It’s been a fun week here at VoodooPress. I’m pretty new to the whole reviewing thing. But I really enjoy learning about anything to do with WordPress, and I love passing the info to all of you. This time I was approached by the Infinite WordPress (InfiniteWP)  folks to review their product. This is a new product, and I can definitely see a future here. I can tell you now, I’m keeping it installed, and I’m excited to see where this goes! If you are interested at all in a central way to manage your installs, read on! (Just a note, this is NOT a paid review – these are my honest thoughts after trying InfiniteWP out)

The first thing I want to mention, is some of the difficulties I ran into while installing. This is absolutely no fault of InfiniteWP, and was all on my end. That being said, they were very helpful on their support forums and through email, and helped me get on the right train of thought to fix things. I mention the difficulties in case you run in to the same thing. Basically for me, a combination of aggressive minification on CloudFlare, and the fact that for some reason, W3 Total Cache (On my main domain) was interfering on my subdomain. I turned off the minification, checked all my DNS settings, flushed caches, and eventually got there.

It may be tempting to try to compare this service with ManageWP, another service I’ve experimented with (and do like), but I’ll hold off on that I’ll probably write a comparison in a different article. InfiniteWP is different – it offers similar services to be sure, but here we get a self-hosted solution, something I really enjoy. Setting it up is really easy, I honestly did the entire install from my Kindle Fire. If you’ve installed WP manually, you can definitely do this. Pick a location (I like a subdomain: manage.domain.com is catchy), unarchive the zip there, set up a mySQL DB, and run the installer inputting your DB details. Done!

Once you have everything set up, and you log in, you can start adding sites. I wanted to test this out for real, so I put in all of my sites. To be able to do this, you install the client plugin on each of your sites (search IWP Client from the plugin dashboard in your site). Once activated you get your API key. Add the site back in your InfiniteWP dash (WP icon in the bottom left of your screen), and fill in the credentials – URL, Admin user name, and API key. That’s it. I had all mine up in no time.

Once you get all your sites in there, check out what you can do. The first thing you’ll probably see is any updates you have available (if there are any). This alone is reason enough to install InfiniteWP, you can update WP Core, Plugins, and Themes for all of your managed sites right from this central location. I absolutely love this! Currently, this only supports free plugins and themes from the WP repo, it will be cool if some mechanism for expanding this is made available in the future. But even if not, you can reach each site’s dashboard through InfiniteWP, we’ll discuss that soon.

We can also run backups from InfiniteWP. You can select individual sites, or you can back them all up. You can also choose whether to backup all files and the DB, or just the DB. I immediately got all of my databases backed up. Pretty cool! Of course in my opinion you can’t keep backups of your server files on the server right? Well, you have a manage backups screen, and you can delete backups, and you can download them. Always handy! Even cooler, you can restore your backups. We also have an activity screen, keep tabs with what you’ve done. You can see when your data was refreshed, when updates were made, when backups were made, etc.

InfiniteWP has a simple setting panel too. There are a couple of tabs where a few things can be adjusted. One of the tabs offers the ability to whitelist some IP addresses, which is nice for security. We can also scale various settings up or down, such as max server read/write requests, max simultaneous requests, and time delay between requests – all good ways to keep things in check with your server.

The other settings tab available to us is is account settings. My favourite feature in the tab is the ability to customize email settings. We can set up daily, weekly, or monthly emails to be sent to us informing us of available updates. These can incluse WordPress Core, plugins, and themes. That can be quite happy to remind you to log back in and make sure everything is up to speed!

Finally, a neat feature we alluded to earlier, you can open your website’s dashes up within InfiniteWP. A handy way to catch your premium themes and plugins for updates right now. Also using the same concept, you can post to each of your sites, etc. A nifty way to click through to each of your sites already logged in for various tasks., pretty much a single login point

As I stated earlier, InfiniteWP is quite new. It’s already a simple to use tool that offers some quality, useful things to users. I recommend it completely the way it stands. The exciting thing though, if you visit their site – you can catch a glimpse of future plans. There appear to be plans for a variety of addins for InfiniteWP including the ability to manage postys and comments, bulk content creation, front end editing, and more backup options. It looks like some of these will cost money, but folks have to make a living right? I personally think the free service is already stellar, and if they can make the right kinds of premium services, I can see people paying for some useful upgrades.

