In order to dynamically create these page links, set the following variable within the loop in the archive template:

$pageNumber = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;

Then I spurt it out when creating my links like so:

<a href="http://example.com/category-b/page/<?php echo $pageNumber; ?>">Back to Category B</a>

The $pageNumber variable will automatically get the page number of the category you are currently browsing, which will then be inserted in your link to go to the same page of the other category.

The Facebook Like button is quite new, but I was surprised at the volume of plugins already in the WordPress plugin repository.  My needs were quite simple: that it work and that it has the option to use the XFBML version which allows the sharer to share with a comment. I went through several plugins that either didn’t work at all, didn’t provide the XFMBL functionality, or were just too much plugin for my simple needs.

I finally came across the aptly named “Facebook Like Button Plugin” that worked simply and perfectly.

This recommendation is for WordPress 2.9.2 and Facebook Like Button Plugin 1.3.4.

The first site is The Green Road Show. The client had a banner already designed and said she wanted a simple WordPress site set up to go with it. I created a child theme from my trusty standby, Mimbo,  which I’m loving more each time I use it (as well as each time I don’t).  It is so simple to modify and by default includes dropdown menus and post thumbnail generation. Clients are generally very happy with the results. I hardly ever use its built-in functions like the featured category posts on the home page. These could be useful if you aren’t going to get into the theme files and rearrange them, but I’ve never had a client have a use for them.

The next site we worked on was Design Life Blog. The site already had a full design created in PSD, and the client had purchased the Thesis theme from which to work. I previously had some experience working with Thesis and some other themes like it, like Hybrid. I wasn’t initially attracted to either of these themes because of the complexity involved in modifying them. Yes, there are many built-in functions that you or the client can manipulate without touching a line of code. That is the advantage. The disadvantage is that if you want to modify the theme beyond these built-in functions, you don’t simply go to the WordPress codex and follow the Template Hierarchy to create a new layout. No–you must actually program little mini-plugins called theme hooks. I’m not going to get into all the details on theme hooks, but suffice to say they drove me absolutely crazy. This may be because this particular site was so complex and customized. If I were working on a much simpler site where changing some colors, fonts, and column widths would do the job, then Thesis or Hybrid might be a good choice. But then again, I would probably still go with something like Mimbo just for simplicity’s sake.

But enough of Thesis, which probably deserves a whole post of its own. For Design Life Blog, I took the PSD design, then pulled up the Thesis theme and customized it beyond all recognition with theme hooks. This site really has a lot of cool additions. We installed VideoPress, which is Automattic’s own video plugin for HD video upload and playback. Then we created a contest plugin where visitors can enter design contests, upload images, and vote on other visitors’ contest entries. The client can see vote tallies and set contest start and end dates through the admin.

The third WordPress site we worked on was GraduateFog.co.uk. This site was already set up for the most part, we just came in for some small tweaks like resizing and placing the banner, creating the dropdown menu, and customizing the home page to the client’s specifications. The client had already chosen the Arras WordPress theme, which I liked for the most part, though parts of the coding seemed unnecessarily complex made modifying it much more time consuming. I had to dig through several directories and files before I figured out why it was doing what it was doing. The thumbnail generation is not automatically done like with Mimbo. This always leaves the client frustrated, since they generally have to insert urls in custom fields–not very intuitive. But at least customizing it didn’t involve theme hooks!

The first site is Id8, the Sellier Design blog. Sellier Design requested that we  turn their original design into a WordPress blog. We coded the theme from PSDs then installed it with the website system. The site is configured to pull in Twitter posts from two different accounts and automatically post them as blog posts. The client also can use the WordPress admin area to make other blog posts to the site.

The second site is Cardiopump Fitness. Using a design created by Bonita Pioneer, we coded and built out this website on the WordPress platform. Website features include interactive video clips, free workout downloads, a blog, and an online shop. The shop interfaces with PayPal for secure online payments.

HECM World

Sacramento, CA
This WordPress website to offers two content types: free content for anyone to access and member-only content in the form of premium reports and a member-only forum area. Once a visitor registers and makes his payment (through PayPal Standard), he may then immediately download the premium reports or access the member-only forums.
http://hecmworld.com

Roca Services

Washington D.C.
We transformed our client’s existing static website into a WordPress website with a completely new design. WordPress allows the client to update all content himself without knowing HTML. Offered in two languages, site highlights include an area where customers may pay their invoices online and a bi-lingual contact form for service inquiries.
http://rocadc.com

Business Matters

Geneva, IL
Business Matters broadcasts weekly podcasts about the impact of business on public policy and communities. We provide ongoing support and custom plugin development for this WordPress website. A highlight includes the the monthly podcast archives page which may be browsed through a point-and-click javascript interface.
http://businessmatters.net

The Mighty Sparrow

Red Bluff, CA
The Mighty Sparrow is a project of the California Parks Companies which aims to be your one destination for everything related to the California outdoors. We built this WordPress website by customizing a child theme of the popular Mimbo magazine theme. Other customizations include a most popular posts list, comments by Disqus, and site search with the Google Custom Search engine.
http://themightysparrow.com

in the Mix

Woodstock, GA
in the Mix is the online counterpart to the print magazine of the same name. Highlights from this WordPress website include a rotating banner on the home page, ad spots managed by the client, and celebrity recipes where visitors can search drink recipes by various criteria. Posts are organized on an issue basis as well as by category and tag.
http://inthemix.on-premise.com

Where the heck is that extra padding coming from!?!

Bless the day that I heard about Firebug, an add-on for Firefox that allows you to highlight different HTML objects on your page and see the styles associated with that object. See that 10px extra padding on your image? That’s coming from line 131 of your styles.css file.

