Archive for the ‘WordPress Tips’ Category
by Franky Branckaute on March 20th, 2010
Many people blog for fun while others blog to make money but at the end of the day most of us all have the same purpose in mind and the game is all about one thing, one word: traffic.
There are many different approaches to blogging and the best way to achieve long term success with your blog is to create valuable content but sometimes your entries need that small push to take off and you will have to promote your entries, often relying on friends/colleagues to get those first submissions/votes on social networks. On platforms such as StumbleUpon or Reddit verticals those first initial votes can make the difference between no referrals or thousands of visitors to your post.
So off you go hitting up all your friends on Twitter, Facebook and in Basecamp. Guilty as charged.
In this entry I am going to show you how you can easily set up a private network with WordPress and 3 plugins only, to promote your entries among, together with friends, hoping for those often crucial initial votes, submissions to the main social networks to maximally promote your awesome content. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tools, WordPress Tips
Tags: Promotion, Social Media, traffic, wordpress, WordPress Tips
by Franky Branckaute on January 19th, 2010
Recently Ajay D’Souza asked how we made our author archive pages here on BloggingPro. I personally am a big fan of displaying content differently on different sections of blogs and also think that archives should be more informative than be just a collection of excerpts.
Because I personally believe that an ‘Author Information’ block below every entry overkill is, the author archive is the right spot to display more information about every author and also display the entries written by authors in a short and concise way.
Part 1: Adding The Author Description and Gravatar
Creating customised author pages is really simple. Other than some CSS customisation the code for the author description is entirely provided by known and documented WordPress template tags and information gathered from the author profile.
First we need of course a author.php template for this to work and you need to make sure that every author fills in their profile. The code used in following code samples is backwards compatible (to WP1.2!) and makes use of the $ curauth functions documented in the WordPress Codex Author Templates. The email address is protected from spam harvesters. Read More
Categories: WordPress Tips, WordPress Tutorials
Tags: design, Themes
by Mark McWilliams on January 18th, 2010
This is a guest entry by Mark Mc Williams. Mark is known in the WordPress scene as @wpkid. In this entry he discusses the new page template options in WordPress 2.9.
With the
release of WordPress 2.9 it brought in many new features, but a couple in particular I quite liked, and think they’d be very useful when building client websites or working on your own. Not just that, but out of every other release post, I never saw this mentioned once.
Up First The category-slug.php Template
Before it was added, all you had available was the standard category.php template file which we’re all aware of, along with category-id.php which would have been used by some developers if they needed to show different layouts for each category archive. The trouble starts though if you’ve got 2 or 3 files like category-2.php, category-30.php and category-17.php then it get’s a little confusing if you forget what ID goes with which category! Read More
Categories: WordPress News, WordPress Tips
Tags: design, wordpress, WordPress 2.9
by Franky Branckaute on December 12th, 2009
Since some days several contacts have been considering the option to display upcoming posts on their site. WordPress offers a really simple solution for this in the form of the attribute post_status. The post_status is stored in the wp_post table and has generally the attributes: draft, private, publish or static for pages. There is one more attribute which we will use in this example: future.
It is now simple to create a list of the 5 upcoming entries and display this in your theme, fe. in your sidebar.
<?php
$my_query = new WP_Query('post_status=future&showposts=5');
?>
<div class="sidebar-box">
<?php
if ($my_query->have_posts()) : while ($my_query->have_posts()) :
$my_query->the_post();
?>
<ul>
<li>
<?php the_title(); ?>
</li>
</ul>
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
<div>
<ul>
<li><?php _e('No upcoming Posts'); ?></li>
</ul>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>
You can now easily style this in your CSS.
Use A Shortcode To Display Upcoming Entries In A Post
First, what are shortcodes? I wrote a small intro to shortcodes on Devlounge yesterday with some examples of how to build a shortcode.
Why would you want to display a list of upcoming posts within an entry? You could be writing a series and want to use your upcoming entries as an additional teaser in the hope that the reader will subscribe or return to your site. You could use a post template for this but it is very simple to create a shortcode. Once you have created this shortcode it is then very simple to add the list of upcoming posts anywhere in an entry.
Building the shortcode
For this example we are going to build a shortcode [upcoming] and will use the tag series as selector. Doing this, it will avoid that scheduled entries not tagged Series will not be displayed. This can be handy on multi-authored blogs with a regular, scheduled posting rhythm.
Add the following code to your functions.php.
function upcom($atts, $content = null) {
extract(shortcode_atts(array(
"num" => '5'
"tag" => 'series'
), $atts));
global $post;
$myposts = get_posts('numberposts='.$num.'&post_status=future&order=DESC&orderby=date&tag='.$tag);
$retour='<ul class="upcoming">';
foreach($myposts as $post) :
setup_postdata($post);
$retour.='<li><a href="'.get_permalink().'">'.the_title("","",false).'</a></li>';
endforeach;
$retour.='</ul> ';
return $retour;
}
add_shortcode('upcoming', 'upcom');
All you have to do now to display this list in an entry is use the shortcode [upcoming] in the editor.
