WordPress Tutorial for Beginners

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By: Chad Bell
Take a look at Zen Den’s WordPress Video Blog Tutorial for Beginners!

Despite its powerful features, WordPress is designed with ease of use in mind. Once your site is running, you simply log in and manage your content from the administration panel. Find out how you can do this easily by watching our WordPress expert create blog posts, edit page content, upload photos, and much more.

About WordPress:
More and more websites these days are being designed entirely in WordPress. WordPress is a free platform that makes it easy for anyone to create and update content for their site without any technical knowledge. Originally intended to be used primarily for blogging, it has since evolved to be capable of handling fairly advanced sites.

Baking with the 960-Grid

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By: Chad Bell
When a designer starts a project from scratch, a good amount of time is usually spent on setting margins, text spacing (padding), positioning (floats), and defining sections of content (div). The 960-Grid is a favorite method of Zen Den designers to improve the structure and design of web layouts.

How exactly does this work? Think of it as baking cookies from scratch. You still have to use pre-made flour as one of your ingredients – the 960-Grid is the flour in your concoction.

Recipe for 960-Grid

Ingredients:

  1. Lightweight – The 960 Grid is a lightweight CSS framework for constructing your web content. In other words, it’s adaptable, browser-friendly, and easy to use!
  1. Flexible – If nothing else, its flexibility has made the 960 Grid the most popular system used on many Web2 sites and design templates.
  1. Efficient – It helps the designer to quickly prototype the layout in any number of columns (e.g. 9 x 3, 3 x 3 x 3, 4 x 4 x 4 x 4, 10 x 2 col, etc.)

Directions:

The grid is comprised of a fixed number of columns within a fixed 960 pixel wide layout. There are various column options to choose from. The most popular are the 12 column and 16 column variants.

The 12-column layout consists of 12 column grids, 60 pixels wide with a 10-pixel gutter on each side.

The 16-column layout consists of 16 column grids, 40 pixels wide with 10 pixel gutters on each side.

Remember, not all websites are created equally. For example, the 16-column layout is best used for websites with the more than normal amount of content sections (divs).

Result:

It saves time, money, and frustration.

By reducing the amount of CSS and markup that must be duplicated each time a new project begins, the 960-Grid provides the designer an advantageous starting point.

There are also many features that the 960-Grid brings to the table including source ordering which provides SEO benefits, focused functionality, solid cross-browser and multi-platform support. Subtle, but significant, each function reduces the amount of project hours necessary – which can become very costly.

In addition, the 960-Grid provides built-in support for non-compliant browsers allowing for shorter test phases. This means less time spent on fixing bugs and more time spent on designing.

The overall outcome of using this wonderful system is a well-balanced and sophisticated design.

At the end of the day, the 960-Grid makes for a great base when creating visually delectable designs from scratch. If you want to hear more about this this system or any other one of our ingredients, feel free to leave us a comment and the designers at Zen Den would be happy to fill you in!

The Power of WordPress – More Than Just Blogging

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By: Chad Bell
More and more websites these days are being designed entirely in WordPress. WordPress is a free platform that makes it easy for anyone to create and update content for their site without any technical knowledge. Originally intended to be used primarily for blogging, it has since evolved to be capable of handling fairly advanced sites.

Despite its powerful features, WordPress is designed with ease of use in mind. Once your site is running, you simply log in and manage your content from the administration panel. There you can create blog posts, edit the content of pages, upload photos, and much more. This is a significant change from the way websites were maintained in the past. Previously, sites developed using platforms such as Flash or Dreamweaver required even the smallest change to be performed by the web designer, which could significantly add to the cost of running a site.

 

What really makes WordPress shine is its extensibility. Plug-ins can be used to add additional functionality to the core WordPress functions. Examples include social media integration, enhanced photo management and presentation, calendar applications, online reservations, and eCommerce. Built from the ground up, WordPress is great for SEO and provides plug-ins to get you noticed by Google.

Though its ease of use for both developers and users have long made it a popular choice for websites, WordPress was not previously considered as full featured as other platforms such as Joomla and Drupal. However, with the recently released Version 3.0, WordPress reaches into territory once reserved for more advanced platforms. Major new features such as customizable menus and custom post options give WordPress the ability to function as complete Content Management System (CMS). An example of a CMS in action would be a real estate website. A realtor could simply fill in a customized form with fields for city, neighborhood, square footage, then upload photos, organize and edit listings, and remove sold units.

Although a default WordPress installation is usable, to make a site really stand out often requires a customized job. From layout to coding, web developers function to create professional designs to match the goals of your site. And perhaps more importantly, to bridge the gap between the originality of customized features and their combined ease of use.

