Who: Meet Mark Taylor.
What: Mark is the owner of TAYLORMARK, a Digital Life Service. They offer services in recover, support, banking and consulting. What are they using WP for? It runs their website!
When: Mark got into wordpress THIS MONTH! Can you believe that?! And his company was a WCDFW09 sponsor too, that is some quick work and adoption!
Where: Mark is from the big D.
How: He is using WP so he doesn’t have to rely on a coder/designer to make small changes, updates and modifications. “It just allows our business to be nimble. I get to prototype the site will satisfaction then publish it.”

Be sure and follow her on Twitter or check out his website. You can also follow his company on twitter at: http://twitter.com/taylormark.

The wordpress community in Dallas is still around, even if Wordcamp is over. If you’d like to introduce yourself and get to know some of us, let me know or @ me. I’d love to give you a quick interview and help introduce you!

Be sure and check out the DFW wordpress meet up group. We meet once a month and it is always a great time. If you are on twitter, we use the hashtag #dfwwp so you can follow the conversations there too.

Who: Meet Kat Rice.
What: Kat is the owner and a consultant for Veribatim web design and consultation. She is using wordpress in the following ways: running 90% of their clients on wp, they make custom plugins for wp too, and she also runs her personal blog on wp.
When: Kat got involved with wordpress about 2 years ago.
Where: Kat is from the Dallas area.
How: As far as how she is using wordpress, “it is the vehicle that her company reaches the goals and meets the needs of their clients. It is flexible and we would not be as effective without wordpress. I just believe in the platform.”

Be sure and follow her on Twitter or check out her website.

The wordpress community in Dallas is still around, even if Wordcamp is over. If you’d like to introduce yourself and get to know some of us, let me know or @ me. I’d love to give you a quick interview and help introduce you!

Be sure and check out the DFW wordpress meet up group. We meet once a month and it is always a great time. If you are on twitter, we use the hashtag #dfwwp so you can follow the conversations there too.

I’ve never been to wordcamp so I have no idea what to expect at all.

I’ve never done mobile coverage of an event before either, so I have no idea what to expect there either.

Should be an interesting weekend, come say hi, I’d love to meet you if you are here. You can find me on Twitter @m_a_simo too.

Stay tuned!

So, I’m trying to pull a custom field and setting the result as $sortingTag I’m then trying to query_posts looking in a particular category and by a certain tag.

Here is the code I’m using:

<?php if ( (is_page('web')) or (is_page('print')) or (is_page('identity')) ) {

$sortingTag = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'sorting-tag', true);		

query_posts(array(
	'cat'=>17,
	'showposts'=>15,
	'tag'=>"$sortingTag",
));
?>

Here is how I’m trying to implement it:

I’ve set up child pages ‘web’, ‘identity’, & ‘print’ under the parent ‘Portfolio’. On each page I’ve set a custom field with the key ‘sorting-tag’ with it’s respective page name (i.e. web for web).

And I’m using posts to hold my portfolio pieces, depending on the project each could have one or more of the tags ‘web’, ‘identity’, or ‘print’ (spelled the same, with same case).

Now my problem, I figure I’d be able to pass the custom field and search by that value for the post tags. But it isn’t populating the loop at all, I do get a populated loop when I change ‘tag’ to ‘tag_slug’ but it still isn’t changing the query results, it is as if they are still unfiltered..

Anyone have any help or run into this before? I’d love to sort this out… lol sort. Get it?!? Haha, sorry, couldn’t help myself…

But seriously, little help… and if you could pass this on to your wordpress guru’s that’d be sweet too.

I was at the DFW WordPress May Meetup earlier today (at BJ’s) and met some really smart people that know a whole heck of a lot more than I do (and are much further along “the road” than I am).

One guy in particular, Randy Hoyt, was a great resource for what I’m attempting to do with wordpress. After talking with him for about 5 minutes, we got on the subject of Custom Field’s and he said Custom Field Template was a great tool that would help me achieve my goals.

Needless to say, I left the DFWWP Meetup pretty pumped to get back to my computer to start playing around with all the ideas of what I could do bouncing around in my head!

After I got the CFT plugin installed I decided to take it for a test drive so to speak. (*As I’m new to a lot of this, the nomenclature I use may be off a little, as I continue I hope I do a good enough job describing the process I followed. Also, if there is a better/more effective/efficient process than what I’ve followed, please, enlighten me!)

I made a custom field template that I titled “Portfolio” with the plans of handling all of the ‘extra’ data associated with a portfolio piece (i.e. Client Name, Client Quote, Portfolio Image, Skills used, etc…)

There is a great post by Gabriel Serafini (@gserafini) in which he highlights and does pretty good walk through of setting up your own CFT template. I won’t go into it here, check out his post.

Here we go! I had my template all set up and rigged up some test posts to test out the functionality and work out any bugs. All of the ‘simple’ fields worked beautifully (client_name, portfolio_image, etc…) but I had put in a custom field ‘skills_used’ that utilized checkboxes. Since you can click on more than one box it passes an array to that custom field, which I haven’t had to deal with up to this point. I didn’t know if I could parse the array successfully and apply the html tags I wanted to it as well and place it in the wp template I needed it in.

I found some good posts on the net but nothing that really dealt specifically with this particular issue (granted, I’m sure it is out there, I looked for like 5 minutes max…) so I rolled up my sleeves and went to work.

Here is what I came up with, I’m sure it is pretty sloppy (I consider myself a php novice pretty much.) but it works like a beauty. I decided to wrap everything in an unordered list and wrap each skill used in it’s own list item.

<?php //get skills_used (custom field) ?>
<?php $skills = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'skills_used'); ?>

<?php if(empty($skills)) {
	//if $skills is empty DO NOTHING!!!
}
else {

	echo '<ul class="skills-used">

		<li class="skills-used-title"><h4>Skills Used:</h4></li>';

	foreach ($skills as $skill) {
	    echo '<li class="'."$skill".'">'."$skill</li>";
	}

	echo "</ul>";
}
?>

*this code was placed into the single template file for my portfolio category posts* (It can go in any wp template you need it to go into, sidebar.php, single.php, etc…)

Description: I passed the custom field ‘skills_used’ which was part for the template that I created in CFT ( Remember the checkboxes? Ya, those guys.) to a variable $skills. Then I tested this variable to see if it was empty, if it was empty I wanted it to do NOTHING, although, if it had the good stuff, I wanted it. But the question was, how to get all of it. Enter “foreach”, basically, the jist of what is happening here is that I’m splitting the array apart and labeling each part it pulls off as the variable $skill (not plural!) echo’s it after wrapping it in the li tag, then forgetting it and moving to the next one, until there is nothing left. Tack on the close ul tag and wrap up the php.

An astute student would notice two ‘$skill’ varables being used each foreach. Very good padawan, I want css control over each one, so I’m listing the class of the list item as $skill. This way, if I use Photoshop CS4 for a particular project, I can place a sexy little blue square with “Ps” carved into it.

That, my friends, is what was so cool that it got me blogging at 1:30 am (pardon my spelling!). There is a whole lot of cool stuff you can do with custom fields and similar implementations to this, it just takes a little imagination and experimentation. Enjoy!