First, you should create a network of blogs using following these instructions : http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network

Once you have your network set, just create a second / third blog with the proper sub urls. You can now share the same plugins, same wordpress installation, same theme with various languages.

What I usually do is have one main blog just as a placeholder, one with /fr base url and one with /en base url.

I still miss the functions to get links between posts but we could probably find plugins to do that

That was easy wasn’t it?

Next time I may talk about exporting zd_multilang content. I made a plugin for that but I still need to make some changes to make it work properly.

The second reason is simply that with WordPress 3.0 you don’t need any plugin to get bilingual content.

This is why I made a new plugin to export ZdMultilang content to WordPress .xml format.

I will also make a short tutorial on how to create and manage a FULLY multilingual blog with WordPress 3.0 soon.

If anyone wants to fork or keep on maintaining the plugin, you are welcome to contact me.

It will include lots of new features, some bugfixes and still no different permalinks for each languages.
Apparently someone managed to do it for Carla Bruni Sarkozy but they forked the plugin and didn’t share the changes…

I just contacted the company who made the website and see if they will share the knowledge. If not, then we will all have to wait until I fix that.

In the meantime, I did some improvements to the plugin, here is the changelog for version 1.2.5 :

• The most expected feature is now working : You can have static pages as a frontpage !
• Updated a bug with translation icon in the page while the page has never been saved
• Added options to hide the flag in the widget
• Function zd_multilang_menu now takes two paramaters : zd_multilang_menu (show_language_name, show_language_flag) by default these are true
• Added an option to display original post while translating
• Added a donate button if you want to support development of the plugin
• Ability to choose the user level needed to edit content
• Added an option to keep comments separated – Amazing work done by Pau Sanchez

Stay tuned, I’ll let everyone know as soon as I publish the next version, it should be soon.

1. Meet people

So that’s what I did, first by Going to the Summer meetup of meetups, but it was very crowded. Then I’ve been to a second one more focused on Internet Marketing. That where I had the chance to meet John Chow and talk with him for nearly an hour about marketing, WordPress and many other topics (like Airbus A380 ) as well as how he got banned and reintroduced to the Google search.

2. Work

I’m usually a big fan of the let people see how good you are and they will contact you, but it’s very difficult to do when you don’t know the people in your new place.

So, I started my business here by Working for a great video game company, SlantSixGames. This project was about making their entire website using WordPress as a CMS and Blog. I will repeat myself, but I really enjoyed working with these guys ! Lots of passion in their work and the design was really awesome as you can see below.

I just finished a new project for a Sports author, this project was about integrating the design into a WordPress theme. I will post more about this contract later (when the page will be live

3. WordPress Consulting in Vancouver

I know there are already lots of companies doing WordPress consulting in Vancouver, but I also know there is still room for me

The truth is that there are more Joomla! and Drupal consultants here than WordPress Experts here. I Just wish there was more events around WordPress in order to meet some WordPress fans and can’t wait for the next WordCamp Vancouver.

There is soon to be a WordCamp Fraser Valley but I won’t be able to attend because it’s my daughter’s birthday !

All that to say that I’m a happy WordPress Consultant in Vancouver, and do not hesitate to contact me if you are looking for a WordPress Expert.

[Photo credit: llawliet]

Once you have decided the features you are looking form you should try to get some inspiration. Inspiration is very important to understand your niche and to find out what your audience would like to see in a Blog and what they do not expect. Of course, inspiration is not copying a blog, au contraire !

You will have to find what is best for you, take bits and pieces everywhere to make your own design unique !

Here are some specific places where to find inspiration:

1. Webdesign Cluster on Flickr
2. Web Design Pool on Flickr
3. WebDesignerWall made a great post on finding Inspiration
4. 44 Must Learn Web Design Layout Tutorials in Photoshop @ Naldz Graphics
5. 40 Web Design Artists And 102 Websites Worth Watching @ 1stwebdesigner
6. 25 Incredibly Artistic Websites @ vandelaydesign
7. 50 Stylish Navigation Menus for Design Inspiration @ Six Revisions
8. 30 Most Inspirational Business Websites @ elitebydesign
9. 41 Great Looking Free WordPress Themes @ Hongkiat
   

But there are also some more generic places to go for your daily dose of inspiration

• Smashing Magazine
• The FWA: Favourite Website Award
• Abduzeedo
• Css ZenGarden
• Naldz Graphics
• Elite By Design – Inspiration category
• The Design Inspiration

And you, where do you find your inspiration ?

[Photo Credit: stephenpoff]

1 – List the good/bad things about your design

Before to go to far, you should make a list of all the features you want and all you want to get rid of from your current design.

Which basically means, what do you want to keep from your current design and what do you dislike ?

For example, you might want to get rid of that left sidebar and move it to the right, get a better search system but want to keep your great Archives page !

2 – Define your style.

You have to define your topic. Then you’ll have to decide which style you will use.
Why is that ? Mostly because your topic and your style will have a bigger impact with a design made for them.

Let’s say for example you are a Video game company and you want to have a funny design, then you cannot have a serious style as it will be misplaced. If you have a comic style logo and have a corporate tone, then your audience will be lost.

An the contrary, if you have a profesionnal looking website like the one we can see at EA, then your tone as to be corporate.

3 – Define your content guidelines

How do you intend to present your content, one image as a header, 2 paragraphs as the introduction and h2 titles to cut the content ?

