mattern co. notes

WordPress for Libraries

matternco — Sat, 31 May 2008 21:23:08 +0000

Meredith Farkas recently blogged asking for examples of WordPress-based library websites. Seemed to be lots of discussion generated by that simple question, so this is definitely something folks are talking about.

WordPress MU for Social Networking

matternco — Sat, 31 May 2008 21:08:29 +0000

There seems to be much recent interest in customizing WordPress MU as a tool for startup and grassroots social networking sites— successful examples of this include chickspeak.com and mybabyourbaby.com.

The developers of these sites have said they will release plugin packages to the open source community, and there should soon be more information about this (from the ChickSpeak developer) at buddypress.

In addition, the DiSo (Distributed Social Networking) project is working on WordPress-based open source social networking components.

Exciting stuff!

Simple Web-based CRM Research

matternco — Sat, 31 May 2008 20:57:55 +0000

In researching web-based CRM options that would integrate with a potential client’s social network-leaning website, this is the preliminary range of options I can come up with:

Level 1: A simple email marketing tool like the web-based MailBuild or MailChimp could easily integrate with the website, capture names and emails, and support mass emails. However, the level of contact information and contact management features provided by this type of tool would be limited. Such plans can cost $5 plus 1 cent per recipient (MailBuild), or from $30 to $150 per month to accommodate 2,500 to 25,000 contacts (MailChimp).

Level 2: The web-based contact management tool Highrise is well known and easy to use. It provides robust contact management, supports import and export of a range of contact information, can create new contacts from web forms (although I need to investigate the extent of this further), and allows for sharing contact information within a group. Highrise’s major limitation is that it currently doesn’t include high quality e-mail marketing capabilities— this could be addressed by manually exporting contacts to a separate email marketing program like MailBuild. Monthly plans for Highrise can range from $24 per month for 5,000 contacts to $99 per month for 30,000 contacts.

Level 3: More robust web-based CRM solutions, like Salesforce, would provide integrated contact management and email marketing capabilities and would be capable of supporting significant growth over time. The main drawback of this type of tool is that it would be more complicated to set up and manage than the options listed above and would likely require additional support.

Embedding Flash

matternco — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:09:17 +0000

SWFObject is a standards-friendly method for embedding Flash content.

Ordering Posts in WordPress

matternco — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:38:24 +0000

The more I use WordPress as a CMS, the more it seems something like aStickyPostOrderER will come in handy. Learned about it in an article by Perishable Press.

Local WordPress with MAMP

matternco — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:17:10 +0000

See Michael Doig’s article about how to set this up

Managing Today’s Date and Hours

matternco — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 20:28:21 +0000

To display current hours, I’m thinking of doing something simple like working with custom fields in WordPress and using a bit of PHP to compare to display these based on the current day (ie, if it is Monday-Thursday, use the Mon-Thurs custom field…).

[Later...] Another option could be to use a calendar plugin, like wpng-calendar.

JQuery or Yahoo DOM libraries?

matternco — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:59:44 +0000

After using the Yahoo DOM library for a few image carousels, I needed to add a popup panel into the mix. I looked briefly at the Yahoo Panels, but ended up selecting the smooth Thickbox, which is easy to work with and based on JQuery. Now I’m looking at replacing my carousels with a JQuery option– this will cut down on the scripts introduced and hopefully make the site run a bit faster.

Customizable Menu

matternco — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:24:29 +0000

I needed to let visitors customize a Quicklinks menu as is done on the Humboldt State site. I ended up using PHP and Javascript (as well as the JQuery based Thickbox panel) to set cookies for the menu items. Then I used PHP in the menu (and in the form) to recognize if the cookie is on or off for each item and determine the CSS class accordingly.

Here are some resources I came across while researching how to do this:

Using a form & PHP to set cookies
PHP reference materials on cookies, and more
A List Apart on PHP
Discussion on using Javascript & cookies
Using Javascript to pass data from a form to cookies
Lists of code snippets at paulspoerry.com.
Lists of list options at maxdesign.com.
Using Javascript for a customizable start page

Book Cover Images

matternco — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 02:06:05 +0000

I’m looking into using book covers for a library website. Here are some technical and analytical resources I’ve come across:

The book Amazon Hacks has a simple approach for using product images from Amazon.
A conversation about using book cover images online, especially images from Amazon.
An article about how to properly use Amazon images.
Amazon’s Web Services Customer Agreement (see section 6.1), which says product images can be easily referenced/embedded with the ISBN, but via the partnership, there needs to be a link back to Amazon.
The Amazon affiliate program for information about link types. Under Product Links, it says that “we also provide Associates the option to host individual links themselves.”
A good Amazon beginner overview is at the Amazon affiliate program website.
The Amazon Associates Web Service, when used alone, must be used to drive traffic back to Amazon. This may not be appropriate for a library catalog.
A non-Amazon option would be to get images from the publishers, the bigger of which it appears have online systems for this. This would be Fair Use. Could these images be obtained via Amazon though? If so, they would need to be hosted on the user’s server, and they would not support the simple interface offered by Amazon.
Scriblio in action uses book cover images throughout its catalog that are linking internally but reference Amazon’s server.

I also saw some Amazon-related plugins for WordPress, although I ended up just using custom fields and code in the template to embed the images.

A simple Amazon Showcase plugin
An older Manalang.com WP-Amazon plugin (with related WP Amazon Google Group)
Amazon Simple Admin
Amazon Machine Tags