Karen Rodriguez
I am a Stay at home mom & wife of 2 young children.  I have been shopping for deals and using coupons so we can afford for me to stay at home with the kids. I decided earlier this year to put my efforts into a website to help other families save money as well. SavingTheFamilyMoney.com is a hobby that has turned into a wonderful learning experience, where I have met many wonderful families.  What I’ve learned over the past year about Wordpress and HTML has helped me expand my knowledge as a blogger and turned me into a self professed “geek”.

Alex Denning
Hi. I’m Alex Denning. WordPress designer and developer; I blog about WordPress development at wpshout.com.

Lynne Foster
Lynne Foster is the director of PoLR Limited – a web design, SEO and online marketing company in Glasgow Scotland.

What is OneWorld.net all about?

OneWorld is a global information network developed to support communication media of the people, by the people and for the people — everywhere. Its goal is to help build a more just, global society, through its partnership community. OneWorld encourages people to discover their power — power to speak, connect, and make a difference — by providing access to information, and enabling connections between hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of people around the world.

What will I be covering in my presentation?

I’ll be providing a basic overview of what WordPress is, what it does, and what it can do. I’ll also be giving an overview of the Dashboard and then touching on the options for extending WordPress through the use of themes and plugins. After this, I’ll be fielding specific questions from the webinar participants.

Rosalyn Lemieux will be showing specific examples of how current nonprofit’s sites are being powered by WordPress, and how they are updating their content.

If you’re interested in learning more, I welcome you to sign up for the webinar. If you’re not interested but know someone who may be, please forward share this post in whatever social portal you prefer:)

The plugin descriptions starts out like this:

Add a second block of HTML content to WordPress pages. A perfect solution for layouts with two distinct content areas or “blocks”, such as a sidebar or two column view. When editing a page, a second WordPress WYSIWYG content editor will appear beneath the standard page editing block.

The description goes on to explain that whatever you enter into this second HTML content area, can be output to your page in a couple of ways. You can add the “Secondary HTML Content” widget to your sidebar or you can use a function inside your template. This video only covers the widget usage.

Thanks for taking the time to watch this video. Please feel free to leave comments below with further questions.

I’ve created a video that gives you a quick overview and also an idea of the possibilities available with this plugin. Incidentally, I’ve created several videos so far and this is the first to show my ugly mug…so be prepared. Ha!

Oh wait, one more thing before the video…don’t forget to enter the WordPress Book Giveaway, it really couldn’t be easier to enter. You’ve got nothing to lose and only WordPress knowledge to gain.

WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart allows you to add an ‘Add to Cart’ button on any posts or pages. It also allows you to add/display the shopping cart on any post or page or sidebar easily. The shopping cart shows the user what they currently have in the cart and allows them to remove the items. It can be easily integrated with the NextGen Photo Gallery plugin too.

You can learn more by visiting the plugin page here.

Well kiddos, if any of the above rings true for you, today’s post is sure to satisfy. Through a deal with Packt Publishing, I’m a giving away not one, not two, but three books focused exclusively on WordPress, the open source software we all know and love. Let’s cut to the chase shall we? Here are the book details…

1. WordPress Theme Design

A complete guide to creating professional WordPress themes

Take control of the look and feel of your WordPress site
Simple, clear tutorial to creating Unique and Beautiful themes
Expert guidance with practical step-by-step instructions for theme design
Design tips, tricks, and troubleshooting ideas

2. WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner’s Guide

Build powerful, interactive plug-ins for your blog and to share online

Everything you need to create and distribute your own plug-ins following WordPress coding standards
Walk through the development of six complete, feature-rich, real-world plug-ins that are being used by thousands of WP users
Written by Vladimir Prelovac, WordPress expert and developer of WordPress plug-ins such as Smart YouTube and Plugin Central
Part of Packt’s Beginners Guide series: expect step-by-step instructions with an emphasis on experimentation and tweaking code

3. WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner’s Guide (Please Note: This title is expected to be released in Dec. 2009)

Build your own blog network with unlimited users and blogs, forums, photo galleries, and more!

Design, develop, secure, and optimize a blog network with a single installation of WordPress
Add unlimited users and blogs, and give different permissions on different blogs
Add social networking features to your blogs using BuddyPress
Create a bbPress forum for your users to communicate with each other
Part of Packt’s Beginner’s Guide Series, with step-by-step, detailed instructions for building a blog network from scratch

So, how do you get your hands on one of these books?

