C. Murray Consulting Lands on Smashing Magazine

Published by Christopher Murray on July 3rd, 2009 in Awards & Recognition and Content Management Systems and Featured and WordPress Tips. 2 Comments

On July 2nd, a post by Jake Goldman that was originally published here on the C. Murray Consulting Blog was enhanced and republished on Smashing Magazine. The post began as five quick tips for implementing WordPress as a Content Management System and grew into an in-depth, essential guide for leveraging WordPress as a full-featured website CMS.

Power Tips for WordPress Developers

Read the full post on Smashing Magazine

The post highlights real-life examples from some of our recent WordPress implementations:

Congratulations to Jake for creating such valuable tips and making them available to the open source community. Thanks also to Smashing Magazine for distributing the article.

WordPress as a CMS: 5 8 Power Tips for Template Developers

Published by Jake Goldman on June 7th, 2009 in Featured and Programming and WordPress Tips. 1 Comment

WordPressEver since WordPress 2.5 was released, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of WordPress as a comprehensive CMS.

WordPress offers a wealth of plug-ins that extend the limitations of its reasonably light core; we’ve even contribued a couple of our own back to the community. But if you like to make slim, fast websites – like we do – you know that sometimes the plug-ins, and their overhead, are overkill.

Here are five power tips for template developers that address common CMS implementation challenges with solutions that are not well documented or not entirely intuitive. Please note that all of the code here was written for and tested with the latest version of WordPress (2.7.1). Some of the functions may not be compatible with older versions, or may require some initialization (i.e. global $post).

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on April 10th, 2009 in Programming. that includes integrated eCommerce. Thankfully, with some sleuthing and tinkering, we were able to update the necessary DLLs and correct the functions.

Continue reading PayPal API and .NET 2.0 compatibility fix

Introducing the “Ning-tranet”

Published by Christopher Murray on February 4th, 2009 in Clients and Design & Creative and Social Networks and Strategy. 5 Comments

Over the last year we’ve helped several clients deploy social networks on the Ning platform. Our early Ning deployments were elegant, but traditional: we helped member organizations create rich, dynamic online member communities. Recently, we’ve been breaking out of that box.

Earlier this year, we customized an instance of Ning for FIRST Credit Union in British Columbia, creating a social network that enables their staff to meet up and share ideas online. The project included a custom design (implemented via CSS), custom home page components (via the Ning API), and some creative hiding and renaming of core features (using CSS and JavaScript).

Continue reading Introducing the “Ning-tranet”