A cool trick you can do with WordPress is display information directly from your theme’s style.css stylesheet. I recently used this on a site where the theme’s version number is used throughout the template to keep things current and consistent.
Displaying Theme Data with WordPress
WordPress 3.3 Update
..went oh so smooth here at DigWP.com. We just completed the WP 3.3 (Sonny) update and everything is working (and looking) great. The revamped Admin interface looks incredible! Kudos to the entire WordPress team for their hard work and for making WordPress #1. Download and learn more.
WordPress Hosting Review
Alex Denning of WPShout has put together a comprehensive, independent review of the best hosts for WordPress-powered sites. An excellent resource for those looking for awesome WordPress hosting.
HTML Formatting for Custom Menus
For some projects, it’s nice to output clean, well-formatted markup. Using theme template files enables great control over most of your (X)HTML formatting, but not so much for automated functionality involving stuff like widgets and custom menus. One of my current projects requires clean, semantic HTML markup for all web pages, but also takes advantage of WordPress’ custom-menu functionality to make things easy. In this DiW article, we’ll see how to enjoy both: WordPress custom menus and clean, well-formatted HTML markup.
Clean Up “Cannot redeclare” Hack
One of my clients was hacked with the so-called “Cannot redeclare” hack. It seems closely related to the nefarious TimThumb hack, so if you’ve been hit by either of these hacks, you should check for the other. Apparently these hacks affect shared servers, so if you host multiple WordPress sites, chances are high that they’re all infected.
Import Feed, Display in Multiple Columns
Recently I worked on a project where a single RSS feed was imported and displayed in multiple columns on the web page. Certain pages display feed items in two columns, others in groups of three or more. This technique uses WordPress’ built-in fetch_feed functionality to parse external feeds, and a slice of PHP magic to display them in multiple columns. It’s flexible too, enabling any number of columns and feed items from anywhere in your theme/template files. For example, you could display any of the following:
Where to Get Help with WordPress
We get quite a few requests for 1-to-1 WordPress support, but unfortunately don’t have the resources to help everyone directly. We frequently see emails like this:
I understand that you are not able to give 1:1 support, so I would like to ask: where (web, forum, IRC) do I get answers about this?
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That’s Not Spam: False Positives and Ham
Everyone loves a good comment. Readers benefit from the shared information and authors appreciate the conversation and feedback. But you gotta keep the spam out. Akismet and other anti-spam plugins do an excellent job of automating the process, but it’s a good idea to watch out for false positives: legitimate comments marked as spam. Rescuing ham comments from the spam pile promotes healthy comment threads and improves the quality and reputation of your site. In this DiW post, we explain how WordPress & Akismet deal with spam, discuss anti-spam strategy, and share some ham-saving tips and tricks.
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