Pretty simple really. All I ask is that you help me spread the word about an exciting new project that is under development. In fact, you can become part of this project if you’d like but more on that later. All you need to do to be entered to win one of these books is:

1. Link to LearnWebTools (http://learnwebtools.com) in some way and then leave a comment on this post with the url, and what book you’d like. That’s it. No more steps! The contest ends on Oct. 31st. On November 1st, I will put all the commentators (who provided a valid url) into a hat and draw names until I get a winner for each title. Look for the winners notification post on that date!

Here are some ways to link:

• Write a quick blog post describing the LearnWebTools project. You can use this text:

LearnWebTools.com will enable you to do just what our name implies, Learn Web Tools. Our service will include step-by-step instructions for a wide variety of web development tools, social sites, open source software, and more. We are working diligently behind the scenes building a full featured site that will allow you to become an expert user of web based tools, online marketing techniques, and other web only skills. Whether you learn better by reading, seeing, or just plain doing, we’ll provide the information you need to get started building your ideas, or your business.

• Tweet it.
• Facebook it.
• Put a banner link on your site. You can use this 250px wide banner:

I’m really looking forward to giving these books away to the three winners. I’ve read the first two, and I can tell you, they are packed with very useful information…and I expect that the third title will be just as informative.

Ok, good luck!

*Please Note*
As dictated by Packt Publishing rules, print or ebook formats are available for winners located in the U.S. and Europe. Winners located in other countries will be provided the ebook format only.

Viper007Bond

Read here for more…

I am using posts to display individual product information, but I needed to use individual pages to display the information about a particular product series. Using pages posed a bit of a quandary though when I started thinking about how to display them in a dropdown list. Why? Have a look in your WordPress Dashboard–>Appearance–>Widgets area. Look at the Categories widget. See that option in there to “show as dropdown”?

Now have a look at the Pages widget. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

…right! WTF? No option to display pages as a dropdown list? Why? Who knows, but I needed to solve it so I set forth on my search. The first thing I did was look for a Template Tag similar to wp_dropdown_categories and I found one for pages named wp_dropdown_pages. Now, I needed to use this tag AND be able to specify the individual pages to be included AND the order of these pages. Before we get to that code, the first thing I needed to do was to figure out the easiest way to get it displayed in a widget. As you might know, WordPress doesn’t allow for inserting PHP code into your widgets by default, so finding a plugin for that was the first task. Luckily, I came across Otto’s PHP Code Widget plugin pretty quickly and since Otto’s pretty ingrained in the WordPress world, it seemed very likely that this plugin would be “future-proof”. OK, so now I can put PHP code inside a widget.

I then wrote some pretty simple code using the wp_dropdown_pages Template Tag (or function) to pull a list of pages into my PHP Code Widget. It looked like this: (with proper beginning and ending PHP tags not seen in this example) wp_dropdown_pages(‘include=1409,1411,1413&sort_column=ID’). I saved my widget, refreshed my main page, and presto, a pages dropdown list. But wait!!! When selecting any page from the list, none of them were being loaded by the browser. HUH?

So, off again I went to search the Template Tag section of the Codex. I found this on the wp_dropdown_pages detail page:

See the section entitled 5.1? With Submit Button? But I don’t want a submit button, I want a “jump” menu. Take me to the page when selected. It works in the categories widget by default and there’s not even an example of how to achieve this with dropdown pages. Say it ain’t so WordPress gods, say it ain’t so!

After much time searching the Codex, forums, and blog posts, and bothering online friends who have better things to do, I finally found the answer. Guess where. The Codex! I missed it initially, but the answer is there, only it’s on the wp_dropdown_categories Codex page and not the wp_dropdown_pages Codex page.

See examples 4.2 and 4.3. Those were my answers. Actually 4.3 was my answer. I took that bit of code, replaced all references to categories and replaced with pages, and Bam! A dropdown list of pages that works like a charm! Here’s the end result:

Here’s what my PHP Code Widget looked like with the code inside: (notice I commented out the H2 title tags also)

I hope that helps and if you use this trick, please post a link in the comments.

If you’ve been wondering how you can give back to your community and make a difference, I urge you to just do one thing. No matter how simple it may seem to you, your act of kindness CAN affect others. Whatever your expertise, whatever your passion, share it freely with others and it WILL make a difference.