<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <rss version="2.0" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/" ><channel><title>Sennza</title> <atom:link href="http://www.sennza.com.au/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /><link>http://www.sennza.com.au</link> <description>The best WordPress site ever!</description> <lastBuildDate>Mon, 14 May 2012 02:17:03 +0000</lastBuildDate> <language>en</language> <sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod> <sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency> <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2</generator> <xhtml:meta xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" name="robots" content="noindex" /> <item><title>Thank You WP Engine</title><link>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/05/11/thank-you-wp-engine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=thank-you-wp-engine</link> <comments>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/05/11/thank-you-wp-engine/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Fri, 11 May 2012 11:22:46 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Lachlan MacPherson</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[WordPress]]></category><guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sennza.com.au/?p=1408</guid> <description><![CDATA[&#160; After watching the recent Mixergy interview with Jason Cohen as few weeks back I felt like I should write a quick thank you to WP Engine. Ever since we started Sennza I have been on the look out for a hosting company that knows WordPress back to front. We have had our fair share of war stories from hosting companies. Believe it or not, we once used Distribute IT before they died a painful death, but that&#8217;s another story. After using upwards of 7 different hosting companies plus experiencing many other hosting environments with our clients I can say that for hosting WordPress websites, WP Engine is second to none. We only every use WordPress on our hosting so it&#8217;s important that everything is optimised for this content management system. While I was watching the interview with Jason on Mixergy, he mentioned that they experienced rapid growth and had a few disgruntled customers towards the start of the year. During this high growth period we were moving one of our high traffic clients over to WP Engine. I wouldn&#8217;t say we were disgruntled, we did have to shoot a few support tickets back and forth at this exact same [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: center;"><img class=" wp-image-1409   aligncenter colorbox-1408" title="WPEngine &amp; Sennza" src="http://cdn.sennza.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IMG_20120308_224445-e1336290006649-635x393.jpg" alt="" /></p><p>After watching the recent <a href="http://mixergy.com/jason-cohen-wpengine-interview-2/">Mixergy interview</a> with Jason Cohen as few weeks back I felt like I should write a quick thank you to WP Engine.</p><p>Ever since we started Sennza I have been on the look out for a hosting company that knows WordPress back to front. We have had our fair share of war stories from hosting companies. Believe it or not, we once used Distribute IT before they died a painful death, but that&#8217;s another story.</p><p>After using upwards of 7 different hosting companies plus experiencing many other hosting environments with our clients I can say that for hosting WordPress websites, WP Engine is second to none.</p><p><span id="more-1408"></span></p><p>We only every use WordPress on our hosting so it&#8217;s important that everything is optimised for this content management system.</p><p>While I was watching the interview with Jason on Mixergy, he mentioned that they experienced rapid growth and had a few disgruntled customers towards the start of the year. During this high growth period we were moving one of our high traffic clients over to WP Engine. I wouldn&#8217;t say we were disgruntled, we did have to shoot a few support tickets back and forth at this exact same time. I couldn&#8217;t help but think that we were one of the customers he was talking about&#8230;</p><p>When we first decided to use <a href="http://wwww.sennza.com.au/go/wpengine/">WP Engine</a> we started with just one of our clients, naturally it was one that gets a significant amount of traffic. The website is also a membership website that is visited by tens of thousands of customers each day. One of the best things about WP Engine is that their server&#8217;s cache websites heavily. Unfortunately for us the caching on the migrated site was not playing nicely with WP Engines&#8217; setup and thousands of members were locked of this website. After several support requests, Jason himself (the CEO of the company) jumped in to help sort out the problem!</p><p>I can guarantee that any other hosting company would have given up with the caching problem we had initially! Actually, any other hosting company would have flat-out said that it&#8217;s &#8220;not their problem&#8221;.</p><p>So hats off to WP Engine and thank you for helping us where no other hosting company would have. They even took notice of some feedback we&#8217;d provided about Random Posts widgets being able to be stored in a WordPress transient to reduce server load and allow some sites to still have these widgets. They even added a new feature in their dashboard to active the &#8216;orderby&#8217; =&gt; &#8216;rand&#8217; option in WordPress queries! I bet no other WordPress hosting company has ever done that in the past!</p><p>Their service was so good that when we visited Austin Texas for SXSW this year we made it a must to drop by the WP Engine and say &#8220;Hello&#8221; (Picture above). All the team are extremely passionate and they are doing amazing things, I&#8217;m really keep to see where they are headed.</p><p>Once again, Thank you WP Engine!</p> ]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/05/11/thank-you-wp-engine/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>WordPress Security</title><link>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/03/28/wordpress-security/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=wordpress-security</link> <comments>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/03/28/wordpress-security/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Wed, 28 Mar 2012 10:23:36 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Lachlan MacPherson</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[WordPress]]></category><guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sennza.com.au/?p=1304</guid> <description><![CDATA[Yesterday we had a call from someone that who had their WordPress website hacked and was in a panic to get it fixed ASAP. For something that is easily avoidable this happens way to often. After getting in and fixing the website we were asked for a list of things to ensure this doesn&#8217;t happen again going forward, which made us realise, although there is some great documentation on this online, we don&#8217;t have a post about it on our blog. First thing we did was enlist Sucuri to fix the malware. We could have poked around for serveral hours and fixed the problem, but that the end of the day these guys know security and malware back to front and for such a reasonable price it simply a no brainer. They found the malware pretty quickly so that left us to harden WordPress. &#160; The WordPress Security Shortlist There are some pretty easy things you can do on your WordPress site to stop some basic &#8220;attacks&#8221; on your WordPress site.  Delete any user account with the username &#8220;admin&#8221;. If you have a admin account with the username &#8220;admin&#8221; then you have just given your hackers half the information they need to attack [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Yesterday we had a call from someone that who had their WordPress website hacked and was in a panic to get it fixed ASAP.