URL: http://www.timberlinelodge.com
Agency: Nemo
Role: Lead Developer
Technology: PHP / Wordpress

Featured in the Wordpress Showcase

The following code will let you create a custom “Wordpress Loop” that contains the post objects of the children of the current page.

Just drop this code in your theme file:

<?php
    $project_list = get_posts('numberposts=5&order=ASC&orderby=menu_order&post_type=page&post_parent='.$post->ID);
 
    foreach($project_list as $post):
    setup_postdata($post);
?>
    <div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
    </div>
 
<?php 
    endforeach; 
?>

Congratulations to the entire NVIDIA team here @ odopod on the success of the Speak Visual site on being featured in F:E:D, StyleBoost, and being chosen as the FWA Site of the Day.

In a current project I’m reading in a user’s Twitter feed and displaying it on the hompage of their Wordpress blog. I know that there are a thousand plug-ins that exist to do this exact thing, but I wanted to write my own.

Using the official Twitter API the contents of the individual were returned as plain text, meaning that all HTML links were totally dead. I wanted a way to automatically add the HTML to enable URL’s as well as twitter “@” profile links. I found some regular expressions and with some tweaking came up with these 2 functions.

To activate the URLs in block of text pass it to the following function:

function activateURLS($tweet)
{
    return preg_replace("@(https?://([-\w\.]+)+(:\d+)?(/([\w/_\.]*(\?\S+)?)?)?)@", 
        "<a href="$1" target="_blank">$1</a>", 
        $tweet);
}

To activate Twitter @ profile links using the following PHP block:

function activateTwitterProfiles($tweet)
{
    return preg_replace("/@([^ ,.!#$%^&]+)/", 
        "<a href="http://twitter.com/$1" target="_blank">@$1</a>", 
        $tweet);
}

They’re super easy to use, just call them like this:

activateTwitterProfiles(activateLinks($tweet->text))

I make no secret of my love Wordpress, and when I’m talking with other developers one of the things I constantly hear is “You can’t use Wordpress as a CMS” – this was a constant theme at WordCamp Portland. Now – for the most part I agree with this statement – but only to a certain extent. Wordpress isn’t the solution to EVERY problem on the web like some evangelists would say, BUT that doesn’t mean that it can’t be used as an effective small-to-mid size CMS solution.

Why would I want to use Wordpress as a CMS?

extensible plug-in architecture – I can’t stress how much power this gives a developer with a working knowledge of PHP, and if you don’t write your own there literally tens of thousands of existing plug-in out there to do most anything you could want.

access to the wordpress administration interface – Happy Cog designed it, what else is there to say?

access to one of the best user communities in existence – There’s a TON of nice people using Wordpress, and they LOVE it – when was the last time you saw an ad for ExpressionEngineCampDesMoines?

it’s easy to develop for – The templating system is well thought out and powerful, and once you learn how to harness the power of custom hooks, actions, and filters you’ve got a very powerful framework at your fingertips.

Case in point: Here’s the last project that I did while at NEMO for local Portland, Oregon ski resort Timberline Lodge:

The client came to us using a custom version of ModX that someone had hacked together for them a few years ago. Although I had never even heard of ModX – I correctly guess that they was only using a tiny subset of it’s immense feature-set. Wordpress made the most sense because the client wanted a strong SEO ranking, an intuitive interface that his staff could pick up easily without a lot of training, as well as something where the presentation was de-coupled from the CMS allowing him to update the front-end easily.

Built on a single Wordpress install, this site allows for management of it’s custom data through the use of a number of custom plug-ins that read / write from their own custom database tables. This allowed me to leverage the Wordpress framework while still using a non-post like data structure. Bits like this are used throughout the entire site, but most notably on the conditions page, where the team at Timberline is able to update all of the recent weather data through the Wordpress admin interface.

The page structure is managed through the use of flexible “tag grids” to build the subpage grid structure. Pages are just posts, and on the desired page shortcode is used to create a grid of posts based on the tags provided as parameters to the shortcode…. like this:


[tag-grid tags="lodging, history"]


Which would a retrieve a list of posts tagged with “lodging” & “history” and would produce a grid that looks kinda like this:

The addition of this “build-your-own” grid system gave me the flexibility to manage all of the “pages” of the site – no matter where they sit in the site structure – as regular post objects with little-or-no data differentiating parent from child, or top-level from third-level.

The site also allows external social networking tools to do some of it’s work. We’re bringing in the contents of a Flickr group to act as the photo gallery, and the “likes” of the Timberline Viemo account as a video gallery. We’re also using the Timberline twitter account for external communications that provide up-to-the-minute weather reports via SMS without lifting a finger. As with other parts of the site, all aspects of the connections to external tools are written as custom plug-ins and managed through the Wordpress interface.

I would say that people who categorically dismiss Wordpress as a CMS option most likely just don’t know how to use it well enough.

Nate and I grew up together, and I consider him to be the BEST WordPress developer in Portland right now. I’m happy to see that someone out there is using WordPress in new and exciting ways, and his knowledge and insight has gotten me out of more than a few jams. His work totally inspires me, and I think it shows us that WordPress is more than just a simple blogging platform.

Nate works locally for Alpha Multimedia or you can find him at the blog that he never updates.

Here is some of his recent work (all in WordPress):

Pear Panache

Cottonseed Oil Tour

Studio Coburg

Netflix Player by Roku

Lucid Food

OurPDX mentioned my session at Wordcamp saying:

from superfancy’s roundup of Wordcamp Portland:

OK… so let’s talk about what I learned this weekend at Wordcamp Portland.

1. Aaron Hockley and the OurPDX crew know how to put on a conference. They all worked really hard and hosted a stellar event. My wholehearted thanks goes out to them for putting this together in their spare time, and for allowing me to speak.

2. Writing a conference presentation takes longer than you think. A LOT LONGER than you think. Next time I speak I will not procrastinate so heavily. I spent most of the day in the back trying to finish my presentation.

3. When out in the world… always keep your eyes on your sunglasses. I lost+found them at least twice throughout the day.

4. I’ve got to get better at “networking.” These events are sort of excruciating for me, because – I’m just no good and meeting and talking to people, in fact I picked a career in software specifically because of the low amounts of human to human interaction.

5. Take a pack of gum. You’re going to by away from home all day dummy, gum is an absolute must.

6. Klonopin.

7. Must get involved with the planning for next year, in terms of content for the serious Wordpress developer there was nothing. I would like to see something of a traditional track-based conference agenda representing different needs.

8. There is no need to evangelize something that people have paid money and gotten out of bed early on a Saturday morning for.

9. Code will fail when you are on stage. Don’t freak out.

10. There is, by and large, less snark in the Portland tech-scene than anywhere else in the world. This may be it’s biggest asset, or it’s greatest weakness.

11. Sometimes bloggers freak me out.

I am speaking this Saturday September 27th @ WordCamp Portland.

I’ll be talking about extending the functionality of Wordpress by writing custom plug-ins, and creating your own administration menus & functionality.

Registration is still open but they’re capping attendence at 150, and I hear that they’re pretty close – so if you wanna go register now.