Urbanism: “The culture or way of life of city dwellers.”

I moved to downtown Milwaukee in 2002 and have since become both a fan of the city and a fan of city life.  I found that the lifestyle of living, working, and playing all within the city could allow me to make a great living, enjoy more of my time, interact regularly with people from a wide background, live green, and enjoy a higher quality of life.  It is this passion for urbanism and Milwaukee that grew into a new joint venture between Texo Development and fellow Milwaukee tech shop Fresh Coast Ventures.  Jeramey Jannene co-founder of Fresh Coast Ventures started UrbanMilwaukee.com in early 2007 with a similar passion for Milwaukee and urban life.  Our combined efforts intend to allow UrbanMilwaukee.com to cover a wider array of issues including mass transit, public spaces, local government, and economic development projects in Milwaukee.   Truly our goal is to “Champion Urban Life in the Cream City.”

Not only did we teamed up with  Fresh Coast Ventures to be partners in content creation but also to develop the look and feel of UrbanMilwaukee.com.  First we selected Wordpress as the platform for this project because it gives you the tools you need to get a site up fast, yet the flexibility to make the site your own. Next, we considered a variety of themes including a more businesslike look and feel, a web magazine style that allows a clean split of categories, and enough open spaces for customization. The base theme we settled on was BranfordMagazine because this theme had many valuable features and displays content in the style of magazine.  Although the BranfordMagazine theme was a good starting point it required numerous updates to achieve what we had in mind.  The five major improvements we made were:

1. Plugin to Manage theme settings – This plugins handles which categories are displayed on the homepage’s.  The BranfordMagazine theme based category selection on hardcoded values which would make data conversion from an existing site difficult and took away from the ability to customize the homepage. 
   
2. Enhanced Top Level Navigation -  The navigation was customized to support both categories and pages as part of the dropdown menuing system.
   
3. Custom Header Image – On category pages the header image changes to match the category page a user is viewing if a matching image is available.
   
4. flickr Integration – On category pages flickr images from the flickr group “UrbanMilwaukee” display in the right hand sidebar based on matching the category to the tag.
   
5. del.icio.us Integration – On category pages del.icio.us links display in the right hand sidebar based on matching the category to the tag.
   

We look forward to evolving UrbanMilwaukee.com, and to continuing development work.  If you are interested in a Wordpress site, drop us a line and let’s talk.

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This release corrects two minor issues and implements a new feature. First, the most significant issue corrected was that the number of photos added to the post wasn’t always returning the amount specified by the option “Max Number of Photos to Display”. This was happening because the number of uniquely titled photos requested could be more than the number of photos recieved from the Flickr API call. Essentially the correction required calling the Flickr API until the “Max Number of Photos to Display” value had been reached or no more photos were available that matched the search criteria. The second issue required the renaming of the more_reccurences() and all references to it, to fridayphotos_more_reccurences(). This was to insure no collisions would occur with other plugins implementing this function. A new feature was also added to this release it will allow for posts to be generated in statuses other than “published”. This is managed on the Friday Photos’ “Option” screen through a new DropDownBox titled “WordPress Post Status” that allows the user to select the appropriate status. You can download the Version 1.2 of Friday Photos here.

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• Friday Photos Version 1.1
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Friday Photos Version 1.1 corrects two issues and implements a new feature. First to support weekly scheduling the implementation of WP Pseudo Cron required a “weekly” interval value that isn’t part of the default cron_schedule filter. To add this interval value the implementation of a filter function, as explained in the article Timing is everything: scheduling in WordPress, was needed. The code is shown here:

function more_reccurences() {
return array(
'weekly' => array('interval' => 604800, 'display' => 'Once Weekly'),
'fortnightly' => array('interval' => 1209600, 'display' => 'Once Fortnightly'),
);
}
add_filter('cron_schedules', 'more_reccurences');

Secondly the “Author” field wasn’t being set properly and required a small change to pass the field from the form to the database. Additionally Friday Photos now supports the ability to pull in the picture’s description from Flickr. This is handled through a new checkbox titled “Include Flickr Description” on the “Friday Photos” admin screen. You can download the new version of Friday Photos here.

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• Friday Photos Version 1.2
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I was recently inspired to write my first Wordpress plugin, Friday Photos. The Friday Photos plugin will access your Flickr account and create a weekly post of a specified number of pictures based on username and tags. The first release will require a Flickr API Key, Flickr Secret and Flickr Username to be entered on the Friday Photos Options screen. (see screen shot below) Future releases will pull the description field and tags from Flickr, improve photo selection options, and add Flickr video support.

The plugin draws on the code and ideas of two great plugins, the Slickr Gallery and Yet Another Daily Delicious. As this was my first attempt at writing a plugin the challenge of learning phpFlickr, the Flickr API, the basics of Wordpress Plugin design, and how WP Pseudo Cron works all at once was challenging but with these well done plugins to look at it proved a very doable project.

A sample post can be seen live on the blog Milwaukee Development Update and starting Friday April 25th 2008, the site Friday Photos, will use the plugin to display weekly photos. The Friday Photos site will be the place to look for new releases and additional documentation for the Friday Photos Plugin.

To try out this plugin yourself:

1. Download Friday Photos
2. Upload the plugin into your wp-content/plugins directory
3. Extract the .zip file
4. Activate the plugin in the plugin administration page
5. Open the plugin configuration page, which is located under Options -> Friday Photos and enter your Flickr username, Flickr API Key, Flickr Secret and additional paramaters. To obtain a Flickr API Key click here
6. The plugin will automatically create a Friday post of pictures from your Flickr Account

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• Friday Photos Version 1.2
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