The Blog

The Embed Block is a core block in Headway – that means if you have Headway, you have this block. But are you using it?  The Embed block is incredibly flexible – just place a block in the desired size on the page, drop in the URL of the embeddable media and Save.

Yup, it’s that easy!

The Embed Block supports a ton of media services by default – and this list can be expanded, if you’re familiar with WordPress Hooks and PHP.

• blip.tv
• DailyMotion
• Flickr
• FunnyOrDie.com
• Hulu
• Instagram
• Qik
• Photobucket
• PollDaddy
• Revision3
• Scribd
• SlideShare
• SoundCloud
• SmugMug
• Twitter
• Viddler
• Vimeo
• YouTube
• WordPress.tv (only VideoPress-type videos for the time being)

Examples

To embed a TV show or movie from Hulu, you’d enter the link to the episode page in the block options for the Embed Block, i.e. : http://www.hulu.com/watch/486599

A YouTube embed would be similar – just link to the YouTube Video. Note that you do not have to generate a special URL or pull the URL from the iFrame source – nothing fancy here, folks. Just grab the link you’d normally share, and drop it into the Embed Block, i.e. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6DJcgm3wNY

With non-video services like Twitter or SoundCloud, you aren’t embedding video – you’re embedding the media that service collects along with the proper controls to interact with that media. So a single Tweet includes controls to reply, retweet, etc, and a SlideShare presentation has controls to page through the presentation, and a SoundCloud link will let you play the audio.

So what are you waiting for? Start using the Embed Block to create more interesting and dynamic layouts!

Have you ever wondered why you need so many options on the Content Block? Most often when you’re using a single content block in your layout, you’re using it in Default Mode. But there’s a whole world of options for you under Custom Query, and today we’ll go over a few helpful use case scenarios to get your creative juices flowing and push you to make the most of that Content Block!

1. Spice Up Your Blog’s Homepage

You don’t have to be running an online magazine to take advantage of a magazine-style layout.  If your site has been established for a little while, you probably have loads of great content – show it off! A Content Block with excerpts from your latest posts – or even your latest post in full – is great. But what about all the rest of that space? Instead of filling your homepage with the same widgets your visitors will see as they dive deeper into your blog, spice it up and drop another couple of Content Blocks on the page. You can set each of these to Custom Query mode and pull in content from a specific author (if you have more than one author on your blog) or a specific category. Now, don’t just leave it as a plain list of posts with Title, Meta & Excerpt; we can really make this area pop by using the Display Options to hide the Excerpt and the Meta and display just the title and the Featured Image, or the Title, Featured Image and Byline (for a multi-author blog).

2. Make Your 404 Error Page Useful

It’s a fact of websites: We all have broken links. But your 404 page doesn’t need to be a dead end for your users! You have the ability to customize the layout for your 404 Error page in the Headway Visual Editor; so edit it and add another Content Block to show posts from a category, an author, or just the latest 5 posts from your site. Show them in full, show them in excerpt – whatever you think will be most useful. Play with the layout! Add Block Titles to help organize the content for your visitor, or get cheeky with it. Have fun on your 404 Error page and you’re more likely to get your visitor to read another resource rather than going back to Google to read your competitors  site!

3. Bring Page Excerpts Onto Your Front Page

Use automatically-generated excerpts from your WordPress Pages to tease your audience into reading more by using the Fetch Page option in Custom Query Mode.  If you’d like more control over your excerpts (like the ability to write a custom excerpt) try installing the free Page Excerpts plugin.  If you’d like to include HTML tags or images in your page excerpts, you might want to check out Advanced Excerpt (also free). When you consider the ability to style each of these Content Blocks independently for unique backgrounds, borders, and font styles – you’ve got a fabulous way to draw attention to products, services, or anything else that you need to promote on your homepage – while keeping management of those elements easy to handle in the WordPress admin.

Today we’re letting the world know that we’ve released a developer beta of Headway 3.5! We actually released it on May 1st as a dry run of our system, and today we are going to give you a quick screencast to show off some of the new feature, Multiple Wrappers!

Headway 3.5 will feature multiple wrappers. So not only will your sites and designs be limited to a single fixed wrapper, you’ll actually be able to use fluid wrappers with fluid grid or fixed grid, or a fixed wrapper with a fixed grid.

Remember that betas are only available to our developer license holders. Not a developer license holder? No problem! Sign up or upgrade now, and get in on testing this new release!

Don’t take my word for it though, check out the video below!

Today marks the reboot of the Screencast Tuesday series. I hinted at it on Twitter yesterday, and got some great feedback about maybe renaming it to the ‘Headway with AJ’ so I renamed it for the time being since this week and next, they aren’t coming on out Tuesdays. They are still packed with helpful tips and tricks though to get you moving in the right direction for your next project.

This week’s screencast is one that’s been asked about for awhile now. We just haven’t had time to get to it. We’re going to be coving WooCommerce and the Storefront: WooCommerce block by Headway. There’s a lot of information we could go into, and while I didn’t really think you all wanted me to talk on and on for hours about WooCommerce (there’s a lot of things it does!!), I wanted to focus our time on using it with Storefront: WooCommerce block, and with Headway.

The screencast is about 20 minutes in length and covers a fresh install of WordPress, Headway, WooCommerce and Storefront: WooCommerce block. I go over a few of the minor settings I wanted to change in WooCommerce, how to fill your store with test products so you can play with the pages and design your site, and we go over the few uses for the Storefront: WooCommerce block.

Update: The screencast is now here. Sorry about that ya’ll!

By default, Headway does not enable comments for WordPress pages.  However, enabling comments for WordPress pages is pretty easy.  Depending on your setup, the options are different.  You first need to understand how Headway’s inheritance works.

If you want comments enabled for posts and pages and you want them to have the same layout, you just need to customize the Single layout in the Headway Visual Editor.   You will edit the options for the content block on the Single layout to always show comments.

Click on the content block options for the Single Layout, then click on Display.  Where it says “Comments Visibility” you will change that to show “Always Show Comments”.  See the screenshot below.

If instead you only wanted comments enabled on pages or if you want the single page layouts and single post layouts to be different, then you would need to customize the Single > Page layout in the Visual Editor using the steps I described above.