Before giving you the changelog, let me tell you this, I found a way to make translated permalinks work, but, this is very bad in term of SEO so it is not yet implemented. The way I implemented it for now makes these work :
http://blog.zen-dreams.com/fr/nouveau_post
http://blog.zen-dreams.com/en/new_post, that’s great
and finally, http://blog.zen-dreams.com/en/nouveau_post and that is not good at all as two different permalinks with the exact same content…

I’m trying to find a way to make it work properly right now, and even those who forked the plugin have this behaviour. I have my ideas so we may see a version 1.2.6 before Christmas, but probably not.

And now, here is the changelog.

• 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
• Autosave (optional) so that, every 5 minutes.

This article was originally published on Zen-Dreams.com — Reproduction without authorization is strictly prohibited.

Looking for a WordPress Profesionnal, Hire 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.

This article was originally published on Zen-Dreams.com — Reproduction without authorization is strictly prohibited.

Looking for a WordPress Profesionnal, Hire me

add_action( 'wp_footer', 'bp_core_admin_bar', 8 );

remove_action('wp_footer', 'bp_core_admin_bar',8);

Before removing the toolbar

After removing the toolbar

Questions ?

Any questions about buddypress or integration of Wordpress-mu, Buddypress and BBPress ? Do not hesitate to ask in the comments below.

This article was originally published on Zen-Dreams.com — Reproduction without authorization is strictly prohibited.

Looking for a WordPress Profesionnal, Hire me

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 :D) 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]

This article was originally published on Zen-Dreams.com — Reproduction without authorization is strictly prohibited.

Looking for a WordPress Profesionnal, Hire me

Following some of your requests and due to the fact that I had to look in order to make ZdMultilang work with the latest Wordpress, Here is the updated article with explanation of how to integrate tinyMCE into your wordpress plugins.

So here is the code you need to include.

add_filter('admin_head','ShowTinyMCE');
function ShowTinyMCE() {
	// conditions here
	wp_enqueue_script( 'common' );
	wp_enqueue_script( 'jquery-color' );
	wp_print_scripts('editor');
	if (function_exists('add_thickbox')) add_thickbox();
	wp_print_scripts('media-upload');
	if (function_exists('wp_tiny_mce')) wp_tiny_mce();
	wp_admin_css();
	wp_enqueue_script('utils');
	do_action("admin_print_styles-post-php");
	do_action('admin_print_styles');
}

Don’t ask me to explain everything, I just found all these details while browsing the admin pages related to posts.

This article was originally published on Zen-Dreams.com — Reproduction without authorization is strictly prohibited.

Looking for a WordPress Profesionnal, Hire me

In order to do so, I need YOU. I will make all the improvements and bug fixes based on a priority list that I want you to help me build.
Below is a list of bugfixes and features that will be included in the next release (or two if I release first a version with full 2.8 compatibility)

1. Bug fixes

• Fix home page as a static page handling !
• Fix the save button in Wordpress 2.8 Fixed since 1.2.3
• Issue with the Media Upload icon Fixed in the upcoming 1.2.4
• Better handling of permalinks detection (permalink with more than 2 char)

2. Features

• Allow to create different permalinks depending on the language
• Update the zd_multilang_menu function to add parameters (like displaying only some elements)
• Add an option to allow displaying all the languages including the current one in the widget.
• Make a better, up to date F.A.Q / Help page.
• Create a function to get the current language used.
• Handling of Widget title translation.
• Uninstall function with Database cleaning
• Write post in non default language only (find a way to do this…)
• Add a theme switching function according to current language (requested by AMN)
• Translation could have a different date than the original post.
• See if it can work with WP-Print

Now it’s up to you to help me add items to the list. Please read the comments before asking for a feature/bugfix as I will try to update the list as much as possible.

This article was originally published on Zen-Dreams.com — Reproduction without authorization is strictly prohibited.

Looking for a WordPress Profesionnal, Hire me

The goal of this small tutorial will be to show you how to create popping windows in only a few lines of code.

First, the demo

Show popup

1. Setup your environment

First, you have to grab the latest version of jQuery on their site.

Unzip it where you are going to use it and just add to your site’s header these lines in the <head> element :
<script src="js/jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Once you have done that, you must create within your page the placeholder for your content, to do that, just add these lines just before the </body> in your code.

<div id="popup" style="display: none;"></div>
<div id="window" style="display: none;">
<div id="popup_content"><a href="#" onclick="Close_Popup();">Close</a> </div>
</div>

These lines will create two divs not nested so that you can get transparency on the Popup layer and not on the Window Layer. If you put Window inside the Popup div, you will see that transparency will be inherited and that’s not what we want here.

2. The css

In this part we will define the way we want to display windows, you can use nested css or simply put them in a separate file.

#popup {
height: 100%;
width: 100%;
background: #000000;
position: absolute;
top: 0;
-moz-opacity:0.75;
-khtml-opacity: 0.75;
opacity: 0.75;
filter:alpha(opacity=75);
}

#window {
width: 600px;
height: 300px;
margin: 0 auto;
border: 1px solid #000000;
background: #ffffff;
position: absolute;
top: 200px;
left: 25%;
}

You will note that there are 4 lines to handle transparency, this is for compatibility purpose until all the browsers support the opacity property. If you don’t really care about IE, you can skip the filter line.