So, have any of you tried InfiniteWP yet? What do you think? If you haven’t, give it a whirl and follow up with me.

Do you have questions about InfiniteWP – The Voodoo Review, or any WordPress topic? Visit VoodooPress for many answers, or to ask your own questions.

Well, this is a first here on VoodooPress! Now we’ve given some pretty brief reviews of products before, but those were simply things I was using – and felt obliged to mention. I figure if I’m using something and it works, or doesn’t work, it’s my job to let all you WordPress peeps know about it! It’s best for the community when we all share what we learn! This time I was approached by WP Theme Generator and asked if I would check out their product. I thought, why not? It looked like a cool product, so I figured we should all check it out together! Just a note, this isn’t a paid review – I was given access to the product so I could thoroughly test, but was not paid. So these opinions are completely my own! Let’s dive in!

So, before we get into the nitty gritty, what do I think? Well, I definitely had fun! WP Theme Generator is a web interface product, you log on to the site, you make a theme, and then you can download it! All the pointing and clicking is pretty fun in my book. There are some points where this producst is still a bit rough around the edges, but it is brand new. I think the product will improve over time, and I think some people will really enjoy it. Also, you can get a pretty cool looking theme out of it! Now I’ll tell you about my experience!

When you head over to the WP Theme Generator webite, take a look at their home page. See how that looks? If you like it, this product may be for you. You can make thousands of variations in your theme with tonnes of graphical elements and colour options, and all sorts of sidebar combos, and layout choices, etc. But ultimately, your site will always have the ‘feel’ of that main page. That’s not a bad thing really, the layout is a pretty common blog layout – and it works. You just won’t be able to radically shift away from that baseline.

When you log in to the site, you begin to create your theme. You can alter layouts, and change just about everything. Each little graphical element you see on the page – social icons, post and widget wrappers, backgrounds, menus, search bar, even highlights and shadows. These all have myriad options for you. If the provided options aren’t enough you can also upload your own graphical elements for certain features. There is even a font selector to alter your headings and body text. I like that, as I like my heading to be serif, and body to be sans. I appreciate the choices!

Besides being able to change out all the colours, the layout, and the graphical elements, you can alter some of the functionality. You have slider options here – Featured slider, Nivo, Accordion, and Piece maker sliders. You can also add a variety of ‘sidebars’ or widget areas to the top and bottom, left and right. The cool thing about this is that you aren’t locking yourself in here. The changes you make to the fonts, colours, and graphical elements are, for the most part, permanent for this theme. But the sliders and sidebars are really just to help you envision your site at this point, they can be changed later on – once the theme is on your site, from the admin option panel.

Let’s talk about the admin side of things. If you are a paid user, you can download your creation as a WordPress theme, all packaged up into a zip file and ready to install. Once installed and activated, you can explore the features. I”m going to touch on what I noticed here, I guarantee these themes offer more than what I discovered.

A pleasent surprise once installed is that the admin panel doesn’t fight with WordPress. So often, themes try to wedge in their own admin panels – trying to get over-fancy, and not using the tools provided by WordPress. The backend on this theme uses the tools provided. It looks like a piece of WordPress, not some other bizarre program shoved in there trying to be fancy. Besides the theme’s own menu, it utilizes some of the built in theme customization options – headers and backgrounds. Thats always nice.

In the backend you are given the opportunity to customize a variety of options. You can upload a logo, alter the header text, create and remove sidebars, pick your social icons, and add in the links, change your slider, and pick the slider content, add in you analytics code, customize your footer text, etc. There are a good deal of options, but not too many. The theme does balance functionality and options. Some themes present hundreds of options in the admin panel, and that’s just silly! With a WP Theme Generator theme, you just get the essential things you need.