</p><p>For something that is easily avoidable this happens way to often. After getting in and fixing the website we were asked for a list of things to ensure this doesn&#8217;t happen again going forward, which made us realise, although there is some great documentation on this online, we don&#8217;t have a post about it on our blog.</p><p>First thing we did was enlist <a href="http://sucuri.net/">Sucuri</a> to fix the malware. We could have poked around for serveral hours and fixed the problem, but that the end of the day these guys know security and malware back to front and for such a reasonable price it simply a no brainer. They found the malware pretty quickly so that left us to <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress">harden WordPress</a>.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-1313 colorbox-1304" title="WordPress Security" src="http://cdn.sennza.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/wordpress-security-e1332929642576-635x495.jpg" alt="WordPress Security" width="635" height="495" /></p><p><span id="more-1304"></span></p><h2>The WordPress Security Shortlist</h2><p>There are some pretty easy things you can do on your WordPress site to stop some basic &#8220;attacks&#8221; on your WordPress site.</p><ol><li> <strong>Delete any user account with the username &#8220;admin&#8221;.<br /> </strong>If you have a admin account with the username &#8220;admin&#8221; then you have just given your hackers half the information they need to attack your site. Go to Users, set up a new Administrator account with a unique username and delete the &#8220;admin&#8221; username. Make sure you assign all previous posts and pages to your new Administrator account otherwise you&#8217;ll lose all the content that was created by the &#8220;admin&#8221; account.</li><li><strong>ALWAYS update WordPress.<br /> </strong>As a guideline, generally 0.0.1 updates are to do with security and it&#8217;s in your best interest to update these as soon as possible. If your WordPress theme has been coded correctly <em>(this is a rant for another time)</em> then updating WordPress will do nothing except make your website more secure&#8230;oh and if it&#8217;s a major WordPress release then you&#8217;ll get new features! (read: win/winning!) <img src='http://cdn.sennza.com.au/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley colorbox-1304' /><br /> <em>N.B. To any WordPress developers:  If you are using a theme as a base for a website alway create a child theme before making any modification to theme. There are <a href="http://wordpress.tv/2011/08/20/jane-wells-appearance-is-everything-customizing-your-theme/">many</a> <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes">tutorials</a> on how to do this and even a <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/one-click-child-theme/">plugin</a> that will help you as well.</em></li><li><strong>Update all plugins</strong>.<br /> Self explanatory right? It&#8217;s one click, not that hard <img src='http://cdn.sennza.com.au/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley colorbox-1304' /></li><li><strong>Add &#8220;Salt&#8221; in wp-config.php</strong> to add extra security for people logging into the site. Nearly all meals need salt, no matter how wonderfully prepared they are and the same goes for any WordPress install. Add <a href="https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/">salt</a>! wp-config.php has a link to that.</li><li><strong>Change the default database prefix from wp_</strong> rather to a unique prefix. You can make it anything you like, <em><strong>just make sure it&#8217;s not wp_</strong></em>. I wouldn&#8217;t go back and change this to existing websites, but just keep it in mind when you install your next WordPress website.</li><li> <strong>Ensure both the FTP and cPanel/Plesk passwords are not the same</strong>. Yes passwords are a pain to manage&#8230;no its not imposible, trust me, I have close to 100 WordPress admin passwords I have to manage and I do it all with <a href="https://agilebits.com/onepassword">1Password</a>. Spend the time and money to make generating a unique password a daily habit. There is no excuse for using the password: passwOrd (You&#8217;re not the smartest person alive <a href="http://mashable.com/2011/11/17/worst-internet-passwords/">because you replaced a letter with a number</a>)! I see a lot of passwords, and you would not believe some of the ones I have seen. If you forget your password, you can always reset it, I do on a daily basis.</li><li>Last but not least, have a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmKp2EGsQB8">back up plan</a>!<p><span style="text-align:center; display: block;"><a href="http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/03/28/wordpress-security/"><img class="colorbox-1304"  src="http://img.youtube.com/vi/XmKp2EGsQB8/2.jpg" alt="" /></a></span></p><p>Believe it or not a back up plan also includes a <em>restoration plan</em>. A backup isn&#8217;t worth it&#8217;s weight in gold unless you have an easy way to restore it.  Just buy <a href="http://pluginbuddy.com/purchase/backupbuddy/">BackupBuddy</a> so you have both a backup and restore option covered! I cannot tell you how many times BackupBuddy has saved our skin at Sennza. We  use this plugin on a daily basis! (Massive props to Cory, Matt, Dustin and the <a href="http://ithemes.com/">iThemes</a> team!)</li></ol><p>Want to know more? <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress">http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress</a></p> ]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/03/28/wordpress-security/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>1</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>The Trouble With Sidebars/Widget Areas In WordPress</title><link>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/03/28/the-trouble-with-sidebarswidget-areas-in-wordpress/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-trouble-with-sidebarswidget-areas-in-wordpress</link> <comments>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/03/28/the-trouble-with-sidebarswidget-areas-in-wordpress/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:02:20 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Bronson Quick</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[WordPress]]></category><guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sennza.com.au/?p=1284</guid> <description><![CDATA[As I&#8217;m sure most of you are rather aware, I have been pro-WordPress as a CMS for a rather long time! I think the hardest thing for us as WordPress developers is working out a way to deal with different sidebar areas and page templates. The more sidebars we declare, the harder it is for the client to update. I&#8217;m an avid fan of keeping things as simple to update as possible but as WordPress developers we tend to end up with a crazy amount of sidebars when a client clicks through to Appearance-&#62; Widgets. Even a lot of WordPress frameworks end up with a crazy amount of widget areas! Sure &#8220;we&#8221; understand all the widget areas but the client doesn&#8217;t! The best solution I&#8217;ve seen to address this issue  is from Mika &#8220;Ipstenu&#8221; Epstein. She rethought the whole WordPress sidebar thing. Mika raised her points in part 1, 2 and 3 and Jane fulfilled her role as an awesome WordPress UI lead and pulled up the handbrake. So Mikas&#8217; logic isn&#8217;t in core Here&#8217;s my take on it cause I&#8217;m still a trac virgin I&#8217;ve been thinking that we might be able to have  any Page Templates we&#8217;ve declared appear [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>As I&#8217;m sure most of you are rather aware, I have been pro-<a href="http://www.sennza.com.au/2011/11/24/wordpress-is-taking-over-the-internet/#content">WordPress as a CMS</a> for a rather long time! I think the hardest thing for us as WordPress developers is working out a way to deal with different sidebar areas and page templates. The more sidebars we declare, the harder it is for the client to update.</p><p>I&#8217;m an avid fan of keeping things as simple to update as possible but as WordPress developers we tend to end up with a crazy amount of sidebars when a client clicks through to Appearance-&gt; Widgets. Even a lot of WordPress frameworks end up with a crazy amount of widget areas! Sure &#8220;we&#8221; understand all the widget areas but the client doesn&#8217;t!<span id="more-1284"></span></p><p>The best solution I&#8217;ve seen to address this issue  is from Mika &#8220;Ipstenu&#8221; Epstein. She rethought the whole <a href="http://tech.ipstenu.org/2011/wordpress-sidebars-as-menus-part-1/">WordPress sidebar</a> thing. Mika raised her points in <a href="http://tech.ipstenu.org/2011/wordpress-sidebars-as-menus-part-1/">part 1</a>, <a href="http://tech.ipstenu.org/2011/wordpress-sidebars-as-menus-part-2/">2</a> and <a href="http://tech.ipstenu.org/2011/wordpress-sidebars-as-menus-part-3/">3</a> and Jane fulfilled her role as an awesome WordPress UI lead and pulled up the handbrake. So Mikas&#8217; logic isn&#8217;t in core <img src='http://cdn.sennza.com.au/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_sad.gif' alt=':(' class='wp-smiley colorbox-1284' /></p><h3>Here&#8217;s my take on it cause I&#8217;m still a trac virgin</h3><p>I&#8217;ve been thinking that we might be able to have  any Page Templates we&#8217;ve declared appear as a flyout menu under Appearance:</p><p><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-1285 colorbox-1284" title="Page Templates As Flyouts" src="http://cdn.sennza.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/page-templates-as-flyouts-635x449.png" alt="" width="635" height="449" /></p><p>Then when you select a page template you could get the widget areas for that template rather than all the widget areas at once.</p><p><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-1286 colorbox-1284" title="page-template-sidebars" src="http://cdn.sennza.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/page-template-sidebars-635x628.png" alt="" width="635" height="628" /></p><h2>What are your thoughts?</h2><p>Is this something that I should work out how to submit to WordPress trac?<br /> Does my idea suck and am I doing it wrong?</p><p>I&#8217;m looking forward to your feedback <img src='http://cdn.sennza.com.au/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley colorbox-1284' /></p> ]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/03/28/the-trouble-with-sidebarswidget-areas-in-wordpress/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>1</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>Sennza &#8211; 2 Years In</title><link>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/03/10/sennza-2-years-in/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sennza-2-years-in</link> <comments>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/03/10/sennza-2-years-in/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Sat, 10 Mar 2012 05:58:28 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Bronson Quick</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[WordPress]]></category><guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sennza.com.au/?p=1244</guid> <description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m happy to announce that Sennza has now been in business for 2 years and it&#8217;s time for me to take a few minutes to reflect on what has happened since our first birthday. We&#8217;ve come a long way in the last year so I&#8217;ll do a &#8220;quick&#8221; list of some of our achievements: We&#8217;ve got our own office! We helped organise WordCamp Gold Coast! We found time to redesign our website We&#8217;ve worked with 3 publicly listed companies More site traffic! Massive WordPress Meetup growth Another team member Sennza represents at SXSW! We&#8217;ve got our own office! 12 months ago we were embracing the &#8220;distributed office&#8221; format for our business. Lachlan and myself would both work from home and use Skype to call each other. We&#8217;ve been though 2 offices in the last year. Our first office was a shared office space called The Thought Fort. The Thought Fort is a shared office space where you can rent desks per day, week or month. The Thought Fort is a fabulous environment and it&#8217;s filled with so many amazing people who work in all kinds of industries. While we were there we got to work alongside illustrators, web developers, iPad app developers and [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="size-full wp-image-1246 aligncenter colorbox-1244" title="Happy Birthday Sennza" src="http://cdn.sennza.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/wordpress-cake.jpg" alt="Happy Birthday Sennza" width="480" height="463" /></p><p>I&#8217;m happy to announce that Sennza has now been in business for 2 years and it&#8217;s time for me to take a few minutes to reflect on what has happened since our <a title="Sennza - 1 Year In" href="http://www.sennza.com.au/2011/03/28/sennza-1-year-in/">first birthday</a>. We&#8217;ve come a long way in the last year so I&#8217;ll do a &#8220;quick&#8221; list of some of our achievements:</p><ul><li>We&#8217;ve got our own office!</li><li>We helped organise <a href="http://2011.goldcoast.wordcamp.org/">WordCamp Gold Coast</a>!</li><li>We found time to redesign our website</li><li>We&#8217;ve worked with 3 publicly listed companies</li><li>More site traffic!</li><li>Massive WordPress Meetup growth <img src='http://cdn.sennza.com.au/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley colorbox-1244' /></li><li><a href="http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/01/25/mathew-hood-joins-the-sennza-team/#content">Another team member</a></li><li>Sennza represents at <a href="http://sxsw.com/">SXSW</a>!</li></ul><h2><span id="more-1244"></span></h2><h2>We&#8217;ve got our own office!</h2><p>12 months ago we were embracing the &#8220;distributed office&#8221; format for our business. Lachlan and myself would both work from home and use Skype to call each other. We&#8217;ve been though 2 offices in the last year. Our first office was a shared office space called <a href="http://thoughtfort.com.au/">The Thought Fort</a>. The Thought Fort is a shared office space where you can rent desks per day, week or month. The Thought Fort is a fabulous environment and it&#8217;s filled with so many amazing people who work in all kinds of industries. While we were there we got to work alongside illustrators, web developers, iPad app developers and game programmers. If you&#8217;re working from home too much and need somewhere to work then you should definitely check out The Thought Fort!</p><h2>We helped organise WordCamp Gold Coast!</h2><p><a href="http://2011.goldcoast.wordcamp.org/">WordCamp Gold Coast</a> was an amazing event for the Australian WordPress community. We had around 150 attendees for the event which was fantastic. Organising the WordCamp took over 6 months and I was lucky enough to be part of an amazing team that included <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/lachlanj">Lachlan MacPherson</a>, <a href="http://find.brentshepherd.com/">Brent Shepherd</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/dd32">Dion Hulse</a> and Russell McCurdie. We hustled as best we could to get some fantastic sponsors and speakers. We had <a href="http://john.onolan.org/">John O&#8217;Nolan</a> design an amazing t-shirt for us and he also spoke at the event. We were also lucky enough to have two other international WordPress celebs speaking at our event: Dan Milward from <a href="http://getshopped.org/">WP-Ecommerce</a> and John Ford from <a href="http://vaultpress.com/">VaultPress</a>. Our Australian speakers were absolutely amazing as well and we were blown away by the quality of their talks and the time they donated for our WordCamp!