More tips for styling the WordPress tinyMCE editor

Blue WordPress logo, courtesy http://wordpress.org/about/logos/A few weeks ago, I blogged about styl­ing the tinyMCE editor in WordPress to resemble your WordPress theme’s con­tent area. On this post, I received a com­ment from LA, ask­ing if it’s pos­sible to style the tinyMCE editor for spe­cific posts or post tem­plates. Folks, it’s WordPress… anything’s possible!

With my mis­sion at hand, I set to work. I’d been think­ing about this for a while after writ­ing the ini­tial blog post and am please to say that I have found a solu­tion. Please be sure you’ve read through the ini­tial blog post, as the main points are covered over there.

There are a few steps we need to go through here. They’re pretty straight for­ward, so bear with me. :)

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This time for Africa — World Cup Pride

Bafana Bafana Logo

Okay, so the Soccer World Cup bug has def­in­itely bit­ten me. I don’t gen­er­ally fol­low much soc­cer, but wow, what a vibe!

If one steps back and takes a look at what the world exper­i­enced not even an hour ago, it’s quite mira­cu­lous, actu­ally. An entire nation, across all con­tin­ents of the world, united in sup­port of Bafana Bafana as they went up against Mexico in the open­ing match of the 2010 Soccer World Cup. And that first goal… wow!

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Styling the tinyMCE editor in WordPress

WordPress logoWith WordPress’ easy to use nature and user inter­face, con­tent man­age­ment of web­sites is access­ible to a vast range of users, from the Bill Gates’ of the world right through to users who dis­covered this “inter­net thing” just yes­ter­day. Once the con­cepts of “what is a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem?” and “Okay, so this is the ‘backend’ and the web­site is the ‘fron­tend’” have been grasped, the usual ques­tion arises: “So, why does the backend con­tent look dif­fer­ent to the fron­tend con­tent?”. To this ques­tion, we are about to say one thing: “Question… be gone!” Read More »

Restaurant review: Fusion Cafe, Bistro

Fusion CafeOkay, so who doesn’t love a good meal out, hmmm? I’m not much into writ­ing res­taur­ant reviews or any­thing, so I thought I’d give it a go with the res­taur­ant I ate at last night –Fusion Cafe– and share my thoughts and exper­i­ences at the res­taur­ant. I’ve been walk­ing past the res­taur­ant and not going in for a few months now, on the way to other res­taur­ants, and was pleas­antly sur­prised when I decided to finally have a meal there.

Fusion Cafe is a sports bar/​restaurant hybrid. The sec­tions are sep­ar­ated by a per­pen­dic­u­lar walk­way which allows vis­it­ors to eat in the res­taur­ant and not be dis­turbed by rowdy sports fans, if they’re look­ing for a quiet meal. The divi­sion between the two is subtle yet just right to be con­veni­ent for vir­tu­ally any vis­itor. Read More »

Enhancing the comments list in WordPress

With the intro­duc­tion of the wp_​list_​comments() func­tion, WordPress enabled users to eas­ily list com­ments on the web­sites without hav­ing to manu­ally run a series of loops and quer­ies to get the com­ments into neat XHTML. This func­tion out­puts default code with a selec­tion of options for how this code is struc­tured. Today we’ll be cus­tom­ising how com­ments are dis­played in our WordPress theme, and adding a few extra enhance­ments to our com­ments while we’re at it (one of them being the Twitter user­name we added before). Lets start with the call­back, shall we? Read More »

Storing a Twitter username with comments in WordPress

Follow me on TwitterWe’ve all seen this before when com­ment­ing on a blog post we’ve just read. The stand­ard com­ment form on a WordPress-​​driven web­site asks for a user’s name, email address (not pub­lished), web­site address and their com­ment. What if we could get some other inform­a­tion from the user*, and later integ­rate that into their com­ment? Why not get their Twitter user­name and link back to their Twitter pro­file as well as to their web­site? This tutorial will explain how to do just that.

* While this tutorial uses a Twitter user­name as an example, vir­tu­ally any addi­tional inform­a­tion sup­plied by the user can be stored along with their com­ment (a rat­ing, a selec­tion of their social media pro­files, etc). Read More »

South African bands and why they rock

I love South African music. There’s some­thing unique about the South African music industry, the cul­ture behind the bands and the unique ded­ic­a­tion and pas­sion with which musi­cians and industry folks go about things. I’ve been listen­ing to some really excel­lent South African bands lately and the other way, while in the car, it occurred to me that the band I was listen­ing to released the album almost 6 years ago. Despite hav­ing released sub­sequent albums and hav­ing grown astound­ingly as a band, the album I had on still soun­ded amaz­ing. This notion lead me to the topic of this blog post– bands I’ll most likely still be listen­ing to in 10 years time and why.

A few months ago, I posed the ques­tion of “is it the bands or the musi­cians?”- this ques­tion repeats itself here. It is said that a song, when played in a par­tic­u­lar con­text, can trig­ger memor­ies and feel­ings from a point in your his­tory. Below is a list of sev­eral South African bands, what they do and what they mean to me. These are just some of the bands that have fueled my love for South African music. If you haven’t heard of sev­eral of them, I recom­mend you try and check them out (well, those that are still around). Let’s kick things off, shall we? In no par­tic­u­lar order… Read More »

My (updated) WordPress Plugins Toolbox

Blue WordPress logo, courtesy http://wordpress.org/about/logos/Last year, I wrote about my WordPress plu­gins tool­box, a series of WordPress plu­gins I find myself using day in and day out. Since then, the list has grown and developed fur­ther to adapt to my vary­ing needs when con­struct­ing WordPress-​​driven pro­jects. Below is an updated list of the plu­gins I find myself using almost always, in addi­tion to the cus­tom tweaks and wid­gets I’ve writ­ten to accom­mod­ate my needs within WordPress. Read More »