Archive for the ‘WordPress Hacks’ Category
by David Peralty on June 9th, 2009
In my recent surge of interest in WordPress plugins I’ve stumbled on a lot of interesting things. Today instead of plugins, it’s a list of 10 WordPress hacks, from themeflash.com, to add some pretty cool features without needing a plugin.
They’re a little trickier than plugins to implement but can be well worth the final effect.
Hacks in the list include:
Create TinyURLs On The Fly
List Upcoming Posts
Create A Maintenance Page For Your WordPress Blog
Display Related Posts Without A Plug-In
Resize Images On The Fly
And 5 more…
They include detailed explanations of how to add the hacks that’s easy enough for anyone to follow, and none of them take more than a minute or so to setup (most will likely take just a few seconds).
Categories: WordPress Hacks
by David Peralty on May 13th, 2009
Smashing Magazine has put up a list of different things that you can do to extend your WordPress blog, and how it functions through custom fields. I’ve heard that this is going to get easier to use in future versions of WordPress, but for now, this should inspire some great additions to your blog.
In this article, we’ve compiled a list of 10 useful things that you can do with custom fields in WordPress. Among them are setting expiration time for posts, defining how blog posts are displayed on the front page, displaying your mood or music, embedding custom CSS styles, disabling search engine indexing for individual posts, inserting a “Digg this” button only when you need it and, of course, displaying thumbnails next to your posts
I can’t really think of anything that’d require expiring blog posts, but the others are very helpful. Check out the whole article on Smashing Magazine, and let me know what you think was most helpful.
Categories: WordPress Hacks
by David Peralty on March 20th, 2009
There is one file that is barely understood by most WordPress users, and that is .htaccess. Most of us understand that it is what controls the pretty permalinks that most blogs take advantage of, but there are other amazing things that .htaccess can do, and if you dig deep enough, you can change how your WordPress blog behaves.
Cats Who Code has a great list of ten .htaccess hacks that will do interesting things. From redirecting your RSS feed to Feedburner, to banning spammers from your blog, .htaccess can be a powerful ally in making your blog the envy of the blogosphere.
Take some time and look at these .htaccess edits, and don’t stop there, as many people have been writing amazing edits for a long time now for all sorts of sites that could easily be applied to your WordPress blog.
Categories: WordPress Hacks
by David Peralty on March 3rd, 2009
I love to see WordPress extended, and manipulated in weird ways. My favourite post thus far has been Raj Dash’s 48 Unique Ways To Use WordPress, but DesignM.ag has released their own list of non-traditional uses for WordPress.
They cover some of the things we’ve seen before like the contact manager, but also show some cool things like using WordPress as a Membership directory.
If you are interested in extending WordPress in weird and wonderful ways, these two posts will probably give you some ideas of how far WordPress can be pushed, mostly through the use of plugins and themes.
Categories: WordPress Hacks
by David Peralty on February 3rd, 2009
Shortcodes are a nice way of doing complex things within a post, without having to push PHP code through ExecPHP or one of those other plugins. Many plugins already make use of short codes allowing you to easily insert information into your posts.
Smashing Magazine has done a great job of explaining WordPress Shortcodes, how you can take advantage of them, and even write your own.
Introduced in WordPress 2.5, shortcodes are powerful but still yet quite unknown WordPress functions. Imagine you could just type “adsense” to display an AdSense ad or “post_count” to instantly find out the number of posts on your blog.
WordPress shortcodes can do this and more and will definitely make your blogging life easier. In this article, we’ll show you how to create and use shortcodes, as well as provide killer ready-to-use WordPress shortcodes that will enhance your blogging experience.
Of course you can go too overboard with these sorts of things, so I recommend limiting your shortcodes to less than five items, but it can be a great way to speed up what could be otherwise monotonous work when blogging.
Categories: WordPress Hacks, WordPress Tutorials
by jim on July 21st, 2008
Updating your WordPress version to 2.6 may break your podcast.
If you’re using Podpress (the popular free podcasting add-on for WordPress) PLEASE hold-off on upgrading to WordPress 2.6 (Tyner). Read this article first, it may save your Podcast from the dreaded “off-air” state.
Today, I received a GoogleAlert saying that Tyner and Podpress isn’t fully compatible. Once you successfully install WordPress 2.6, ALL your Podpress based podcasts will not work.
Here’s a typical message from the PodPress Forum:
I installed Wordpress 2.6 (the full version, not the Release Candidate) today but am having problems as soon as I activate Podpress. When I try to edit an existing post from the front page or from inside the Admin Panel, I get the error message “Internet Explorer can’t open the page [address of page] Operation cancelled.” but I see it only with IE. With FF it works like a charm. I thought it was out since longer already..that’s what you get for upgrading without informing yourself in advance.