</p><h2>We found time to redesign our website</h2><p>Due to our hectic work schedule the last thing on our list of &#8220;things to do&#8221; over the course of the year was redesigning our own website. As they say, &#8220;the plumber always has a leaky tap&#8221; and our leaky tap was our own web site! Each day we were working on stunningly beautiful WordPress powered websites for clients but we didn&#8217;t get the chance to give our own site a makeover. We managed to find a few hours to code up a responsive WordPress design for our own site. So you&#8217;ll get a slightly different look and feel for our site depending on what device you&#8217;re view it on. So if you&#8217;re viewing this on your mobile you&#8217;ll see a different layout and the same goes for iPad and desktop browsers. We still have a a few style bugs to work through when we get a chance but the site is looking rather sexy! <img src='http://cdn.sennza.com.au/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley colorbox-1244' /> Oh yeah and of course we&#8217;re using HTML5 and CSS3. (Geeky buzzwords <img src='http://cdn.sennza.com.au/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley colorbox-1244' /> )</p><h2>We&#8217;ve worked with 3 publicly listed companies</h2><p>We&#8217;re happy to have worked with 3 publicly listed companies who are using WordPress as their content management system (CMS) of choice. Seeing WordPress now powers <a href="http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all">15.9%</a> of the top one million sites on the internet we&#8217;re lucky enough to have these kinds of companies seeking us for their WordPress site design and development because they are already aware of how easy WordPress is to use and we&#8217;re one of the few &#8220;WordPress only&#8221; web development agencies in Australia.</p><h2>More site traffic!</h2><p>We&#8217;ve seen a good spike in traffic to our site over the last year thanks to a combination of our SEO efforts and our increase in branding. We are going to work on publishing more content on our blog this year and we&#8217;ll also be submitting some patches to the WordPress core this year so we&#8217;ll be getting even more traffic because of that so stay tuned!</p><h2>Massive WordPress Meetup growth</h2><p>Last year Lachlan and I said that we wanted to see both the <a href="http://www.wpbrisbane.com.au/">WordPress Brisbane</a>, <a href="http://www.wpsydney.com.au/">WordPress Sydney</a> and <a href="http://www.wptas.org/">WordPress Tasmania</a> meetups grow&#8230;.and wow did they grow! Members to the Brisbane meetup have more than doubled, members to Tasmania are growing rapidly and Sydney members have almost tripled! This is thanks to the marvelous people who have taken the reins from other states to help keep the meetups powering on when we can&#8217;t make it interstate. Thanks to <a href="http://www.pbwebdev.com.au/">Peter Bui</a>, <a href="http://thewpguy.com.au/">Tony Cosentino</a>, <a href="http://thewebprincess.com/">Dee Teal</a> and <a href="http://japh.com.au/">Japh Thomson</a> for keeping the Sydney and Tasmania Meetups organised!</p><h2>Another team member</h2><p>After searching high and low and interviewing <strong>a lot</strong> of potential staff over the last 8 months we finally found  a suitable WordPress developer to join our team. <a href="http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/01/25/mathew-hood-joins-the-sennza-team/#content">Mathew Hood</a> is our first official WordPress developer. I&#8217;ve been working alongside him to groom him into an awesome WordPress developer so he&#8217;s learning how to do things &#8220;the WordPress way&#8221; and we&#8217;re excited to watch Mat grow as a developer. We&#8217;re very fussy when it comes to hiring the right person so you can rest assured that we&#8217;ve got another developer on board who will be a WordPress gun in no time!</p><h2>Sennza represents at SXSW!</h2><p>Last but definitely not least&#8230;two of the Sennza staff are at <a href="http://sxsw.com/">South By Southwest</a> this year! SXSW is a massive conference that pretty much takes over all of Austin, Texas. There are three streams: Music, Film and Interactive. We&#8217;re here for the Interactive stream because a stack of WordPress people come here every year. We always miss out on meeting a lot of these people as they are mostly American and never come to Australia <img src='http://cdn.sennza.com.au/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_sad.gif' alt=':(' class='wp-smiley colorbox-1244' /> So we decided that we&#8217;d come to them this year. We were lucky enough to bump into (read: stalk on Twitter) some diehard WordPress people this afternoon while they were in line waiting for their SXSW badges. We said a quick &#8220;G&#8217;day&#8221; to <a href="http://markjaquith.com/">Mark Jaquith</a>, <a href="http://darylkoop.com/">Daryl Koopersmith</a>, <a href="http://evansolomon.me/">Evan Solomon</a>, <a href="http://chexee.me/">Chelsea Otakan</a> and <a href="http://sara-cannon.com/">Sara Cannon</a>. They were all lovely people&#8230;even though they were a little freaked out by some crazy Aussie WordPress people hunting them down in the line!</p><h2>What&#8217;s next?</h2><p>Over the next year we&#8217;ll be launching our own WordPress theme company, attending WordCamp New Zealand and WordCamp San Francisco, pumping out more high quality WordPress sites and hopefully growing our team further as well. It&#8217;s an exciting time to be a business who is &#8220;powered by WordPress&#8221; and I can&#8217;t wait to see what else unfolds over the course of the next year!</p> ]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/03/10/sennza-2-years-in/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>1</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>10 Tips For Creating A High Quality WordPress Theme</title><link>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/02/17/10-tips-for-creating-a-high-quality-wordpress-theme/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=10-tips-for-creating-a-high-quality-wordpress-theme</link> <comments>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/02/17/10-tips-for-creating-a-high-quality-wordpress-theme/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Fri, 17 Feb 2012 05:52:04 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Lachlan MacPherson</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Web Design]]></category> <category><![CDATA[WordPress]]></category><guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sennza.com.au/?p=1196</guid> <description><![CDATA[1. Don’t forget php wp_head(); ?&#62; If you look inside most WordPress themes &#60;head&#62; tags, you will find a function called wp_head(). From a first glance, this function may seem fairly useless, however it is extremely important. A large percentage of plugins require the wp_head(); function to “hook” into the WordPress header. Without this code between your &#60;head&#62; and &#60;/head&#62; tags, you may find that a large portion of your plugins will not work. Similar to wp_head(), you will find wp_footer() in the footer.php file of a majority of themes. This function is used by plugins to hook into your footer to hook code in. An example of something that requires this is Google Analytics. 