. We’ll come back to this later.
  3. Next go to Structure > Date Tools. Here is where you will create your calendar item. It will create a bunch of views, the correct content type, etc. Follow the date wizard to setup your calendar.

Some recommended settings and things to remember.

  • In the “Date Field” section, make sure and select the correct option for “show repeating date options”. Coming back and changing this later only creates problems. Decide now whether or not you want repeating dates.
  • In “Advanced Options”, confirm the way you want this calendar to handle the timezone. If you want no timezone conversion (my suggestion for most projects), then select that option.
  • You’ll want to select “yes” for “create a calendar for this date field”.
  • And, you’re ready to go! If you go to “Add Content” you’ll see your brand new “Date” content type. The calendar tool is fairly basic in this module, but you’ll see it has quite amazing recurrence features, which is nice.

 

Sharepoint Scrolling broken in IE9

31 Aug
2011

As far as I can tell, the only way to re-enable scrolling in IE9 is to add your site to your list of trusted sites. I’m sure there’s an actual compatibility issue to fix somewhere, but this seems to do the trick. Anyone have any other suggestions?

HTML 5 + Sharepoint

29 Aug
2011

I am going to begin the process of converting a master page to html5 specifications. I’ll focus mainly on the document outline aspect. No new features of html5 yet. No CSS3 yet. Just basics basics basics.

Managing a multiple blog site in Sharepoint 2010

22 Aug
2011

We just deployed over 50 blogs in one shot for an entire elementary school. The scope? Each teacher must be the owner of their own blog, while letting any other teacher be a contributing author. We must leave the option open for kids to be contributing authors to the blogs as well. The owner of the blog must also be the owner of the comments list, and each comment must be moderated. And for the final trick, everything must have the same master page, and the principal must have ownership rights over every blog.

Here’s what I did:

  1. Create a publishing site (for the landing page).
  2. Apply a Master Page to that site (see my blog on creating master pages for blog sites)
  3. Create a sub blog site
  4. Customize that site to your heart’s content
  5. Save that blog site as a template
  6. Distribute that template over and over and over and over :)
  7. Set permissions
    • First, break permissions on the individual blog
    • Give ownership rights to the owner of the blog
    • Second, in the comments list (still inheriting at this point), break the permissions
    • Give “member” rights to whoever is allowed to leave comments. Here I had to customize it so that the parents had rights to add, edit, and delete items on this specific list.
  8. Change list settings
    • List versioning settings: require content approval
    • List advanced settings: allow users to create and edit anything “created by the user”, not just anything
  9. Repeat steps 7 and 8 for every blog.

This wasn’t a particularly in-depth tutorial, but it’s just to let you know the basic workflow of setting up dozens of blogs at once. If you want to know more, let me know.

Goals for the Year

21 Aug
2011

One of our goals for the year with the current Sharepoint project I’m working on is to get a large amount of people contributing to the site. This is going to involve a lot of permissions, design, branding, and training issues. We’ll see how it goes…and if anyone out there has worked on something like this, pipe in with advice and suggestions.

crap

20 Aug
2011

Don’t update your theme if you’re working off the master. Make a child theme. Hence…my website sucks now. dangit. Well…it shall remain themeless unless I find a backup somewhere. Hmmmm.