BackSpaceStudios Blog

WordPress Plugin Development Workshop at RMI - Recap

This past Saturday, yes I know it was Valentine Day, but we spread the WordPress love, I ran yet another WordPress workshop at RMI ( Rich Media Institute ), it was great to see almost everyone from the theme design workshop show up, plus a few new faces.  This was the second in a series of workshops I’m running at  RMI this year.

Other workshops to look forward to , WordPress 2.7 - all the ins and outs, WordPress 2.7 Admin Skinning/Customization. i am also planning on running a FREE Workshop on WP2.7 Admin Theming at PHUG end of Feb or early March.

For this workshop, the goal was to convert a PHP script that loads random Flash SWF ( view here ) files into a functional WordPress plug-in. Sounds easy, and it was! You can download the original PHP script here and the WordPress plug-in here. The plug-in is fully functional, but still requires some option under the admin area. Play arounf with and let me know what you think.

Here’s the slide presentation from the workshop.

As promised here is a list of some plug-in development resources:
Simplified AJAX For WordPress Plugin Developers using Jquery
“Desenvolvendo Plugins para WordPress” by Rafael Dohms (in Brazilian Portuguese)
12 part “How to Write a Wordpress Plugin” at DevLounge.net by Ronald Huereca (PDF)
How to create WordPress Plugin from a scratch
Using AJAX with your WordPress Plugin, also at DevLounce.net
How to Write a Simple WordPress Plugin at ATD

Posts from past workshops:
http://backspacestudios.com/blog/index.php/wordpress-25-workshop-at-rmi-recap/open-source/
http://backspacestudios.com/blog/index.php/vecta-lova-free-wordpress-theme/open-source/

WordPress Theme Design Workshop at RMI - Recap

This past Saturday I ran another WordPress workshop at RMI ( Rich Media Institute ), it was great to see so many familiar faces, you know who you are This is the first in a series of workshops I’m running a RMI this year.  This weekend, Saturday Feb 14th 1-530pm, is WordPress Plugin Development ( register now ).

Other workshops to look forward to , WordPress 2.7 - all the ins and outs,  WordPress 2.7 Admin Skinning/Customization.

During the theme design workshop, we converted a static HTML+CSS web template, from styleshout.com, to a functional WordPress theme. There is still a little work to do to get it all working, you can downlaod here and feel free to feedback or ask questions.

Here’s the slide presentation from the workshop.

As promised here is a list of some great FREE Premium Theme sites, enjoy.
http://themeshaper.com/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://www.wpsnap.com/
http://freethemelayouts.com/
http://www.styleshout.com
http://wpcandy.com/

…and for inspiration…
http://www.bestwebgallery.com
http://welovewp.com/

Posts from past workshops:
http://backspacestudios.com/blog/index.php/wordpress-25-workshop-at-rmi-recap/open-source/
http://backspacestudios.com/blog/index.php/vecta-lova-free-wordpress-theme/open-source/

ColdFusion is alive! And it’s Open Source…

Last night PHUG hosted another FREE workshop, Railo - Open Source ColdFusion, presented by Rick Mason, Technical Director for FITC.

…and yes, I said last night, normally we hold all FREE PHUG workshops on Tuesday nights, but Rick was unavailable so we changed the date to Monday,  which would account for the poor turnout ;(

However, those who did manage to remember and make their way out had the fortunate opportunity to learn about Railo and get some extra one on one time with the master.

Most of us, especially anyone involved in open source, doesn’t really know about or pay attention to CF. In fact, even those outside the open source community just assume it’s dead! Well, according to Rick and the many passionate CFer’s, the community is still here and growing! It’s always exciting to see another commercial project going open source. Hopefully, and from what I took in last night, Railo should attract many open sourcer’s to its realm. Open Source CFML offers tons of potential to the community at large, a few simple tags (which are basically HTML style with simple if statements) , you create on the fly pdf’s, out put and track video, embed AS and JQuery, and there is an Eclipse debugger as well, just to name a few.

Recently PHUG has recruited a few journalism students from Seneca to become bloggers and last they had the opportunity to sit down with Rick after the workshop and interview him on camera, they also recorded a good chunk of the workshop as well. The vudeo should be posted on PHUG soon, and i will make sure to cross post it here.

Here’s the slide presentation from the workshop > http://app.sliderocket.com/app/FullPlayer.aspx?id=08F13F85-D0AE-2914-9E21-F7C7C94B2818

WordPress Workshops - Theme Design and Plug-ins

After a very successful WordPress workshop at RMI (Rich Media Institute) back in November I have been asked back to run 2 more great WordPress workshops.

Feb 7th – WordPress Theme Design
In this workshop, we will show the process of taking an HTML & CSS designs and PhotoShop templates and converting them into a fully working WordPress theme. Along the way, we’ll look at the main aspects of WordPress theming, some best practices and a few tricks. WordPress 2.6 and 2.7 makes the whole process easier than ever, so get started making your WordPress site look not like a WordPress site!

To find out more and register

Feb 14th – WordPress Plug-ins
“Plug-ins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine.” In this workshop we will cover the following areas, Extending WordPress, Customizing WordPress Plug-ins, Tips On Writing WordPress Plug-ins, Writing WordPress Plug-ins, and Essential WordPress Plug-ins. Plus, that isn’t enough, we will build a simple Flash plug-in by the end of the workshop that you can take with you!

To find out more and register

Vecta Lova FREE WordPress Theme

This past weekend (Saturday Nov 15th) I did a WordPress workshop at RMI (Rich Media Institute), one of the ares we covered was converted CSS themes into WordPress themes. I used a free example I downloaded from Styleshout.com called VectorLover.

I decided to keep working on it and complete covert as a functional WP Theme, so here it is (vectalova1.0.zip). Do to copyright issues I will not be releasing this theme on Wordpress.org.

On a side note, James Walker, Drupal God, did a workshop at PHUG a few weeks back on Drupal Theming in an Hour. James used the same theme in his workshop and decided to continue working on it to release a Drupal Version. You can download the drupal version here.

Please report any bugs in this theme by replying to this post. Thanks!