BlueLayerMedia - Creative Web Services

The overwhelming success of our User Self Delete plugin has made it quite clear there is desire for this plugin to keep evolving.  Because of this we have already begun work on v.1.6.

You can see the feature we are currently planning to include HERE.

We are hoping to release the new version in a couple of weeks once development and testing are completed.

To celebrate the new version we will be giving away (10) free copies of the plugin to the first users who post a thread in our forums indicating why the need the plugin.  It’s that simple!  Make a post and get something for FREE!  We will announce when the contest will start one day ahead of time.  So be sure to subscribe to this thread, our RSS or check back often for more updates!

This plugin will hide the update notifications for both plugins and WordPress core from everyone else but the administrators of your site.

Many web administrators do not want their subscribers and other user groups to see that their WordPress or plugins are out of date for security reasons.

Estimated Release Date: 6/26/10

Today we are releasing our third WordPress plugin, ‘User Self Delete’.  We saw a request on the WordPress Ideas forum and thought we would give it a shot.

As you can probably guess from the name of the plugin, this will allow your users to delete their own account without any need for interaction on the administrator’s behalf.

When a user wishes to delete their account, they are taken to a confirmation page where they must enter the word “yes” in order for the deletion to take place.  Once they type “yes” and press the delete account button, they are redirected to the login page and they no longer exist as a user on your site.

Although this may not be the most popular plugin in the WordPress world, we’re sure some people out there may find it useful.

Download Here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/user-self-delete/

We’d like to introduce an update to our first WordPress plugin, Random Testimonials.

With this plugin you have the ability to display a number of testimonials either in a page or post. The amount displayed is determined by you. We also created a submission form that you can include in a post or page in order to have people submit their testimonials to you. User submitted testimonials are added to a queue in your WordPress Admin for your approval.

In this updated version, we widgetized our plugin and gave you the ability to set the number of testimonials you would like to appear via the widget settings.

We also made our plugin compatible all the way up to WordPress version 3.0 beta 1!

Admin Area

Here is a quick set of instructions to get you going:

1. Install the plugin either via FTP or Admin backend
2. Activate the plugin
3. Go to the Random Testimonials Admin, under Settings
4. Add any testimonials you already have (yes, you could even make some up)
5. To have the testimonials show in a post use the following code: [show_testimonials limit="x"] and replace ‘x’ with the number of testimonials you would like displayed.
6. To have the testimonialssubmission form displayed in a post/page use thefollowing code: [testimonial_form]

Don’t forget to check your queue every now and then to see if there any new testimonials waiting for your approval.

Below is the file for you to enjoy. If it worked out for you, feel free to leave a comment, we’d like to hear from you.

WP Plugin: Random Testimonials (109)

We’ve created a new WordPress plugin due to seeing several help forum posts on WordPress.org.  We’re happy to give back to the community and hope you enjoy.  The Relative Image URLs Plugin does the following.  When inserting an image into WordPress posts, WordPress uses absolute URLs to the files.  This plugin overrides that functionality and forces it to use relative URLs.  For example:

WordPress Default:

http://www.example.com/wp-content/upload/04/20/example.jpg

Plugin Override:
/wp-content/upload/04/20/example.jpg

This is particularly useful if you plan on switching domains ever and has been requested in several help threads.

Let us know what you think or get in touch if you have a plugin you would like us to develop.

Download from WordPress.org

Today we decided to release our second modification to the WP e-commerce plugin.

This modification will add the ability for you to have a product thumbnail appear in your cart when someone adds a product.  Now you won’t just have plain ‘ol text but a visual thumb so your customers are sure they’ve added what they have meant to.

See the image below for a better description and look:

How to use:

• Download the fix below
• Extract it
• Overwrite your existing ‘shopping_cart_page.php’ file
• Enjoy!

Here is the download:

Client Area

Are you getting the dreaded “Oops! We are unable to process your request” error message after freshly setting up WP e-commerce plugin and your Google API?  If so, we have the quick and easy fix for you.  Just follow the steps below and you should be good to go.