2. Prefix your PHP functions As a developer, it is considered best practice to prefix your PHP functions. There are numerous benefits from doing so. Besides being easier to read, you will also prevent yourself from clashing with other functions that plugins etc may create. And poor example of prefixing your PHP functions is as follows [php] function foo_bar($foo){ &#8230; } [/php] Instead, add a prefix to your function. Common prefixes are your initials, or a simple way to reference your site [php] function sennza_foo_bar($foo){ [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<h2>1. Don’t forget php wp_head(); ?&gt;</h2><p>If you look inside most WordPress themes &lt;head&gt; tags, you will find a function called wp_head(). From a first glance, this function may seem fairly useless, however it is extremely important. A large percentage of plugins require the wp_head(); function to “hook” into the WordPress header. Without this code between your &lt;head&gt; and &lt;/head&gt; tags, you may find that a large portion of your plugins will not work. Similar to <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference/wp_head">wp_head()</a>, you will find <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference/wp_footer">wp_footer()</a> in the footer.php file of a majority of themes. This function is used by plugins to hook into your footer to hook code in. An example of something that requires this is <a href="http://www.google.com/analytics/" target="_blank">Google Analytics</a>.</p><p><span id="more-1196"></span></p><h2>2. Prefix your PHP functions</h2><p>As a developer, it is considered best practice to prefix your PHP functions. There are numerous benefits from doing so. Besides being easier to read, you will also prevent yourself from clashing with other functions that plugins etc may create.</p><p>And poor example of prefixing your PHP functions is as follows<br /> [php]</p><p>function foo_bar($foo){<br /> &#8230;<br /> }<br /> [/php]<br /> Instead, add a prefix to your function. Common prefixes are your initials, or a simple way to reference your site<br /> [php]<br /> function sennza_foo_bar($foo){<br /> …<br /> }<br /> [/php]<br /> The effort required for this is minimal but it can save you a lot of headaches down the road.</p><h2>3. Use dummy content</h2><p>The primary goal of most websites is to display content. While this is commonly known, it is surprising how many websites you will find that have no list styling or block quotes styled. An easy way to ensure that you style everything is to use dummy content.</p><p>What dummy content does is injects your WordPress website with various types of pages, posts and comments. From this dummy content you are able to easily see if there is anything you missed. Possibly you forgot to style the ordered list, or you didn’t style a right aligned image, this is no longer an issue with the dummy content.</p><p>A great resource to use is <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-dummy-content/" target="_blank">WP Dummy Content</a>.</p><p>It is installed through the WordPress importer by uploading an XML file containing the various content pieces.</p><h2>4. Start from a base</h2><p>In order to save time, a large majority of developers prefer to code from an existing theme. There are two great base themes that are available that will ensure that you have got everything you need to begin creating your high quality theme. Take a look at <a href="http://starkerstheme.com/" target="_blank">Starkers Theme</a> and the <a href="http://html5reset.org/#wordpress" target="_blank">html5reset.org WordPress theme</a>.</p><h2>5. Keep it streamline</h2><p>Keeping your theme streamline not only will save you time in creating stunning content, but it is good practice and you will thank yourself for it later. There are a few different situations that you can streamline your content, but the most important to me is in the thumbnail image.</p><p>If you cannot see the thumbnail image in your post editor, chances are that you haven’t enabled it in your theme. To do so, just add this snippet to your functions.php<br /> [php]<br /> add_theme_support( &#8216;post-thumbnails&#8217; );<br /> [/php]</p><p>Now that you have posts with thumbnail images, you will want to take advantage of the <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_image_size">add_image_size function</a>. This handy function allows you to set different thumbnail image sizes for where the content is displayed. Setting different image sizes is simple with the use of the add_image_size function. Below where you added the theme support for post-thumbnails, place the following code:<br /> [php]<br /> add_image_size( $name, $width, $height, $crop );<br /> [/php]</p><p>To simplify the above code, enter the name of your image size inside the brackets, for example ‘homepage-thumbnail’. After that, set your width and height and then whether you want to WordPress to crop the image. An example of a working add_image_size function would be:<br /> [php]<br /> add_image_size( ‘homepage-thumbnail’, 190, 190, true );<br /> [/php]</p><p>Now to call the image at that size, all you have to do is place the following code inside your loop:<br /> [php]<br /> the_post_thumbnail( ‘homepage-thumbnail’ );<br /> [/php]</p><p>If all went to plan, you should now see the resized version of your thumbnail. If you already had the thumbnail generated, you will need to regenerate the thumbnails. A good plugin for this is <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/regenerate-thumbnails/" target="_blank">Regenerate Thumbnails</a>.</p><h2>6. Remove the links menu item</h2><p>As WordPress is being used more an more for a full CMS website, as opposed to just a blog roll, some features are being used less and less. There is a new function that has been added to WordPress 3.1 that makes it quite easy to remove unwanted menu items. In this example, we will remove ‘Links’. Placing this in your functions.php will remove the unused menu item.<br /> [php]<br /> add_action( &#8216;admin_menu&#8217;, &#8216;my_admin_menu&#8217; );</p><p>function my_admin_menu() {<br /> remove_menu_page(&#8216;link-manager.php&#8217;);<br /> }<br /> [/php]</p><p>You now have a cleaner Admin dashboard for yourself and other users!</p><h2>7. Comment your code</h2><p>Commenting your code will not only make it easier for you to reference back later on, but if another developer picks up your code they should be able to understand what you have done as it is written there for them. How you choose to comment is really a personal decision, I personally comment my code as follows<br /> [php]<br /> /*<br /> Foobar …<br /> ========== */<br /> [/php]</p><p>It is about finding what works for you and sticking to it. You may find that you need to reference back to how you did something in a project a few months later, and having comments there to remind you will save you a lot of time that you would otherwise spend wasting trying to work out how you solved the issue.</p><h2>8. Don’t forget pagination</h2><p>There are loads of amazing plugins in the official WordPress repository that handle pagination for you. If you are after a quick solution to a problem, then this will definitely do the job for you! WP-PageNavi is one of the most popular WordPress plugins, and is very well developed.</p><p>If you want to dig into the code yourself you, then you are looking for the <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/paginate_links">paginate_links()</a> function.</p><p>The default usage is shown here (taken from the WordPress Codex &#8211; paginate_links<br /> [php]<br /> php $args = array(<br /> &#8216;base&#8217;         =&gt; &#8216;%_%&#8217;,<br /> &#8216;format&#8217;       =&gt; &#8216;?page=%#%&#8217;,<br /> &#8216;total&#8217;        =&gt; 1,<br /> &#8216;current&#8217;      =&gt; 0,<br /> &#8216;show_all&#8217;     =&gt; False,<br /> &#8216;end_size&#8217;     =&gt; 1,<br /> &#8216;mid_size&#8217;     =&gt; 2,<br /> &#8216;prev_next&#8217;    =&gt; True,<br /> &#8216;prev_text&#8217;    =&gt; __(&#8216;&amp;laquo; Previous&#8217;),<br /> &#8216;next_text&#8217;    =&gt; __(&#8216;Next &amp;raquo;&#8217;),<br /> &#8216;type&#8217;         =&gt; &#8216;plain&#8217;,<br /> &#8216;add_args&#8217;     =&gt; False,<br /> &#8216;add_fragment&#8217; =&gt;  ); ?