BloggingPro » WordPress Tutorials

Creating a Shared Content Box Across All of Your WordPress Blogs

James Junior — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 05:40:36 +0000

More than five years ago, I was bit by the Autoblog bug. I don’t build them anymore, but I still build WordPress blogs in large numbers. One of my pet peeves when I was working with 100+ different blogs was that if I wanted to interlink them, or have the exact same links on the sidebar of each blog, I would have to add these links manually to each and every blog every time I built a new blog. For example, if I have 98 blogs, and I want every one of them to have a link to blog #99 that I just created, I would have to add that link to all 98 blogs manually. That is very time-consuming, so I knew there had to be a better way.

Of course, PHP can do just about anything if you know how to tell it to. I thought it would be awesome if I could have a shared links box on the sidebar of each WordPress blog, and have a form online that I could enter in the name and URL to each new blog as I built them, and then have PHP add that link to all 98 blogs instantly. Thankfully, I was able to set this up exactly how I needed it. This is what I am going to show you today, and you can use it however you see fit. One thing I want to remind you of is that even though I am using the shared content box for links, it technically can be used for anything, your imagination is the limit. Let’s get started.

Requirements

WordPress Blog(s)
Hosting with PHP and MySQL Database (this is a common setup, so your host should have it)
PHPMyAdmin Access

Step 1

Download the Samsarin PHP Widget to your WP blog; install and activate it. This plugin lets you create a widget that can execute any PHP code right in the widget. This is crucial for you because it allows you to connect to your PHP database and display the content right there on your blog.

Step 2

Open up your PHPMyAdmin dashboard, and create a new database called links_database. You do this by clicking on the “databases” tab from the PHPMyAdmin home page, then you can specify the name of the database you want to create. If you don’t have enough admin rights to create a database from PHPMyAdmin, then you have to create it from within your hosting panel (CPanel, etc.).

Step 3

Once you have the database created, you need to execute the following SQL code to create the table that will house the links. Do this by clicking on the SQL tab up top and pasting in and running the following SQL code:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `links` ( `site_name` varchar(50) NOT NULL, `url` varchar(100) NOT NULL ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

That SQL code will create a table named links inside the links_database database. Notice that it has two columns/fields: site_name is the anchor text, and url is the URL of the site that the anchor text will point to.

Step 4

Next we are going to create a PHP file named connect.php which will contain the login and password for the specific database that we want to hook up to in our other scripts. Go ahead and create connect.php with your text editor and insert the following code into it (be sure to change the username and password to your own):

# Type="MYSQL" # HTTP="true" $hostname_links = "localhost"; $database_links = "links_database"; $username_links = "DB_USERNAME"; $password_links = "DB_PASSWORD"; $conn = mysql_pconnect($hostname_links, $username_links, $password_links) or trigger_error(mysql_error(),E_USER_ERROR); ?>

Step 5

Now we create another simple PHP script called update.php, which will actually update the database every time we create and add a new link. Fill the update.php with the following code:

$site_name = $_POST['site_name']; $url = $_POST['url']; mysql_select_db("links_database", $jim); $query = "INSERT INTO links (site_name,url ) VALUES ('$_POST[site_name]','$_POST[url]')"; if (!mysql_query($query,$conn)) { die('Error: ' . mysql_error()); } echo "1 record added"; ?>

Step 6

Next we are going to create another PHP script called enterblog.php which will serve as the online web form that you will go to every time you want to add a new link to the list. Create enterblog.php with the following code in it:

Enter New Blog


















Enter name of new site:







Enter the url of the site:

Step 7

We now will create another PHP script called displayurls.php which will be the script we call from the widget in WordPress. This script simply pulls all of the rows from the links table in the links_database. Put the following code inside displayurls.php:

// Connects to your Database mysql_connect("localhost", "DB_USERNAME", "DB_PASSWORD") or die(mysql_error()); mysql_select_db("links_database") or die(mysql_error()); $data = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM links") or die(mysql_error()); $rt=mysql_query($data); while($nt=mysql_fetch_array($data)){ Print "

";

echo "

";

echo "

";

Print "

echo $nt['url'];
echo "\">";
echo $nt['site_name'];
echo "";
echo "

";

}

?>

Step 8

Okay almost done! Upload all of the PHP files we created here to the root directory of your site. Then change the file permissions on them to 755. Once you are done with that, it is time to bring up the web form and enter in a few links to the database. To do that, just type in the URL to your enterblog.php script, which should be something like http://www.yourblog.com/enterblog.php and you will see a two field web form. Enter in a few sites and URL’s, and hit enter after you type each one. It should tell you that 1 row was added if it went through successfully. Once that is done we can move on to the final step.

