Early Morning Child Theme

This elegant design was inspired by the colors of the early morning. It’s light, elegant and pleasantly surprising.

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Early Morning Child Theme for Thematic

Profile Builder version 1.1.21: fully customizable userlisting!

It’s been quite a while since we released a new version, but this is due to the complexity of the new feature this version of Profile Builder comes with: a fully customizable userlisting.

For those who just met up with WordPress, Profile Builder is WordPress registration done right; it lets you customize your website by adding a front-end menu for all your users, giving them a more flexible way to modify their user-information or to register new users.

Besides the new features and functionalities I will describe later on, we also added some minor bugfixes, and improved the query times a lot!

So what is userlisting, and what can it do?

Listing registered users to your blog/site has never been easier: to create a page containing a userlisting, insert the following shortcode in a (blank) page: [[wppb-list-users]].

For instance, to create a userlisting shortcode listing only the editors and authors, visible to only the users currently logged in, you would use:
[[wppb-list-users visibility="restricted" roles="editor,author"]].

The back-end has two textareas which lets you write your own html code for the front-end userlisting design: one for the “all-userlisting”, and one for the “single-userlisting”. Using the added, built-in extra functions, you can create a personalized userlisting easily.
Don’t have any ideas or coding knowledge? No problem! – we added html codes for a default userlisting for just such cases.

For more info regarding this, please visit the description page of this feature.

All in all we hope you take benefit of this cool new feature, and as always, if you have any ideas on improving this feature (or any other part of the plugin), or just want to report a bug, either ask about in the forum section, or write an email to gabriel@cozmoslabs.com.

By | Published: March 7, 2012 | Posted in General, plugins, Profile Builder, Wordpress | 1 Comment

WordPress Creation Kit – a sparkling new custom field, taxonomy and post type creator

WordPress Creation Kit
WordPress Creation Kit consists of three brand new plugins that can help you with the tough task of creating and maintaining custom post types, custom taxonomies and most importantly, custom fields and metaboxes for your posts, pages or CPT’s.

Why another plugin for this?

We’ve actually started work on this more then a year ago, even though we didn’t know it at the time.

We needed to offer to our clients an easy way to add repeating fields that were tied to particular page, post or custom post type. While there were quite a few existing plugins at the time none really fit the bill or had various issues. So we started developing our own API for creating them.

Built around two main concepts

Everything can be a repeater field

As I’ve mentioned, the main feature of our plugins is that metaboxes are actually repeater fields.
This means you can create complex pages like “Our Team”, “Testimonials”, “Our Products” where you have multiple team members, testimonials or products but the number can vary. Also check out the video at the bottom as it should make things a bit clearer.

NO Lock In – everything is saved as post meta or WordPress options

The Custom Fields Creator does just what is says. Every data from your meta boxes or repeater fields is saved as a default custom field in WordPress. They are a bit different though as we’re saving them as a serialized array but that’s something WordPress supports in full.

The big benefit of this is that you can use standard WordPress functions (get_post_meta) in your page templates to list the information entered from the backend. No custom functions and full compatibility with WordPress.

The Plugins

WCK Custom Fields Creator allows you to easily create custom meta boxes for WordPress without any programming knowledge. It supports repeater fields and uses AJAX to handle data.

WCK Post Type Creator gives you the possibility to create and edit custom post types for WordPress.

WCK Taxonomy Creator – create and edit custom taxonomies and attach them to post types.

A short video tutorial

Last but not least, please check out this video on how to create an “Our Team” page using Custom Fields Creator.

By | Published: March 1, 2012 | Posted in CMS, plugins, Recomended Reading, Wordpress | Tagged , , , | 39 Comments

Redesigning Cozmoslabs

I’ve been working lately on a redesign / re-branding of Cozmoslabs. Designing for your self is one of the most annoying things I’ve ever done. It’s hard to say “this is good, let’s leave it like that”. There’s always that feeling that something better can exist.

And I’m sure it does exist… so I’m going to save this iteration and continue work on the redesign.

What I’m trying to achieve

As it happens I’m not redesigning Cozmoslabs just as a design exercise.

With Profile Builder we started a journey into more complex plugin development. Besides that, we’re currently alpha testing three new plugins based on our WordPress Creation Kit api available on Github. Counting the free themes available for download, wpMail.me newsletter and Reflection Media (Custom WordPress Solutions) things just got crowded.

We needed a fresh start, an umbrella brand that will hold under it all our released projects for now and the future.

Here’s some of the things I’m trying to achieve with this redesign:

  • Transform Cozmoslabs into a recognizable brand.
  • Bold and Simple.
  • The website redesign should support all our projects without complicated menus.
  • Bring focus to our forums / registered users.
  • The blog and articles will still be an important part of the redesign.

With those in mind I present you the future Cozmoslabs.com (this won’t be live for another month at least. Still lots of things to do here.)

