Diabolik

The new blog theme is called Diabolik and let me get started by saying: I didn’t build it myself. It’s actually a premium theme I bought on ThemeForest. I never thought about buying a premium WordPress theme because it seemed like such a waste of money but after seeing the live demo, I realized I wouldn’t be able to create something similarly powerful in a reasonable amount of time. So 35$ seemed like a no-brainer.

At first it seemed like it was perfect but as I started updating my site, I realized a lot of things were buggy, incomplete or just not implemented. Examples:

1. Lots of default WordPress default CSS classes were not there..
2. Quite a lot of Javascript imperfections which could cause errors and stop stuff from working.
3. Bad copy/pastes in the custom post types (which caused a bug that drove me nuts).
4.  The theme’s contact form didn’t work. Required a rewrite.
5. Buggy theme functions that would break the site from time to time.
6. Page navigators were poorly implemented (and would screw up the design).
7. The searchform was not correctly implemented.

And more stuff like that. Ok, at this point it looks like I bought a load of crap but I have to be honest: Those were tiny bugs and imperfections in an otherwise great theme! There’s multiple templates for every kind of page, there’s quite a lot of custom widget magic, the portfolio section of the site is now fully powered by this theme, loads of animation and interaction. It was totally worth doing some bugfixing. I love it!

I’m currently in the process of adding my work to the portfolio and updating the current blogposts to fix the images and add the featured image (which I never used before). I’m very happy with the current theme. It’s fresh, light, pretty clean and as far as I’m concerned: It loads faster. That should make some people just a bit happier.

So yea: I saved a lot of time by buying this theme but if you ever consider buying a WordPress theme, make sure you’ve got the time to get your hands dirty because you might just need it.

Bugs and suggestions?

If you see anything out of line, encounter a bug or have an idea of something that should be different: Feel free to let me know in the comments. I’m pretty sure you can think of something

It took a little over a year, but it’s finally here: Dooodl 1.1.0 1.1.1 is a fact!
What has been done?

• You can now manage the Dooodl’s that were submitted to your blog.
• I even went one better: There’s now an option that enables you to first approve Dooodls before they appear on the site.
• You can choose to get an email everytime a new Dooodl is submitted (with links to approve, disapprove or delete the new Dooodl)
• Your blog, your style: You can make the Flash Gallery and the HTML gallery look exactly the way you want (well, you can choose the colors )
• What’s better than choosing the colors of the gallery? Being able to completely edit the look of the widget so it fits into your theme perfectly!
• Don’t like the Flash gallery? Disable it in the Dooodl settings. Hurray for Flash-haters!
• Previous versions would load all Dooodls at once. That is now history: I added endless scrolling to the HTML version: People with lots of Dooodls will have less trouble showing the HTML version from now on.

I’m really excited about this release because Dooodl has now finally grown up. It’s able to fit in to your theme using the different options.
It finally fits your philosophy too as from now on you can choose to moderate them!

If you haven’t got Dooodl yet, but this release sparks some love for a fun plugin, I’d say: Go get it! It’s free and it will be a good laugh. More than 4200 downloads can’t be wrong!

Oh and by the way: I wanted to take a moment and thank every single one of you guys for downloading and installing the plugin! Seeing that many people use something I created really excites me to make things even better! Thanks for the continuous support and suggestions! You guys rock!

And as always, if you have problems, suggestions, questions: Go crazy in the comments! Drop me a line if you like it! I’d love to see how it looks/works on your site!

Enjoy!

[Update]

A few people commented they didn’t get the widget to show up in the sidebar automatically. That’s because you need to add it to the sidebar yourself. But don’t worry: It’s easy!

• Go to the WP-admin
• Go to the Appearance panel
• Select the Widgets-submenu
• Drag the Dooodl-widget into your sidebar
• Done. Ready. Finito. Party!!!

If you don’t see a sidebar in your widget-manager, it means your theme is not widget ready. In that case you can use the Dooodl PHP template tags, somewhere in your theme (yes I really thought of everything!) where you’d like the widget to show up. Use this code:

<? if (function_exists("Dooodl_widget")) Dooodl_widget(); ?>

There you go! Good luck!

