January 14th, 2012 by Mike

Well, I am finally going to do what I preach, and be more active in posting. It is time that I walk the talk so to say. As this site is to promote “Blogs” and Guarantee success the the task at hand is to provide great information that is helpful and useful to my readers. However, there is a problem with that, if I give away all the tips, tricks and how-to’s then why would anybody need to hire me? I will tell you because time is money and someone who wants or needs to get the job done, isn’t going to pour over my site and try to figure it on their own. And if they do, and succeed, more power to them as they probably would have driven me crazy. But the real reason that I doing this is to help those that I have taught over the years to be better at what they can do.
So, here’s the plan. I am going to start off with working with the Twentyeleven theme. Not only using it, but how to upgrade to it. Then I am going to start discussing the ‘core’ plugins that I find most beneficial from my clients sites. My guess is that at some point I may see the Twentytwelve theme pop into existence. If so, I guess that will give me more to discuss.

January 31st, 2011 by Mike

So many of my clients rely on Testimonials on their site. And usually a simple page, or often posts are used for the process. However, there are major drawbacks to using either. The main one being that they are ordered according to entry, and thus when one opens the page they see the same ones in the same order until it is manually changed. Not good.
So, I figured I would see what plugins might exist. so I searched for “random testimonials” and was surprised at the number or results. That lead to the tedious task of testing each one. What I found was not a single one randomized the testimonials when placed on a page. However, in reading through the posts for one of the plugins I found someone who had kindly figured out a way to fix the problem and make it work. Now, hopefully, the author takes this into consideration and updates the plugin accordingly on his next update. Given the edits, the plugin now works great and provides great flexibility when it comes to styling as you can customize both the html and css from within.
The plugin is LTW – Testimonials by LessThanWeb.
For those wanting to give it a try, install the plugin as usual. Then Edit the following two files:

1)pages/testimonials_settings.php – This creates an “Random Order” option

- goto line 25, you should see the form options. Add the following option after the </option> tag for option 3

<option value=”4″<?php echo get_option(‘ltw_tes_sort_testimonials’) == ’4′ ? ‘ selected=”selected”‘ : ”; ?>><?php _e(‘Random Order’, LTW_TES_UNIQUE_NAME); ?></option>

- Save
2) ltw-testimonials.php This adds the code to sort by random
-goto the bottom of the page and search up for the “ltw_tes_shortcode_all() function”
- add the following code after the closing ‘}’ for option 3
else if (get_option(‘ltw_tes_sort_testimonials’) == ’4′)
{
$ltw_testimonials_order_sql = ‘ ORDER BY RAND() ‘;
}
- Save
And you are good to go.