I love the WordPress plugin Custom Admin Branding by Josh Byers..  who doesn’t love seeing their shiny, official name at the top of their admin panel?

I noticed, though, that when when I updated the plugin to 1.3.5, my custom files were overwritten.. Doh!  It defeats the purpose of auto-update if we have to resurrect our settings afterwards, clearly, but every journey progresses one step at a time, and I’ve been rapt to have such a great plugin, complete with annotated photoshop templates.

Still, it would be great if the custom files survived an update, so I’ve had a fiddle, and come up with a crude solution… and while I was at it, I’ve added an option to change the Header background colour (which is simpler than using the custom stylesheet which is currently an option hidden in the code of the plugin).

I’m hoping that he’ll like the changes, and we might get another update soon!

Wordpress Training Melbourne

I love the WordPress plugin Audio Player by 1pixelout, and highly recommend it to folk who want to present audio on their site.  I’d like to be able to offer the file for download too, though, so I’ve created a little download icon that sits beside the player.

Here’s a demo:

luscious-woman-afoot

To set the effect up:

• upload the icon to your theme’s images/ folder
• add the following code to your theme’s stylesheet
• insert the link in to your post with the audio
  • Upload
  • Edit the Link
  • Insert the audio quicktag

Upload the audio:

• Open up your post
• Click Add Audio
• Browse to the track on your hard drive, and select Insert into Post

You should now have a text link in your post which points to the audio file.

Edit the Link:

• click the link that you’ve inserted, then the Insert/Edit Link button (which looks like a chain)
• type a title like “Right Click and ‘Save As’ to download this file”
• switch to HTML mode, and add the class “audio-download” to the link:

<a class="audio-download" title="Right Click and 'Save As' to download" href="http://mysite.com.au/wp-content/uploads/my-audio-filename-goes-here.mp3">

Tip: I use the really handy TinyMCE Advanced plugin, so I replace that last step with:

• Click on the Advanced tab in the link dialog
• enter audio-download into the classes field

Insert the audio player quicktag:

• position the cursor after the link you’ve inserted
• type: [ audio:my-audio-filename-goes-here.mp3]
  • I’ve added a space after the first square bracket: be sure to remove it, and be careful not to leave any spaces after the colon!

The stylesheet code:

.audio-download {
	background: url("images/audio-download.png") no-repeat scroll 0 0 transparent;
    float: left;
    width: 29px; height: 24px;
	margin-right: 5px;

    text-decoration: none;
    text-indent: -999in;
}
.audio-download:hover {
	background-position: 0 -24px;
}

The download icon used in this tutorial:

Enjoy!

Wordpress Training Melbourne