&gt;<br /> [/php]</p><p>Because the function takes all of the information needed to generate page links, you can use it for almost any pagination list. Here is some code to generate pagination links for an article archive:<br /> [php]<br /> // get total number of pages<br /> global $wp_query;<br /> $total = $wp_query-&gt;max_num_pages;<br /> // only bother with the rest if we have more than 1 page!<br /> if ( $total &gt; 1 )  {<br /> // get the current page<br /> if ( !$current_page = get_query_var(&#8216;paged&#8217;) )<br /> $current_page = 1;<br /> // structure of “format” depends on whether we’re using pretty permalinks<br /> $format = empty( get_option(&#8216;permalink_structure&#8217;) ) ? &#8216;&amp;page=%#%&#8217; : &#8216;page/%#%/&#8217;;<br /> echo paginate_links(array(<br /> &#8216;base&#8217; =&gt; get_pagenum_link(1) . &#8216;%_%&#8217;,<br /> &#8216;format&#8217; =&gt; $format,<br /> &#8216;current&#8217; =&gt; $current_page,<br /> &#8216;total&#8217; =&gt; $total,<br /> &#8216;mid_size&#8217; =&gt; 4,<br /> &#8216;type&#8217; =&gt; &#8216;list&#8217;<br /> ));<br /> }<br /> [/php]</p><p>The above code results in the following HTML<br /> [html]</p><ul class="page-numbers"><li><span class="page-numbers current">1</span></li><li><a class="page-numbers" href="http://mysite.com/page/2/">2</a></li><li><a class="page-numbers" href="http://mysite.com/page/3/">3</a></li><li><a class="page-numbers" href="http://mysite.com/page/4/">4</a></li><li><a class="page-numbers" href="http://mysite.com/page/5/">5</a></li><li><span class="page-numbers dots">&#8230;</span></li><li><a class="page-numbers" href="http://mysite.com/page/10/">10</a></li><li><a class="next page-numbers" href="http://mysite.com/page/2/">Next »</a></li></ul><p>[/html]</p><h2>9. Add excerpt functionality to pages</h2><p>A great line of cool to have in your functions.php file is this snippet to add excerpt support to your pages. This is handy if you want to pull a snippet of text from a page and then place a read more. For example, on the homepage of your theme you may want to have some content from an about page with a link to read more. Rather then using a text-widget, you can simply query the page_id and call the post excerpt. This means less editing and its one less thing that the user has to worry about.<br /> [php]<br /> add_action( &#8216;init&#8217;, &#8216;my_add_excerpts_to_pages&#8217; );<br /> function my_add_excerpts_to_pages() {<br /> add_post_type_support( &#8216;page&#8217;, &#8216;excerpt&#8217; );<br /> }<br /> [/php]</p><p>You can now call the excerpt of pages into different areas of your website to assist in keeping it streamlined.</p><h2>10. Theme Check using WP Theme Unit Test</h2><p>The final step with any theme you create should be running it through the<a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/theme-check/" target="_blank"> Theme Check plugin</a>. This plugin will review your code and make sure that your code is up to standards, and that you are not using any depreciated functions or other mistakes. Once you have passed this, your theme is ready to be released!</p> ]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/02/17/10-tips-for-creating-a-high-quality-wordpress-theme/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>WordPress Predictions for 2012</title><link>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/02/06/wordpress-predictions-for-2012/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=wordpress-predictions-for-2012</link> <comments>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/02/06/wordpress-predictions-for-2012/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:53:49 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Lachlan MacPherson</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[WordPress]]></category><guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sennza.com.au/?p=1133</guid> <description><![CDATA[Ok, so first up I know it might be a little late to be doing yearly predictions in February. I&#8217;ve had this post sitting here for a few weeks now so I thought I would publish my thoughts anyway. The predictions I have might be a little bold, but frankly safe predictions are boring. Having said that, although they may be bold I think that all these predictions are definitely more than possible. WordPress gets an &#8220;App Store&#8221; WordPress.com or WordPress.org will finally gets an “app store” for paid/premium plugins. It somehow seems more likely that this will happen to WordPress.com first, and I don&#8217;t think it will be a full-blown app store to start with, ala apple, but there will be the beginnings of an app store. First you will see Automattic products available for purchase, such as Akismet, Poll Daddy and VaultPress. We may even see a few select premium plugin providers invited to participate in much the same way a select few theme developers were chosen to sell themes on WordPress.com Left Field: It&#8217;s also likely that we see other members of the community band together to form their own app store. MassivePress is a perfect example [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><strong><img class="aligncenter  wp-image-1142 colorbox-1133" title="crystal ball" src="http://cdn.sennza.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/crystal-ball.jpg" alt="" width="614" height="461" /><br /> </strong></p><p>Ok, so first up I know it might be a little late to be doing yearly predictions in February. I&#8217;ve had this post sitting here for a few weeks now so I thought I would publish my thoughts anyway. The predictions I have might be a little bold, but frankly safe predictions are boring. Having said that, although they may be bold I think that all these predictions are definitely more than possible.<span id="more-1133"></span></p><h3>WordPress gets an &#8220;App Store&#8221;</h3><p>WordPress.com or WordPress.org will finally gets an “app store” for paid/premium plugins. It somehow seems more likely that this will happen to WordPress.com first, and I don&#8217;t think it will be a full-blown app store to start with, ala apple, but there will be the beginnings of an app store. First you will see Automattic products available for purchase, such as Akismet, Poll Daddy and VaultPress. We may even see a few select premium plugin providers invited to participate in much the same way a <a href="http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/introducing-premium-themes/">select few theme developers</a> were chosen to sell themes on WordPress.com</p><p><strong>Left Field:</strong> It&#8217;s also likely that we see other members of the community band together to form their own app store. <a href="http://www.massivepress.com/">MassivePress</a> is a perfect example of how this might happen.</p><h3>WordPress + Social</h3><p>I think pingbacks are great way of connecting other websites and conversations on the web but it would be great if this could be extended further. For example it would be great to be able to keep all the WP.org sites that I follow/manage in one place much like you <a href="http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/read-blogs/">can on WP.com</a>.</p><p>I know that Automattic is looking to build more bridges from WP.com to WP.org, which is the long-term idea for JetPack. Although some more social feature would be cool, this will be tricky to balance to get right.</p><h3>Better Media Experience</h3><p>Media in WordPress finally gets some loving. This is more of a wish (plea!) as this has been an ongoing “joke” in the WordPress community, but I think 2012 will see it get some much needed attention. Even basic things like being able to categorise media, replace and existing file (instead of re-linking every instance) and better sorting would be a nice start.</p><h3>WordPress Dominates the Web</h3><p>WordPress CMS share will reach 20% of all CMS’s. I know this is a pretty ballsy prediction, but right now its currently sitting at <a href="http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all">15.7%</a> of the entire web and during 2011 WordPress CMS market share grew by and average monthly growth rate of 1.71%. If it does the same average growth rate in 2012 it will reach 19%, but I am going to bet that its has a little more steam given that currently 22 of every 100 newly registered domains in the US have WordPress installed.</p><h3>Party Up Front</h3><p>This is more of a wish than a prediction, but I know it is definitely on the cards for WordPress. WordPress will get more front end editing functionality. As Matt Mullenweg said, the Admin Bar is the starting point for front end editing. Unfortunately I think WordPress spent way too much time chasing Tumblr in 2011, when they should be looking at the front end capabilities that Drupal and even more so that Squarespace have been working on. People don’t want dashboards, they want an easy way to update content. See Scribu’s <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/front-end-editor/">front end editor</a> which I think makes for a nice stepping stone.</p><p>So there you have it, my 5 WordPress predictions for 2012. I&#8217;ll see you all back here in 11 months where we can scrutinise the results. Do you have you own predictions? Please leave them in the comments below.</p><p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/meknits/224801439/"> image credit</a></p> ]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/02/06/wordpress-predictions-for-2012/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>3</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>Cart66 Action Hook &#8211; cart66_after_order_saved</title><link>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/01/31/cart66-action-hook-cart66_after_order_saved/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=cart66-action-hook-cart66_after_order_saved</link> <comments>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/01/31/cart66-action-hook-cart66_after_order_saved/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:23:46 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Bronson Quick</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Logic]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Web Design]]></category> <category><![CDATA[WordPress]]></category><guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sennza.com.au/?p=1122</guid> <description><![CDATA[We&#8217;ve recently been working on a horoscopes website for one of our clients that has some content that is for members only. The Cart66 WordPress eCommerce has been great for handling the PayPal subscriptions but I had to add some custom functionality so that new members on certain levels would be automatically signed up to a mailing list which is handled by Constant Contact. Cart66 actually has Constant Contact integration which adds an &#8220;opt-in&#8221; style mailing list signup that is added to the checkout which would normally work fine for most eCommerce sites however I we needed to make the signup compulsory for the user and to do it seamlessly without the user knowing that this has occurred so they receive the daily emails that they have purchased. The undocumented cart66_after_order_saved hook I hunted around the Cart66 support section to see if Cart66 had any hooks built in and I found out that there are four hooks which aren&#8217;t documented at this stage. One of these hooks is the cart66_after_order_saved hook which I decided to use for the additional functionality I required. I started with a function and after hunting through the Cart66 code I found that the $orderInfo array would get passed into [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>We&#8217;ve recently been working on a <a title="Horoscopes" href="http://mysticmedusa.com/">horoscopes</a> website for one of our clients that has some content that is for members only. The <a title="Cart66" href="http://cart66.com/">Cart66</a> WordPress eCommerce has been great for handling the PayPal subscriptions but I had to add some custom functionality so that new members on certain levels would be automatically signed up to a mailing list which is handled by Constant Contact.</p><p>Cart66 actually has Constant Contact integration which adds an &#8220;opt-in&#8221; style mailing list signup that is added to the checkout which would normally work fine for most eCommerce sites however I we needed to make the signup compulsory for the user and to do it seamlessly without the user knowing that this has occurred so they receive the daily emails that they have purchased.</p><p><span id="more-1122"></span></p><h2>The undocumented cart66_after_order_saved hook</h2><p>I hunted around the Cart66 support section to see if Cart66 had any hooks built in and I found out that there are four hooks which aren&#8217;t documented at this stage. One of these hooks is the <strong>cart66_after_order_saved</strong> hook which I decided to use for the additional functionality I required. I started with a function and after hunting through the Cart66 code I found that the $orderInfo array would get passed into the function.</p><p>[php]</p><p>function sennza_add_to_constant_contact($orderInfo){</p><p>/* This is where my logic will go*/</p><p>}<br /> add_action( &#8216;cart66_after_order_saved&#8217; , &#8216;sennza_add_to_constant_contact&#8217; );</p><p>[/php]</p><h2>What&#8217;s in the $orderInfo array?</h2><p>Next up I need to find out what the contents of the $orderInfo array are so I used print_r($orderInfo) to echo them out. The array contents are as follows:</p><p>[php]</p><p>Array<br /> (<br /> [ship_first_name] =&gt; Test<br /> [ship_last_name] =&gt; User<br /> [ship_address] =&gt; 888 Brunswick Street<br /> [ship_address2] =&gt;<br /> [ship_city] =&gt; NEW FARM<br /> [ship_state] =&gt; Queensland<br /> [ship_zip] =&gt; 4005<br /> [ship_country] =&gt; Australia<br /> [bill_first_name] =&gt; Test<br /> [bill_last_name] =&gt; User<br /> [bill_address] =&gt;<br /> [bill_address2] =&gt;<br /> [bill_city] =&gt;<br /> [bill_state] =&gt;<br /> [bill_zip] =&gt;<br /> [phone] =&gt;<br /> [email] =&gt; test@here.com<br /> [coupon] =&gt; none<br /> [tax] =&gt;<br /> [shipping] =&gt; 0.00<br /> [subtotal] =&gt; 0<br /> [total] =&gt; 0.00<br /> [non_subscription_total] =&gt; 0.00<br /> [trans_id] =&gt; MT-ZLPLDQNSJC7JGE<br /> [status] =&gt; New<br /> [ordered_on] =&gt; 2012-01-31 13:06:05<br /> [shipping_method] =&gt; None<br /> [account_id] =&gt; 2829<br /> [ip] =&gt; 124.171.95.111<br /> [discount_amount] =&gt; 0<br /> [id] =&gt; 4987<br /> )</p><p>[/php]</p><h2> Alright, stop&#8230; Database time!</h2><p>Now I knew that $orderInfo[account_id] was the newly generated Cart66 Account ID I looked into the database tables in phpmyadmin and realised that I needed to use this id to find out the membership level (or &#8216;feature_level&#8217; as Cart66 names it).</p><p>[php]</p><p>function sennza_add_to_constant_contact($orderInfo){<br /> global $wpdb;;<br /> $account_id = $orderInfo[account_id];<br /> $table_name = $wpdb-&gt;prefix . &#8220;cart66_account_subscriptions&#8221;;<br /> $sql = &#8220;SELECT `feature_level` FROM $table_name WHERE `account_id` = $account_id&#8221;;<br /> $account_type = $wpdb-&gt;get_var($sql);</p><p>/* User $account_type to perform the Constant Contact Logic */</p><p>}<br /> add_action( &#8216;cart66_after_order_saved&#8217; , &#8216;sennza_add_to_constant_contact&#8217; );</p><p>[/php]</p><p>Take note of the $wpdb class that I&#8217;ve interacted with in this function. The $wpdb class has a massive amount of power that makes interacting with the WordPress database a breeze! In this case I only wanted to pull out one variable so I&#8217;ve used the <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/wpdb#SELECT_a_Variable">$wpdb-&gt;get-&gt;var function</a>.