WordPress Simple Social Sharing Widget

WordPress Simple Social Sharing Plugin adds a 'Simple Social Sharing Widget' to your theme. After activating the plugin go to the Widget section of your dashboard and drag and drop the widget to your desired sidebar location.

Installation and Basic Configuration

1. Download the plugin. Download from GitHub
2. Install and Activate the plugin
3. Visit 'Widgets' in your theme appearance.

4. Drag and Drop the new widget to the desired sidebar.

5. Enable or Disable social sharing buttons.
6. Set the social sharing button urls to your desired values.
7. Save your new settings.
8. Go to the front end of the site. You can see the new social sharing buttons.

This theme is an advanced version of 'The Simplest WordPress Theme', a basic WordPress theme which was introduced in a previous post, with sidebar functionality.

https://github.com/upekshawisidaga/wordpress-simple-social-sharing

Freelancer.com is GREAT

Initially I thought to rename this post as 'Lost $125USD'. However I changed the title of the post later. PHP Sri Lanka lost $100USD [$125USD] in a recent project. 19th August 2012 was a normal day except it wasn't. In the morning I bid on several carefully chosen projects on freelancer.com as usual. After a brief discussion on the clients requirements, I was awarded the project.

Project ID: 2415235
Project Name: WP Template For News Website
Project Poster: kinza852147

NOTE: The project is deleted and you will not be able find it on Freelancer.com

I am a basic member of Freelancer.com. So just after I accept the project award, $25USD was deducted from my account. i.e. 10% of the project value.

I completed a part of the project and uploaded all the source files of work done to the files section of the project page. The client seemed satisfied with the work done and released $100USD of the initial milestone.

Now I have earned $75USD from this particular project. I worked on that project in the night too. Next morning I opened my email inbox as usual to find out the mails I received previous night. I saw a strange mail from freelancer.com

I logged onto the Freelancer.com account. I noticed my account balance has been reduced from $100USD.

The project has been deleted.

I contacted the Freelancer.com regarding this incident.

They were very supportive. They explained what has happened. They were very fair and reasonable in their explanations on reversal of funds from my account.

They refunded $25USD back to my Freelancer.com account. Freelancer.com is indeed providing a great service for individual freelancers. But you have to be very careful about project posters. If Freelancer.com found the project to be a fraudulent activity they will delete the project.

Freelancer.com is the world's largest outsourcing marketplace. Freelancer.com is GREAT! in all aspects. But, beware of the project posters. Don’t deal with bad people on Freelancer.com.

Simple Facebook Like Gate with Heroku Hosting

Learn the basics of how to create a Simple Facebook Like Gate for your Facebook Page App.

'Like Gate' is a Facebook gate in which a visitor must go through in order to view a specific app tab content of your Facebook fan page. The visitor must 'like' the page before viewing the content. This is also called a 'Fan Gate'.

First a simple Facebook app will be created and added to a Facebook page profile tab. Then a Facebook like gate will be integrated into the app.

Visit the completed Facebook like gate demo - PHP Sri Lanka Facebook fan page.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/PHP-Sri-Lanka/155553284581042?sk=app_405567522824849

Creating and Configuring Facebook App

Sign into the Facebook developers account. If you don't have one yet, create an account. It is free.

https://developers.facebook.com

Simple Facebook Like Gate with Heroku Hosting

Click on the 'Apps' tab on the top menu bar. See highlighted in picture below. Then click on the '+ Create New App' button.

https://developers.facebook.com/apps

You will be presented with 'Create New App' dialog box. Fill the App name and Namespace. Make sure you tick the Web Hosting option. I am going to use free app hosting provided by 'Heroku'. Then continue with the app setup.

Select PHP development environment as PHP. I am going to use PHP SDK for this simple app development.

After the setup your app will be assigned a URL pointing to Heroku servers. Browse to that location and find the live demo app. We will modify this app slightly later on this exercise.

The default app page provides information and configuration of your new app. I am going to use this app inside a Page Tab. Select 'Page Tab' section and give the app a name. Be sure to select Wide (810px) option before saving changes.

Have a look at your new Facebook App. In the new Facebook App click on the 'Learn How to Edit This App' link. You will be presented with information regarding how to edit this app further.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/facebook

This is part one. Read the other parts too.

Part 1: Simple Facebook Like Gate with Heroku Hosting
Part 2: Developing and Deploying with Heroku
Part 3: Implementing the Facebook Like Gate

HTML 5 Template conversion to Wordpress

HTML 5 Template was converted to WordPress CMS. This conversion was checked against HTML 5 standards at W3C and successfully passed HTML and CSS validation tests. Several Widgets were designed from scratch to allow easy modifications to the front end.

I completed this project on time within budgets. The client was impressed by the work done. He offered me a $15USD bonus. This was the first time I received a bonus for my project on Freelancer.com

Mailchimp Email Template

This MailChimp template was designed for Caskers. I am well experienced in MailChimp template language. I can design and develop your email template according to your specification.

The Simplest WordPress Theme

I tried to create 'The Simplest Wordpress Theme' while preserving the 'blog nature' of 'Wordpress Content Management System'.

Requirements

I should be able to make new posts to my blog and modify them via admin interface. Blog theme should use as less as possible code in the theme.

The Simplest Wordpress Theme

I found following solution for this. with only two files. index.php and style.css.

index.php
#index.php
<?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
<?php the_content(); ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>

style.css
/*
Theme Name: The Simplest WP Theme
Theme URI: http://php-sri-lanka.blogspot.com
Author: Upeksha Wisidagama
Author URI: http://upeksha-wisidagama.co.cc
Description: the simplest possible wordpress theme
License: GNU General Public License v2 or later
License URI: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
Tags: simple, wp, theme, simple, minimal
Text Domain: none-except-minimal
*/

This is the theme front appearence after activating the theme. Just the posts. No styles have been applied except p and h1 tags.

If you view source this will be shown.

Excercise

Clone into the source at GitHub and modify the source until you get the desired results.

https://github.com/upekshawisidaga/The-Simplest-Wordpress-Theme
https://github.com/upekshawisidaga/The-Simplest-Wordpress-Theme.git

Custom WordPress Project

This project was completed using WordPress CMS. The project was to rework the template of the site. They needed the new template to be similar to their existing site template while adding new management and design features. E.g. Home page should display a table which can be editable from the admin back-end, Home page should have a slider and it should display cells in a table defined from the admin back-end, etc. I was able to successfully complete the project.