Step 9

Go into your WordPress admin and click on the Widgets option under the Appearance menu. In the widget selections you should see a widget titled something like “Samsarin PHP 1″, make sure you drag that widget somewhere onto your visible sidebar. When the widget pops up, enter in the title of the widget which might be something like “Links” and then in the body field type in the following PHP code:

Then hit Save. If you should run into an issue where you cannot see the links, try typing in your Absolute Server Path inside the above PHP include code (so instead of “displayurls.php” you might put something like “/var/www/displayurls.php” but the exact path is different for everyone’s server). You can get the absolute server path from your hosting company. When you bring up your blog, you should see the links box on any site you put that widget on. If you have this widget installed on every blog on your server, you can add a link to them all instantly just by entering the link info once into the web form and hitting enter! Pretty cool huh?!

Just a side note, I am not a PHP programmer. I know enough to modify some things and write simple scripts, but if you are a PHP guru and you see something that can be improved in these scripts, or see something wrong, feel free to voice your opinion in the comments and I will listen to all of your ideas. Good Luck!

How to Move From WordPress.com to WordPress.org

Franky Branckaute — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 10:21:21 +0000

WordPress.com is a hosted service, which allows you to set up multiple blogs for free, however there are optional paid options which add functionality to your blog. WordPress.com is perfect for a beginner blogger, however many bloggers find that it is to restrictive and looks unprofessional. In this Conor P. explains how to move from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, with the help of some video tutorials.

Visit the tutorial here.

Tutorial: Show All WordPress Image Sizes

Franky Branckaute — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 02:31:35 +0000

Justin Tadlock, of Theme Hybrid fame, has published a new entry describing how to display links to all images sizes within WordPress (or on your attachment pages). The attachment page often is a forgotten area in many a WordPress design.

At Splashpress Media we also made sure to pay extra attention to the attachment page in our redesigns and all our newly designed pages also include an ‘Attachment gallery’ as can be seen in this ForeverGeek post. Click any image in that post or just visit an attachment page:

Justin’s entry explains how to include links to every image size in your designs.

Read Justin’s tutorial here

How to: WordPress to Jekyll

Franky Branckaute — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 03:14:56 +0000

Paul Stamatiou has switched his site from WordPress to Jekyll. In this extensive review he features a step-by-step how to switch from WordPress to Jekyll, a new static generator. Paul mentions also some interesting details and reasons why his traffic dwindled and how this had a massive impact on his earnings.

What is Jekyll

Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server.

Find out more about Jekyll at Github and read Paul’s excellent write-up here.

WordPress 3.1 Post Formats Guide

Franky Branckaute — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 17:45:52 +0000

Lisa E. Sabin Wilson takes a look at the with WordPress 3.1 Beta introduced Post Formats in an extensive tutorial. In the post Lisa, from WordPress for Dummies fame, provides examples and the code to get you started with your own Post Formats for WordPress and even helps you on the way to get started at designing different styles for different post formats.

Read the tutorial at Lisa’s website.

Retrieve Your Twitter Followers Number Without API Issues

Franky Branckaute — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 11:43:33 +0000

In this WPShout entry Angela Giese provides the code to use and retrieve the number of your Twitter followers without being hit by the Twitter API restrictions, which popular bloggers can suffer from. This work around is mainly aimed at popular sites not using the Twitter widget.

Once you have added the code to your functions.php you can easily implement the number of Twitter followers anywhere in your theme or design.

Read the tutorial, completely with copiable code, at WPShout.

Correct Coding for WP Sidebars

Franky Branckaute — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 20:21:40 +0000

Great entry by Justin Tadlock, of Hybrid Theme fame, on the correct way to integrate sidebar into WordPress themes. Also contains a very detailed explanation of the term sidebar and its possible uses in WordPress Themes.

A must read for anyone who want to develop themes for WordPress: Read Justin’s entry here.

How To Easily Edit Your WordPress Theme Design With The Firebug Firefox Addon

Robyn-Dale Samuda — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:24:54 +0000

As bloggers, we aim to provide unique user experiences for all our visitors online through the use of the best blog designs and templates we can find. Although there are thousands of free and premium themes available, there comes a time when we want something specifically suited to our taste as well as our readers’ without hiring a developer.

The ability to customize your own blog theme is an invaluable skill and will save you lots of time and money in the long-run; and through the use of a tool like the Firebug Firefox Add-on, making simple and advanced customizations are easier than ever. Firebug is a tool I use extensively as a developer to help me understand a site’s layout and quickly implement design changes through CSS. So here are some tips and ideas to get you started on customizing your own WordPress themes.

Firebug’s Features

Firebug provides the most common features for almost every customization you can think of. While you browse you can edit, debug and monitor your CSS code and tweak styles to see what they would look like before you implement. Firebug basically allows you to:

Tweak and position HTML elements with CSS and the Layout panels.
Find specific elements on a webpage with ease and precision.
Monitor the performance of each file to identify slow loaders
Visualize CSS Metrics
Plus a host of additional features

To download this neat tool and find more details regarding its powerful features, visit Getfirebug.com.

Identifying & Editing CSS Properties & Values

For WordPress blog theme users with Firebug installed, customization is a breeze regardless of who designed the template and how. Once Firebug is installed a small icon will be available in your web browser that gives you access to it’s panel as shown below.

In the image above, the left panel shows the HTML that controls the site’s layout and on the right we have its CSS. Usually WordPress themes’ CSS are editable through the style.css file which is found in your theme’s directory.

Common Challenge Overcome

Trying to figure out what each selector and property represents can be an impossible task especially if the developer of the theme does not provide comments and descriptions within the code. To overcome this, Firebug allows you to select page elements, using its element inspector, to find out its HTML code as well as the CSS selectors and properties that control the elements.

Once you have found the selectors you want to edit, simply access your style.css file through the WordPress dashboard Appearance >> Editor option and use your browser’s search feature to find the code.

Learning to edit and tweak your CSS within the theme’s stylesheet file is the first step to creating a unique theme for your blog even if its from a free design.

Additional Resource

To gain more insight into the power of CSS and learn all the possibilities that exist in design, check out the CSS section of the WordPress.org codex – They have many references to W3Schools, which is where I learned most of my CSS. W3Schools provides all the information you will need to learn CSS from the basics to advanced.

Conclusion

Not all of us as bloggers are interested in becoming developers but think of CSS as a tool to control the layout, colors and feel of your blog’s theme as you would think of customizing a Microsoft Word document. It can be a very fulfilling feeling to know that you can make your blog stand out by simply implementing some very basic code. So CSS is definitely worth learning a bit.

Firebug is the simplest tool I have found so far for gaining control and understanding a WordPress blog theme design and is very useful for getting started as a new blogger and editing your theme.

Are there any other tools you have tried that offer comparable features and capabilities thatÂ have helped you to master your blog’s design? Please share them with us in the comments below, we would love to hear of your experiences.

How To Create A Cool “Bubble Up” Effect For Your Blog’s Icons Using CSS

Robyn-Dale Samuda — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:00:45 +0000

A few years ago, the bubble effect that I’m about to show you to create could only be executed using flash animation but thanks to some CSS innovation, the limitations and boundaries to simple yet elegant design are crumbling. For any blogger or website owner, its very important to learn a little HTML and CSS; you will find that you have more control over your blog’s design and will be able to implement simple changes that can make your blog’s design stand out.

Here is a short and simple tutorial to give your buttons a nice bubble up effect that is sure to catch your readers’ attention, using the image swap method in CSS.

Step 1

Access the page that you would like your icons to show and insert the code below:

The code above uses 2 images for each button link and will be arranged in a horizontal list format. In the next steps you will see that the code allows the buttons being hovered to seem to be above the others.

Also, ensure that the links in the code above are replaced by your own social profile links and you need to upload your icons to the relevant directories. You can find lots of free icons at Iconfinder.net.

Step 2

Add the CSS code below to your style.css file.

#bubble {
list-style: none;
margin: 20px 0px 0px;
padding: 0px;
}

#bubble li {
display: inline-block;
margin: 0px 5px;
padding: 0px;
width: 70px;
height: 70px;
}

In the above code we had to specify the height and width of the

elements because we do not want the list to be moving and changing sizes when the cursor hovers. 70 px is the size of the small images before hovering so we don’t want these too big.

Step 3

Still in the style.css file, add the following code for the links.

#bubble li a img {
 position: relative;
 border: none;
}

#bubble li a img.large {
 display: none;
}

#bubble li a:hover img.small {
 display: none;
 z-index: 0;
}

#bubble li a:hover img.large {

 display: block;
 margin-top: -30px;
 margin-left: -30px;
 z-index: 1000;
}

Note: In the above it is very important to set the position to relative.

Step 4

Finally, for Internet Explorer and its limitations, we will add some extra code to deal with conflicts along with your HTML code.

That’s it! You should now have that cool bubble up effect for your share buttons on your blog. Remember, the HTML code can be placed anywhere on your blog, so be specific with the files you choose to edit.

Discussion

If you have any difficulties implementing the code please feel free to ask questions in the comments below and we will be happy to help.

