I found this awesome jQuery script for a carousel. It’s sort of a combination of the “smoothgallery” by Jondesign and the “Featured Content Glider” from DHTML. I like it better. It has some great features, like the hover arrows to direct scrolling, visual indicators in the top portion of the display that allow you to scroll, and the ability to display dynamic content. I look forward to implementing this one into my future designs.

Check it out yourself here: Agile Carousel

When I was creating this site, I had to figure out a way to display the single post page of my portfolio differently from a single page of a notebook entry. I wanted each to contain some different structure, and using one single.php page was not going to cut it. What if I wanted a different sidebar on the notebook page? After all, it’s content would not relate well with my front page sidebar.

So I looked for a more efficient and easy way to create multiple single page templates in Wordpress. It’s actually rather simple. Open your single.php Wordpress template and cut and paste the contents of it into a new file that you will name “single1.php”; this will be the template I use to display portfolio entries.

Then, paste the following:
[sourcecode language='php']
$post = $wp_query->post;
if ( in_category(’notebook’) ) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/notebooksingle.php’);
} else {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/single1.php’);
}
?>
[/sourcecode]

This special query is like a traffic router for your posts; if a post belongs in a certain category, send it to a certain template. If it’s not in any category, default back to the regular single.php template.

Querying posts and then filtering them by the category is smart and easy. In my case, if they belong to a certain category – in this case “notebook” – Wordpress displays the notebooksingle.php template file. You can use as many separate templates as you want with the “else” property.

You can use as many different single page templates as you want, and easily separate them this way.
For instance, you could trigger as many templates as you like:

[sourcecode language="php"]
$post = $wp_query->post;
if ( in_category(‘5’) ) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/article.php’);

} elseif ( in_category(‘6’) ) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/column.php’);

} else {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/blogpost.php’);
}
?>
[/sourcecode]

I hope this helps someone.

Both of my parents enjoy taking photos and when I came across these pictures, taken by my mother, I thought they’d be perfect to offer up. These are pictures of old floors, taken at various locations in Maine. They are grungy in nature, and display a great mix of colors and textures. The download includes nine full-size images.

Download the set (.zip)

Lately I have been using jQuery a lot more; handling image fades, transitions, and galleries. Today, I came across this plugin that can be used to display a photo gallery with jQuery. It’s highly configurable, and is built very well.

It features

• Smart Image Preloading after the page is loaded
• Thumbnail Navigation (with pagination)
• Bookmark-friendly URLs
• Slideshow (with auto-updating url bookmarks)
• Image fade transitions
• Download Link for the original image
• Flexible configuration

Check it out yourself:

http://www.twospy.com/galleriffic/#14

I have found that one of the simplest ways to manage images in wordpress is to use the custom fields. By simply inserting a “key” to identify the image, and the image path, you can easily manage and incorporate a variety of images into your site.

Step One

Decide what kind of image you want to use. In this case, we are going to insert a square thumbnail image next to each post, like below.

First you need to resize and upload the image to your appropriate folder. In the case above, it was a 100 x 100px thumbnail. Once you have done that, go to the post you would like the image to appear next to.

Find the Custom Fields section and give your image a semantic name like “postthumb” or whatever you’d like. Then type the image name into the value field.

After uploading the photo and assigning it a key field, it’s time to insert the following bit of code into the page you want it to display on. In my case, I’m inserting it at the beginning of the “notebook.php” template’s loop, as shown below: