Save WordPress Plugin CSS changes
WordPress plugins offer a great way to extend the functionality of your ‘standard’ WordPress implementation. Often the plugin author includes a CSS file that provides the style attributes for the content elements that the plugin creates. However, many authors do not provide a way to change the style of the elements, without having to change the plugin’s CSS file. This works fine – however, any changes will be lost when the plugin is upgraded and the bundled CSS file is replaced.
My solution for this problem is to place CSS changes in a separate ”style-override.css” file in the Theme’s directory – including all of the selectors and attributes that I’d like to change. CSS works on the ‘last one in wins’ rule – so the last definition of a given rule will over-ride any previous definitions.
You can load this ‘style-override.css’ file at the end of the page, over-riding any previous definitions, by using the following code in your functions.php:
//load the style-override.css file at the very end of the document
//allowing CSS for plugins to be altered and protected against overwrite by upgrade
add_action(‘wp_footer’, ‘loadOverrideCSS’);
function loadOverrideCSS() { ?>
<!– load style-override.css file –>
<link rel=’stylesheet’ type=’text/css’ media=’screen’ href=’<?php echo get_bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); ?>/style-override.css’ />
<?php }
//pcLoadOverrideCSS()
This will use the ‘wp_footer’ hook, which is one of the last things executed by WordPress when generating the content page.
Custom App for Midas Recovery Services
We’ve just delivered an interesting project that brought a wide variety of technologies and techniques together to create a custom application for Midas Recovery Services. Midas works with insurance companies and other health care providers to recover expenses associated with Worker’s Compensation cases and has been using an aging FoxPro database for the past 15 years to manage their business.
Our system collects data about every Worker’s Comp case filed in California, then looks for matches against a table of over 3 million client members. An easy-to-use AJAX user-interface provides information about each case, as well as complete case management and activity tracking tools. Midas has seen processing times go from several hours with the old system to under 1 minute with our optimized mySQL database and object-oriented PHP code. DCP Partners is hosting the application and providing on-going administrative / management services.
Initial response from Midas has been very positive, as they see: significant improvements in their ability to provide service to their clients, increased efficiency of their staff, the security of hosting their core business application in a managed datacenter, and the strength of a solid technology foundation on-which to grown their business. Next on the list – a new public-facing website.
WordPress 3.3 – Ready for Prime Time?
Based on the reviews I’ve been reading, I’m going to hold-off spending a lot of time with the new WordPress 3.3. Like with most bleeding-edge software updates, there are going to be performance and quality issues with the initial releases that I’d prefer others spend time finding and resolving. My clients’ sites are working fine and the new features implemented in WP 3.3 are largely cosmetic – adding little in the way of functionality. It will take several weeks/months for plugin developers to complete their upgrades for the new system, where needed, and the WordPress team a similar amount of time to get all of the bugs resolved. We’ll revisit WP 3.3 next quarter and evaluate the benefit of jumping on the bandwagon.
In the mean time, enjoy the solid performance of your present system and know that we’re keeping a close eye on the progress of this new version of the WordPress core.
Illumination Systems moves to WordPress
When Mark Chapman at Illumination Systems Inc found that his SEO results were much less than expected – he asked us to look at the design of the site he had just paid to have developed. What we found were poorly designed content structure, missing elements, and static meta tags. Additions or edits to the content required hardcoding HTML … and lots of FTP back-and-forth. Sadly, this happens all too often when using a website-mill developer.
We were able to move his content and site design into a WordPress 3.2 platform and open a whole new world of easy-to-use content management, with powerful SEO tools that provide content-specific titles, descriptions, and keywords … using WordPress and the Genesis framework.
Content is still being defined and the site design will be refined over time – but Illumination Systems is now on a solid foundation for building their internet presence.
Laverty Chacón Commercial Real Estate Site
Another site we’re proud to announce is the new site for Laverty Chacón Commercial Real Estate in the Sacramento area. This was another collaborative project with Nicole Bratt of Rock+Feather Creative in San Francisco, who was responsible for the fantastic graphical design. Lisa Yaple did the content editing.
The site is built on a WordPress 3.2 platform, using the Genesis Framework as our foundation. There was a fair amount of custom code written (Google Map and custom data element ‘shortcodes’ and plugins, custom taxonomy, conditional menu selection, etc) to provide Laverty Chacón with the look, features, and functionality they wanted. In the end, they were very happy with the result and I think they have a great looking site that is easy to use and maintain … and provides their clients with a site where it is easy to find what they’re looking for.
Laverty Chacón has also chosen DCP Partners to provide their fully-managed hosting and system administration services.
Adaptive Business Solutions site released
We’re very happy to announce the release of a new site for Adaptive Business Solutions. The site was done in partnership with Nicole Bratt of Rock+Feather Creative in San Francisco. Nicole is a gifted graphics designer and has created another fantastic site, which is built on WordPress 3.x and the Genesis Framework. The team at Adaptive specialize in helping companies maximize value by teaching them how to leverage Lean and Six Sigma principles.
Please stop by the site and have a look around.
In addition to doing the development and implementation of the site, Adaptive has selected DCP Partners to provide fully-managed hosting services.
Bandvideos.com Online Store
We’re happy to announce a new online store for The Symonds Group’s Bandvideos.com. Designed for and built on the Zen Cart open-source e-commerce platform, it features a number of customizations and financial / payment integrations for their merchant account and PayPal.
The Symonds Group has also chosen DCP Partners for its hosting and administrative support – a complete turn-key solution for their online presence.
WordCamp OC
I’ve just completed registration for WordCamp O.C. – which will be held at Chapman University in Orange, CA on May 14th. WordCamp is a day-long gathering of WordPress designers, developers, integrators, bloggers, and devotees – where ideas, methods, and all sorts of creative things are discussed. I attended the WordCamp in LA last fall, which proved to be invaluable for me.
If you’re in SoCal and have any interest in developing on the WordPress open-source CMS platform – you should try to attend. Time to get your geek on.
New Site for DonnaEvansMusic.com
We’ve recently migrated a ‘hard-coded’ website we developed a year ago for DonnaEvansMusic.com to a WordPress CMS site. Donna provides piano and voice lessons in Aliso Viejo, CA and wanted to achieve better ranking on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines. By moving to WordPress, we can keep a sitemap updated automatically, leverage the intrinsic SEO capabilities of the system, add an easy-to-maintain Event Calendar, and provide her with the ability to publish a blog that her students and others can follow.
This isn’t your father’s WordPress
It wasn’t all that long ago that I looked at WordPress as a service for those that had lots of spare time on their hands and whiled-away the hours transcribing their every thought into their blogs. I suspect that same opinion was held by ‘serious’ content management system (CMS) users and developers. When I re-launched the DCP news-site about 5 years ago, we used Joomla – which was (and still is) one of the better-supported CMSs around.
While Joomla, Drupal and others are still fine CMSs – which we develop around and support (to varying degrees) … WordPress has become my de-facto standard when developing new CMS sites. This is especially true when my client is more interested in running their business and less interested in managing their CMS. Recent advances in the WordPress foundation have made it easier for developers to extend and ‘hook’ into the core of the system … resulting in an explosion of new plugins that provide enhancements to the WordPress core feature-set. The add-on functionality that the “Pods” plugin provides in the way of customized database applications opens the door to sophisticated WordPress-based applications. (More on the upcoming Pods 2.0 here)
WordPress 3.1 was released this week and, while I’ve been running the release candidates from RC3 forward, I’m excited about the possibilities I see for this system. We’re able to produce high-quality, easy-to-use, easier-to-maintain solutions for our clients in less time – resulting in better productivity and value for everyone.
If you’re interested in upgrading your present static website to a client-driven CMS-based site – let’s talk about your application. We’re finding that there are few things we can’t do with this platform.