</p><p>After that I ended up reading some of the Constant Contact API documentation to generate some XML to send to Constant Contact so that the subscribers were instantly added to the appropriate mailing list.</p><p>NB: <strong>I haven&#8217;t included the additional logic for the Constant Contact API</strong> as it is very site specific and I just wanted to document the data that the cart66_after_order_saved hook receives for other Cart66 developers <img src='http://cdn.sennza.com.au/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley colorbox-1122' /></p> ]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/01/31/cart66-action-hook-cart66_after_order_saved/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>3</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>Mathew Hood Joins The Sennza Team</title><link>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/01/25/mathew-hood-joins-the-sennza-team/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mathew-hood-joins-the-sennza-team</link> <comments>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/01/25/mathew-hood-joins-the-sennza-team/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Wed, 25 Jan 2012 01:17:15 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Lachlan MacPherson</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Brisbane]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Web Design]]></category> <category><![CDATA[WordPress]]></category><guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sennza.com.au/?p=1109</guid> <description><![CDATA[Hey everyone, My name is Mat and I am proud to be the newest addition to the Sennza team. I will start with a little bit about me. I am 22 years old and have a passion for Web Development. When I&#8217;m not behind the monitor, you will find me riding my bike or at the beach. Like Bronson and Lachlan, I too have fallen in love with WordPress. After starting on other CMS (Joomla, Drupal), I found WordPress and have never looked back since! If you want to keep in touch with what I am doing, feel free to follow me on twitter @MathewHood. I look forward to interacting with you all and hope you get some benefit from what I have to offer. -Mat]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Hey everyone,</p><p>My name is Mat and I am proud to be the newest addition to the Sennza team.</p><p>I will start with a little bit about me. I am 22 years old and have a passion for Web Development. When I&#8217;m not behind the monitor, you will find me riding my bike or at the beach.</p><p>Like Bronson and Lachlan, I too have fallen in love with WordPress. After starting on other CMS (Joomla, Drupal), I found WordPress and have never looked back since!</p><p>If you want to keep in touch with what I am doing, feel free to follow me on twitter <a href="http://twitter.com/mathewhood">@MathewHood</a>.</p><p>I look forward to interacting with you all and hope you get some benefit from what I have to offer.</p><p>-Mat</p> ]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/01/25/mathew-hood-joins-the-sennza-team/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>1</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>Why Is Simplicity Good?</title><link>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/01/09/why-is-simplicity-good/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-is-simplicity-good</link> <comments>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/01/09/why-is-simplicity-good/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Mon, 09 Jan 2012 10:42:22 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Lachlan MacPherson</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Design]]></category><guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sennza.com.au/?p=812</guid> <description><![CDATA[Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential. - Jony Ive (From Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson) via www.therussiansusedapencil.com]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<blockquote><p>Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.</p></blockquote><p>- Jony Ive</p><p>(From <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1451648537">Steve Jobs</a>, by Walter Isaacson)</p><p>via <a href="http://www.therussiansusedapencil.com/post/12290002370/jony-ive-on-simplicity">www.therussiansusedapencil.com</a></p> ]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.sennza.com.au/2012/01/09/why-is-simplicity-good/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>WordPress Is Taking Over The Internet</title><link>http://www.sennza.com.au/2011/11/24/wordpress-is-taking-over-the-internet/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=wordpress-is-taking-over-the-internet</link> <comments>http://www.sennza.com.au/2011/11/24/wordpress-is-taking-over-the-internet/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Thu, 24 Nov 2011 00:34:54 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Bronson Quick</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[WordPress]]></category><guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sennza.com.au/?p=797</guid> <description><![CDATA[I love going to the monthly Brisbane Web Design Meetups that are held at The Edge and I occasionally put my hand up to speak so that I can share information about projects I&#8217;ve been working on and to hopefully inspire and educate the attendees. The theme for Novembers Meetup was &#8216;What I Learn in 2011&#8242; so I volunteered to do a 5 minute lightning talk titled &#8216;WordPress Is Taking Over The Internet&#8217;. I hope you enjoy it! The slides from the talk are available on Slideshare! WordPress Is Taking Over The Internet View more presentations from Bronson Quick]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I love going to the monthly <a href="http://www.meetup.com/The-Brisbane-Web-Design-Meetup-Group/">Brisbane Web Design Meetups</a> that are held at <a href="http://edgeqld.org.au/">The Edge</a> and I occasionally put my hand up to speak so that I can share information about projects I&#8217;ve been working on and to hopefully inspire and educate the attendees.</p><p>The theme for Novembers Meetup was &#8216;What I Learn in 2011&#8242; so I volunteered to do a 5 minute lightning talk titled &#8216;WordPress Is Taking Over The Internet&#8217;. I hope you enjoy it!</p><p><span style="text-align:center; display: block;"><a href="http://www.sennza.com.au/2011/11/24/wordpress-is-taking-over-the-internet/"><img class="colorbox-797"  src="http://img.youtube.com/vi/3l8x_56wzfc/2.jpg" alt="" /></a></span></p><p><span id="more-797"></span>The slides from the talk are available on Slideshare!</p><div style="width:425px" id="__ss_10262562"> <strong style="display:block;margin:12px 0 4px"><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/bronsonquick/wordpress-is-taking-over-the-internet" title="WordPress Is Taking Over The Internet" target="_blank">WordPress Is Taking Over The Internet</a></strong> <iframe src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/10262562" width="425" height="355" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no"></iframe><div style="padding:5px 0 12px"> View more <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/" target="_blank">presentations</a> from <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/bronsonquick" target="_blank">Bronson Quick</a></div></p></div> ]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.sennza.com.au/2011/11/24/wordpress-is-taking-over-the-internet/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> </channel> </rss>
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