Cozmoslabs - WordPress Solutions for Developers

On the website design part of things, I’ve already started that but I’ll post some mockups once I have a clearer idea of what I want from it. Still a little bit fuzzy on that end :) .

So let me know what you think, do you like it, do you hate it? Just be blunt.

By | Published: February 13, 2012 | Posted in Design, General | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Profile Builder version 1.1.13 is officially out

Even though we released a few hot-fixes since v.1.1.6, it’s been a long time since we released a new big update for our ever-growing plugin…but wait no more, v.1.1.13 is finally here!

For those who just met up with WordPress, Profile Builder is WordPress registration done right; it lets you customize your website by adding a front-end menu for all your users, giving them a more flexible way to modify their user-information or to register new users.

Although we added a few new things (like 1 more custom redirect, and some usable parameters in the userlisting), the main feature we worked quite a lot on is redesigning the plugin’s functions from custom PHP functions to WordPress functions. This should solve a lot of the black avatar issues we read on the forums about.

We added the possibility to have a user defined meta-key name. When you add a new extra field you still get the custom_field_x default meta-name, but now you can change it according to your liking.

A few other useful things we added include filters (you can see a sum of them here), and a userslisting parameter [[wppb-list-users visibility="param"]] where param can be: public (so that anyone can view the userlisting, even visitors not logged in), or restricted (only logged in users can see it).

A few things we would like to mention regarding this version:

  1. The .mo and .po files in any language other then English are most of the time out-of-date as these are supplied to us from our users. If you have a translation you made (or updated) and want to share it with the rest of the community, you can send it to gabriel@cozmoslabs.com. This also regards any future updates of Profile Builder.
  2. Depending on the kind of update you make (automatic or manual) we saw that there were cases when the meta-names didn’t appear in the extra fields table. We built in a function to solve this, and to preserve the backwards compatibility with other versions of the plugin, but if you see some columns are missing (even though the column-heading is there), please make sure you deactivate and reactivate the plugin and see if that solved your issue.

UPDATE:

There was a minor bug regarding the way one could insert html links into the “agree to terms and conditions” checkbox, which is now fixed with a proper text-display. Version 1.1.14 should be available for download.

By | Published: December 13, 2011 | Posted in Profile Builder | 4 Comments

Understand how to create triangles with CSS

I’ve been creating css shapes for a while now, but just recently I’ve been starting to wonder how does the technique actually work and why.

You can find a good collection of css snipets here. Most shapes use css 3 properties but there are a few useful ones that do not require css 3 so you don’t have to worry about browser compatibility.

How to create a triangle with css

#right-triangle {
   width: 0;
   height: 0;
   border-left: 60px solid red;
   border-top: 30px solid transparent;
   border-bottom: 30px solid transparent;
}

Read More »

By | Published: November 21, 2011 | Posted in Tutorials | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Q&A about Akismet with Pete Davies

(a-kĭz-mĭt)

Pete Davies is a Business Engineer at Automattic and you’ll probably find him writing articles on the Akismet blog.

Akismet is an anti-spam filter for comments. If you visit the website, Akismet is described as “possibly the best way in the world to protect you from web spam”, which from my experience is not far from the truth.

However, with over 9 million websites that use Akismet on a daily basis, questions about privacy and differences between the personal and commercial account are bound to appear and Pete was really open to answer a few of them.

Read More »

By | Published: November 21, 2011 | Posted in Wordpress | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

WordPress Developer Tools

WordPress Developer Tools

WordPress Developer Tools


During the last 3 years while providing web-design and development solutions to our clients over at Reflection Media, we’re tried our best to optimize our processes and development time by reusing code, creating a database of often used code snipets and constructing generalist plugins when possible.

While this didn’t always work out as expected, we’ve tried to push for these goals to the best of our abilities and tried to “Do The Right Thing” as often as possible. Out of our efforts we ended up with two cool projects: BareSkin – a WordPress Starter Theme and Custom Field Creator – a easy to use class to create Meta Boxes for posts, pages and custom post types.

By building these WordPress Developer Tools we hope to save time and energy on our projects and create a solid base for more complex themes and plugins.

Both projects are in a ALPHA stage but stable enough to be of real use to you as well. I’ve been using both of them in client projects and I’m really happy on how they turned out.

Read More »

By | Published: November 3, 2011 | Posted in Theme Design, Wordpress | Tagged , , , , | 11 Comments

What Is WordPress?

Ever now and again the question arises with new clients that aren’t really tech savvy: “What Is WordPress?”

What I’m hopping to achieve with this post is to drop the technical jargon for a minute and explain in down to earth words what is WordPress , how can it help you, what is WordPress.com, what’s a theme and why do you need plugins.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a FREE web software that anyone can use to create and update a blog or web-site. You can install WordPress on your web-server (or hosting account) and then use the user interface to create pages, upload images or write articles.
Read More »

By | Published: September 26, 2011 | Posted in Wordpress | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Profile Builder version 1.1.6 has arrived

The latest version includes a few small, but important features if you wish to customize the plugin.