This content guidelines will help you to define the whole structure of the site (cf ch4). If you use a banner for all posts, then you have to define the placeholder with the correct sizing to make sure there is consistency on all pages of your design.

As well, if you do use separators for paragraphs, you’ll have to remember to design them.

4 – Define the general structure

You have to know how the content is going to be organized, this means define (or change) the names of your categories, the pages and how they will be organized, like subpages etc…

By doing that, you will give more consistency to your blog as well as readability. For example, you can see that I do have a header with pages, this will change in next design as there will be more sub-pages and therefore more submenus. I will also join multiple pages into one page with subpages.

About + Resume + Contact will become an entire category (page + subpages) and will lighten the header.

[Photo Credit: Caro Wallis]

This is no secret, it is a WordPress powered website, thus giving Slant Six Games the power to use it as a corporate website, and as a blog at the same time.

This was the challenge, while having dynamic pages, we wanted to have static pages and a blog as well. The graphics, layout and wireframes was built by Karyo Edelman and it was integrated and developed by myself. The most challenging part of this website, appart from making it compatible with Internet Explorer 6 was the changing layout depending on the pages you are looking at. And also the apple spotlight functionnality that was requested as the search engine.

Basically, you have the homepage (3 column layout), the blog (2 column layout), single page (2 OR 3 columns depending on the content) and static pages (2 or 3 columns depending on the content). Below are some screenshots of the site, of course you can also go and check it live !

Zen-Dreams will also change

And now, it is time to change this layout ! I will try to make posts during this process to emphasize the process and show you how to : Integrate ZdMultilang in your design and how to create your own WordPress Template.

Screenshots

Slant Six Games Homepage

The blog @SlantSixGames

Life at Slant Section

The search box in action

]]> http://blog.zen-dreams.com/blog-en/2009/03/25/slant-six-games-new-website/feed/ 0 http://blog.zen-dreams.com/blog-en/2008/12/10/zdplugins-now-have-an-official-forum/ http://blog.zen-dreams.com/blog-en/2008/12/10/zdplugins-now-have-an-official-forum/#comments Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:15:59 +0000 Anthony http://www.zen-dreams.com/en/?p=553 As you might have noticed, there is now a new tab on this site. It corresponds to a forum I installed today in order to provide more collaboration with plugins support.

This will give everybody the chance to share their knowledge regarding various plugins I created.

I Hope this will help you all.

Photo Credits :Haags Uitburo

So I first needed to create the DAL.

The DAL must stay : easy to use, coherent (meaning no differences between different DBMS) and with no useless features.

So the first thing to do was to create a generic class encapsulating every aspect that will be generic enough to be DBMS not specific. This class is dna.database.class. It also allowed me to define the behavior and structure of inheriting classes.

Talking about inheritance, for now there are only four classes. MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite 2 and Oracle. Yes this means that the DNA-Framework will have support for all of these systems and probably more when I’ll create an ODBC class

So, briefly, I started the creation of the class system monday and today, the four classes exists and are able to :

• Execute SQL queries (anything)
• Select and browse through results
• Export as SQL or CSV result of a query
• Import from SQL and CSV
• Fetch various states (queries / dbms)

Below is an example of the same code executed on 4 different DBMS.

MySQL

SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> anthony@mysql.com
    -> toto@mysql.com
INSERT INTO MS_User (Email) VALUES ('test@MySQL.com')
SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> anthony@mysql.com
    -> toto@mysql.com
    -> test@MySQL.com
DELETE FROM MS_User WHERE Email='test@MySQL.com'
SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> anthony@mysql.com
    -> toto@mysql.com
PostgreSQL

SELECT * FROM "MS_User"
    -> Anthony@PostgresQL.com
    -> toto@postgresql.com
INSERT INTO "MS_User" ("Email") VALUES ('test@PostgreSQL.com')
SELECT * FROM "MS_User"
    -> Anthony@PostgresQL.com
    -> toto@postgresql.com
    -> test@PostgreSQL.com
DELETE FROM "MS_User" WHERE "Email"='test@PostgreSQL.com'
SELECT * FROM "MS_User"
    -> Anthony@PostgresQL.com
    -> toto@postgresql.com
SQLite

SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> anthony@sqlite.org
    -> toto@sqlite.org
INSERT INTO MS_User (Email) VALUES ('test@SQLite.com')
SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> anthony@sqlite.org
    -> toto@sqlite.org
    -> test@SQLite.com
DELETE FROM MS_User WHERE Email='test@SQLite.com'
SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> anthony@sqlite.org
    -> toto@sqlite.org
Oracle OCI

SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> toto@oracle.com
    -> Anthony@oracle.com
INSERT INTO MS_User (EMAIL) VALUES ('test@Oracle OCI.com')
SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> toto@oracle.com
    -> Anthony@oracle.com
    -> test@Oracle OCI.com
DELETE FROM MS_User WHERE EMAIL='test@Oracle OCI.com'
SELECT * FROM MS_User
    -> toto@oracle.com
    -> Anthony@oracle.com

First, I’m re-writing the DNA-Framework, I don’t know yet what will come out of it, probably something big I’m not sure yet if it will be released as OpenSource framework or not. I’ll decide that when version 1.0 will be ready.

And the other thing is I’m completly rewriting ZdStats with better spam detection and much more realistic filters. Even though I know that my filters are more permissive than google’s, my stats are also much more realistic. Why is that ? Simply because I don’t rely on javascript only, therefore I also count users that come to your website with javascript disabled (or google filtered)