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WordPress

Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points
Posted by Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points

adding Soliloquy to my own Wordpress Theme

I've built my own simple Wordpress theme, with a simple blog listing page and individual blog post pages. You can see it at letterbox-mag.com

I've tried adding both the Soliloquy Lite and Meta Slider slide boxes to my theme, but neither of them function properly.

I'm wanting to know what code I'd have to add to my theme files to make them work. What code needs to be added to a theme to make plugins work?

Any help is greatly appreciated, I'm not really sure where to begin.

1 Answer

Rich Bagley
Rich Bagley
25,869 Points

Hi Gabriel,

What problems are you finding with Soliloquy?

I use this in some of my themes and after generating the shortcode in the dashboard you can use do_shortcode to display it on the front end.

Is this what you need?

An alternative would be to create a custom post type and custom fields then use something like Slick carousel's code to display them in your theme front end.

-Rich

Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points
Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points

Hi Rich,

I'm finding that if I put the shortcode in a post, that the images do not display in the metaslider, but rather they display as individual images, one below the other. You can see an example here

http://letterbox-mag.com/wordpress/?p=15

At

http://letterbox-mag.com/

You can see that Post 4 has the text

[soliloquy id="22"]This is post number 4

I'm not sure why this is. Do I need to add any code to one of my php files? What exactly do you mean by 'generating the code in the dashboard'?

Gabe

Rich Bagley
Rich Bagley
25,869 Points

Hi Gabe,

Do you have wp_head in your header.php file and wp_footer in your footer.php.

-Rich

Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points
Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points

Haha wonderful thank as always Rich. You are a champion. As you can see there's nothing in the footer. That did it, it works now. Can I ask how you came up with that solution?

Rich Bagley
Rich Bagley
25,869 Points

No problem!

I viewed the source to check the references to soliloquy in the header and footer and noticed the extra code missing from the footer section.

Hope that helped :)

-Rich

Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points
Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points

Cool. I can't recall, are you a professional programmer/developer?

Rich Bagley
Rich Bagley
25,869 Points

Sorry for the delay, yes I am :)

-Rich

Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points
Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points

Awesome stuff Rich!

I'm wanting to become a professional front-end developer.My intention is focus on HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Wordpress. Do you think it's good to focus on a specific set of skills and languages? Or does one need to focus on backend as well?

Rich Bagley
Rich Bagley
25,869 Points

I guess it will depend a little on what you're looking to focus on as HTML, CSS and JavaScript will help to build up your front-end development skill set as well as forming a base for other languages.

If you then want to customise WordPress in terms of theme development it would be handy to learn a little PHP too. Zac's course PHP for WordPress is great as a starting point if you want to get in to this.

Hope that helps :)

-Rich

Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points
Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points

Hi Rich,

It certainly does help. From what I can hear, learning Wordpress is a good skill as it's often what clients need/want. But I also love learning how to programme effects and things like lightboxes in JavaScript.

Can I ask how you got into the industry? Did you teach yourself or did you study programming at university?

Thanks,

Gabe

Rich Bagley
Rich Bagley
25,869 Points

Hi Gabe,

Part of my Uni course covered web development but wasn't the main focus of the course. After graduating I developed a portfolio website and looked for trainee graphic & web design roles before moving in to development and gaining my experience :)

-Rich

Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points
Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points

Nice :)

I'm in the process of building up a portfolio to try and get an internship. But I'm unsure of what exactly to do/put on it? What sort of things did you have in your portfolio website?

Gabe

Rich Bagley
Rich Bagley
25,869 Points

Hi Gabe,

At the time my work was mainly design and multimedia with 1 (maybe 2, can't remember exactly) website example so I used examples of projects I had completed at Uni along with any I had done in my spare time. In a way the portfolio site itself showed my HTML and CSS, etc. skills.

Hope that's useful.

-Rich

Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points
Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points

Ok cool thanks Rich. If there's one thing more than any other that I'm trying to work out, it's what exactly to study/build/focus on, whether it be Wordpress, Javascript, CSS, and HTML.

Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points
Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points

Ok cool thanks Rich. If there's one thing more than any other that I'm trying to work out, it's what exactly to study/build/focus on, whether it be Wordpress, Javascript, CSS, and HTML.

Rich Bagley
Rich Bagley
25,869 Points

No problem! Hope you manage to decide :)

-Rich

Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points
Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points

What do you focus on in your day job? Wordpress, Javascript, a whole range of things? What were the projects you worked on?

Rich Bagley
Rich Bagley
25,869 Points

Hi Gabe,

My work mainly involves HTML, CSS, JS and PHP, used for both bespoke and WordPress websites. I started with modifying child themes but have moved in to custom theme developments. Every day is a little different so some builds may be larger than others.

Hope that helps :)

-Rich

Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points
Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points

Man, that sounds fun and varied Rich. In terms of studying/learning Javascript, did you start by reading books, taking online courses on it? Or did you learn Javascript by having projects/problems to solve and just learn the Javascript necessary to solve them?

Rich Bagley
Rich Bagley
25,869 Points

Hi Gabe,

A combination of all those really. I find that a real world example can help a lot though.

-Rich

Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points
Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points

Hi Rich,

How are you? I'm just wondering, do you have a website of any kind?

Rich Bagley
Rich Bagley
25,869 Points

Hi Gabe,

Great thanks, hope you are too.

I used to have one but I don't have a portfolio website any more I'm afraid.

-Rich

Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points
Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points

Ok, I'm also curious, did you learn Javascript and PHP concurrently? Or were you quite adept at one before you started learning the other?

Rich Bagley
Rich Bagley
25,869 Points

I worked on HTML, CSS and JavaScript first and once happy I knew enough I moved on to PHP.

Hope that helps.

-Rich

Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points
Gabriel Ward
Gabriel Ward
20,222 Points

Sure does, thanks Rich.