Already last time I swore that I will never install a Wordpress or Podpress update in the 1st month they are released..always have problems with upgrades.
and a similar thread from the WordPress Forum:
I’ve just uploaded my latest podcast and the pod press will not display it nor attach it to the post. Everything I uploaded yesterday is there and playing but after the update it’s not working.
At this time there isn’t an available patch from Podpress, but here’s a nifty tip from a user who may have stumbled upon a solution (WARNING: PLEASE note that this solution was not tested by anyone from bloggingpro.com, observe caution and care, we will not be held liable for any damage to your data, your person, or business.)
FROM JERD (a forum user/member of the WordPress Forum)
After spending hours digging through the code and looking at the database, I discovered that this is being caused by the new revisions in 2.6. To disable them, just add:
define (‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 0);
to your wp-config.php and the problem disappears.
Podpress patch will be released in 10 days, according to this page (Dan Kuykendall of MightySeek.com).
Categories: WordPress Hacks, WordPress Plugins
by David Peralty on March 20th, 2008
Over on Noupe there is a great post that goes over some of the millions of ways you can effect major changes on your WordPress theme. Some are difficult, others are very easy, and almost all of them are powerful to bloggers looking to add customizations to their blogs.
It includes links to dozens of tutorials from all the great sites on the web that cover WordPress, and can help you answer some of those questions you’ve been interested in finding out more about. Covering things like the loop, conditional tags, post excerpts, and dozens of other things, the guide is a great starting point to those looking to dive deep into theme customization in WordPress.
This is the first article in the four-part series, “Powerful guide to master Your WordPress”. Throughout this article, we’ll be focus on many WordPress Theme hacks, ideas, tips and useful tutorials you need to have ready in hand when developing WordPress websites.
Check it out on Noupe.
Categories: WordPress Hacks, WordPress Themes
by David Peralty on March 18th, 2008
Ozh has put up a tutorial on how everyone can change the colour schemes of the WordPress 2.5 administration panel. It seems to be relatively simple, if you understand how to make a plugin.
WordPress 2.5 introduces a neat option: per user Admin Color Scheme. This means that each user can select a stylesheet they like best for the whole admin area. Now onto the fun stuff: adding a per-user selectable custom stylesheet for your blog.
The new function behind this feature is wp_admin_css_color(),
I have to admit, I wish a build-a-colour-scheme tool was built right into WordPress 2.5. Here is hoping that someone comes up with a good plugin solution for it, but until then, this is a great tutorial on how to change the colours to your own preferences.
Categories: WordPress Hacks
by David Peralty on March 12th, 2008
WordPress 2.5 isn’t even out yet, and already we have a theme to replace the default WordPress administration panel theme that has taken a fair bit of flack.
The theme, Fluency, replaces many of the graphics and navigational item placements in the WordPress admin. It strips the colours back to a black, gray, and white mix, moving the main navigation over to the left hand side.
Despite the huge overhaul that the WordPress admin interface has received its still not quite what I would really like. I had grown quite attached to the Tiger Admin theme by Steve Smith and when I found that it didn’t work with WP2.5 I was a little disappointed. But this gave me the opportunity to do something different, my own admin theme. Fluency is the result.
While this might make many people happy, I still believe that I will adjust to the upcoming WordPress administration panel, and am interested to see how long it will be before someone comes out with a “Retro” administration panel theme, reverting it back to looking closer to the WordPress 2.3 administration panel we have come to be familiar with.
Categories: WordPress Hacks, WordPress Plugins
by David Peralty on March 12th, 2008
Love the Prologue theme, but not the minimalist post box it includes? Raj Dash on Performancing has heard your cries and gone ahead and created a tutorial on adding the TinyMCE editor to the theme.
Twitter-like microbloggging functionality. But out of the box, the theme has a very plain edit area (see image below), and adding links, images, etc., is tedious.
Fortunately, there’s a really easy fix to this problem: TinyMCE editor. TinyMCE is a Javascript-based freeware editor. If you have a recent version of WordPress, it’s the default “visual” editor that you get in the admin panel. Thanks to its easy integration features, we can use this as a replacement to the default HTML message editor in the Prologue theme. And you won’t believe how incredibly easy it is to hack it. I think it took me about 2 minutes, not including download and installation. I’m actually surprised that Automattic didn’t do it themselves.
Definitely worth checking out if you want to add features and functions for users that aren’t familiar with HTML.
Categories: WordPress Hacks
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