Foster Solutions (FSI)

It has become mandatory to use Facebook and Twitter as part of your website marketing strategy.  The development environment for both Facebook and Twitter is finally getting to a point to allow good integration among the various platforms. This can...

Experts Exchange is a great service where you can post your programming issue and you will more likely get a quick and professional response.  You can either earn points by answering other questions or you can pay a monthly fee. This is the b...

If images are float left on a listing/blog page and the next item doesn't break below the image but continues to wrap around it, you need to add a float:left and clear: both to a class in the style.css.   See below   #featured-bot...

Gravity forms is a plugin for WordPress to build forms for surveys and mailings.  It isn't free, but well worth the price as a very well designed product.   If  you are in the business of building websites, you inevitably will be needing to have at...

Parsing names is an age-old process of taking a full name (i.e. "Mr. John C. Smith, Jr.") and extracting the first name, last name, middle name, etc. The following SQL Server function handles 99% of the situations, including prefixes, suffixes and h...

Although WordPress is the undisputed leader as a website CMS (yes, it is a CMS), "real" developers snub their noses at WordPress because it is just a "blog" and doesn't have all the power of Drupal or Joomla. Enter the Genesis Framework and the Stud...

WordPress seems limited with the way it handles images (media).  I don't see why it can't be part of the taxonomy like posts and pages since it is stored in the wp_posts table.  A media item is "attached" to a post if it has a value in the post_pa...

This was an email posted in the wwwac.org listserv.  It's a nice overview of the pros and cons of the "big three" open source CMSs. WordPress is wonderful for a basic content site, especially for blogs and personal stuff. Lots of plugins to add fun...

If you need to migrate WordPress to another server, sometimes it will have a different URL. That will break all the image links in the content of the pages. The best thing to do is do a bulk replace in MySQL.  The command is as follows update wp_p...

Sometimes you want to show future posts, likely when you have posts that are events. <?php // ------------ added for events to show future if(is_category('events')) query_posts($query_string . '&order=ASC&post_status=future'); while (...

Whether you’re a beginner in SEO or a seasoned pro, it’s important to keep up on how your pages will be displayed in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) across each engine. Every engine displays your page differently and depending on what yo...

One must be very wary of paying for SEO on their site. Click HERE for a harsh critique of those making a living doing SEO. Here is a useful short video from Google saying they don't use meta keyword tags at all:

Thanks Matt Varone on this function to check if the current page is a subpage.  WP should have made this a core function http://www.mattvarone.com/wordpress/is_subpage-function/ A useful companion item is to create a template for a parent page w...

Cursors are frowned upon, but I have found times when performance of update query sets are too slow.  I believe this happens when the recovery model is full. The T-SQL below creates a cursor on a table and then steps through each record and updates...

WordPress is an amazing product, and Fantastico Deluxe helps with the install, but there are some issues and best practices. When installing WP using Fantastico, make sure the permissions are secure after installation.  Fantastico usually sets perm...