Brackett Design & Strategic Marketing » Web Development

Croatiatravelblog.com

John Brackett — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 04:17:49 +0000

Description: Customized WordPress blog featuring adsense ads, and embedded flickr photo gallery.

The site is built on Word Press 2.7 and utilizes several revolutionary Word Press Plugins that extend the site from a normal blog to a sophisticated Content Management System. One of the best features is the Flickr Album that enables the site to showcase and rotate images from my Flickr account. Natural search optimization is promoted through various means including relevant articles, keywords and link trading with other Croatia related sites.

Top 4 WordPress Theme Development Resources

John Brackett — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 02:09:01 +0000

I’ve been researching tutorial sites for advanced WordPress theme development lately and have discovered some excellent resources. The WordPress community is passionate about the platform. This is reflected in the outstanding theme development I’ve seen in the past several months.

Here is my collection of resources for aspiring and advanced WordPress developers.

WordPress Codex:
The WordPress Codex is the Vatican of the WordPress universe. All knowledge resides here. The community is constantly updated detailed information covering every aspect of coding in WordPress. The Encyclopedia nature of this site is best used as a reference tool rather than a tutorial.

How to Create a WordPress Theme From Scratch by Kai Loon
Kai has put together a very readable yet detailed three part tutorial on WordPress Theme development. My favorite section is the tag definitions. This is an excellent learning tool to see all of the WordPress tags in a single location. He does this with each primary section of a theme. I’ve read and referred to this site many times, and can’t recommend it enough.

How to Create a WordPress Theme from scratch by Sam Parkinson
Sam created an excellent overview on WordPress Theme development. LIke Kai’s site he provides detailed explanations followed by detailed code examples.
Additionally there are other articles on this site covering WordPress plug-in development. Overall this resource is excellent, and one I refer to quite a bit.

Jquery.com
This resource is for advanced developers, or those who dare to take a dive in the deep end of WordPress Theme extension. If you’ve ever run across sliding panels, or ajax type interactive tabs, then it’s likely the developer used jquery.com as their resource. This is a huge library of free scripts and lesson on how to implement them. Any developer with basic PHP and java knowledge can make these work. It’s worth checking out and bookmarking this page, as I’m seeing a rapid growth in these components within the WordPress theme community.

Nexugen Skin Care Products

John Brackett — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:15:12 +0000

URL: nexugen.com

Nexugen.com is an ecommerce store that features natural anti-aging skin care products. The store is built with Zen-Cart, and is wrapped in Word Press, which I configured as a content management system. A central homepage mixes elements from Word Press and from Zen-Cart. The customer can easily navigate either to a blog to read articles about skin care products, or they can go to the store to shop.

This site encompasses several features for natural search optimization including dozens of relevant articles that are keyword centric, various modules to support meta-tagging and keyword featuring tools to attract search engine spiders.

This configuration has proven to be immensely more successful than the old site in terms of SEO and customer experience. Since I launched it in November 2007, sales has steadily increased, as well has natural search terms list ranking.

Technology: WordPress (used as CMS). Zen-Cart. Various modules and extensions added as well.

Zen Cart Blank Checkout Page Error- Solved!

John Brackett — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:55:02 +0000

I was recently preparing the launch of a new Zen Cart store for a client when encountered a blank page on checkout. There was no error, just a blank page. Baffled, I reloaded the CHECKOUT page and processed another test transaction only to see the blank page appear farther up the checkout process on the CART page.

The admin showed the orders were being processed, so the data was hitting the database. I had no where to go, and was looking at either systematically going through each template file and each database table to see if I could find any evidence of what was causing the errors.

The more I thought about doing this the reality of the tedious hours it would take to just find it began to sink in. I did research and found other developers that had encountered this issue, but none seemed to offer any clear path that would fix my issue. Basically they were even more lost than I was on the blank page horror.

Finally I found the Zen Cart Error-Logging Utility. This little app saved the day and boosted my confidence for future Zen Cart installs. First, the download page explains that the blank page effect is the result of PHP syntax errors. This can happen by tinkering around in the template files and mistyping an operator. Ok, that sounded good. However, I had purposely set my customizations from the admin just for this reason.

Apparently Zen Cart version 1.3.8 has this bug. It’s recommended to upgrade to 1.3.8a, which I had already done. I was still getting the error.

I proceeded to download and install the Debugging Tool per their instructions.

I ran the transaction again and returned this error in the log file

[04-Apr-2008 13:34:22] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/broadcas/public_html/catalog/includes/languages/ english.php:1401) in/home/broadcas/public_html/catalog/includes/init_includes/ init_templates.php on line 78

[04-Apr-2008 13:34:22] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/broadcas/public_html/catalog/includes/languages/ english.php:1401) in /home/broadcas/public_html/catalog/includes/functions/ functions_general.php on line 44\

I replaced these files and thought I got it working until the confirmation page came up blank. After more research I discovered that functions_general.php is not the correct file to swap, it’s english.php in the languages file. At this point I just uploaded the whole damn languages folder from a fresh download of Zen Cart 1.3.8a. Boom! it all worked. It tested and retested with no errors.

If you run into this issue, or any other Zen Cart weirdness, please download this file. It will save tons of time and frustration, when you need to squash little pain-in-the-ass bugs like this.