I really screwed up yesterday. I updated the Dooodl plugin and commited it to SVN. After having done that I wanted to wait until the changes reflected on the WordPress site (which sometimes takes a few minutes). However I had to go over to Ward for dinner, so I took my laptop…

When arrived there I checked the site back and saw the changes. I updated the plugin on my site immediately using the WP-plugin auto-update functionality. That’s when all hell broke loose…
I saw that all the doodle-images on my site were gone, but the userdata (in the database) remained. When checking the FTP I realized what happened… The images are saved inside the plugin folder in a folder called ‘doodls’. Once you let WordPress update the plugin automatically it tells you it ‘removed the old version of the plugin‘, before it ‘upgraded the plugin succesfully‘. It actually removes everything in that directory. I did NOT know that! I expected the plugin to replace all the existing files with new files and add the missing files/folders. And that’s why everything saved by the plugin was was lost once updated…

In my case I immediately lost about 120 doodles you guys submitted. Lucky for me I took a backup only half an hour before running the upgrade . In the end I only lost 11 images. I hope I’m the only one who ran into this misery.

But now…
There’s a new version online (1.0.5) (1.0.6  featuring smaller brushes ) which will not have that issue anymore. But before running off and installing this version please take a look at this and please be absolutely sure to have a backup of your doodles before installing ANY other version of the plugin…

1. Before updating, download the /wp-content/plugins/dooodl/doodls/ folder. This folder contains all doodles your users saved. If you don’t, you will lose all images your users saved.
2. Create a folder in /wp-content/uploads/ and name it ‘doodls‘.
3. Upload the images to this(/wp-content/uploads/doodls/) folder.
4. Now you can upgrade the new version of the plugin.

Again: I’m terribly sorry about all this and I really hope you didn’t lose (too much) of your doodles. I already tested 1.0.6 and it’s working perfectly. If you safely copy/backup the folder with doodles (using the steps above) then you should be safe

Having said all this…

If you got any feedback or information on how WordPress updates itself and plugins, do let me know. I really wouldn’t like running into this kind of trouble again…

But it’s still an independent application hacked into WordPress using basic widget.  That means I can’t just share the code so you can use it too on your website (since you’ll have to set up a database, fill in config files, etc… Boring stuff). So yesterday I decided to compact this into a handy WordPress plugin.
And this is what I did: I give you Dooodl!

[UPDATE] Mark asked me to share the source of the Dooodl Creator App, so I did Feel free to send me links to your own creator. I might add different creators to the plugin, and let you choose in the WP-admin which one you’d like your visitors to use

Plugin page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dooodl
Direct download: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/dooodl.zip
Dooodl Creator source (Flash Builder Beta): Click

If you install it, feel free to drop me a line. Feel free to post the url to your blog as well. I’d be happy to see who’s using it and what people are drawing

(And yes: If you find any bugs, do post them as comment underneath )

Have fun!

I have been thinking about this for some time. A few weeks ago I was browsing Kris‘ site and found the answer to this guestbook-problem in the sidebar: A Doodle-wall. He allows his visitors to draw a little doodle and save it to the sidebar. Better yet: He built a history-browser too which allows you to browse all doodles through time.

I loved the idea and the philosophy behind this and went to build my own. I just finished the first part of Dooodl (this is the name of the official WordPress plugin coming out sometime soon ) and it’s already running in the sidebar! Feel free to test it and save some doodles! If you run into any kind of bugs or unpleasant problems, let me know!
Feel free to drop me a line, whatever the reason might be: Bugreport, suggestions or the good old ‘I iz serious cat! I can haz hamburger, not guestb00k!‘

Links:
Draw your own: Click!
View all of them using the (temporary) History Viewer: Click!

Hackerlab.de

Pervart.net

RosaleeNortiz.net

Kurisue.es

Alexis-Design.info

Ferrypin.net

Bubblecrush.org

Lima-Limon.com

Wil-Vincent.net

Supermini for WordPress

Download: Here

You can check it out at ikDicht.

Oh and while I’m at it: Removing the footer links to Patrick and me is totally uncool… Because some people still do that in 2009.

If you’re reading this, then you have undoubtedly noticed some changes on my blog (to all my fellow RSS readers: feel free to check out the site. It’s worth it ). I created this theme myself, and to be honest: it’s my first real attempt at a WordPress theme. I had to build a blog design for a school assignment, so I figured: “What the hell, let’s just create something cool!” and this is what I came up with.

I’ve tested it on the following browsers, and fixed most bugs and differences.

• IE6 (Win XP)
• IE7 (Win XP)
• IE8 (Windows Seven beta)
• Firefox 3 (OSX & Win XP)
• Safari 3 (OSX)

If I overlooked something anyway, feel free to tell me so.
And please: do tell me what you think of the theme. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

[ Link ]

De plugin kun je vanaf nu hier vinden.
Ik ben benieuwd of mensen met een site op wordpress.com zelf deze plugin in gebruik kunnen nemen.