Content Management Platforms

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In college, I took a class called Internet Business Applications. In this class, I gained experience with using open source content management systems (CMS). Drupal, an open software, leverages the contributions from thousands of brilliant coders around the world. Drupal gave me the basic framework for which I was able to create and customize FindHype.com (a social bookmarking site similar to Digg and Reddit)s. Since then, I have created several other websites using various open source platforms such as Joomla and WordPress. For anyone who wants to make their own web 2.0 website but doesn’t have a lot of technical experience, my suggestions of open source platforms are:

 

Drupal – very robust and customizable, check out Drupal.org for more

WordPress – the best for bloggers

Joomla – plenty of great templates and plug-ins

phpBB – used by many popular forums

A full list of popular CMS platforms can be found here.

Zen and the Beauty of WordPress

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By: Chad Bell
One of the most common requests I get from customers is the ability to add/edit/delete the content of their website without knowledge of HTML. Most hosting accounts have an HTML editor, but fewer have a text editor that allows users to add/edit/delete written content on their site, and if they do, the ability to add images and styling to the content does not exist. For example, Godaddy has a text editor within the control panel, so if you are feeling adventurous you can log in to your account, navigate through the maze of Godaddy’s website, access the control panel, locate the html file you want to edit, open it in the text editor, and finally make changes to the text. A rather simple process if you are a web developer or just Internet savvy, but what if you would rather stick pins in your eyes than have anything to do with the tech side of the web? Well, WordPress is the answer to all your problems. In case you are not familiar with the extremely popular blogging platform the WordPress.org website accurately describes it as a “powerful personal publishing platform.” I would alter this definition slightly to include “a powerful and easy web publishing platform.”

So, back to the common request that I receive from clients, well, my common reply is WordPress because building a website using with this platform gives clients the power and freedom to personally manage their web content after the website goes live. If a client has an existing site we simply copy the existing design into WordPress, thus saving the time and money of designing a new site.

You can see that the Admin section of WordPress looks and functions just like a text editor. Simply choose the page you want to edit, Home page for example, and edit the text. You can change font type, size, color, and add images too. You can even add pages to your site with a few clicks of the mouse. All of this without the need for a web designer or any knowledge of HTML/CSS. So, if you want to take more control of your website it might be time to try the content management powers of WordPress.

Zen Cart – How to Install Credit Card Logos

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By: Chad Bell
Add-On: Credit Cards Accepted Sidebox
Designed for: Zen Cart v1.2.1d
Created by: Carter Harris
Upgraded to Zen Cart 1.3 by kuroi
Modified with Google Checkout and Paypal CC_Logos by WebSkipper
credit card images
Example: http://www.American-RC.com

Add-On Description
==================
This Add-On provides a sidebox with credit card icons to indicate the credit
cards that are accepted by your store.

The add-on is delivered with the following icons:

Visa
MasterCard
American Express
Discover
PayPal
Bank (echeck)
Google Checkout
Extras included

Installation
============

Rename the folowing directories to reflect your template directory’s name
includes/languages/english/extra_definitions/YOUR_TEMPLATE/
includes/modules/sideboxes/YOUR_TEMPLATE
inlcudes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/sideboxes

The files in this add-on will then be in the proper directories to be dragged
dropped to your server if you are using a good FTP client (such as Fetch.com).

If you want to remove one or more of the credit card icons, edit
includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/sideboxes/tpl_cc_accept.php
and comment-out or delete the ones you don’t want. Edit the same file
to add new icons. Just follow the pattern of entries already there.

Login to Admin > Tools > Layout Boxes Controller to activate the sidebox.

Add the following line to your stylesheet and tweak as needed
#ccacceptContent {text-align:center; padding:10px 20px; line-height:1.5em;}
IDs and a class for the card icons are also available for fine tuning the look
of this box

____________________________________________________________________________

Zen Cart Open Source E-commerce – Admin Profiles

Copyright (c) 2006 kuroi Ltd http://www.kuroi.co.uk
Portions Copyright (c) 2005 Carter Harris

This contribution is subject to version 2.0 of the GPL license,
that is bundled with this package in the file LICENSE, and is
available through the world-wide-web at the following url:
http://www.zen-cart.com/license/2_0.txt.
If you did not receive a copy of the Zen Cart license and are unable
to obtain it through the world-wide-web, please send a note to
license@zen-cart.com so we can mail you a copy immediately.

These files submitted for public distribution to Zen Cart

Enjoy!
_____________________________________________________________________________

How to Comment Out a php Line

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By: Chad Bell

Using # or //

<?

echo “John Smith”;

# This is a comment line

// This is also a comment line
?>

Displaying Multiple Posts on WordPress Home Page

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By: Chad Bell
1. Find the file home.php
/blog/wp-content/themes/tma/home.php

2. Open file in HTML text editor.

3. Find line

**** < ?php $the_query = new WP_Query(‘cat=-‘ .$catid. ‘&showposts=1&orderby=post_date&order=desc’); ****

and change ***&showposts=1*** to show more posts.

4. Save and refresh browser window.