So, this is in response to Freaq’s question on the post Adding Title and Description to Nextgen Gallery Thumbnails. He had a site and he wanted to display the image description in the sidebar, not in the main embedded gallery.

To his credit, I couldn’t figure it out off the top of my head, so he hired my programming team to look into it, and he is kind enough to have given us permission to post the solution we came up with publicly so that if any of you need it it’s here…

Left sidebar page
wp-content\themes\THEME\l_sidebar.php

In left sidebar page we have changed div id from “desc” to “gallery_desc”.

Image Browser page
wp-content\plugins\nextgen-gallery\view\imagebrowser.php

In image browser page we added below mentioned code.

<div id="gal_title" style="display:none;"><b><?php echo ucfirst($image->alttext) ?></b></div>
<div id="gal_desc" style="display:none;"><p><?php echo ucfirst($image->description) ?></p></div>
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> document.getElementById('gallery_desc').innerHTML = document.getElementById('gal_title').innerHTML+document.getElementById('gal_desc').innerHTML;
</script>

In place of

<div class="ngg-imagebrowser-desc"><h6><?php echo $image->description ?></h6></div>

Here we are putting the title & description in hidden div tags, and after loading the page, we allocate these values to left panel div tag having id “gallery_desc”.

I recently took over the management and development of GigTrak.com – a great booking resource for small to midsized musicians in the US.

My intention is to rapidly and constantly add new features to the site – things that we all need as musicians. I know what I need (and I’ll share full upgrade plans as soon as they are ready), but I need to know what you need as well. Can you take a second right now to make a comment on this post with your feature requests? Be as detailed as you want, and don’t be afraid to dream. What would the ultimate management tool be for you that would help you book gigs, keep everything organized, get radio play, make sure all of your online profiles were up to date, etc..?

I want to turn GigTrak into the only booking and music career management tool that any musician ever needs – help me figure out what the community wants.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts – just scroll down and “Leave a Reply”

I’ve recently started writing and reviewing for BlogCritics.org – check out my first product review…

Book Review: Reverse Google Marketing by Wendy Stevens

As you probably know by now, I use WordPress on a lot of different sites – I really think that it is a miraculous piece of software. Recently I’ve been approached by quite a lot of people in the home based business community who are doing Google Adwords advertising on their sites, and need to track conversions.

One of my favorite WordPress plugins is Contact Form 7 – it is a powerful and extremely simple contact form that can be set up in a matter of seconds. Until recently, though, there was no good way to get it to use a custom thank you page – you had to go into the code and hack about, and they were releasing updates on a frequent enough basis that by the time you had your hack in place they were already asking you to upgrade the software.

Anyhow, this has now been fixed and the solution is ever so easy.

At the bottom of the settings page for Contact Form 7 is something called “Additional Settings”

Simply paste the code below into that box, edit the thank you page to reflect the URL that you want, and you are off!

on_sent_ok: "location.replace('http://www.mysite.com/mypage.html');"

Then simply paste the conversion code into your thank you page and you are ready to track contacts / signups on your site!

Note:
I found this solution on the comments at http://www.grapethinking.com/wordpress-contact-form-7-plugin-landing-pag – I will keep my eyes out for any further updates, just wanted to post this clearly as I had to dig around for hours to find it!!

In the endless search for pushing the conversion of sales letters and opt-in pages higher and higher, I’ve come across a couple of secrets in my time that have almost invariably made a positive difference in conversion. One of those involves the way that your call to action button is styled. Not to downplay the importance of testing the text itself (Do your customers want to “Buy Now” or “Get It Today!” ?), the way a button is styled can make a huge difference.

I’ve found consistently better conversions with a rather large green square that turns red on mouse over. It isn’t that pretty, but who really cares about pretty in the race to make a bit of cash? I noticed quite a few of the “big name gurus” using buttons like this and figured that they were doing their homework and testing, so I gave it a shot and – lo and behold – it works.

So, in the interest of making sure everyone has a good shot at increasing their sales a bit, I’ve put together a web form that lets you create your own buttons for testing really quickly. Here it is. Enjoy!