How To Add Support For Menus In Your WordPress Theme

Cassie Emelia — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:12:54 +0000

Are you running WordPress 3.0 yet? If so, you might have come across a nifty little addition called Menus. Youâ€™ll find it on your admin Dashboard in the Appearances section, and hereâ€™s a little screenshot of how it looks:

As you can see, Iâ€™ve set up a new menu named â€œLorraine Menuâ€ here, and added various things to it by selecting from the elements on the left side of the page: a link to Devlounge, links to some pages, and so forth.

Also of note is the message beneath Theme Locations that states:

The current theme does not natively support menus, but you can use the â€œCustom Menuâ€ widget to add any menus you create here to the themeâ€™s sidebar.

Custom Post Types Sources You Should Know About

Remkus de Vries — Thu, 06 May 2010 12:33:49 +0000

By now you should be aware that WordPress 3.0 comes shipped with Custom Post Types. It’s a feature that may not be easy to grasp at first, but it holds almost infinite power over what you can do with WordPress. Custom Post Types are not set in stone as to what they exactly are. It’s more important you realize that they can represent any type of content you want. WordPress already ships with several post types such as posts, pages, attachments and even revisions, so it’s basically up to your imagination what you can do with it.

There are three sources about Custom Post Types I think you all should read to get a better grasp of what it can do for you. I’ve heard people say that the new WordPress 3.0 Custom Post Types feature is really not all that important, but I’d like to show them different by presenting you these three great sources.

Justin Tadlock wrote an extensive review about custom post types explaining in great detail what they are, how they behave and what you can do with them:

Donâ€™t be confused by the term â€œpostâ€ in the name. It is actually an extremely generic term and should not be considered the same thing as a blog post. If you prefer, you can replace it with â€œcontentâ€ instead.

Visit Justin’s site for more information.
The second source I’d like to bring to your attention is by Konstantin of kovshenin.com. Konstantin also demonstrates with some inspiring examples how to bend the custom posts types functionality to your liking. To give you an example:

One more example â€“ a Real Estate Agency, same story â€“ Pages, Blog Posts, News stories, property For Sale, property For Rent, Land for sale. The last three would contain extra taxonomy in forms of Country, Region. Custom fields such as price, total area, etc. The Edit Property page could even contain a Google Map where you could point out its location!

Visit kovshenin.com for more information
The last, but certainly not the least source I’d like to run by you is about the Custom Post Types UI plugin by Brad Williams. This plugin enables you to create custom post types without having to code, if that’s not your thing. Or as Brad puts it:

This plugin provides an easy to use interface to create and administer custom post types in WordPress. Plugin can also create custom taxonomies. This plugin is created for WordPress 3.0.

Visit Brad’s site for more information.

So, with all that information taken in now, what do you think the Custom Posts Type feature can offer you?

Post image by teilr

Optimise Your WordPress Themes With Better Author Pages

Franky Branckaute — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 11:51:14 +0000

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.

You're in the Author Archive

	
	

	

	first_name; ?> last_name; ?>
	user_description; ?>

	Information
	user_email, '56' ); ?>
		
		    E-mail: email author
		    Website: user_url; ?>
		    The avatar to the right is my gravatar. Get your own!

You can now easily style this further with CSS.

Part Two: Adding List of Entries Written by The Author

The second part of the author pages is lots simpler and nothing more than a customised loop. Rather a loop without the excerpts.

	Browse Updates by The Author
		
		
		
			  
			  

			  Filed as  on   with

That’s It. Almost

All there is left to do now is to add the Previous/Next navigation and provide a fallback option for when the author hasn’t published any entries yet.

It’s as simple as this. You can see the result on my BloggingPro author page.

How To: Display Your WordPress Category List in Multiple Columns

Franky Branckaute — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:57:24 +0000

Do you sometimes get that feeling to go all overboard and do things differently with your design? OK, I might not be the most creative person with visual designs, actually I like simplicity, but the fact was that I recently switched to a single-column design for my own WordPress blog.

With simplicity, and single-column design, came the following problem: ‘How to implement a smart navigation?’ Important is to understand my blog: iFranky is a mix of several topics and is both my brand and a personal space to write about life as well as a tumblelog and collection of interesting entries I wrote on other blogs. The readership is a mix of friends, bloggers, clients and students I lecture about blogging and social media. This leads to a mix of different topics, but not all are worth to be displayed on the home page.
The main navigation factor is based on the categories, categories I used in previous designs iterations to display multiple loops on the home page or to implement different backgrounds.

Simplicity meant that my complete navigation would be send to the footer, an often overlooked design element (There is no fold), even the header navigation.
Because my main page only shows the main entries, I somehow had to integrate a category list in the footer but who wants to add one column of more than 15 categories or a drop-down? Trust me when I say that I have analysed click behaviour and barely one bothers with these often sky-high columns or drop-downs. The solution: display your category list in columns.

Code to Display Your WordPress Category List in Columns

For this tutorial we are going to display the categories in 5 columns. First we need to define all values for the array.

',$get_cats);
// Amount of categories (count of items in array)
 $results_total = count($cat_array);
// How many categories to show per list (round up total divided by 5)
 $cats_per_list = ceil($results_total / 5);
// Counter number for tagging onto each list
 $list_number = 1;
// Set the category result counter to zero
 $result_number = 0;
?>

We use wp_list_categories to grab the category list, displaying only the top categories (depth=1).

In line 9 we put how many columns we want to generate, five in this example. To limit everything to full numbers ceil is used to round up.

Now we are going to output this list and also add auto-generated classes for CSS styling to the code.




	
		

		';

	}

	else {

		echo $category.'';

		}

	} ?>

We can now easily style following with CSS: #cat-col-'.$list_number.' with '.$list_number.' being the… you guessed it, the number of your column.
Because every column will have its own number, do not forget that you will have to style all columns (#cat-col-1, #cat-col-2, #cat-col-3, #cat-col-4, #cat-col-5).

The Result

This awesome bit of code thanks to t31os_.

Tutorial: How To Merge 2 WordPress Blogs

Franky Branckaute — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:18:45 +0000

For a project I am involved with we recently considered merging 2 rather large WordPress blogs. These were 2 blogs with several thousands entries and posts and at least 20 authors have written on those blogs over the years. The combined blog would have more than 10,000 entries and more than 40,000 comments.

In this post I am going to walk you trough the whole process, because it is simpler than it sounds and should not scare anyone away. Depending on how ‘hardcore’ you, the merger could be done in some hours only. Yes, some hours only.

Getting Started

Although this tutorial is aimed at both ‘beginners’ and ‘pros’, I assume that you have a certain basic knowledge, understanding from WordPress and setup already:

You know how to backup a database;
You know how to FTP;
You have a localhost setup;
You have a basic understanding of WordPress database tables, ie. when I mention wp_options, you know that this is a database table and you know how to ‘find’ this table;
You know how to make changes to the database

The walkthrough is also based on both blogs running a similar permalink structure and using the same plugins.

We will use following terms in this tutorial:

Blog 1: Target blog – [yoururl], this will be the ‘merged blog’
Blog 2: Old blog – [oldurl], the blog we are going to import

Step 1: Define your target blog and set a copy of this blog up locally

Once you have your localhost install up and a local WordPress setup, you have to backup your ‘target blog’ database and files and set the blog up locally. You can use any WordPress database backup plugin, my favourite is Lester Chan’s WordPress Database manager, or backup via phpMyAdmin or Shell.
Import this backup to your local setup. Overwrite the files of your local WordPress setup with the files, themes, plugins and uploads from your web server.

Your blog is now installed locally but if you click on the blog title in your WordPress dashboard, you will be taken to the URL and not to your locally installed blog. Go to Settings > General and change your WordPress URL (if needed also the Blog URL) to your localhost installation.

Step 2: Import the second blog locally

Importing the second blog is really simple actually. You even do not need to backup the database of the second blog. Merging both databases would only create problems and not work because you will have several conflicting IDs: post_id, author_id, category_id and several more. Merging two backup’ed databases will result in ‘FAIL’.

Instead we are going to use the WordPress export function and import this file locally. To export the content of your second blog, go to Tools > Export ([oldurl]/wp-admin/export.php) and download the export file for all authors.

Once you have downloaded this file, you can now import all the content to your locally merged merged blog. Go to Tools > Import on your local setup and choose WordPress in the list. Chose the file you have just downloaded and WordPress will now import all entries, comments, tags, categories and create new authors.

Import all uploaded files from the second blog to your local setup now (normally [blogurl]/wp-content/uploads). While doing this, make sure that folders are merged an not overwritten.

Note: The WordPress importer will import all attachments found in entries, but in our case our setups were rather old and many images were in other folders, many have never been imported as attachment. In a previous optimisation they were all moved to the /wp-content/uploads folder and URLs where changed via a SQL command.

Make sure you don’t have 2 ‘About’ pages and also check if the author profiles. During the import, all entry authors have been created by the importer but their profiles (and password) have not been imported. You will have to complete email-addresses and the profile fields for every ‘newly created’ author.

Your blogs are merged now.

Step 3: Replace the old url in your content with the new URL

Chances your blog has many links to the URL of your old blog are high, especially if you have inserted images in entries. To make sure that these links still work we are going to replace the [oldurl] with the new URL in posts and comments.

