A week after our conversation, I began playing with WordPress on my own webserver and started putting together a website mock up with a template from WooThemes and content from their existing site.  It was fairly easy and I like playing around with websites like that.  Wordpress worked pretty well for the basic site.

WordPress also provided them with an easy way to keep the website up-to-date from the road or from their iPhones as they traveled and snapped photos.  Wordpress is supported and updated as security problems were found and should help them stay secure in the future.

Useful Plugins for Musicians
After putting their existing information into the site, I started looking at what else would be good on the site.  I located the fantastic website of developer Dan Coulter, http://blogsforbands.com/.  He had developed several WordPress plug-ins for bands, including a gig calendar and discography.  I added the discography plug-in to a new install of WordPress and began adding songs from the past album that I had.  It worked wondefully — allowing me to post each album, the songs, words to the songs and links to buy the songs from iTunes, Napster or Amazon’s MP3 store. It also allowed a link to buy a physical copy…  but from where?

Enter another plug-in – Tips & Tricks HQ – developers of the WordPress eStore.  I had used WP E-Commerce in the past, but it didn’t want to install on my musician’s web host and it didn’t easily offer digital downloads, but WordPress eStore did…   We added the plugin and began populating it items, like T-Shirts and CD’s.

Our musician friends utilize ReverbNation heavily and so I was able to find their widgets (which our friends were already using on their original site) and place those into text widgets on the sidebar.  The cool thing about this approach is that it allows them to update their music players, gig calendar and mailing list all within ReverbNation and have it feed their website.  Likewise, their website is feeding ReverbNation new mailing list addresses for future mailings and it is collecting stats of who is listening to their music.   ReverbNation is a free service, but offers enhanced and additional pay-for services.

As we were going live and testing everything, I found a couple things – like emails being sent from the eStore were sending from “WordPress”, but Tips & Tricks HQ had another plugin to allow us to customize the friendly name of the sender.

If any other bands or musicians are looking for a solution, I’ll be the first to recommend WordPress!

When I began my blog last year, I used WordPress.  I had used it once before to build out a church website for my wife’s boss.  I was really impressed with it and how it could be extended and themed really easy.  So over the last year and half, I’ve implemented a few WordPress sites, mostly using themes other people had developed – like the one on this site and my personal site.

Over the last month, though, I have been working on a project for a friend of my wife and I – a business called Keeping the Green.   Nicole has the idea of finding eco-friendly materials and marketing them under this label.   I’ve helped her get some things together – like logo and some designs for printed items – but the website has been more of a challenge.

At the same time, my wife has been working on a business venture selling paintings on recycled windows.  She too is using WordPress with a plugin called WP E-Commerce on her site. We picked a nice looking free template for her site, so no big deal there.

For Nicole, though, I really wanted to create a custom designed website template for WordPress.  After eight or ten sites, I now understand better how the themes are created and its pretty straight forward.  So, over the past few weeks, I have been tackling that, designing the site in Photoshop, working on cutting it and getting all the CSS worked out – I realy only want to build CSS sites from now on – and getting things together.

This week, I really hit a milestone.  Number one, I found time to work on this again (and as you can tell from the blog, my schedule has finally freed up a little to have time to play).  Number two, I took my sample design and I’ve split into a more standard WordPress theme configuration.  And it worked!  I have built the design side of my first WordPress theme.  Its really early in the design phase and nothing is live (don’t try to buy anything just yet!), but take a gander at it.  I’m pretty proud.  Its still got a ways to go, but its there…  And I’m excited!

I had setup a WordPress site for a friend’s church.  It works well and she wanted to be able to post photos from their events and get-togethers.  So, I logically upgraded her to the latest, greatest WordPress to make use of the gallery feature.  But, then the problem occurred.  After using the gallery shortcode, the images displayed were not the thumbnail images, but rather the fullsize images.  And, no setting seemed to fix this problem.

After getting fairly frusterated with the problem last night, I decided to delve into the code and trace through it to find the cause.  After tracing through many functions, I located the problem in the wp_get_attachment_metadata function.  This function was invoked but returned no usable information for the attachment (image, movie, etc.).  Now, this is where I stopped, because I got the desired effect.  The function definition is the following:

function wp_get_attachment_metadata( $post_id, $unfiltered = false ) {

A conditional statement later in the function looks to the $unfiltered variable.  Because it was defaulting to false, it never returned the array of values that it had retrieved.  It instead attempted to “apply_filters” to the array.  The apply_filters apparently did not work correctly.  So, a simple change in the declaration from false to true fixes our thumbnail image problem in WordPress 2.6.2 and 2.6.3.

The wp_get_attachment_metadata function is located in /wp-includes/post.php.   I hope that maybe this will help someone else.  AND, I will be looking into the apply_filters function more to see what its actually supposed to be doing there…