The only problem is when, as usually happens, you need to debug CSS between different browsers. IE8 almost never renders the page the same way as IE6, IE7, Firefox 1, 2 3, Safari, and Opera. (Yes, I have all these browsers installed on my computer.) Although I haven’t used it yet, Firebug Lite apparently solves this problem. It is a Javascript file that simulates Firebug’s features in any browser. I will definitely try that out and report back on my findings. In the meantime, anyone else try this?

I’ve found a new tool that helps significantly with the tiresome process of backing up your files. It’s called Synkron. I first heard of it from the productivity blog, When I Have Time. The post I just linked to has a much more in-depth writeup than I will go into here.

Synkron works on several operating systems. Hook up your external hard drive (if you don’t have one, get one). Then tell Synkron what directories to back up. I have two directires on my computer where I store my personal and business files–I simply tell Synkron to “clone” these two directories to my hard drive. Cloning will copy any new files to the hard drive directory as well as delete any files that aren’t in the directory being cloned. The first time I did this, I saved about 1GB space on my hard drive from deleting previously backed up files that I had deleted on my computer but were still on my hard drive.

One issue I’ve found is that if you have Firefox and other applications open on your computer, Skynron takes forever to finish it’s cloning–I’m talking several hours here. Yesterday I closed all applications on my computer before starting the cloning process and Synkron was done in 2 minutes flat.

Before I knew about WP-Hive, I gave WordPress MU a try. The installation is quite complicated if working with multiple domains, and then you run into the issue that many plugins and themes are not compatible with MU. MU is great if you’re thinking of running a social network of blogs, but not the ideal solution for running several separate sites on one installation.

There is also Stephen Rider’s Virtual Multiblog which sounded great at the outset, but the instructions proved complicated, involving symlinks for pointing the different domains. Edit: Per comment below by Stephen, symlinks are only required if the multiple blogs are set up in different directories.

Come to the rescue WP-Hive. A simple plugin, simple instructions, simply park your domain through cPanel, install the new WordPress site using the new domain, and you’re set to go. You have one installation you have to upgrade for everyone. All the plugins you upload for one blog are available to all. Each installation will run it’s own theme, it’s own set of active plugins, and it’s own user and permission set. It gets somewhat complicated when adding XML sitemaps and robots.txt so that each site has it’s own, but following the instructions easily get’s that done.

This site is running on a WP-Hive setup, as well as our client’s site Roca Services and two wedding websites I set up for some friends. We will no doubt be adding many more sites on this setup now that creating and maintaining them is so easy.

Both softwares have their pros and cons. I originally stuck with bbPress because it is so customizable. Since I was used to customizing WordPress, bbPress follows a lot of the same techniques: making theme files with template tags, adding plugins for extra functionalities, using an admin backend for, well, admin things. While the integration process with WordPress was a bit complicated at first, it got better. Then WordPress 2.6 came out and bbPress would no longer integrate. User registrations and logins for WordPress 2.6 and higher would not synchronize with bbPress. I waited quite some time for a fix to come out, but it never did. The bbPress user forums suggest downgrading to WordPress 2.5.1. However, this limits you from using new and updated WordPress plugins that don’t work in older versions. Apparently Automattic is working on a new version of bbPress which will be compatible and better.

You can see a WordPress 2.5.1 integration with bbPress at HECMWorld.com. On this site we’ve created a “member-only” forum accessible to paying members only using existing and customized plugins for bbPress and WordPress. So the bbPress pros: very customizable in theme and function. Cons: ironically doesn’t integrate with it’s sister software, WordPress (unless you use an older version).

The Simple:Press forum had one big thing against it from the beginning. The default install is ugly. And for customizing appearance, you’re stuck with the options available through the admin backend. This was a big drawback for me as I was used to having full control over the design. Recently, though, the folks at Simple:Press have done an overhaul which now gives you much more control over appearance. I am quite impressed with the level of customization I now have over the forum functionality too. One big plus is allowing unregistered guests post as you build up your user base. Another big pro for this plugin is the ease of installation and integration. As a plugin of WordPress, it uses the WordPress user registration and login by default. It also fits nicely into your existing design. Just create a page for your forum, and there it is. See my new and customized Simple:Press forum at Girlebooks.com.

For now I’ll probably stick with Simple:Press. It seems a lively community and the developers are dedicated to their product. I hope they stick around.

The site’s main focus is hosting free ebooks. Since we have our own hosting space for our web development work, I have been using the extra space on that account for Girlebooks. Lately, due the the increasing popularity of the site, Girlebooks has been hogging all of our extra bandwidth and disc space so that we have none left for hosting new clients or upgrading existing accounts. It was either buy more space on our hosting account or seek out an alternative for Girlebooks’ growing needs.

Amazon S3 is an extremely cheap solution for hosting files, and its pay-as-you-go pricing model means you’re never paying for space or bandwidth you don’t use, and you never will run out of space and freeze up your site. Great! That sounds like the perfect solution, right? Unfortunately there is currently no web-based interface for transferring files to their system–it’s only accessible through SOAP and REST APIs. Since I’m not familiar with SOAP or REST, I’m out of luck.

Come to the rescue S3Fox which I discovered thanks to this article at CodingHorror.com (which has a much better tutorial on using S3Fox than I have here). Once installed as a Firefox add-on, S3Fox appears just like an FTP program, with your local files on the left, your S3 files on the right. Create your “buckets” on S3 to host the files, upload, and set permissions. Then link to your S3 Files from your website. The download manager plugin I use for Girlebooks, Drain Hole, has built-in support for S3 hosted files.

It worked flawlessly. I haven’t set up all the ebooks this way yet, but you can already see the results with our most popular ebook on the site, Pride and Prejudice.