Nerds United World Wide will enjoy this and look forward to replace all [oldurl] mentions in the database with an SQL command based on the structure:

UPDATE tablename SET tablefield = replace(tablefield,'findstring','replacestring');

To replace your old URL in entries with the URL of the merged blog you would use following command:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (post_content,'[oldurl]','[blogurl]')

We are keeping this tutorial simple though and will use Frank Bültge’s excellent Search and Replace plugin.

I combined two steps here already and images will now not be displayed on your local blog. To solve this problem, we now upload all uploads (/wp-content/uploads) to the merged blog, otherwise images will not work.
This also means that internal links will not work locally, or on your test blog, but redirect to the non-existent entry on the merged blog already. Do not worry, I merely combined some steps already to make the whole procedure go faster, bear with me for a second.

Note: Working with a local setup

Actually all these steps could be skipped and we could immediately have worked with an online test blog instead. The reason why I chose for a local setup is following:

It’s good practice. Too many users do not test before making changes. Screwing up your local setup will not take your site down and the user won’t notice. Get in the habit of using a local setup to test things.
You could also test on a test domain or test sub-domain online, but some hosters have limited upload settings. For large blogs 8MB, an upload limitation used by many hosters, sometimes is not sufficient and an upload can always be interrupted. Chances that a local import will fail are smaller than when uploading large import file.

Step 4: Setting up a ‘merged blog’ on a test domain

The following step is to use a test domain or sub-domain and transfer your local merged WordPress blog to an active online environment.

If you need a small reminder how to setup an online WordPress installation, read this post. If your hoster provides Fantastico installation, you can also opt for this procedure.

Now you have to FTP all files from your local WordPress installation to your online test blog. Overwrite all BUT ONE files on the online WordPress installation: do not overwrite the wp-config.php of the online installation.

The next step will be to import the database from your local installation to your online test site. You can once more use the WP-DB Manager plugin to backup your local WordPress database.
You can now import this database via phpMyAdmin but if you do not have shell access (or the shell scares you), I recommend you to upload this file to your hosting and ask your webhoster to import this database. Going this path avoids that your browser based import might be interrupted during upload and fail. Remember, in my example we are speaking about a big database: more than 10k entries and 40k comments.

Step 5: Test, test, test

Now it is time to extensively test your test setup because in the next stage we are going to switch databases and within seconds we will be live.

Test, test, test. Email your authors, tell them to request a new password via the login page. Tell them to create drafts and ask them to browse your archives and notify you of all errors they find.

If they find a 404, tell them to replace the URL of the 404 with the URL of the test blog. Remember that I told you to replace all URLs already? Yup. If after this they find the entry, move on.

Continue testing until you think everything works.

Step 6: We are switching Live

Now we are going to switch live. This involves 3 steps. First though, I advice you to get a statistics package with live updates so you can see what’s going on on your site. Use our PMetrics, Woopra or Chartbeat. This helps you identify 404s and correct them as you notice traffic to not found pages.

Step 1: Switch databases
Within WP, go to Settings > General and change your WordPress URL (if needed also the Blog URL) to the URL of the merged blog.

Open the wp-config.php of the merged blog and change:

define('DB_NAME', '');    // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', '');     // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', ''); // ...and password

To the settings in the wp-config.php on your test blog.

Double check, triple check, quadruple check this because when you hit ‘Save’ your merged blog will be live and use the database of your test blog! Yes, you can also download the wp-config.php of your test blog and FTP it to the merged blog.

Step 2: Redirect the old blog to the new blog
Your merged blog should now be fully functional and have all entries from both blogs on one install. Now it is time to redirect the old blog to the new, merged blog. We are going to do this with the help of a 301 redirect. This does not only mean that the visitors of your site will be redirected to the new blog but search engines will also update their listings and ‘pass on the juice’. We will use some .htaccess rules for this. Replace the content of your .htaccess on the old blog with this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old-domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.new-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Step 7: Relax, this works

Normally you should now be totally wired up and close to being a nervous wreck. Instead… go for a quick frozen one and let your editor deal with the complaints.

Hey, where are you? I said a QUICK one, that shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes!

I now have to tell you that you should be prepared to work hard correcting errors for the next 2 or 3 hours, but I won’t. If you have followed this tutorial, everything should work fine now and if you run in problems on your live setup, you only need to revert two files: the wp-config.php on the merged blog, back to the original database, and the .htaccess on the old blog, back to before the redirect rules. Of course you did make a backup of these, didn’t you?

Now write an entry on the merged blog about the merger and keep an eye on your live stats and the comments on the announcement for the next 2 or 3 hours. If everything is fine, change the Feedburner settings for the old blog to the new one if you use Feedburner.

You can now go and celebrate the operation with a more frozen ones. The next day when you wake up, probably hungover because boy was that a party, check your email, comments and stats and look if any errors have come up. Correct.

Congratulations on the move.

One last, small note

You might have noticed that I said to start your local installation with a database import. You could also have imported ‘an export’ to start the local installation. I opted for a database import because custom fields get lost with the export/import routine from WP. If your theme uses them, you should start with a db import.

Publish Your Blog In Multiple Languages With WPML Plugin For WordPress

Franky Branckaute — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:02:40 +0000

Many people want to publish their blog in different languages or offer translations to their readers. Often a translation plugin is used offering automated translation via Google Translate or Babelfish. But if you speak/write several languages you can use the WPML plugin to publish your blog in several languages, and if you want to have each language on a separate (sub)domain.

The great thing about WPML is the ease to set the plugin up and stat using it, contrarily to other plugins. All you need to do is upload the plugin and fill in the settings.

Configuring WPML

The first settings panel after activating the plugin allows you to set the main language, this is the language an entry will be published in if you do not select an other language for that post. Note that this setting will not change the language of your WordPress admin backend, you still need to localize your WP install for this (more info on localization at the WordPress codex).

When using the basic settings, you now only have to opt what other languages you want to add to your site. Once you have selected the additional languages you only have to decide where you want the widget with the language switcher. If your theme does not use widgets, use in your theme. You can customize the display/colors of the language selector in the advanced settings.

Now your site is prepared to deal with multi-lingual content.

Publish Different Languages On Different Subdomains Or Domains

With WPML it is easy to set your blog up to display every language on a sub-domain or different domain for other language content. To set this up you must dive in the ‘Advanced settings’. The settings to make or change are rather obvious and self-explanatory and the plugin provides ample information when a setting can not be made (see second screenshot)

Adding sub-domains or new domains for other languages is simple. Note that these must have been setup prior to configuring WPML as WPML does not change any DNS entries. If you have not set the domains up, uncheck ‘Validate on save’. Tip: first set your (sub) domains up.

Publishing Your Blog In Several Languages

Whenever you write an entry you can now select in what language this post has to be published and WPML will do the hard work for you. If you have a look at your entries in /post.php or /edit.php you will notice that there is a new column.

Next to every entry you can now see if posts have also published in the other language(s). Clicking on + for any post/language now shows a new option on the writing editor page: ‘This is a translation of with a drop-down menu of all your entries.

This concludes the main part of using WPML in an all-day situation. I need to mention that WPML has many more options such as translating plugin and theme strings or breadcrumb navigation. You can even change the CSS. An extensive documentation is available.

What I like most about WPML is how the plugin can be used for more than just multi-language sites. With a little creative thinking you could use it for different purposes and use the plugin as a ‘mini WPMU’ for large multi-authored sites.

A good example of this would be to use WPML to create a gaming site with similar structure to Joystiq: a sub-domain for every platform. With some minor tweaks you could change the name of languages and replace with the name of gaming platforms. Do the same for the flags and attribute every author a certain platform (language) in their profile and without any supplementary effort you now have a multi-gaming-platform with an easy way to review games with their own entry for each platform they have been released for without cluttering your main feed.

Read more about the plugin at the WPML website.

Display Upcoming Entries In Your Post With A WordPress Shortcode

Franky Branckaute — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 13:20:59 +0000

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.



    have_posts()) : while ($my_query->have_posts()) :
        $my_query->the_post();
        ?>

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);
       $retour='';
       foreach($myposts as $post) :
               setup_postdata($post);
            $retour.=''.the_title("","",false).'';
       endforeach;
       $retour.=' ';
       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

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).

Freelancing with WordPress – WPCandy

David Peralty — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 01:50:27 +0000

The past few days, WPCandy.com has been running some great articles about using WordPress for freelancing. From dealing with project management, to managing contacts, to setting up a portfolio, and (as of today) even invoicing.

If you’re doing much in the way of freelance blogging, or just want some ideas of how you might better organize your own projects using WordPress as a management tool, I highly suggest checking them out.

They each focus on a very specific set of needs and how WordPress might fill those needs (and at times suggests better options), so it’s pretty easy to mix and match a solution that could work for just about anyone.

Here’s a tidbit from the “project management” article to get things rolling…

After checking out all these options IÊ¼ve found the â€œWordPress-as-Project-Management-Systemâ€ experience to be extremely lacking. The options are either simple enough that they could be replaced with Google Docs or a simple notebook or so complex that trying to use them is nearly impossible. There simply is no killer project management plugin for WordPressâ€¦ yet.