For those who just met up with WordPress, Profile Builder is WordPress registration done right; it lets you customize your website by adding a front-end menu for all your users, giving them a more flexible way to modify their user-information or to register new users.

We’ve also put together a short presentation video where you can see Profile Builder in action.

Now back to features. Firstly, we have completed the front-end registration plugin with a password recovery page. Just like every other page, this feature includes a shortcode ([[wppb-recover-password]]). Use this, with fully customizable emails and messages to skip the default WordPress forms all-together.

Also, by using the new (and now complete) custom redirects, your users will only have access to where you want them.

The second biggest feature of this release is the fact that you can mark the fields (both default and extra) as required. This means the user can’t register without having completed these fields, and neither can he delete this info later on from the edit profile page (the information can be modified but he/she won’t be able to submit the new data if it’s not filled out properly).

NOTE: at the moment this feature only works on the front end, but using this in conjunction with the custom redirects, your users won’t have access to the dashboard anyway.

Last but not least, I would like to mention the most important feature of this release: filters, the crème de la crème for all plugins.

We redesigned the plugin and added to every notification/content/values a filter to let you easily customize the layout for your own needs, without the fear of loosing the data after a new update.

You can find a detailed list of all the filters here.

We hope you enjoy the new features, and if you have any questions, just post a new topic over at the forums.

Also, there have been many interesting feature requests, which will be included in the next release(s), so stay tuned!

By | Published: September 22, 2011 | Posted in General, plugins, Profile Builder, Wordpress | Tagged | 12 Comments

New update for Profile Builder Pro available!

The first major update since the launch of Profile Builder has finally arrived!

For those who just met up with WordPress, Profile Builder is WordPress registration done right; it lets you customize your website by adding a front-end menu for all your users, giving them a more flexible way to modify their user-information or to register new users.

This update-pack was long awaited by a lot of users, especially since it took us a while to code it, test it and release it; so from now on we will focus mainly on more, smaller updates rather than fewer and bigger ones. But enough with the technicalities, let’s see what we got:

1.) New custom fields:

  • Datepicker
  • Country Select
  • Timezone Select
  • “I agree to terms and conditions” Checkbox

2.) Addons:

New features (from now on) will come as an addon pack, meaning they are present in the plugin core, but not active until you activate the one(s) you need. They can be found in a side-tab named “Addons” (intuitive, isn’t it?). Here you can activate whichever you need, and once active it/they will be listed in the side-tab also. This is done so for those who don’t need it, so it won’t complicate their experience with Profile Builder.

The addons added this update are:

  • User-Listing
  • Custom Redirects

The User-Listing feature is basically a short-code, [[wppb-list-users]]. Once added, head over to the back-end and activate the addon (if you haven’t done so already). There, under the User-Listing tab you will find some settings, regarding user-listing options. These set by an administrator will become the default settings in the front-end for every visitor/user to see. They can be temporarily overwritten by the visitors (locally), if they wish to do so, but they will revert to the settings the administrator saved once they close and reopen their browser.

The Custom Redirects are just that: you can set up the pages a visitor sees after he registered or logged in or if he tries to access the wordpress login page or the wordpress register page. Besides the fact that you can activate the “Custom Redirects” addon, you can also chose which of these four “actions” to activate (individually).

3.) Register a user with a certain role:

The old register shortcode was [[wppb-register]], and after registration the user created was (by plugin default) subscriber. I used the expression “plugin default” because it didn’t use the settings set up in the back-end of your wordpress installation, it just registered the user as subscriber.

But now this downside was taken care of: when placing the register shortcode, be sure to add the role=”user_role_name” parameter next to it, like so:
[[wppb-register role="user_role_name"]].

Thus, to register every new user as an editor, just use the following shortcode:
[[wppb-register role="editor"]]

Don’t worry in case you get it wrong, this won’t create a new user-role. Instead it falls back to the wordpress role set up in the back-end, and in case something should happen (not set up, or what not) it falls back to subscriber.

4.) More translations:

  • norvegian (thanks to Havard Ulvin, haavard@ulvin.no)
  • czech (thanks to Martin Jurica, martin@jurica.info)
  • dutch (thanks to Pascal Frencken, pascal.frencken@dedeelgaard.nl)
  • spanish (thanks to redywebs, www.redywebs.com)

We would also like to thank for anyone else who sent their version of the localized Profile Builder, and apologize we didn’t mention them here, but fear not: they are still listed in the readme file!

Last but not least thanks to all our users, who suggested really cool ideas, that were implemented in these new features, with the rest to come in the next update(s).

UPDATE:
Apparently there were some hidden bugs, one where the user tried to register and kept getting the “you need to agree to the terms and conditions before signing up” message even though there was no active Terms and Conditions checkbox. The second one was in the redirecting process after registration; it didn’t redirect all the cases (both when a user signs up and when an admin creates a new user). Both of them are fixed and version 1.1.5 was issued.

By | Published: August 17, 2011 | Posted in General | Leave a comment