Andres Ferraro » Featured

How to Build This Blog Using Headway Theme 1.5 for WordPress – Video Review

Andres — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:57:37 +0000

Pondering what the best theme for WordPress is? Before settling on Headway I tried FlexSqueeze, Affiliate Theme, K2, WP Remix, building my own using Artisteer and dozens of others, some free, some not so free. In the end Headway won hands-down no-contest. There is simply no other theme that affords this level of flexibility – not even making your own with Artisteer.

Watch over my shoulder as I build this blog using Headway in 78 minutes. I know, 78 minutes is not exactly the instant-gratification some people might lead you to believe, but its reality – this is reality, warts and all.

What you’ll see on the video:

Starting from scratch with a live site using Headway 1.5

Creating a magazine-like layout for the blog

Look-and-feel: Modifying fonts, colors, spacing and visual elements

Customizing layout and sidebars for special pages like “About”

Linking and customizing archives, categories and other pages

Re-using sidebars selectively – footers and others

Working with tons of sidebars and even more widgets

Integrating bbPress as a WordPress widget (yes, a widget)

Tweaking the SEO parameters and using the code hooks

You can skip around the video getting a feel for how the theme works or grab some popcorn.

The video has no voiceover, so select your favorite soundtrack or listen to the voices in your head.

This is me building the site and it is largely unscripted – so you’ll see me fight with the layout a bit, get the type of leaf mixed up, fiddle with colors and other errors you’ll do yourself. You want to see the pitfalls and problems – for the finished result just take a screenshot of my site.

Here is my nutshell review of the various other themes I tried along the way:

FlexSqueeze: Excellent theme, but for affiliates or made-for-adsense sites.
Affiliate Theme: Very nice. But again good only for affiliate marketing or made-for-adsense sites.
K2: Super-slick dynamic resizing and display of elements. Limited to three columns.
WP Remix: Eye-catching, but better suited to a more static site.
Artisteer: This was my second pick for a theme. It creates beautiful themes and gives you an incredible level of customization – but has only a few layout options. In an ideal world, Artisteer would let me build Headway skins with Artisteer – that would rock! As it stands, Artisteer is better than 80% of the themes I tested, but definitely not better than targeted themes (for example for video sites or affiliates) and not as flexible as Headway.
Headway: Need I say more? My biggest problem with Headway today is that the visual editor gets stuck on loading with some plug-ins enabled. This can be worked around (and you can see me do it) by turning plug-ins on and off when going into edit mode – understandable for bleeding-edge tech and a small price to pay for WYSIWYG in-place layout editing of your blog! Update 12/22/09: With Version 1.5.5 all the Visual Editor glitches I encountered have been resolved – the Visual Editor was overhauled as is now even better. Stop staring and start building!

Hope you enjoy the video and leave a comment!

How to Integrate bbPress into a WordPress Blog using iFrames

Andres — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:30:35 +0000

Problem: After you’ve followed all the integration steps from the bbPress site there’s only one problem left – it looks like shit. It totally breaks you site’s continuity. When someone goes into your forums, the place not only looks different, all your navigation menus, sidebars, footers, and guides are gone. I searched far and wide for an answer to this one and finally “rolled my own” and here I am sharing it. The big “aha!” moment came in the shower, when I realized the answer was dead-simple HTML.

Here are the steps.

Install bbPress into a subdirectory of your blog pages. For example /user/public_html/forum if your blog is set up at the root of your domain. This is optional but makes things easy.
Do the cookie integration from the bbPress site instructions. This will allow anyone who authenticates to your WordPress to access bbPress and vice-versa. No point in integrating halfway.
Add a social networking log-in conduit to your blog. I chose Gigya Socialize for this and used their little “widget creator” to create a little widget that does the dirty work, plus their WordPress plug-in in the back-end. This is optional but its a lot easier for folks to sign in using their Twitter, Facebook or Google accounts than asking them to remember user/password combination number 457. The day my blog is as popular as Facebook, maybe I’ll ask people to sign up.
Put the log-in widget from Gigya Socialize on the sidebar right next to the forums. Can’t miss it!
Here’s where the magic happens. Create a WordPress Page for your Forum. Name it different than the directory you installed bbPress to. In my case the page is named “Forums” and the installation directory is “forum” (note the missing ‘s’). Now go edit that page and use the following bit of HTML as your guide:

Replace the address http://andresferraro.com/forum/ with your bbPress installation URL, and the width and height parameters to match your site. Note that you need to pick a bbPRess theme that doesn’t go crazy with the width and hopefully has a color scheme that blends in with your WordPress blog.

Voila! You now have your bbPress forum embedded into a Worpress page. Check out mine at Andres Ferraro’s Forums.

Notes:

My blog is built using Headway, so the steps I followed are a smidgen different. On the WordPress page that contains the forums I edited the layout so it would have a sidebar, a footer and instead of a “Content” container, I placed a very large “Widget-ready sidebar” and aptly titled it “Forums Container”, then I went into the Appearance–>Widgets in my WordPress dashboard and added a “Text/HTML” widget to the “Forums Container” Sidebar. I then added the iFrame HTML detailed above into the widget and off it went. Check out Headway if you’re interested in the killer ultimate WordPress theme.

Plug-In Whore

Andres — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 21:34:02 +0000

I’m trying out so many WordPress plug-ins that I expect this site to crash any moment now. I’ve got 58 plug-ins enabled right now. This post editing page looks like I could send a rocket to Mars – I have Star Trek ratings, Tags with Slugs, Thumbs up and down, Sticky posts, Favorites and Featured, Moderated, commentated, Twitted and Facebooked, Trackbacks and Pingbacks, SEO out tha kazoo, iPhone support, blackberry support, blueberry ice cream, red socks, google analytics, ads, reCaptcha, Carpal tunnel syndrome and even a pact with the devil.

The WordPress control menu on the left expands to joke length. Each of those items in there has anywhere from 5 to 10 options and sometimes a whole other website full of options. Then there are the widgets and gadgets I put in with Javascript, including the new comments system… Oh and even a bulletin-board forum! Download manager, Content subscription system, shopping cart, affiliate manager… This thing is NUTS.

Now if only I could get it to look pretty to visitors – Going to definitely have to hire someone to sort out this CSS thing.

Presentation Zen – No more PowerPoint Death Wish

Andres — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:32:54 +0000

How many times have you wished you were dead while watching a PowerPoint presentation? Every time?

I’ve been on the giving and receiving end of presentations more than anyone should – most of it was very painful. My rough gesstimate is that I’ve seen just shy of 2,500 (yes, twenty five hundred) presentations delivered live over the last decade. I’ve also delivered somewhere in the vecinity of 500 presentations big and small (still get a bit nervous in direct proportion to the stakes at hand), and created only about 80-90 brand-new presentations.

Recently Lee Ackerman suggested the book Presentation Zen from Garr Reynolds. Its an excellent book you can’t miss if you got this far into this blog post. It should be required reading for everyone in business. It should be part of English 101. Business runs 90% on PowerPoint, 9% on Excel and 1% on the platforms it really should.

This is a must-read for folks involved in presentation creation. If you’re only involved in the receiving end, then skip this book or you’ll walk out of your next meeting really frustrated.

To Illustrate how critical the material in this book is I put together a single chart – lets see if the relevance of creating and delivering good presentations comes across clearly, plainly and viscerally on the following single slide