CloudZoom, A new jquery zoom is here on the market, with features such as image blur, zooming inside the image. It works a bit like jqZoom, which is now a de facto standard for image zooming, but CloudZoom claims to be lighter and certainly is nicer to view.
Yes it is possible to host multiple sites for multiple customers with Wordpress. The Multi User feature we expeted in wordpress 3.0 will satisfy bloggers only but we need something more specific. The technique I describe here is similar to the one described here in the sense that it directs the database configuration constants to specific databases instead of table prefixes as seen a lot. The advantage obviously is that you keep a single install of wordpress and only have one codebase to manage , while databases remain independant.
$domain = strtolower( str_replace( “www.”, “”, $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"] ) );
$domain = preg_replace(’[^a-z0-9\.-]‘, ”, $domain );
$domainDirectory=”/wp-domains/” .$domain;
$domainConfig= dirname(__FILE__) . $domainDirectory . “/db-config.php”;
if ( file_exists( $domainConfig ) ) {require_once( $domainConfig );} else {
$dbuser=”defaultdomaindatabase”;
$dbpwd=”password”;
if ($domain!=”defaultdomain.com”)Â echo “missing ” .$domainConfig;}
define(’DB_NAME’, $dbuser);
define(’DB_USER’, $dbuser);
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, $dbpwd);
Once this is working with your default  domain, setup virtual hosts  in Apache and try a new domain. Remember on a new install to setup the upload folder in wordpress admin settings.
Multi site config for Wordpress : Compatible plugins
I’m running the following plugins and they work perfectly
Word press image upload is nice and perfectly integrated in the wysiwyg editor. If you need to specify clearly where the image will appear, you can use the post thumnbail feature that attaches a specific image to a post. But if you need to duisplay more than image per post, then you’re better off using custom fields, and a few plugins are available to let you upload image directly to a custom field
Bonus : Custom Field Template Hack  displays full size image on custom image thumbnail in post / page edit in backend and additional function to automate image display in templates
SEO Toaster was introduced last week and it comes with a set of features that puts that solution right in place for competing with other famous systems. It’s also nice to note that the technology behind it is the Zend Framework.
Inline editing : all administration is performed within the actual site, the admin area does not exist. This is a particularly challenging choice of development but tends to please users when correctly designed. Visually the green & blue theme for the sidebar admin is not the best but is functionnal.
I particularly like the page creation form (image above) which allows the content manager to specify all page information, including SEO related, page title and header image, in one shot.
File Management uses the famous swfupload which is now a minimum requirement for CMS practise. Images are automatically resized and the upload process allows uploading and editing within the same screen which is a recipe for content efficiency. Jquery lightbox is provided in the distribution and resized images link to the original image automatically.
Form maker is integrated in the distribution too but only with the email sender feature, no database integration yet
wpml is a wonderful plugin that has so many  it takes a while to get used to its power.
A new beta version of the multilingual plugin has been published for early adopters who have already switched to 3.0
What I’ve tested is interesting and allows quick setting of multilingual website
 Main home page screenshot |
 specific admin widget sidebar |
 Custom post type for products |
the implementation of jquery photo gallery is better performed when the thumbnail is dynamiccaly generated via some magic library such as the old phpthumb. But this method doubles the amount of images to load, especially the big ones that we want to pop in on thumbnail click. And that’s where comes Ariel Flesler’s jquery preload plugin, that allows some various configuration using jquery selector to specify which images should be preloaded. Another jquery plugin takes all images from css files and preload them, can be useful on all websites that rely on background images in styles.
Love flash but hate compiling ? here comes frontal, an intuitive markup and scripting language that generates Flash and enables you to create interactive content, sites or apps with a few lines of code. Still slow on some browsers (crahed flash plugin on chrome), the library has a lot of available widgets for photogalleries, slideshows…
Link : http://www.frontalcode.com
as of version 3 of Wordpress, posts and pages have three options for visibility :
What we’re looking for today is a solution that hides the post from the list but allows certain users to see it via permalink. Of course you can give the permalink and tell the user to identify via the wp-login page, but this can be complex for beginners. Ideally you would give the permalink of a private page and if not connecetd the visitor will be presented a login prompt. Here’s a review of available  solutions, tips and plugins
Other privacy options and plugins are available for Wordpress. We’ve tested for our intranet project some pugins that restrict the whole blog to registered users.
We’ve alerady covered the most innovative iphone / itouch applications for web content managers. Webmasterbulletin now features accessible content from your iphone : if you are viewing this blog from a standard browser you won’t notice a break, but get out and run webmasterbulletin.net from your iphone. The standard webmaterbulletin theme is conv erted to a very specific IPHONE application with AJAX calls for quicker use of the device. Thanks WPTOUCH, #1 plugin at the SanFrancisco Wordpress Camp 2009.
