IBS Team Blog

It's been awhile since the original release of the Simple Realty Theme, and even thought it was rather experimental, than commercial project, I was quite surprised in the amount of interest it received. A few days ago I released version 1.5 with a major overhaul of the administrative panel, plus multiple functional and design improvements.

I spent too much time trying to hunt down this problem: Google Maps inserted into a WP blog post loads the map control icons, Google logo and copy right text, but doesn't display the actual map. All I could see is a gray background.

It appears to be a pretty common problem with WordPress plugins that use Google Maps API. And the problem is in CSS. Assuming your JavaScript code is correct, make sure that images within the map layer have this rule

#your_map_id img {
max-width: none;
} 

That's all. Hope this helps some one :)

While I was working on my next generation of Simple Realty Theme for WordPress, I tried using Featured Content Gallery plugin and got really frustrated with it, since I couldn't get it to work. I spent almost half of a day trying to debug JavaScript errors and even after I got it fixed, it still wouldn't work.

Details

Advanced Text Widget is a regular text widget that has extensive conditional options to display content on pages, posts, specific categories etc. It supports regular HTML as well as raw PHP code. With these flexible appearance conditions, you can have your content showing up only in certain places of your Wordpress blog (or web site), and not on every single page, without editing your templates.

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Current Versions: 1.0.2 - only for WordPress 2.8 or higher.

While I was working on a few WordPress based web sites at our office, I discovered that thickbox (effect) code was included into the WordPress core. Beside displaying images in a fancy pop-up overlay, thickbox also can handle different content types or code in a similar way.

Being in a real estate industry myself, I noticed that a lot of agents are using WordPress for their real estate blogs and, some, even for web sites. Even though I'm a huge fan of Drupal, which I don't think will change in the near future, WordPress is one of the most popular and user friendly blogging platforms today. Since I developed at least half of a dozen themes for WordPress, I thought I would try to create something for the real estate community. Who knows, may be you guys will find it useful.

Details

Simple Sidebar Navigation is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily create custom sidebar navigation widgets. By simply selecting existing pages from the list or adding custom links you can create sidebar navigation blocks in seconds without any PHP knowledge.

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Current Versions:
- 2.1.2 for WordPress 2.8 and newer
- 2.0.9 for WordPress 2.7 and older

Earlier versions are available as well.

Features Include:

• Flat and multi-level navigation hierarchy for existing pages and custom links.
• Very flexible conditional appearance options (greatly expanded from before 2.0 version).
• Out-of-the-box Suckerfish support.
• Option to add navigation links with custom title, url and target attribute.
• Unlimited number of navigation widgets.
• Optional setting includes blog posts into the navigation selection list (only pages are available by default).
• Support for custom drop-down menus CSS.

This is something I've done already so many times, but just because I don't do it every month, I forget it all the time. So, I thought I would make a reminder note to myself and anyone else who has similar problem :)

The easiest way for me to import an sql file into a database in WAMP environment using command line is using follwoing:

1. Run the cmd (DOS) and get into the mysql folder, which in my case works like this

C:\>cd C:\wamp\bin\mysql\mysql5.0.51b\bin

2. Then use this command to fire up MySQL

Pretty good news from Google today - they have added "URL Removals" options to their Webmaster Central tools. This tools allows to remove not only URLs, images or files from Google's index, but also whole directories, sub folders, a whole site if you wish and even cached pages in the results. I noticed that many agents lately fighting duplicate content issues, wrong cache in the results, supplemental results etc. Well, I think this is a great tool to play with.

Graywolf created pretty exstensive list of Wordpress plugins that will help you to improve your blog's SEO and usability. Check it out, I think it's well worth bookmarking.