Designs by Seth Alling

Over the past year, I have developed quite a few sites in WordPress. One of the common requests that I have been asked to do is to create a testimonial page, where people can leave their testimonials as a comment and then style the feed so those comments will display nicely as client testimonials.

While this has been easy to do, I have found it rather annoying at times because I then have to allow comments on that particular page, but on no others. One would think that WordPress by default would allow for this be be fairly simple out of the box, and it is, but only if you do it their way.

On the WordPress settings, you can choose to disable posts and trackbacks by default, but throughout the entire site. You can still enable comments on a page by page or post by post basis, but you can’t have it be enabled by default on posts, and then disabled by default on pages. This is the probable that I always seemed to be running into. Normally, I would just remove the comments template from pages, but once I wanted comments on just one page, I would have to add the code back into the template.

Now, I know I could just grin and bear it and remember to disable comments on each new page, or enable comments on each new post, depending on my main comment settings, but I want things done my way. I don’t want to have to remember and leave the possibility of human error taking effect, so last month I determined that I have had enough.

I finally put my mind to it and wrote a plugin to allow me to set the default comment settings individually on a page. This way I could enable the comments so they would appear on posts, but disable them by default on pages. I did this using javascript so I could then change my comment settings on an individual post or page basis. After developing it, I released it to the WordPress community. The plugin is No Page Comment.

Well, now that a little more than a month has passed since developing it and releasing it to the WordPress community, I have made some more modifications to it. It is now possible to set the default for posts, pages, and any custom post types that may be installed on your site. I found out that some people wanted comments disabled on posts only, but wanted them open by default on pages. Others saw a need to block comments on custom post types that came from third-party plugins. Because of this, I have made the modifications, and am happy to release the next version of No Page Comment. Feel free to check it out. It just may make working with WordPress a little easier for you, as it did for me.

The other day I was working on capturing screenshots for a plugin I’ve been working on and every screenshot I took didn’t include the cursor. Now, on most occasions this isn’t an issue, but I needed one of the shots to show drag and drop functionality, meaning that I needed the hand cursor.

Well, after trying out a variety of different screenshot programs, I still wasn’t able to get the desired result. I was able to figure out a way to show the drag and drop functionality, but the hand cursor was still missing. In the end, I determined, that I would just have to recreate it by hand.

By zooming in on the screen (CTRL-Scroll) I was able to see the hand cursor up close, although it was a bit fuzzy. From there I could then build the hand in Photoshop pixel by pixel. With much zooming in, remembering, and then zooming out and moving into photoshop, I was able to build it.

Because it’s wasn’t the most enjoyable experience, I’ve decided that if anyone else ever needed this cursor, then they can download it from my site.

Download the PSD Mac Hand Cursor. Inside the zip file is the cursor in PSD, PNG, and GIF formats.

What am I thankful for? In two days, I will get to fly out to Utah so I can finally be with my wife again after spending the last five weeks apart, and six weeks apart prior to that. We will be driving back to Michigan together and hopefully the weather doesn’t cause any problems. If there are no problems, I will also be thankful that we will make it back home in time for Thanksgiving.

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, I felt it would be appropriate to list some design freebies for the holiday. I’ve noticed in the past that Halloween and Christmas always seem to have icons, vectors, fonts, brushes and other resources available. Thanksgiving, on the other hand, is not the same, so hopefully these will come in handy to anyone who needs them. Also, a thank you to all of the designers who created these and made them available. Read more…