Recently I and my team have been looking at a design that we have been working on which of course included implementing the design into Wordpress. This was a special project only because no matter how many backup links, bookmarks you can create, manage and hold on to there is always something that you will work on where you just can’t seem to find it. We have a huge list of links and resources that are always available in case we need to go back and re-study them to complete something unique. This happen to us on this project when it came to creating a Wordpress website design and development in need to use the Accordion Vertical Sliding menu.

Having to look for a new source, using Google and MSN we noticed that we haven’t found many places that incorporate this effect well into Wordpress. Specially when your client wants quite a few custom features in it. On our search and find mission, we went through quite a bit of date, trials, tutorials and others. We’ve played around with few ideas in our heads, within the HTML and PHP coding but no matter how we tried to wrap out head around, nothing seems to work just the way our client and our team would of liked.

Finally we stumbled going through the large Wordpress Extend directory of plug-ins to find this fantastic Wordpress plug-in that simply works! That’s right you heard us correctly, a simple download, install and activate plug-in for Wordpress that will generate an “accordion sliding like” menu and use your pages. It is called the Collapsing Pages. We also wanted to get our sub-pages included in this, as a multiple drop down / accordion menu. Amazing, the plug-in just did that for us too. Styling it was a little bit of a pain, but you can select custom code within its setting/preferences and implement proper styling within your CSS file that is imported into your web page under Wordpress.

It also works great because not only can you implement this little thing into your page or blog but it also comes with its own little Widget, place it, configure it and bam! a working accordion sliding menu in Wordpress sidebar.

That said off we went, installed the plug-in, activated the plug-in, configured and bam! like a charm it worked! We placed it and used the widget style of this plug-in to incorporate it into the functioning website as the location was the sidebar.

Our client was very happy with the results and I must say that we were as well. So check it out, download it and share it. Very nice and tons of credit to the creator for this, too bad its not as popular as it should be. I must say, quite a few people around the forums, blogs and else where are searching just for such working plug-in. Hopefully this will change and boost a little bit of its popularity, so everyone can enjoy and use it within their own blogs, designs and inspirations.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/collapsing-pages

Have a blast with it, for us this one did the job and delivered the results we wanted for our client. It works better than anything else out there we could scoop up and get to work. Plus on top of its setup and functionality, 100% browser compatible folks! of course might need little extra attention when we get into Internet Explorer 6 and below.

Enjoy, share your thoughts with us on this one.

Recently we have been getting quite the number of questions from previous clients who are trying to get a fix of transparency on their projects (not developed by us), as well as other visitors to our company’s blog. Since the requests are flowing in more and more everyday, I’m personally guessing because we have demonstrated that such is possible with a tiny work around. We’ve came up with a small list and thought it would be a great idea to blast this off as our first Tutorial program. For those of you who are just starting off and unfamiliar with this and everything so far that has been written above became just jumbo mambo, let us explain a little in detail before we get down to the list.

Introduction and How Come?

As a designer you can design that perfect looking site but in some cases as we all know it simply is hard to achieve the perfect look without using a PNG file here or there. Sure, many of you might say “Why not use transparency with gif”. You can of course, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t but for those whom just seriously need to use PNG at some point in their design, in a background or other a fix will be needed.

Now having that great design, most updated and latest browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Opera, Safari and Chrome perfectly understand and render the PNG file. However, going a little bit back in time to the old and ugly Internet Explorer 6 and 5, PNG images are simply not rendered, showing up. In such that either your images or background will not show up or rather in some cases you will get a “white” image in that place. This is simply unacceptable by any designers and the last thing you want.

You don’t have to use the transparency fix for all PNG format images, only PNG format images that actually contain transparency within them. To fix such problem within your website development, you can visit the links below to fix this with a little bit of Javascript coding. These are provided as small JS files and little or not extra coding.

jQuery.ifixpng

Visit and Download: Right Here

Unit PNG Fix

Visit and Download: Right Here

IE7.js Fix

Visit and Download: Right Here

Twin Helix Fix

Visit and Download: Right Here

DD_BelatedPNG Fix

Visit and Download: Right Here

As a development team of some wacky websites for our clients and other firms and their clients, we have tried most of them. To be honest, right now even thought Internet Explorer is still used by 20% of the public and having two versions already ahead of version 6 (being 7 and 8), the above fixes have their own bugs. That said, whatever works for you as a designer to fix your problem and make your design compatible with Internet Explorer 6, is what you want.

I hope everyone enjoys our list of transparency work-around for Internet Explorer 6.