The Easy Restaurant Menu Manager WordPress plugin lets a site owner:

• Put items into categories like appetizers, entrees or desserts — name them whatever you want — and set the order those categories should display in
• Include a description for each item, and decide whether or not you want to display the price
• Add CSS right from the plugin, without fiddling with theme files
• Attach pictures to each menu item
• Choose single-column or two-column layouts
• Add icons to dishes to show that an item is spicy, vegetarian, a speciality, etc. — even upload your own icons
• Create multiple menus
• Include a “print this menu” link that creates a print-friendly version of your menu

I did most of the planning for features and functions, and created the flexible HTML and CSS output for the plugin. Richard actually built the thing and made it work in WordPress.

The free version of the plugin was added to the WordPress.org plugin directory on Monday; since then, it has been downloaded about 150 times. We’ve also sold several of the $25 extended version on our SAI Labs website.

Can’t wait to work on the next one!

It’s really simple to exclude images from the default WordPress gallery. Create your gallery like normal, and make sure you’re in the HTML editor of your post or page. You’ll see something like

[gallery columns="4"]

Next, you’ll need the ID number for the photo you want to exclude. Go to the Media area of your dashboard, hover over the photo and note its attachment ID number. Then, simply add

exclude="numberhere"

inside your gallery shortcode. You can exclude multiple images by separating with a comma. All together, it will look like this:

[gallery columns="4" exclude="575,582"]

Hope that helps!

While the task was not complicated or difficult, it did surprise me how much there is to think about when you’re making a theme from scratch (before, I’ve always started with at least a basic framework). You have to style the comments, make a search results page, decide what regions to “widgetize,” label those regions, style the search box, decide how to display metadata, the list goes on. And several times I broke the whole dang thing by forgetting to close a <div>.

However, it was totally worth it, because now I have a WordPress-powered Web site that acts exactly as I want it to. If you’ve seen my designs, you know I like simple, easy to navigate design. And I’m in love with the “cute critters” icons from Tutorial 9, which I used on my old site and definitely had to include here. Plus, I prefer the “excerpt” function for the index page, rather than using a manual “more” tag, so I could do that too.

Since I’m using WordPress 2.9, I also made use of the new thumbnail feature. It eliminates the need for a custom field to display a thumbnail on your index, search results, etc. pages. Once you activate the feature in your function file, you can set the thumbnail from your media library, or upload an image specifically for that use.

As usual, I figured all of this out as I went along, with the help from some great Web sites, including:

• Web Designer Wall
• WordPress Codex
• WPCandy
• CSS Newbie

Of course, now that my blog is also my home page, I’ll have to blog more often. (Damn you Twitter!) Can’t have months-old content pop up when a potential client finds my site.

Hope you enjoy the new site, and if you find anything broken, please let me know!

She’s already blogging on WordPress.com, so I suggested she use a self-hosted WordPress installation as her portfolio site. It will be easy for her to update, she can add functionality as her site grows and it’s much, much more search-engine friendly than her old Flash site.

One of the easiest ways to get started with WordPress is to customize a pre-made theme or template. I pointed Tricia to ThemeForest, which I’ve used before, because the themes there are inexpensive and high quality. She chose one called PhotographerDream.

It features a nifty rollover effect on the home page, where it automatically displays the most recent images added to the portfolio. The top navigation displays a lits of categories, as well as pages and a link to Tricia’s blog.

The theme as purchased was purple and pink, but Tricia preferred a more understated black and grey scheme. I showed where to edit the stylesheet to make the changes, but being tech-savvy, she did all the customization herself.

The whole thing was completed in a weekend.

Convert videos to FLV
SoThink Flash Video Encoder
One of the few things the client had to purchase to make the site work, encoding software not only makes the video viewable online, it also drastically reduces file size. SoThink’s video encoder is $45 and is designed for Windows. But if you have a Mac, try iSkysoft Video Converter.

Upload the videos to the server
FileZilla
Each video file was at least 50 MB, so transferring files with FTP was the logical choice. There are any number of free FTP clients available. Though I use FireFTP on my own computer, it’s a FireFox extension and the client uses IE. So I recommended FileZilla, which is a great free FTP program.

Display the videos on WordPress
Wordtube plugin
I tried several different plugins for displaying the FLV files. I finally settled on this because it has an easy user interface that makes it simple to add videos to the backend, and places an “insert Flash video” button in the post creation window. It works in conjunction with the JW FLV player from Longtail Video, which is free for noncommercial sites.

Keeping it private
WordPress Password plugin
This plugin protects your entire WordPress site with a universal password. Just give it to anyone who you want to access the site. You still have to enter your own password to get into the admin pages. It’s also easy to change the password if you ever need to.