WordPress and Web Development › home of Ben Gillbanks
I am a hugely passionate Wed Developer and love building new websites. My skillset largely revolves around WordPress theme development and my theme Elemental is my current fave project. I also like to dabble with the image resize script, TimThumb.
Web Design child categories : Elemental, Marketing and SEO, Mimbo Pro, Regulus, TimThumb, tips, WordPress and WPVote
Ghost is a project born from frustration with WordPress. Ironically it seems to be mostly WordPress power users who want to use it. The Ghost team - led by John O'Nolan - put Ghost on KickStarter last week and it flew through its goal in just 2 days - and is now over 4 times the stated goal! The original concept of Ghost was to use WordPress as a base and either create a plugin or fork it and create [...]
So - I make WordPress themes - lots of them Something that's bugged me for a while is that I can't easily use the WP_Query to select posts with featured images. This isn't functionality that's needed that often - but it can be desirable for things like image carousels where you need an image to make everything look good. Today however - I finally found a solution - and it's surprisingly simple. All post data - including the featured image [...]
My main websites (Binary Moon, and Pro Theme Design) are hosted with Liquidweb on a VPS, but I have many smaller sites and I like to run them on NearlyFreeSpeech.net. The service is great, and I like the 'pay for what you use' model, but it's a bit of a pain to update software because I have to log into each site individually, and then upload new versions of WordPress/ new plugins etc. It's only recently that I've started using [...]
I know it's a little bit old but I read an article on Dustin Curtis blog recently about how perfection is a make or break element of a performance or product - and craftsmanship has been lost... and I don't agree. In fact, most creative industries throughout history have had this component, called craftsmanship, and it's a bond between creator and user. But it seems to have been lost, somehow, in the expanding bureaucracy and process of modern companies. Dustin [...]
Recently I have looked at expanding my internet empire. I have all sorts of ideas and never enough time - so I thought I would see if I could buy some websites relatively cheaply, improve them, and then either flip them, or profit from them because of the benefit they bring. Website Flipping? What's That? I don't know how commonly known the phrase is - but essentially 'flipping a website' involves selling a website. The types of people who flip [...]
I'm not that knowledgable about the command line and controlling a server with it. Over the years I have picked up a few bits - I use nano a lot for editing files, and I like to use grep to search my code. Or at least I used to. Ack The other day I was trying to work out how something worked in WordPress, and I was using grep to search the WordPress code base - except it wasn't traversing [...]
I know that I am most productive in the winter months and tend to churn out a lot more of my personal projects than I do during the summer months. I suspect this is due to the fact that I go out less and so spend more time sitting in front of my computer. It seems others have this condition as well - since the new year seems to have brought with it some gifts. Notably there have been a [...]
Anyone who knows me knows that I like to automate everything. I'm sure it's a common trait with programmers - in fact it's the reason I started programming online. My first online application was a very simple cms - that allowed me to easily edit the content on my website. I wanted to save time doing repetitive things so that I have more time for the important things. So recently I have become really interested in automating content creation on [...]
I'm a bit of a stats junky. I know I shouldn't watch them too closely but I like to keep an eye on the numbers for my blogs. So when my page views, here on Binary Moon, plummeted recently - I had to find out why and fix the problem as quickly as I could. For Binary Moon in particular I like to keep a close eye on the numbers. Over the last year the traffic has been increasingly steadily [...]
People are resistant to change. It's strange since I consider myself quite forward thinking, but I still find it takes me a while to accept new things. I've been using CSS3 effects for quite a while now - as have many web designers. It's nice to be able to add a box shadow or a text shadow to things. Or maybe to round some corners. But that doesn't mean I always think of using it. For instance - I was [...]
A quick tip for any WordPress devs out there (or any other devs for that matter). Don't use PHP short tags! I've been bitten by this more than once in the past. Some servers allow PHP short tags (<?) and others don't (<?php) and so when distributing your code it will look broken to some people - and work fine for others. For me PHP Short Tags have been an issue when creating WordPress themes for Pro Theme Design. As [...]
It's cool to have the WordPress login page customized to fit your own website branding. This is even more significant for multi author blogs, or sites you have set up for clients as it adds that little extra something. Since writing this post in 2007 I have released a plugin called BM Custom Login which does everything described below I was actually inspired to write this post because of a [...]
I often get asked questions about TimThumb and why it doesn't work in certain situations. I can generally tell what is wrong with the script within about 60 seconds of being sent a demo url. Below are my top tips for debugging TimThumb issues. Keep TimThumb up to Date This is super important. TimThumb should always be kept up to date. I regularly publish bug fixes and improvements and often [...]
Regulus has been far more popular than I ever imagined it would be. So popular, in fact, that I have already created version 2.0 Changes Version 2.0 has been created specifically for WordPress version 2.0 (hence the name change) and features a number of new features. From the outside it looks the same, with the exception of the 4 new header images and the extra colour scheme, but underneath it [...]
TimThumb is a popular image resizing script that was created for Mimbo Pro - but it's never worked properly with WordPress MU, so I wanted to change that. The reason it doesn't work is quite simple. Because of the way WordPress Multisite (formerly WordPress mu) runs multiple blogs it uses a server rewrite rule to point to media uploads. This in turn means that the file paths for the images [...]
TimThumb has always been built with simplicity in mind. However there are a few things it can do that have not been exposed before. Inspired by a comment from RBhavesh I have decided to write a series of posts in which I will show you how TimThumb should be used - and introduce some new functionality. In this post I will discuss the basic usage of the script - the [...]
Regulus has it's own theme page here Towards the end of the Bubble Blitz developement I started work on my first WordPress theme. The making of it kind of stopped and started for quite a while since there were things I wanted to do that I couldn't. The idea behind the theme was to create a very simple to customise theme for the novice blogger. One of the problems with [...]
About BenMy name is Ben Gillbanks. I'm a lover of Video Games, WordPress, Web Development and everything in between.
I have been working on the internet since 1998, and working with computers even longer. I am a hardcore Nintendo fanboy and have owned most of their consoles at one stage or another.
Read more about me on my about page.
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