The theme presents a couple of other things you might like. You get a variety of custom taxonomies pre-installed, including Gallery Items, Portfolio Items, Product Items, Services, and Testimonials. These can be used to offer up various content and serve it in a custom manner using the provided templates, or through shortcodes. Speaking of shortcodes, you get plenty. You get shortcodes to frame images, style quotes, dividers, buttons, popovers, modal windows, tooltips, etc. Some people love these things, some don’t. I’m not a huge fan, but for very specific personal reasons. Having shortcodes and custom post types or taxonomies built into a theme locks you into the theme. You can’t switch themes without losing the functionality and breaking your content – hence, my repeated focus on a functionality plugin. Usage of some of the cool additional features may not be apparent at first, but their website has some pretty good documentation which will help you learn how to use your new theme! Definitely read the docs, there nothing worse than finding out you’ve had a feature available that you haven’t been using.

I mentioned previously that this is a new product, and will no doubt evolve over time. I’m going to look at a few oversights I found that would block this theme from being a daily driver for me. I threw my generated theme up on my test site where I try everything out (NOTE: the theme is active there now, and I’ll leave it up for a bit. If you wish to see the theme, and it’s not up, just ask me and I’ll turn it on for you).  and ran into some issues.

One of the features noticeable lacking, is post format support. On all of my sites I rely heavily on the various post formats. They are not included in the theme currently. You can’t assign posts to a format, and there is no styling included for individual formats. A few other things I noticed using the WordPress theme unit test are as follows. On a post which has been split into multiple pages, the links are absent which allow me to navigate through the posts subpages.  Centered images did not center. Sometimes on a post with many categories, the categories overlapped the content. On a menu many top level items, the contents will break out of the menu and display plain text below the graphical menu. And I also ran into problems with my social icons getting mixed up, they were pointing at the wrong services. As far as styling text within posts, all of the alignments, tables, lists, headings, etc. were all styled well, I didn’t find anything that got missed.

Also, when you download your theme, it is named WP Theme Generator. Not too much of a problem, but I would prefer it to be custom named whatever I would like. While I’m looking at the code, let’s talk about that. In general, the code wasn’t hard to read through. It would be complicated if you wanted to customize it directly, many divs are used to be able to position the graphical elements. Also, in the header a meta description was hard coded in discussing WP Theme Generator. This would not be hard to fix for anyone who knows code, but for the average user trying to use an SEO plugin, this would be frustrating. Also in the header is a hardcoded link to a Google hosted jQuery. The off-site resource isn’t a bad thing, I do it on my sites. However, this brings up a couple of issues. We’ve discussed earlier not hardcoding jQuery into the header, but rather, we enqueue it using the provided tools WordPress has like this. Also, relying on a particular jQuery which is not bundled with WP can be dangerous. ON the last upgrade of WP, many peolpe’s admin panels broke due to conflicting jQuery. WP wanted one, but a theme/plugin used a different one.

Now, here’s a cool feature. When you create a theme on WP Theme Generator, it is basically a layer built on top of their framework. And of course, you can save your theme on their site. This means that as they upgrade their framework to provide improvements, or to implement future WordPress features, your theme can be downloaded again from where it is saved, and it will bring in the new features that have been put into the framework.

One final thing to mention, the theme is pretty resource heavy. The zip file for my theme was 8MB. To put that into perspective, the zip for all of WordPress (with 2 themes included) is less than half of that! The themes rely heavily on graphics, which is really going to hit your load times pretty hard. Caching can definitely help you with this. If you really loved the theme you created, you could manually combine scripts, css files, and sprite the graphics if you’d like. That would be a fair amount of work though.

So, my bottom line? I think WP Theme Generator is a lot of fun to play with. I made a few themes, and had a good time doing it. The results come out pretty – there are so many graphical elements to play with it’s crazy! All of the graphical elements are high quality, nothing looks fuzzy or pixelated. You can do a lot of neat things, and you are given a variety of options. You also get a variety of custom posting options, shortcodes, sidebar options, layout options, etc. You can definitely go crazy with setting up some good looking custom themes. And the theme is built on a framework that can be easily upgraded.

