HoJoe Coffee & Books is a proud local business located in the heart of downtown Kenora on beautiful Lake of the Woods in Northwestern Ontario.

Vantage Studios Inc. is proud to launch the new HoJoe Coffee & Books Website.

I was responsible for design and development of a functional WordPress theme, content organization and plug-in development/management.

All content property of Vantage Studios Inc.

Billy is supposed to be buying me coffee. He’s procrastinating.

I know I know, no one but me finds this sort of thing interesting but I feel like the website has been getting 0 love over the past few weeks.

It’s not because I don’t enjoy writing tutorials. Lots of stuff in the 9 to 5 has changed, which means i’ve been getting quite busy. We recently lost Billy Kiely to the real world which means we are down a designer.

Fear not, there are some amazing things going down at Vantage Studios and the Vantage Lounge so hopefully I will have some new portfolio work for you to look at in the near future!

For now, feel free read my twitter!

*The twitterrific bird is copyright of David Lanham and the Icon Factory. Check out his stuff, you won’t regret it!

Dazed survivors wandered past dead bodies in rubble-strewn streets Wednesday, crying for loved ones, and rescuers searched collapsed buildings as officials feared the death toll from Haiti’s devastating earthquake could reach into the tens of thousands.

via Yahoo! News

You’ve probably all heard about the earthquake in Haiti so this is going to be short.

Go donate now! The minimum donation is $5. Pocket change can help someone in need. Do it now!

Donate now via Canadian Red Cross

2009 ended with a huge bang and lots of changes so let’s see what 2010 is going to bring.

I’m hoping that I can start writing about some interesting content for everyone to read and share, so let’s hope I stick to the plan. We all know how unpredictable life can be

The Project

Near the end of 2009 I joined Project52 which looks like a very interesting concept. (Yes, I know i’m a few days late, but let’s not tell anyone!)

Project52 is a personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year. Because we all know what it‘s like to procrastinate on our content. A website is not just a fresh design that can be uploaded to the web and forgotten about!

Be sure to check it out and Have a great 2010 everyone!

We are going to run a 24 hour Obox theme sale here at EnvexLabs. Just choose a theme and buy it, ultra simple. Be sure to snag up any of these themes before the time runs out! You’ve been warned.

Briefcase – Buy Now!

Smoke & Mirrors – Buy Now!

Slider – Buy Now!

Slider.Press – Buy Now!

Micro.Press – Buy Now!

Hash Two – Buy Now!

I’ve written a class based on some basic functions of Digg.com that I’m planning on using for a tutorial. I wouldn’t be a very good teacher if I released a shoddy class out to the masses.

This is where you come in. I would like anyone and everyone to take this class and tear it apart. Call me an idiot for doing something a certain way, praise me for a chunk of code or make changes in silence. I want this to be a learning experience for everyone.

You can fork it, download it or copy it from my gist account or use the big button below!

You can either contact me on gist, leave a comment or send me an email, either way lets try and make this a kick ass class!

DigDug Icon is copyright Gedeon Maheux & The IconFactory

DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts, and other service names are the trademarks of Digg Inc.

The Vantage Lounge was created as a division of Vantage Studios Inc. to give our clients more great services. The need for quality digital printing services was in demand and our attention to detail and years of experience as print brokers made us a perfect candidate to fulfill this need.

Our concept is simple, to create an enviroment that promotes education and excitement about the print industry. Our cafe style shop will promote creativity and build a community that can share ideas and concepts, whether it be design related, marketing ideas or business solutions. We offer reliable services and guarantee your satisfaction.

Vantage Studios Inc is proud to launch The Vantage Lounge Print Cafe. If you happen to need any printing done and are in the exchange area in Winnipeg, stop by The Vantage Lounge to say hi!

You can view the new site over here and maybe order some prints while you’re there!

Northern Lights is an undeveloped template created at Vantage Studios Inc.

Luckily, we can write our own comment function, using our own code, to make styling the comments 100% easier and 50% more fun

The Function

In your WordPress theme folder (root/wp-content/themes/your-theme/) there will be a file called functions.php. This is the first file we are going to edit, so open it up. Add this code to the bottom of functions.php.

<?php

function envex_comments($comment, $args, $depth) {

$GLOBALS['comment'] = $comment;

//grab the commenter id
$user_id = $comment->user_id;
$user = new WP_User( $user_id );

//set the current role of that commenter to the role variable
//most of the time, you'll just be worrying about you, the administrator
$role = isset($user) ? $user->roles[0] : ''; ?>

<li <?php echo $oddcomment; ?>id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">

<div>
<?php if(function_exists('get_avatar')) { echo get_avatar($comment, '45'); } ?>
<p><strong><?php comment_author_link() ?></strong><br /><?php comment_date('m/d/y \@ h:m a') ?></p>

</div> <!-- comment_grav -->

<div>
<?php comment_text() ?>
</div> <!-- comment_text -->

<div>
<?php comment_reply_link(array_merge( $args, array('depth' => $depth, 'max_depth' => $args['max_depth']))) ?>
</div>

<?php
if ($comment->comment_approved == '0') : ?>
<p><em>Your comment is awaiting moderation.</em></p>
<?php
endif; ?>

</li>

<?php
/* Changes every other comment to a different class */
$oddcomment = ( empty( $oddcomment ) ) ? 'class="alt" ' : '';

}

?>

In a nutshell, WordPress is going to run this function for each comment.

We’ve created an li element that will hold all of our comment info.

The Gravatar

The first div, comment_grav, will display a gravatar is the current commenter has one setup. We use get_avatar($comment, ‘45′) and pass 2 variables to it. The first one being the comment info and the second is the size of our gravatar.

You can read more about gravatars over at their website!

The Comment Text and The Reply Link

These next 2 functions are pretty straight forward. To display the comment text we use comment_text().

To display the reply link we use the comment_reply_link(). The arguments that are being passed are to deal with threaded comments (*if they’re enabled).

*Threaded comments are enabled in Admin panel –> Settings -> Discussions.

The Approval

We don’t want to show any unapproved comments, so we check to see if $comment->comment_approved is false. If it’s false we display that it’s awaiting moderation.

The Template

Now that we’ve created our own comments function, we need to tell our theme to use it instead of the WordPress one. Open comments.php and find wp_list_comments(). It should be around line 29.

We are going to pass a few arguments to this function.

wp_list_comments(array('reply_text'=>'Reply to this Comment','type'=>'comment','callback' => 'envex_comments'));

These arguments tell the wp_list_comments() function to use envex_comments() to display our comments.

Conclusion

You now have the basic structure for some new comments on your blog/cms. All that’s left is to style them up to match your site, and i’m going to leave that up to you!