I think it is worth noting that the best replacement IÊ¼ve found for Basecamp is an open source project called Project Pier which does almost everything Basecamp does. ItÊ¼s even themeable and they have some pretty slick options. If you want a self-hosted project management solution, Project Pier is deï¬nitely the way to go.

Check out WPCandy.com for the original articles, and a pile of other fun stuff.

Mastering WordPress Shortcodes

David Peralty — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:45:44 +0000

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 â€œadsenseâ€ to display an AdSense ad or â€œpost_countâ€ 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, weâ€™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.

Secure Your WordPress Admin

David Peralty — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:41:00 +0000

I don’t know how much credence I give to the idea that WordPress is inherently insecure by default, but I do understand that people want to take steps to further protect their blogs. Smashing Magazine has put up an article relating to securing your WordPress admin, and while this won’t make your blog secure if you are making other security mistakes, it can be a great last step in a comprehensive security audit.

Here is one of their ten tips:

Choose strong passwords
Our recommendation for a secure WordPress password is that it be at least seven characters long and include uppercase and lowercase characters, numbers and symbols such as ! â€ ? $ % ^ & ).

If you are worried about your blog, and want to take as many precautions as possible to maximize your protection from intruders, I’d suggest enacting at least five out of the ten items on this list and look for more security related posts to help control every entry point into your WordPress blog.

Create a Custom WordPress Plugin

David Peralty — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 14:56:40 +0000

While it might not be the tutorial that many of us want, NETTuts has published a great guide to making your first WordPress plugin from scratch. They talk about making something that can show products from OSCommerce, which while interesting, isn’t what my first choice would be.

In today’s tutorial we’ll be talking about creating a WordPress plugin that extracts and displays products from an external OSCommerce shop database. We will start by describing the file structure of a plugin and where it must be included in the WordPress structure, then we’ll be having a closer look at how to make our plugin visible for WordPress and integrating it with actions run by its frame.

They cover the important broad strokes though, and help people realize that it is mostly PHP knowledge that comes into play when making a WordPress plugin, so if you aren’t strong in PHP, or aren’t willing to learn, then you might want to stick to the ones that are already developed.

Some of the great parts for anyone interested in plugin development to note include information on how to make your own page in the WordPress administration panel, as well as dealing with hooks to display your work on the public facing theme.

I hope to see more of such tutorials from NETTuts in the future, as WordPress plugin development interests me, and I enjoy how the Envato network writers break down concepts.

BloggingPro » WordPress Tutorials

Creating a Shared Content Box Across All of Your WordPress Blogs

Requirements

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Step 5

Step 6

Step 7

Step 8

Step 9

How to Move From WordPress.com to WordPress.org

Tutorial: Show All WordPress Image Sizes

How to: WordPress to Jekyll

What is Jekyll

WordPress 3.1 Post Formats Guide

Retrieve Your Twitter Followers Number Without API Issues

Correct Coding for WP Sidebars

How To Easily Edit Your WordPress Theme Design With The Firebug Firefox Addon

Firebug’s Features

Identifying & Editing CSS Properties & Values

Additional Resource

Conclusion

How To Create A Cool “Bubble Up” Effect For Your Blog’s Icons Using CSS

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Discussion

How To Add Support For Menus In Your WordPress Theme

Custom Post Types Sources You Should Know About

Optimise Your WordPress Themes With Better Author Pages

Part 1: Adding The Author Description and Gravatar

first_name; ?> last_name; ?>

Information

Part Two: Adding List of Entries Written by The Author

Browse Updates by The Author

That’s It. Almost

How To: Display Your WordPress Category List in Multiple Columns

Code to Display Your WordPress Category List in Columns

The Result

Tutorial: How To Merge 2 WordPress Blogs

Getting Started

Step 1: Define your target blog and set a copy of this blog up locally

Step 2: Import the second blog locally

Step 3: Replace the old url in your content with the new URL

Step 4: Setting up a ‘merged blog’ on a test domain

Step 5: Test, test, test

Step 6: We are switching Live

Step 7: Relax, this works

One last, small note

Publish Your Blog In Multiple Languages With WPML Plugin For WordPress

Configuring WPML

Publish Different Languages On Different Subdomains Or Domains

Publishing Your Blog In Several Languages

Display Upcoming Entries In Your Post With A WordPress Shortcode

Use A Shortcode To Display Upcoming Entries In A Post

Building the shortcode

Modifying The Shortcode Function

Freelancing with WordPress – WPCandy

Top 50 WordPress Tutorials

Mastering WordPress Shortcodes

Secure Your WordPress Admin

Create a Custom WordPress Plugin