So what do we have here ?

We have a black background with 75% opacity that takes the whole page (if you don’t care about IE, I would suggest changing the position: absolute; to position: fixed;. Why ? So that it never whos any white space when scrolling down to the page.

Second definition is just to position the window itself.

Here what it looks like :

3. The jQuery code for the effects

Once you have prepared the html and css, you must have your popup ready to be displayed.

Usually, what I do is put some Ajax request in there but I won’t go into that today, But we are still going to create one function to dislpay the popup and one to close it. Just after the divs you created, add these lines :

<script type="text/javascript">
function Show_Popup(action, userid) {
$('#popup').fadeIn('fast');
$('#window').fadeIn('fast');
}
function Close_Popup() {
$('#popup').fadeOut('fast');
$('#window').fadeOut('fast');
}
</script>

And that’s it, you are nearly finished, now all you have to do is trigger these function when you click somewhere (maybe using a onClick=”Show_Popup()” event)

This article was originally published on Zen-Dreams.com — Reproduction without authorization is strictly prohibited.

Looking for a WordPress Profesionnal, Hire me

First, you have to get your architecture design and identify any SPOF⁽1) once you have identified them, make sure they will be monitored first and with a good frequency.
Having identified your SPOF, you can now identify what also needs to be monitored and define a frequency for each item.

• CPU
• Memory
• Disk Usage
• System logs
• Specific processes (databases, webservers, application servers…)
• IPCS⁽²⁾
• System Backup logs
• Application logs
• Network usage
• Network connections

When you have defined what you want to monitor, define actions that are to be taken when reaching certain levels (which we will call alarms), for example send an email, raise an application error, etc… One thing that could be done is to define multiple levels such as warning, critical error, severe error with different actions for each state.

Choose your system.

Having defined you plan, you now have to choose a monitoring system, there are many available on the market and each of them as its purpose, pros and cons.
Here is a short list of systems you can have a look at:

• Tivoli
• Sysload
• BigBrother
• Nagios (OpenSource)
• Catci (OpenSource)
• rcp.rstatd
• SNMP
• MS Perfmon

Take actions!

When an alarm is set, take actions as soon as possible, any kind of actions that could set the level to normal state. You must not stay in the raised level, as your service level will decrease exponentially.

After having your state back to normal, analyse what happened and take actions to prevent this in the future. Update your monitoring if necessary, and also make sure to archive all events so that you will be able to prevent recurring problems more easily This is important to analyse problems after they happen and not before taking any corrective action because you cannot know how long the analysis will take. Also make sure to save everything that will help you analyse the problem, to do so you can define actions in your alarm to take a “snapshot” of the system automatically for analysis purpose.

Maintain the system.

Make sure your monitoring is always up-to-date; update it every time you change something on your server. Regularly check that you are not missing events happening on your system.

(1): A Single Point Of Failure is a part of your architecture that will cause the entire system to stop working if it breaks.
(2): Inter process Communication system, might contain Shared memory, semaphores and message queues

This article was originally published on Zen-Dreams.com — Reproduction without authorization is strictly prohibited.

Looking for a WordPress Profesionnal, Hire me

For application that runs on a remote server like Citrix⁽1) servers, Terminal Server⁽²⁾ , X11⁽³⁾ or any other system made to export the display, the behaviour is quite the same as you just put more power into your server. But sometimes developers know that the application is to be used in a multi-user environment and therefore try to optimize their code or they should.

The last group of applications as the same principle as remote application as there are run on a remote server but through a web server⁽⁴⁾. Main aspect of using a web server is that any user can use the application, even lightweight terminals such as PDAs or Smartphones. The main difference between those two groups is the sharing of resources but also multi-level components, making optimization more complex.

The goal of stress testing is to check every components⁽⁵⁾ of your application and to be sure that the final result is what was expected from a functional point of view and that the application is matching your SLR⁽⁶⁾. Tests are also made to find bottlenecks and to correct them.

Prior to test the applications, you must define a test plan from a functional point of view and define your targets, meaning that you must know how many users you want to simulate during the tests, how long the processing of a page can take, and so on. Just define your test plan before running the tests or you will waste lots of time tweaking it.

Having identified bottlenecks, optimization has to be performed, most of the time, optimization just consists of upgrading servers but it should also include optimization of the code/database/system parameters/network. Just find how much the optimization process will cost and what you have to gain for each part of the optimization.

1 : Citrix servers are commonly used in a graphical environment to export display to clients computer while having everything else processed on the remote server.
2 : MS Terminal Server is included in most of Windows Server environments exporting the display to a client computer while having the software run on the Terminal Server
3 : X11 is the graphical environment in most Unix Systems, the display can also be exported
4 : Apache, Tomcat, iPlanet, Websphere, Weblogic, RoR etc…
5 : Host server, webserver, application, database, network, authentication system, etc…
6 : Service Level Requirements, this define how the service must behave regarding customers.

This article was originally published on Zen-Dreams.com — Reproduction without authorization is strictly prohibited.

Looking for a WordPress Profesionnal, Hire me