In this example I used <ul class="upcoming"> to easily style the output in your CSS.
Modifying The Shortcode Function
The shortcode function above can easily be modified.
- The example returns 5 posts, change the value in line 3 to display more or less entries
- Change the tag you want to use in the same way as you would change the number of displayed entries (line 4).
Categories: WordPress Tips, WordPress Tutorials
Tags: Code, Howto, tutorial, wordpress
by David Peralty on September 15th, 2009
There are numerous cheat sheets for WordPress, and they’ll continue to be created, edited and re-released, but I wanted to highlight a new one for those in search of one that fits the bill for WordPress 2.8.x.
Ekin Ertac has created a new sheet entitled “Free Complete Wordpress Cheat Sheet” where you can look over WordPress specific tags for various theming needs.
It is one page, and in PDF form.
Categories: WordPress Tips
by David Peralty on September 2nd, 2009
One of the most confusing thing about WordPress is custom fields. The shame of it is that custom fields are one of the most powerful features of WordPress, allowing you to do all kinds of very interesting things.
Over on WordPress.tv, there is now a video introducing people to custom fields, how they work, and how to use them.
Using custom fields can be confusing to new WordPress users. Scott Ellis provides an introductory explanation of how to use custom fields for image placement and the components that go into making custom fields work from front end placement to back end utilization and code.
I hope to see more detailed videos regarding custom fields and their use in the future. I think it is entirely an underused and under appreciated feature in WordPress.
Categories: WordPress Tips
by David Peralty on August 18th, 2009
This might get a little confusing, but hopefully you can follow along. Over on Lorelle.WordPress.com, Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today has written a post about reporting abuse and spam to WordPress.com.
If you use WordPress.com, or are thinking about using it, you might want to spend a bit of time hunting down abuse and bringing it to the attention of Automattic, the people running WordPress.com’s hosted service.
As someone who has filed hundreds of copyright complaints over the years, I can say without a doubt that Automattic has been very responsive to copyright complaints. However, there is a very strict protocol that one needs to follow in order to have their complaint acted upon.
Automattic is a U.S.-based company and its servers are located with in the country. As such, it is bound by U.S. law, most notable the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This law provides a safe harbor to Web hosts, such as Automattic, to prevent them from being held liable for copyright infringement perpetrated by their users without their knowledge.
Follow the advice in the post, report abuse, and make WordPress.com a better place for everyone.
Categories: WordPress Tips
by David Peralty on July 31st, 2009
While we weren’t part of the list, (for-shame!) I did want to point out the 48 Resources, Tips, Tricks & Themes post on Thinkdesign.
Today I’m bringing you a bunch of WordPress resources. As I’m sure your aware, WordPress is my tool of choice. The wonderful thing about WordPress, is you can do just about anything with it. So I’ve compiled this list in hopes of showing you some cool things you can do with your WordPress site that you might not have known. This list includes general resources, inspiration, quality themes, along with a bunch of tips & tricks (from beginner to more advanced) Enjoy!
If you are just getting into WordPress, or you are thinking about it, this list has a great number of resources that I check out nearly daily, making it perfect for any level of WordPress user or fan.
While many of you that read this blog will probably know nearly all of these sites, hopefully there will be a few that catch your eye that you haven’t frequented because the best way to learn something new about WordPress is to find those hidden gem blogs.
Categories: WordPress Tips, WordPress Tools
by David Peralty on July 28th, 2009
Have you added a changelog to your plugin yet? If not, I’d really like to send out a general request that you all take the time to do so, as it will make my life easier.
Over on the WordPress blog, they’ve made finding out how to add information to your plugin relating to the various things you’ve done between versions, and this information can be very important for those working with your plugin.
We’ve recently made some changes to help improve the communication between plugin authors and plugin users about the changes that are made between versions.
We feel that all software should have a changelog that details, at a high level, what changes have been made in each version so that the user can make an informed decision about when to upgrade and how much testing they should do with their site.
In order to make this an easy and open communication channel we have added support for a Changelog section in the plugins readme.txt file. This changelog information is then displayed as a separate tab in the plugin directory and also in the back end of your WordPress blog when you view the details on a new version of a plugin.
So if you don’t yet have a changelog section in your readme.txt file, now is the time to add one, and if you need more information on the structure or what you should include, check out the WordPress blog posting on the matter.
Categories: WordPress Tips
by David Peralty on July 24th, 2009
Over on 1st Webdesigner, there is a list of twenty-three WordPress cheat sheets and resources that you’ll find helpful if you are having issues remember which code to put in to include your theme’s stylesheet or display comments. I really love these types of resource posts because the cheat sheets are one of the fastest way to get a new user up to speed when they are interested in seeing an overview of what makes WordPress tick.
Most of them are in PDF form, so you’ve been warned. If your computer chokes on PDF’s, you might want to look elsewhere, but these files are worth having. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked up the same piece of code in the Codex, only to run and do a Google search regarding the function.
If you need a WordPress quick reference sheet, check out those listed on 1st Webdesigner’s list.
Categories: WordPress Tips, WordPress Tools
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