Client Spotlight

Victory Boxing Club is a not-for-profit Christian organization based in South Omaha. Their mission is to Provide a safe refuge for the youth of South Omaha, by the pouring of Christian principles into lives…through the gift of boxing. -Servando Perales @ victoryboxingclub.org

The Project:

The Design

I was contacted by my friend Steve over at ididntdo.it to create a design for the Victory Boxing Club site. With Steve’s input and the copy provided by the client I was able to research the organization and develop not only a design that worked for them, but included several pages, social elements, calls to action etc. that I felt would help the client achieve their goals.

…and more.

Due to extenuating circumstances Steve’s schedule was suddenly full and his internet access limited. So I stepped up and handled content management, social networking and hosting set up so the site could go live without complication or delay.

Testimonial:

Scott was able to take a site from concept to live quickly while adapting to an ever changing schedule.

I had originally planned to do it myself but at the last minute was unable to. Scott took over that day and had an amazing concept to me within 24 hours. Anytime I had a change or request, it was integrated within hours.

When we finally went live, Scott took the time to guide the client through the setup of a great social network and the workings of their new site.

I personally cannot recommend him enough and I look forward to working with him more. -Steve Johnson @ ididntdo.it

Success!

victoryboxingclub.org is now live and interacting with their community and supporters via their new online presence including their blog, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube!

style.css and WordPress Custom Menus
So I was working on a WordPress blog and found that the comments in my theme files were doubled spaced. But only ones that I had recently edited with the editor in the admin panel (I don’t normally do this but I was working from my phone.)

style.css was one of the affected files so I went through it and removed all the extra spaces and uploaded it to the server. Then for some reason my custom menu was no longer loading and was defaulting to the native menu structure.

After going over all my theme files for about an hour or maybe more I finally realized that a single space character after the opening of the block comment in the declaration at the top of style.css was the culprit. I removed the space and everything worked again.

For those wondering if you have a similar bug, I also noted that everywhere my theme summary was displayed, where the theme name should have been displayed, instead there was a blob of text consisting of the theme name and everything else in the commented declaration at the top of style.css as well. So this was a red flag that the problem originated from there, so look at your theme summary!

So I was really impressed with the new buttons that ShareThis is offering now but was disappointed to find out that they don’t currently support them for WordPress (If you use their WordPress plug-in you get the old version of the ShareThis button).The new ShareThis WordPress plug-in has been released and you can find it here. But, they did provide some copy & paste code, so I figured where there’s a will there’s a way (As you can see from the counters below this post there’s a happy ending to this story!).

NOTE: This tutorial involves making edits to the functions.php file in your WordPress theme.

So here’s the copy & paste code provided by ShareThis:

This code goes in the loop with the post:

<span class="st_twitter_vcount" displayText="Tweet"</span>
<span class="st_facebook_vcount" displayText="Share"></span>
<span class="st_email_vcount" displayText="Email"></span>
<span class="st_sharethis_vcount" displayText="Share"></span>

This code goes in the footer of your page:

<script src="http://wd.sharethis.com/button/buttons.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
stLight.options({publisher:'YOUR PUBLISHER KEY'})
</script>

This particular code is for the vertical counters if you pick a different button type you will get different results. Note however, that if you aren’t going to use the counters then you may have issues outside of the scope of this tutorial. I’ve provided the above as an example of what the code looks like when we start out, you should really go to the ShareThis site yourself (sign up if you haven’t already) and copy and paste the button code from them because it will already have your publisher key embedded in it.

How to add the URL and title of your post:

ShareThis provides some attributes to control your counters. You need to add the st_url and st_title attributes to each one of the spans in the loop code shown above. If you don’t add these attributes then by default the counters will share and track the URL and title of the current page. Which is fine if we are viewing a single post, but on the home page for example, the buttons will be tracking and sharing the home page and not the individual posts with which they are associated.

How do we fix this?

You will need to use the get_permalink() and get_the_title() functions to return the URL and title of the current post in the loop. Then insert these values into all of your spans. This brings us to our first function which we will add to functions.php found in your themes directory.

sharethis_button()

function sharethis_button() {
$st_url = 'st_url="'.get_permalink().'" ';
$st_title = 'st_title="'.get_the_title().'" ';
	return '
		<p>
		<span  '.$st_url.$st_title.'class="st_twitter_vcount" displayText="Tweet"></span>
		<span  '.$st_url.$st_title.'class="st_facebook_vcount" displayText="Share"></span>
		<span  '.$st_url.$st_title.'class="st_email_vcount&amp" displayText="Email"></span>
		<span  '.$st_url.$st_title.'class="st_sharethis_vcount" displayText="Share"></span>
		</p>
		';
}

First we write our post’s URL and title to variables including the rest of the attribute definitions as well. So the value of these variables would be something like: st_url="http://www.piddmedia.com/tutorials/sharethis-social-bookmarking-counters-on-your-wordpress-blog" and st_title="ShareThis Social Bookmarking Counters on your WordPress Blog" Then we return our original spans but with the new attributes inserted into each one. I also wrapped the spans in p tags so the counters don’t misbehave with the layout. You might add some other styling depending on your needs.

NEXT:How to insert the counters into your posts: