I haven't written as many WordPress tutorials as usual lately, as I have been so busy building websites and blogs, so I thought I would take the time out to share a few WordPress codes I have developed recently for attachment page templates and specifically the image attachment page template. The attachment page template is the page that displays a single image when the images link URL is set to 'Post URL'. You can set the image's link URL when inserting a single image into a post, and also when using the gallery shortcode.

The codes in this article are mostly applicable to images inserted using the gallery shortcode as they are most useful for posts or pages that have multiple image attachments. Read more about using image and file attachments.

These template codes can be added to your WordPress theme using the attachment.php and image.php files. If these template files do not exist in your theme you can create them, or WordPress will default to using single.php or index.php to show attachments by default. (See more about template hierarchy).

If you don't want to create a seperate image.php or attachment.php template you can always edit the index.php or single.php files and wrap the attachment specific codes in the is_attachment clause like so:

if(is_attachment()){
//attachment page specific code goes here
}

These php functions are loosely based on code I found in this article: Adding text links to WordPress Gallery by Michael Fields. In this article he provides code examples of how to show previous and next thumbnail links in a WP attachment page. I also made use of this previous-next keys in array function which is infinitely useful!

My first set of functions will return text links for previous image, next image and back to gallery. The functions themselves will need to be added to your theme's functions.php file before calling them in your image.php or attachment.php files. So here we go:
Read on…

I have recently been working on a highly versatile premium theme for WordPress which is due for release soon. As part of the project I wanted to test how the theme (and WordPress itself) could work with sites of various different genres. My intention was that the theme would be configurable enough via it's Options Menu that it could easily be styled to suit corporate sites such as recruitment, blue chip company, technology site  & product portfolio, media sites such as magazine, news, image & video gallery and also youth oriented sites such as music / band website,  games website.

The theme also features simple integration for banners and advertising,  so creating a couple of  'working example' sites was not only a good way of testing the theme's versatility but also a potential source of a few extra quid!

I had been wanting to do a games & videos website for a while, and I had built the theme's default settings around a 'corporate magazine' look & feel, so I decided the games site would be a great way to test the theme. Here is my wordpress games arcade site so far:  Zap Gamez

I decided to look around and see what articles I could find about creating a games arcade website with wordpress, or if there was a plugin that allowed you to easily insert games into your WordPress blog. I found this article by Emanuele Feronato:

• Creation of a Flash arcade site using WordPress

It describes a method of populating your WordPress blog with games via a feed from MochiAds (A source of free games for websites) using custom fields. However, for my site I wanted to be able to integrate games from various free content suppliers and host games on my own server as well as embedding games hosted by content suppliers. What I really wanted was a plugin that could embed games into posts or pages using shortcodes.

THE PLUGIN

The prototype plugin I have built includes the following features:

4 Different views:

1. Grid view - a grid of thumbnail images linking to each game (can be restricted to a single category or parent category)
2. Category view - this view includes a medium sized image and a written description of the game
3. Single page view - the page where you play the game itself
4. Featured Game view - a page with a list of featured games

Different embedding modes:

1. iFrame embedding - embed iFrame content using code provided by free games sites, or use this method to display games from your own server where an html file has been provided with the free game download.
2. Flash embedding - embed Flash content using embed codes provided by other sites, or embed flash games directly from your own site. You can even upload them easily using the wordpress 'Add Media' tool.

The beta version of the WP Game Embed plugin can be found here.

I was recently confronted with the problem of having a single html form with three different submit buttons, each button submitting the form data to a different php script. This is obviously impossible with html alone, as a form can only have one 'action' attribute, which dictates the URL of the file that the form's data is submitted to.

