Kwatog Tech

On Buying Premium WordPress Theme

Posted on: June 3, 2009 by admin No Comments

I have been customizing wordpress themes ever since I started using it. I also made several themes from scratch for my websites. Though making a theme from scratch is fulfilling, customizing a freely available template simply makes the process faster. As they say, why do you have to reinvent the wheel? But the problem with free templates for use as baseline is that they usually look the same. And most are simply garbage. So what’s the alternative? Shell out some money for a premium theme.

And shell out, I did! But it took time for me to find very affordable set of themes that suits my needs and taste. As most of you know, premium themes cost an arm and a leg. We’ve seen wordpress templates that costs above $80 apiece and you can only use that in one domain. That’s the main reason why I shy away from it until I found Elegant Themes. At a price of $19.95 per year, you’ll be able to download all their current themes plus future releases. I got 17 A+ themes when I signed up and more to come in the coming months. That made the price of each theme a little of $1. That’s a fraction of the cost my time if I do the coding myself. And their themes are all XHTML/CSS compliant and compatible with major browsers including Opera, Safari and Netscape.

What’s good with Elegant Themes is that they don’t require you to. However, the themes are not released through GPL. That means you cannot redistribute the themes with your changes. This makes the license of the template incompatible with Wordpress template which is released through GPL. But I don’t really care for now.

How To Determine SQL Server Version

Posted on: April 20, 2009 by kwatog No Comments

In case you need to know what version of SQL Server you are currently using, you can use the queries below.

Starting at SQL Server 2000, you can use the following query.

SELECT SERVERPROPERTY('productversion'), SERVERPROPERTY ('productlevel'), SERVERPROPERTY ('edition')

The above query is applicable for SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. For SQL Server 7 and SQL Server 6.5 series. The code below should be used.

SELECT @@VERSION

If you are not sure what version of SQL Server you have, use the second query. It still works as it isn’t deprecated yet. The new version is handy if you need to get the details programmatically.

Tutorial for WordPress Plugin Writing

Posted on: April 16, 2009 by admin No Comments

I’ve been looking for a good wordpress plugin creation tutorial for some time already and though I found quite a number of them, there’s always something missing. What I found were like piece meals and I have to connect the dots myself.

That’s the case until I found Ronald Huereca’s tutorial posted at DevLounge. His tutorial is concise and direct to the point. It was easy to read and follow and most importantly, it follows the object-oriented approach in wordporess plugin development. Making a plugin in object-oriented way presents a lot of opportunities and lessens the headache in development.

To give you a preview, I’m listing down the table of contents.

Table of Contents: How to Write a Wordpress Plugin

1. How to Write a WordPress Plugin – Introduction
2. Seven Reasons to Write a WordPress Plugin
3. How to Get Ideas for Wordpress Plugins
4. Structure of a Wordpress Plugin
5. WordPress Plugin Actions
6. WordPress Plugin Filters
7. Constructing a WordPress Plugin Admin Panel
8. Constructing a WordPress Plugin User’s Panel
9. WordPress Plugins and Database Interaction
10. Using JavaScript and CSS with your WordPress Plugin
11. Using AJAX with your WordPress Plugin
12. Releasing and Promoting Your WordPress Plugin

To view the tutorial, you can go over to Devlounge’s How to Write a WP Plugin. Alteratively, you can also download the tutorial in pdf form by clicking this link.

Codes for Web Safe Colors

Posted on: April 9, 2009 by kwatog No Comments

When developing themes or doing anything that requires colors, it’s important that you know the hex codes of the color you want to use. They are the 6-number codes that represent a specific color which you use on your CSS.

The list below shows the codes for web safe colors. I kept this list on my usb drive and always had seach from the net numerous times as I don’t bring my usb drive with me all the time. Take note that most of the monitors and browsers can now display millions of colors and shades. Go somewhere else to get all of them hehe

By the way, I only realized now that my little blog site lacks color. Too bad I only realized this after making this post.

Monitor SQL Server DB Processes

Posted on: April 8, 2009 by admin No Comments

If you don’t have DBArtisan or other more advanced SQL Editor, you can use the query below. Take note that you’ll need necessary rights to be able to run it.

select spid, status, blocked, open_tran, waitresource, waittype,
waittime, cmd, lastwaittype, cpu, physical_io,
hostname, hostprocess, loginame, program_name, net_address,
net_library, dbid, ecid, kpid, nt_domain, nt_username, uid, sid,
memusage, last_batch=convert(varchar(26), last_batch,121),
login_time=convert(varchar(26), login_time,121)
from master.dbo.sysprocesses
--where (blocked!=0 or waittype != 0x0000)

If you only want to see those that are blocking or locking, uncomment the last line. One thing that’s lacking here is the list of tables and database objects that each process id is using. That’s important if a user is running stored procedures and you need to know . I’ll provide that later as honestly, I don’t know yet which table holds that information.

I actually contributed this at SQL Reviewer as I don’t see a lot of websites that discusses this. For further reading, you may go to the MSDN website.