You will find a range of exciting community focused projects that need your help. With only a couple of clicks you can help a grass roots local project get off the ground and make a real difference to those it serves. Whether you are an individual, an organisation, school or business, please show your support by making a donation to a project of your choice.

This website has been built on the latest version of WordPress (3.3) and uses a custom theme built from scratch specifically for Crowdfund Sw1′s needs.

The website’s main functionality is its integration with PayPal, which allows user to securely donate to specific projects online. Using the built in WordPress custom post types, each project tracks how many people and how much money has been donated automatically.

Using the WordPress custom meta data for custom post types, the website allows Crowdfund SW1 to embed videos from Vimeo and YouTube by adding the relevant video ID’s to each project.

The website also integrates with MailChimp’s API to add the details of the users who opt-in when donating to a project. This allows Crowdfund SW1 to easily send updates to these people by email, on the progress of the projects they have donated too.

Crowdfund SW1 needs your help and support so go and donate as much as you can over on their website.

Site: crowdfundsw1.com

So iPhorm, a form builder for WordPress, yes before you say it, I know there are a number of form building plugins out there at the moment (such as Contact Form 7 and Form Builder), but you really should take a look and see how this plugin compares, it won’t disappoint I promise.

iPhorm WordPress Plugin

iPhorm’s website says:

iPhorm makes it easy to build basic or complex forms in WordPress in minutes.

Truthfully after playing about with the plugin for only a few minutes it was quite clear to see that this statement was spot on. The plugin comes with a huge amount of features and takes the basic form builder plugin to the next level.

iPhorm has so many features, I’m only going to highlight the few below but please feel free to check them all out over at iPhorms own website.

Field Type Support

iPhorm supports a lot of different field types from your usual text box, textarea, select boxes, checkboxes, radio buttons etc.. right through to really niche fields like time, date, file upload, captcha, password and hidden.

On extra feature I liked was that they had incorporated the jQuery UI library so that date fields included pop-up date selectors. I very cool addition from a UX point of view.

Email and Database Form Actions

The cool thing about this plugin is that it not only gives you option to have the form data sent to you in an email but also captures all the information in your WordPress db. This is helpful if you don’t want your inbox filled with messages and are after a single place to manage all of your responses

Drag, Drop & Ajax Interface

The whole process of creating a form has been made so simple with great use of Ajax. Adding fields, updating settings and moving the field orders is such a smooth process.

In addition you can tell a lot of thought has gone into the admin section of this plugin. All the basic “must do” actions are displayed clearly to you after every click, this allows you to create basic forms very quickly and easily without any technical knowledge. At the same time you have all the advanced optional settings just one click away, if you really want to customise how each form works.

Many More Great Features

As I mentioned earlier, there are too many features to list here on my website but check the rest them out for yourself, including Preview Mode, Tool Tips, Form Themes and Import/Export Forms Across Websites.

Conclusion

I would have to say that this is a very very good plugin and you can tell that the guys at themeCatcher have put a lot of work in to this.

Normally I’m not one for paid for WordPress plugins but I think the features of iPhorm are worth paying the $25 for. However as a developer I would like to see some sort of commercial licence for it. If you are managing 20 -30 + websites, $25 a licence is soon going to add up and might actually be very cost effective.

If there was a commercial licence available that allowed me to use it across all of my sites I would definitely be using it today. But either way go check it out for yourself and see what you think.

Update

2/12/2011 – After speak with the guys at themeCatcher, they have informed me that they are currently looking into commercial multi-site licences for this plugin, which is great news. Please help them out and let them know your thoughts on commerical multi-site licence pricing.

Download

iPhorm is avaible to purchase over at codecanyon: iPhorm WordPress Plugin.

A number of new features have been added including customisable labels and titles, post counts, excluding taxonomies and support for custom taxonomies.

Usage

<?php chainselect_getcategories( $tax, $level, $titles, $labels, $btn_text, $exclude, $count ) ?>

Parameters

$tax

(string) (optional) The taxonomies to retrieve terms from. Default: Category

$level

(integer) (optional) The amount of levels of child terms to return. Default: 1

$titles

(array) (optional) Titles for the first select option in each level – Must be the same number of array elements as $level. Default: array(‘Please select…’)

$labels

(array) (optional) Labels for each select element – Leave blank for no labels. Default: ”

$btn_text

(string) (optional) Text for submit button. Default: ‘Submit’

$exclude

(string) (optional) Exclude taxonomies by id – comma seperated string of id’s. Default: ”

$count

(integer) (optional) Show count of posts for each term. Default: 1

Examples

Show 3 levels of terms with custom labels and titles.
Syntax:

<?php chainselect_getcategories( 'category', 3, array('Select Country', 'Select County', 'Select Town'), array('Country', 'County', 'Town') ) ?>

Show 2 levels of custom terms with custom titles and no term count and excluding terms 6 and 9.
Syntax:

<?php chainselect_getcategories( 'location', 2, array('Select Country', 'Select City'), '', '', '6,9', 0 ) ?>

Details

Important information if you are upgrading from an old version of this plugin, DON’T!

I can’t stress enough that this plugin has been re-written from scratch and is in no way backwards compatible, so please delete the old version of the plugin before installing the new one.

Download

The new version is now available over on WordPress. Download Category Ajax Chain Selects now.

Here is the code that you need:

<?php
$social_sharing_toolkit = new MR_Social_Sharing_Toolkit();
 echo $social_sharing_toolkit->create_bookmarks(get_permalink( $post->ID ), get_the_title( $post->ID ), '');
?>

As you can probably tell, all this does is pass the current post ID and title into the function create_bookmarks. So you can use this piece of code anywhere in your theme template files within the loop.

There a many different types of splash screens around, homepage replacement pages, jQuery overlays, hacky CSS solutions etc… but one thing that they all have in common is that they all annoy the hell out on me when visiting a website.

Considering the Internet is built up of  information, and that’s what people use it for. It seems strange that some website owners are willing to jeopardize visits to their sites, by intercepting the users path to the exact information they are coming to your site for.

Ok so I may be coming across very anti splash page here. Even I have to say there are some advantages of using them, but I really do think in this case the disadvantages really do outweigh the advantages.

Splash Page – Advantages

They are a good way for marketers to attract visitors attention to latest offers/new things on the site.

There a good way to show off your design and creative skills. *

…if there are more please add them to the comments below because I really am struggling.

*I think this one is more a matter of opinion because with HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery, you can be creative enough on your actually site, without having to implement a splash page.

Splash Page – Disadvantages

Probably the biggest disadvantage – They annoy and confuse customers. Surveys have shown that 25% for people will instantly navigate away from a website if confronted with a splash page. Whether your a blog or you monetize content or even run a e-commerce site, losing 25% of your visitors can never be a good thing.

Depending on how you implement you splash page it could massively affect your SEO rankings. If you replace you keyword rich homepage with a fancy graphical splash page then you will instantly lose any ranking your website had.

These two reasons alone should be a good enough reason not to implement a splash screen on your website or remove it now if you already have one.

Whats Next?

I really hope splash pages will be a piece of the Internet that we leave behind, but im sure only time will tell. While we have marketers out there that are more interested in getting their message across, than they are in an enjoyable experience for the visitor. Then I believe we won’t see the end of one of the most annoying additions to the Internet that we just can’t shift.