I searched around on the web for an easy way to implement this and found various examples. One of the best examples I found was on CoderLab's blog: Multiple submit buttons on a multiple blog which uses javascript to apply a different action attribute to the form depending on which button is pressed. Each button in the form has it's own onClick function like so:

<form name="myForm" id="myForm">
Search: <input type="text" id="wrdSearch"/>
<input type="button" name="google" id="google" value="Google" onClick="SendTo(this.id)"/>
<input type="button" name="msn" id="msn" value="MSN" onClick="SendTo(this.id)"/>
<input type="button" name="yahoo" id="yahoo" value="Yahoo" onClick="SendTo(this.id)"/>
</form>

(Visit the page to see the javascript that goes with it: http://blog.coderlab.us/2005/10/04/multiple-submit-buttons-in-a-form/)

As I already had jQuery installed on the site, and the CoderLab script would still need some modification to serve my specific purpose, I decided to see if I could find a simpler way to achieve a similar result using jQuery. The form on my site was a lot more complex, with many fields etc. So what I really needed was a script that would submit all the form data to each of the 3 php scripts depending on which submit button was clicked.

Firstly, I stripped the onClick functions out of the form and removed the name attributes from the buttons too, like so:

<form id="myForm" method="post">
Search: <input type="text" name="search"/>
<input type="button" id="button1" value="Submit to script 1" />
<input type="button" id="button2" value="Submit to script 2" />
<input type="button" id="button3" value="Submit to script 3" />
</form>

I then wrote the following jQuery script to change the form's action attribute accordingly and submit it when each button is pressed:

$(document).ready(function(){

$("#button1").click(function(){
$('form#myForm').attr({action: "script_1.php"});
$('form#myForm').submit();
});

$("#button2").click(function(){
$('form#myForm').attr({action: "script_2.php"});
$('form#myForm').submit();
});

$("#button3").click(function(){
$('form#myForm').attr({action: "script_3.php"});
$('form#myForm').submit();
});

});

The script should work on any browser that is compatible with jQuery (see here: http://docs.jquery.com/Browser_Compatibility)

For more information on installing and using jQuery visit the website: http://jquery.com/

Admin76 is a powerful and versatile web content management system (CMS) designed and developed by 76 Creative. It is a PHP / mySQL driven project, for which I developed it's coding framework.

The main difference between Admin76 and other commercial CMS's is it's potential to be tailored exactly to the website it is powering. It can be transformed into a very 'bespoke' system, and so can be used to power many different genres of website, from a simple 5 page website, to a large news site, image or video gallery or a recruitment site. The only controls available in the CMS will be the exact controls you need to manage your site, nothing more, nothing less!

Other CMS's have certain 'tendencies' which relate to their intended user-base. For instance, WordPress is very much associated with blogging, Drupal is associated with community-driven sites. This is reflected in the possible themes, plugins and addons available for each.

Admin76 on the other hand is more flexible in this respect.  It can power a site with static pages, and news with categories and date based archives in the same way that WordPress can, but it can also power all sorts of different types of lists, with as many custom fields as you wish, e.g. address lists, list of file downloads, event diary, mp3 playlists, video playlists, etc. It can even be made to output XML, so it can be used to fully manage Flash Sites too.

As Admin76 is currently only available to customers of 76 Creative it has no 3rd party features, like plugins etc., available. This, however, is another strength of the system. All of Admin76's features are built in. It has an advanced image gallery system, with multiple file upload, medium size and thumbnail image creation.

Other standard features include RSS Feeds, Multiple Authors / Administrators, Flash Slideshow System, Flash Video Gallery System.

For more info about Admin76, and to enquire about getting your own self-managed, elegantly designed website get in touch with 76 Creative.

Some of the mySQL and PHP functions I have utilised in Admin76 will soon be available as tutorials on my site.

This is the first part in a series of articles I will be writing on encoding Flash Video (flv files) using the Adobe CS3 Video Encoder. I intend to cover all aspects of flv encoding to help you to attain the best results possible. If you are using another software to encode your flv files, such as Adobe After Effects or Final Cut Pro, many of the principles will be the same.

Read on…