Hello! Woocommerce is a great easy-to-implement and versatile e-commerce platform. With the robust development community, expanding the core functionality can be relatively straight forward with the availability of a wide assortment of 3rd party plugins for Woocommerce. One of the things that we felt was missing, but a simple requirement, was the ability to manipulate the payment methods available based on the zip or postal code of the customer. This means that under certain conditions, the end-user will have a catered list of payment methods available to them. The system would need to have the ability to “Remember” the user, and subsequently the available payment methods, even if they came back later to purchase with a different postal or zip code. Why is this necessary? There could be many different justifications for this type of behavior with Woocommerce. If you are offering products and services to customers on a national […]
Hello! We love integrating Jenkins into development workflow. Typically Jenkins would be used for custom development projects to streamline the development “push” process in order to seamlessly integrate code changes from a testing / staging environment over to the live environment. For frameworks like Laravel or Django, this works very nicely. Until recently, we haven’t considered integrating Jenkins into our development workflow for WordPress projects simply because it seemed like overkill. It wasn’t until a few larger WordPress projects came along that required a standalone staging site to push changes that we considered actually integrating the push process with Jenkins into the WordPress administrative interface. What this means is that our clients wanted a staging environment to make content and other front facing changes, approve them internally and then initiate a content push from the staging site to the production / live site. From a development perspective we would be […]
Hello! One of the nice things about Woocommerce is that it is very easily customized. Actions can be removed and re-added in order to adjust the default behavior. Additionally you can override many of the default templates that come with Woocommerce and its many extensions to fine tune and adjust the way you want your e-commerce to behave. Whether you are selling t-shirts or auto parts, sometimes its nice to have a clean visual representation of the statistics of each of your products. This will allow the customer to easily attain the pertinent information that they may be looking for, perhaps even assisting in leading them into an online sale. One of the best javascript libraries out there for “charting” is Chart.js. It is very simple yet extremely flexible for plotting and drawing visual representations of data. Things like chart colors, borders and a responsive layout are all things that […]
Hello! When designing and implementing Gravity forms there may be occasions where you would want to auto populate multiple fields based on a preceding field selection. This was the case in our scenario where we wanted to populate the selection of a drop-down box based on a Google Map location field within Gravity Forms on WordPress. What we wanted was for the person to enter their location in a Google Map location field (within gravity forms) and based on that selection, read the respective City within that location and based on that selection, populate a drop-down box. Gravity forms already possesses the ability to implement conditional logic, however it largely is designed for the purpose of revealing/hiding/activating input elements based on preceding choices. We need to actually inject an input selection I’ll try to walk through the process to implementing this type of logic specifically with Gravity Forms. Get the […]
Hello! While the scenario may not necessarily be common in which you would want to encrypt your PHP code and execute it, it is something that I would consider an interesting discussion nonetheless. I fully support free and open source software, however if you are developing an application that manages or monitors systems or services or an application that needs to reside in a “hostile” environment, it might be pertinent to consider encrypting the code before executing it. This protects your code from even being read (and ultimately executed) unless the proper key is passed in order to decrypt it. In the following example & breakdown, we will be (separately) using both the Mcrypt and OpenSSL to encrypt a block of code with a specified key. We will then use that same key to decrypt the encrypted code in order to run it. The reason why I am giving both […]
Hello! If you read our last post on us releasing a new WordPress Plugin for Portfolio Galleries, you would have seen us touch a bit on creating custom fields / meta boxes for your post type. One of the bigger challenges when creating the Portfolio Grid plugin was implementing the administrative jQuery to manipulate the WordPress media system in such a way to create custom galleries. The galleries were needed for the plugin. When you view a single portfolio item, you will be brought to a single post page template that displays a modal gallery of additional portfolio images. I’ll be walking you through how we manipulated the custom gallery field with jQuery. I will also show the final product which is the query to produce the gallery images as thumbnails with a modal window to expand the images if they are clicked. Create a meta box for posts in […]
Hello! We just released a WordPress plugin, Shift8 Portfolio, to organize your portfolio in a grid using bootstrap scaffolding! This is a very straightforward plugin that we decided to write for our own portfolio page. After using it ourselves it was decided that we needed to share it with the world 🙂 There are many many portfolio type plugins that already exist but the desire was to write something that was very simple and could be expanded later on to accommodate any changes in the custom content that needed to be created such as different sorting categories as well as different shortcode options that might be needed. There are a few interesting things that had to happen when writing this plugin that might be helpful to share for anyone who is interested. How to create a custom post type in WordPress Instead of using the built-in WordPress blog post type, […]
Hello! We are excited to announce that we have created a brand new website for ourselves! Sometimes its difficult to focus on ourselves when we are so often focused on our clients. With new and exciting projects on the horizon, we thought we would take the opportunity to chip away and eventually launch a new website for ourselves. While previous site was on the Drupal CMS, we decided it would be nice to migrate back to our old friend, WordPress. Though our site may seem kind of simple, there’s a few interesting things that we did that we wanted to share. Mobile Detection with jQuery Why does anyone ever need to detect for mobile devices anymore? Don’t we just use media queries? Well, yes that is the best practice answer. But throw in multiple layers of caching like Memcache, Page caching, Object caching and Varnish caching and you will soon […]
Hello! We have created yet another WordPress plugin! We are highly motivated to roll out any and all WordPress custom development as a neatly packaged plugin for the general public to use. We have many more ideas and many more plugins in the works. Check out the plugin hereThis latest plugin, recently approved by the WordPress plugin auditing community, pulls your Facebook page’s feed and injects it into your site anywhere (by use of a simple shortcode). As with other similar Facebook plugins, this plugin requires you to generate a simple Facebook app with API key/secrets in order to connect and pull the data. The plugin utilizes the PHP Facebook SDK in order to connect and pull the data. I’ll walk you through the different parts of the plugin’s code, however if you’re interested click the SDK link to read more about how the Facebook SDK works. Load Facebook’s SDK […]
Hello! We have recently created & submitted our first official WordPress plugin : Shift8 Modal. This is a relatively straightforward plugin that integrates the animatedModal jQuery library into WordPress as an easy-to-use shortcode. Submitting our plugin to the WordPress plugin directyl took roughly 7 days to complete. WordPress has pretty straightforward (though sometimes changing) development policies, standards and best practices to follow. Once approved, a WordPress team member provides SVN access to submit / commit your code to the plugin directory. This plugin is pretty simple in terms of what it does, but I’ll break down what it does. Load animatedModal.js and Animate.css The animatedModal library makes use of the (popular) Animate.css library as well. So we’ll need to load both as an enqueue within the plugin : // Load Animated Modal function shift8_modal_scripts() { wp_enqueue_script( ‘animate-js’, plugin_dir_url( __FILE__ ) . ‘js/animatedModal.min.js’, array(), true ); wp_enqueue_style( ‘animate’, plugin_dir_url( __FILE__ ) […]
