It’s been a while since we’ve been able to make any significant updates to our website, as we’ve been really busy with some exciting projects for clients, so here’s a round up of the latest miggle news.

A new site for Fitness First for culturebank

First up has been a project we’ve delivered for culturebank, a business I’m involved with along side miggle.  Working to objectives and creative direction provided by the rest of the culturebank team we’ve built out a solution for their latest client Fitness First.  Based on WordPress, with a high level of bespoke customisation layered on top, this site lets employees of their Australian business upload work related success stories and experience supported with videos and photos.  Uploaded videos are encoded on the fly into a Flash player format and photos are rendered into galleries.  Stories that relate to specific job functions appear on pages which additionally pull data in real-time from a feed on Fitness First’s recruitment site.

A Product Plan for Collections Trust

Our friends at Talk Web Solutions have recently launched the new Collections Link website for the Collections Trust (CT).   Our involvement here was to work with CT to build out the initial product requirements which delivered on CT’s core objective of being able to host a site which allowed best practice in collections management to be owned by the people who manage our nation’s libraries, museums, collections and archives.  More and more clients are asking us to help scope their projects before they commit to build.  It’s a sensible strategy we think.

A new web site using Mod-X

We built out a new site for local Brighton business Complete Property Services.  Having built a number of sites for small businesses in the last year in our recently launched miggleCMS, we wanted to roll out something which was built in a different content management system to extend the range of solutions we can offer to clients.  At the time of building Complete’s website, miggleCMS wasn’t as an open source solution and for good business continuity planning (BCP) the client here specifically wanted something that was.  We felt given the brief and the design objectives Mod X was the ideal solution for this.

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

At miggle we have recently started a project using WordPress. The client wanted their users to be able to make posts from the front-end without needing WordPress logins. After many searches we found TDO Mini Forms (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tdo-mini-forms/). A very highly customizable plugin – perfect as a starting point for our goal.

TDO Mini Forms has two main options:

• Form Creator – Where you setup your form fields.
• Form Hacker – Where you have more control to customize the form fields.

One function the client wanted was a drop down list where users could select their location.

When setting up the drop down list through the form creator, it only allows you to include X amount of categories by putting their IDs. This was good to start with but what happens if we want to add more categories? We would need to update the form every time, adding in the new category ID.

This was not ideal for us – We needed the locations drop down list to be dynamic. Over to the TDO Mini form hacker!

With PHP and WordPress’s wp_dropdown_categories() function we can pull in the categories dynamically.

Quick Tip:

Here is the updated code to pull in categories from a category parent.

<p><select name=’location' class='tdomf_location' size='1'>
<option value="1"<?php if( (is_array($defcat) && in_array(1, $defcat)) || ( 1 == $defcat ) ) { echo ' selected="selected" '; } ?>>Please Select</option>

<?php
/*
Setup our dropdown arguments.
The arguments allow us to get the child elements of our parent (location)
With a depth of 1 e.g. if we had parent > child > grandchild it would only get our child level.
*/

$args = array(
'echo' => 0,
'hide_empty' => 0,
'child_of' => 5,
'orderby' => 'name',
'style' => 'none',
'hierarchical' => 1,
'depth'  => 1
);
// Create the drop down list
$select = wp_dropdown_categories( $args );
// Only pull out the <option.....></option> tag (remove <select…></select>)
$select = strip_tags($select, "<option>");
// Display results on the screen
echo $select;
?>
</select>

By using this method our client can continue to add or delete categories allowing the drop down list to dynamically update without needing to update the TDO Mini form’s creator as well.

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.