1. Access the WP backend then Products
2. Click Settings
3. Click the Payment Options tab
4. Select Google Checkout as your payment gateway
5. Click on Set Shipping Countries in the payment gateway box on the right
6. Untick all other countries besides USA

That is all it takes to get Google Checkout working with WP e-commerce!

One of our more larger clients asked us to create a site based on the WordPress platform and utilize the WP e-commerce plugin  as a shopping cart.  One of the many issues our client was facing right out of the box was the inability for WP e-commerce to pass his SKU along to his PayPal gateway.

After going over the plugin in depth and confirming via the author’s site that this feature is  currently not available, we did what we do best.  We made our own!

Our fix is quite simple.  Download and overwrite your existing paypal_multiple.php file with ours and your SKU’s will now be passed on to PayPal. Excellent for those using a fulfillment center.

Download Here:

Client Area

NextGEN gallery is a fabulous addition to your WordPress site and with additional plugins can be used for so much more than just a gallery.

One of the issues we ran in to while doing work for a client was getting a lightbox overlay to work properly. The common solutions we came across were to install two additional plugins. One was the lightbox 2 plugin and the other was the shutter plugin for WordPress. Neither of these worked in our case. We were working on a fresh WordPress v. 2.9.2.

What did work for us was using the jQuery Lightbox plugin.  After installing this plugin and removing the two previous ones, all of our JavaScript errors were gone and we had a nice lightbox overlay appearing on images.

Hope it brings some help to those that maybe trying to accomplish the same thing.

We’ve done quite a bit of work with WordPress with our clients such as designing themes, creating themes from .psd’s, making plugins and more. Working with the BuddyPress plugin was something completely new to us. It presented a few challenges which we thought we would share with you in the hopes we save you some frustration and time.

The Scenario: Our client wanted to have BuddyPress (BP) installed on his WordPressMU site to add additional social functionality. They wanted to have the main WordPressMU site have its own theme (blogging related) and the social (BP) side of their site have a completely different look and feel, yet have them be integrated in to each other.

The installation of BP was as straightforward as any other plugin. Upload and activate. So far so good. Now it was time to give BP its own look. BP came with its own default theme and at first glance it had all the needed functionality we needed. We would be changing some of the layout/theme down the road later anyway. We activated the default BP theme and looked at the social side of the site. It was perfect and it functioned well. We went back to the main site and to our surprise and dismay, the main site had taken on the default BP theme, rendering the main site utterly useless.

We dug around on Google and the official BuddyPress forums and found in the latest version of BuddyPress (1.1.2) there is no support for it to use a different theme than the main site or vice versa. Instead what we were reading is we were going to have to copy the default theme, and in essence modify it and create our own theme. The other option was to copy the main site’s theme, add some of the BP functionality to it, call BP’s CSS and presto, BP would adopt the main site’s theme and would just need “minimal” CSS work to get it to look right. After trying that and seeing there was much more than minimal CSS work to be done, that idea was thrown out.

The Fix: What we decided to do is create another blog on the main WPMU site. We named it to social and set this particular blog’s theme to the BP default. Now we had the main site with its original theme and the social site with its default BP theme. What was lacking was an integration in between them. Here’s how we did it.

In the WPMU admin area, under Site Admin, open the blogs tab and note the blog id of the blog you are using for the BP side of things. As you can see in the image to the right, there is an ID column and in this case the blog id for us was #9.

Next, open up your wp-config.php file. Don’t worry, you’ll be making a very small change and won’t be adding lines of endless code.

Around line #45 you should see something like this: define( ‘BP_ROOT_BLOG’, 9 );

Set the BP_ROOT_BLOG to whatever id number you found in your WPMU admin. This tells WordPress what blog to use for the default BP functions. Save, upload and overwrite your original file. Refresh your main site and try the nav links in the admin bar now. That’s right, they work and link to the social blog you created.

This was by far the easiest and most time saving way for us to accomplish what we were after. The downside is it added an additional url slug to links on the social side. A very minimal downside indeed.

BuddyPress definitely opens to the door to making your WPMU more feature rich and giving your users more to do on your site. Our personal impressions and initial thoughts are it still has a bit of growing and development to take place to make it easier to work with. Not having the ability out-of-the-box to use a different theme is something I hope is changed in future developments.