The flip side of this is that the themes are huge, and resource heavy. Using some of the features will lock you in to the theme, you can’t change away from a WP Theme Generator theme without losing or breaking content. Some of the coding presents some issues that I’m not happy with, and the template structure can be confusing. The lack of post format support was a big shortcoming for me personally.

I feel WP Theme Generator has an interesting product, definitely one to play with. You can head over there now and play around with what is offered. GIve it a go and see what you come up with! Of course, the things that were shortcomings to me may not be such a big deal to you. Themes are a highly personal thing, and I’m pretty particular about mine. While you can play with the theme generator for free, you’ll have to pony up some loot if you want your actual theme for your site. Right now it’ll cost you $29 nucks to make and doanload as many themes as you want for 6 months. I’d say, if you like what you see, that price is pretty reasonable.

Do you have questions about WP Theme Generator – The Voodoo Review, or any WordPress topic? Visit VoodooPress for many answers, or to ask your own questions.

I’ve seen a variety of posts from people devising different ways to customize the_excerpt length. In WordPress, most people are familiar with 2 ways to display their content: the_content, and the_excerpt. Both give fairly predictable results as to what you get. the_content gives you all of your content, with formatting intact. the_excerpt gives you your set excerpt, stripping away formatting, links, etc. But you had one excerpt length, and that was it! What if you want various excerpts? Well I’ve seen ways to craft various excerpts by creating different functions that had to be called per template, but as of WP 3.3 that is no more! Check it out!

First up, credit where credit is due, the inspiration for this post came from c.bavota, and it would be great if you headed over and checked out that article for the lowdown! We’re going to look at wp_trim_words, which I’d played with working on my new theme, but never gotten around to writing about.

With wp_trim_words you can establish what the content is, how many words you want, and what should be displayed in place on the truncated text. It’s simple really. The cool thing here is that on each archive style template, you could display different excerpt lengths. Usage is like this:

<?php wp_trim_words( $text, $num_words = 55, $more = null ); ?>

So we have 3 possible parameters. The first is our content, the second is the length, and the third is the the replacement text. So the example that c.bavota gives is perfect here.

<?php wp_trim_words( get_the_content(), 100, 'Read more $raquo;' ); ?>

Which in our loop would grab the_content, shorten it to 100 words, and add Read More >> to the end of it. SImple right? Instead of creating various functions to make various excerpt lengths, we just adjust our output per template. Since we are working on the_content directly, we shorten the_content. This means that the links, etc. normally stripped by the_excerpt remian intact – definitely something to keep in mind as you may not want that!

Definitely a cool function to keep in mind. If you want true excerpt features (stripping links, formatting, etc.) stick with the_excerpt – but this gives a variety of options to play with. I personally have not fully tested this and would love some further input. This counts words, and truncates. If that truncation happens in the middle of a link let’s say… does your link remain safe, or get cut off halfway? I’m no expert, so I’m not sure how WP handles such things.

For you theme developers out there, I’d love to hear about your successes, and failures, with wp_trim_words! So you have other creative uses for this? I’d love to hear about them too!

Do you have questions about Customize Your Excerpt Length Per Template, or any WordPress topic? Visit VoodooPress for many answers, or to ask your own questions.

I don’t have many affiliate links on here. I put a couple up here and there when discussing certain products that I enjoy. One of them is our Gravity Forms link, which is used when discussing how to do certain things with Gravity Forms. Not gonna lie, I really dig that plugin – I get a lot done with it! I just wanted to take a second to thank the folks who have purchased the plugin through VoodooPress. This month is the first time I’ve made any money off of the links, and I definitely appreciate it!

Thanks for supporting VoodooPress!

Do you have questions about Thanks for Using Our Gravity Forms Affiliate Link!, or any WordPress topic? Visit VoodooPress for many answers, or to ask your own questions.

Do you have questions about WordPress 3.3.2 is Available, Security Update and Bugfixes, or any WordPress topic? Visit VoodooPress for many answers, or to ask your own questions.

Back in August, I ran a little article about running queries from functions.php. We did a little pre_get_posts work, and a bit of a conditional stuff. Well, I learned a bit more since then, and you need one more essential piece of information! Let me key you in on that!

While the solution I gave for you works nicely, I forgot to target it… we let it run wild! If you run that sort of query, what ends up happening is the query stomps all over everything! I noticed that when I ran my query, my widgets on that particular page ran in reverse order! Makes sense, the query I was running was intended to revers the order of my posts!

Let’s get that in check, how do we run a query on a particular page, without messing up menus, widgets, or anything else? Well, since what we are probably focusing on here is our main query, the content itself, we have is_main_query at our disposal! With that we can tell WordPress to only act on the main content brought in by the query, not any of the widgets, menus, etc.

So rather than explain it myself, you can check out this thread on the WordPress forums to see the background info, or jump straight to this post from Bill Erickson on his site. He does a better job explaining it than I probably would… but it’s as simple as adding is_main_query in addition to your existing conditional.

Do you have questions about Running Queries From Functions.php – Update, Let’s Keep This Thing in Check!, or any WordPress topic? Visit VoodooPress for many answers, or to ask your own questions.

We’re further into the test cycle now. Hopefully you’re testing to make sure things go smoothly!

Do you have questions about WordPress 3.4 Beta 2 Now Available, Are you testing?, or any WordPress topic? Visit VoodooPress for many answers, or to ask your own questions.

I came across a couple of posts recently which showed me how to monitor my website uptime using Google Docs. They both work great, one is for a single site. That is suffucient for many users, and you can use multiple copies, 1 to monitor each site. The next one is inspired by the first, but allows for multiple sites in a single sheet. These are fantastic tools that set up easily. Check it out:

All I did was follow the simple instructions. I’ve tested both, and both work perfectly, so just pick one based on your preferences. Set it up, and run it. Here’s what it looks like (on my phone anyway):

Stalk my Site Setup

Here’s the downside of this. It showed my just how often my sites were going down. A minute here, a minute there. Several times going down for 15 or 20 minute blocks. The sheets keep a running log of up and down times for you too, plus you get emails whenever your sites go up or down.

I definitely recommend you play around with this… it just might drive you to a new host!

Do you have questions about Monitor Your Website(s) From Google Docs, and Find Out Some Very Interesting Things!, or any WordPress topic? Visit VoodooPress for many answers, or to ask your own questions.

A.k.a. Help us to help you!

Do you have questions about Have You Really Tried Everything? Really?, or any WordPress topic? Visit VoodooPress for many answers, or to ask your own questions.

So here’s something that I think is totally lacking in WordPress theme that are available. Quality, WIDE themes! Apparently full-width template doesn’t mean to others what it does to me. I’ve been testing a variety of theme on my blog, and I have found a lot of quality stuff to be certain. I plan to keep switching things up now that I’ve made it so easy on myself with my plugin. I literally have every customization I want in there, I just have to install a new theme, figure out what templates do what, make a child theme, and drop in a few custom template tags and I’m good. Less than half an hour of work… BUT, here is what I want!!

WIDTH! I have some pretty decent resolution monitors, and I know many other people do too! Heck, when I see my websites on some of those iMacs out there (I think that’s the right one, the big ass all in one Mac with the huge monitor) they look cartoonish. A little strip of content down the middle, with wasted space on each side. And sometimes, the wasted space is bigger than the content!

I’ve got the basics of a theme for my personal blog done, I’m not going to have time to finish it any time soon, which is lame! But on that little bit of theme I have, I had a lot of fun working with responsive elements. Now, that isn’t my strength, I’m only just learning! But I know there are people out there who can do some really cool things.

Why not make some really big themes? Plan for full width? Plan for huge monitors? My theme was laid out thinking up to 1600px width. Let’s maybe have some header widgets, a sidebar or 2, and footer widgets. Let the content area grow. Maybe move those footer widgets over to the side when there is space.

If anyone has any input on some cool WordPress themes that truly grow, I’m all ears!

Do you have questions about I Want True Full Width! A Wide Responsive Theme!, or any WordPress topic? Visit VoodooPress for many answers, or to ask your own questions.