Using custom fields to filter out posts was a bit tricky since it does not work to parse out an input field inside a function as i hoped, so instead I will use the AJAX function of Jquery to automaticly add contents from posts. It means I’ll have to add the post URL and a custom title field, but it works and it does not cause more headache

This makes it possible to manage all sidebar tabbed areas from the core blog as well, which is a great bonus!

There are many reasons for choosing Wordpress mu and for me the biggest reasons was that it will allow me better flexibility, more focused plugin usage to avoid speed degradation and the fact that it will make my life a whole lot easier. The fact that I can later plugin community functions are just the icing on the cake

My first step will be to install Wordpress mu and setup the Main blog area to be the entrypage and then transfer the Support area so I can redirect my clients  there. The support area will actually be the most blog-heavy area of the website where I look forward to building the entire FAQ using Wordpress mu. This will be a truly versatile FAQ database indeed where I will take good use of the many possibilities of Wordpress.

Once the entry page and support area is complete I’ll start working on the main blog again to build up the bulk of the website using pages and posts side by side with the use of custom fields if things work out as planned. The thought is to add custom fields to each page where I can input the ID of posts I want included in a section that is tabbed up using Jquery UI. That way I can manage all content separate, which is a bit like I have worked before with include files…but now it will be so much easier to manage!

After that I will setup my blog again and “simply” import all the data from the old database and work with that a bit. I will rework the blog a bit to make it easier to work with for me and to leave room for outside participation…I’ll write more about that later. The reason for adding the blog before I add things like the portfolio is that I have a serious itch about writing!

After the blog I will add the Portfolio and then the company section before I start pondering on other things. I have some scetchy plans about adding a dedicated downloads section and a blog just for status about the hosting to make them independent and easy to manage. I also have thoughts about setting up a forum (ipb) and use that for authentication purposes, but I am not sure…maybe I’ll just stick with bbpress which ties in well with Buddypress that is the next step (maybe) or skip it alltogether…we’ll see how that evolve.

Source: http://perishablepress.com/press/2008/12/22/wordpress-custom-fields-tips-tricks/

Display values of a specific key

To loop through and display the values of a specific key, place the following within the loop of your choice, and change the “mood” value to that of your desired key value:

<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'mood', true); ?>

Display multiple values of a specific key

Each custom-field key may include multiple values. For example, if you listen to multiple songs during a given post, you may want to list them all with a key of “songs”. Then to loop through and display the multiple values for the songs key, we place the following code into the loop of choice:

<?php $songs = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'songs', false); ?>
	<h3>This post inspired by:</h3>
	<ul>
		<?php foreach($songs as $song) {
			echo '<li>'.$song.'</li>';
			} ?>
	</ul>

Notice the trick here: by changing the third parameter to “false”, we tell the function to return an array of the values for the specified key. A very handy trick for displaying multiple key values.

Display content only if a custom field exists

For cases when not all posts contain some specific custom-field key, use the following code to prevent unwanted, empty or incomplete markup from destroying the validity of your page:

// display an image based on custom-field value, if it exists

<?php $image = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'url', true);

	if($image) : ?>

	<img src="<?php echo $image; ?>" alt="" />

	<?php endif; ?>

Conditional display of custom-field data

Continuing with the previous technique, here is a basic code template for displaying a list of key values only if they exist:

<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, 'books', true) ||
	 get_post_meta($post->ID, 'music', true) ||
	 get_post_meta($post->ID, 'sites', true)
	 ): ?>

	<ul>
		<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, 'books', true)): ?>
		<li><?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'books', true); ?></li>
		<?php endif; ?>

		<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, 'music', true)): ?>
		<li><?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'music', true); ?></li>
		<?php endif; ?>

		<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, 'sites', true)): ?>
		<li><?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'sites', true); ?></li>
		<?php endif; ?>
	</ul>

<?php endif; ?>

More conditional content based on custom-field values

Here’s another neat trick whereby custom-field values are used to determine which type of content appears on a page. In this example, we are checking the value of of a custom-field key called “hobbies”. Depending on the value of the hobbies key, different links are output on the page. Check it out:

<?php $value = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'hobbies', true);

	if($value == 'gaming') {
		echo '<a href="http://domain.tld/gaming/">Gaming Stuff</a>';
	} elseif($value == 'sleeping') {
		echo '<a href="http://domain.tld/sleeping/">Nap Supplies</a>';
	} elseif($value == 'eating') {
		echo '<a href="http://domain.tld/eating/">Dieting Advice</a>';
	} else {
		echo '<a href="http://domain.tld/">Home Page</a>';
	}

?>

Simplification and externalization

To clean up our source code a little, we can relocate the get_post_meta() function to the theme’s functions.php file. The immediate benefit here is one less parameter to include in the template tag. To do this, first place the following code into your theme’s functions.php file:

<?php function get_custom_field_data($key, $echo = false) {
	global $post;
	$value = get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true);
	if($echo == false) {
		return $value;
	} else {
		echo $value;
	}
}
?>

..and then call the function by placing this code in the desired location within your page template:

<?php if(function_exists('get_custom_field_data')) {
	get_custom_field_data('key', true);
} ?>

The only thing you need to edit here is the value of the “key” parameter, which should be the same as the key for which you would like to display value data. The second parameter is currently set as “true” so that the key value is echoed to the browser. To save the key value as a variable for further processing, change this parameter to “false”.

In the next few days not much will happen than setting the new server up and configure things the way it’s supposed to be. This is all handled by the great team of ConfigServer that I always use for new server setups, which leave me some time to focus on my upcoming 48 hour PHP exam this weekend and for my other 48 hour Javascript exam in a few weeks. In between I’ll also continue working on my webdesign projects.

I have had some time to scetch this project up and while I have some very cool things planned for this design I think the most interesting aspect will be to build a subcontentbox that will automaticly use subpages to the current page and put them into tabs using the jQuery UI widget. I’ll get plenty of use for my PHP skills trying to get that to work for sure. The second task that feels a bit daunting is to code the dropdown menu for the clientarea and make sure it work with WHMCS…

Adoption a design I saw some time ago (atebits.com I think) I have added a sidebox that can use the jQuery library to load tabs of information and still look very clean. This will allow for several uses such as list subcategories, special notices, information andprettu much everything else you can think of.

With 2 ordered VPS’s I hope to be able to get started on this project soon…I am itching!!

Twitterboard you can see here to the left and it’s a nifty thing that I really like and one that takes the Twitter experience out of the tabletop applications and into the web in a very nice way. This could prove a really nice product for the future indeed!

VPS.net is my second find of the day and it’s one of the best looking websites I have seen in a very long time combined with really nice products indeed. VPS.net is basicly a VPS version of the cloud reselling industry where you buy “nodes” with specific sets of allocated RAM, CPU, Harddrive space and so on. Starting at only $20 for the first node its cheap considering all the benefits you get from cloudhosting such as pretty much always stay online, instant recovery and the very easy to use system to rebuild nodes unlimited times as you see fit with different configurations.

The only downside is that the upgrades are a bit steep and if you want to toss in WHM/CPanel you pretty much need 2 nodes right away and end up in the mid $50 region right away. It would have been nice if there could have been some middleground there with 384RAM for $25 + $10 for Cpanel. This was the only reason I stuck to Geekstorage and their $35 VPS deal that include Cpanel and comes with 512MB RAM, free daily backups and support.

VPS.net are building a WHMCS module and as soon as that is ready I will check it out and see if I can include that into Mortfiles Evolved. Even if I did not pick VPS.net today I will certainly use them in the future…unless something better comes along!

The first step was to get a new server and a new domain name so I can start working on the design without messing with the websites of Mortfiles.se and Mortfiles.com. Once the server is setup it will need a finetuning with suphp, mod_security, suhosin plus litespeed and a security sweep before I move on to setting up the actual website. I will start with a wordpress installation and go from there until I have everything ready for setting up the WHMCS section and build the headermenu.

At that point I will move the WHMCS license from Mortfiles.se and add the clients from Mortfiles.com and then add both domains to the new account so that all domains point towards the same account. The whole process will then be complete…I hope

For this project however I will try some, for me,  new things and see how they effect the website’s performance.  The first thing to do will be to consider http requests and see how to make them as few as possible. This I plan to do by taking the three categories CSS, Javascript and Images and rework them slightly so that I hopefully will get very few http request.

For javascript, which I will have a few of, I want to bundle the scripts into one, or possibly two http request. This is done by adding the different calls into one combined call that hold all the javascripts required.  All javascripts will of course be minified to make them as small as possible and I will carefully look over the plugins to make sure redundant javascript is not added by them. I am considering adding the jQuery library from Google repository, but I’ll have to play with that a bit to see how that work out and what the benefits will be when combined with my other time saving efforts.

For CSS I will use a similar setup, taking advantage of the code written by Rakaz that allow the same combination of files  as for javascript files, reducing the CSS files into one single http request. I will use the minified approach here as well and we’ll see how much this will speed things up.

For images I will use sprites, which is essentially one big picture with many images that is used instead of many smaller ones. This will seriously reduce the number of http requests and I will use this throughout the website. The sprite itself will of course be minified as much as possible without reducing the experience. All images are of course plced in the CSS and not in the actual HTML code.

This is all good and it will reduce the number of requests alot, but I can do more.  Javscripts that are not essential should be placed at the end of the document which means that altough it att a second javascript http request it should increase speed for the visitors as it is added after the page loads. The actual pageload will be a little higher due to the second http request, but it will feel faster.

The http request can also be speeded up by dividing them into two hostnames since there are only two http requests at any given time for any given hostname, the other requests will be placed in que. So by splitting the http requests over two hostnames we can process two sets of http requests instead of just one. This will speed things up additionally.

The php function Flush() will be added to force the browser to load the HTML instead of waiting for the http requests to finish as is it’s normal behaviour. This will make sure the HTML is loaded almost instantly without waiting for the http requests which will, once again enhance the experience for the visitors.

In addition to this I plan to put the new Mortfiles website on its own VPS that will be equiped with LiteSpeed and lighttpd to make things really fly. Then I’ll just add Wordpress super cache to make all areas of the website into static files and add server compression to the files and violá…

pretty fast website…for a white guy

This examination point require that I write a paper on the design of Mortfiles Evolved in the same manner as a style guide we have received as guide. The paper is required to describe the Mastergrid structure, 2 different pagegrid structures for subpages, navigation structure, masthead, color scheme, fonts, content organisation and graphical elements.

This will be a great oppertunity to really do things right for this project and to take advantage of the class I attend this summer. I will start working on this in a few days and once done I hope I will be able to get the Mortfiles Evolved project ready for release very quickly.

On the current Mortfiles website I have no less than 3 wordpress installations for different purposes mixed with static files and includes in one big mess, although it’s a working mess. This is not a very efficient way to handle a website obviously and it’s far easier to merge all areas into one, controlled by one administrative interface. This is where Wordpress comes in.

Now, how do I intend to make all the areas of the old website merge into the Mortfiles Evolved website? The short answer is that I don’t. There will be several areas that will be cut out and the remaining areas will work just fine using the Wordpress backend through some creative use of templates and custom coding.  The most interesting part of the project will be to use the post feature both for blogging and to maintain a portfolio, both with different designs and different setup. That will be dealt with by making some creative use of the Wordpress template system so that posts under the portfolio for example will use a specific template instead of the default that will be reserved for the blog. Once setup I will be able to maintain both the website, the blog and the portfolio with very little effort.

The advantages of this also include taking advantage of the Wordpress plugin system that has alot of great features such as automatic sitemaps (both in html and xml), Cache system, RSS feeds, newsletters and much, much more. It also means that it’s possible to take advantage of the Wordpress search system to make the entire website searchable. This is in addition to a great content management system that is easy and fun to use that hold a flexible template system.

All in all this gives a more uniform impression and I think it will be more fun for me to work with, a better experience for my clients and a much more dynamic website for potential clients. Fingers crossed.