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Monthly archives: December 2009

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The Book, in Print!

The Book, in Print!

If you have been waiting to buy the book until the real print version is available, today is the day! The print version of Digging Into WordPress the book is now available here. We’ll probably talk more about the journey through the entire process of creating this book at a later date, but for now, let’s check out the book!

How to Develop WordPress Themes Behind the Scenes

How to Develop WordPress Themes Behind the Scenes

A reader recently asked about how to develop a theme on a live site such that:

  • All visitors will see the current theme
  • Only the designer will see the new theme
  • All site plugins will work with the new theme
  • Smooth transition between old and new theme at launch

These are the main concerns, but there are a few other details that need addressed to ensure smooth theme development on a live site. Let’s take a look at how to achieve these goals and effectively develop themes behind the scenes.

Display Gravatar & Autofill Fields for Previous Commenter

Display Gravatar & Autofill Fields for Previous Commenter

When someone comments on your site, cookies with the information the entered are saved to their computers. WordPress makes it easy to access that information. In fact, in your comments.php template they are ready-to-go PHP variables you can spit out anywhere you’d like. Let’s take a look.

WP Engineer Advent Calendar

The guys over at WP Engineer have been ambitiously shelling out useful daily posts all through December. This link just goes straight to their homepage, so check that out and paginate back a few times to check out all the great articles.

Optimizing WordPress Post Navigation

Optimizing WordPress Post Navigation

Implementing a solid set of navigational links for your WordPress site is one of the best ways to encourage visitors to stick around awhile and check out additional content. For example, after you’re done reading this post, you’ll find a set of navigation links for the previous and next posts in the blog. So you could, if you wanted to, read through every post, one after another in sequential order.

As discussed in our definitive guide to WordPress post navigation, there are essentially three different types of navigational tags for WordPress:

How to Publish Your Blog in Multiple Languages

BloggingPro.com’s Franky Branckaute provides an excellent guide showing how to use the WPML plugin to easily publish your blog in multiple different languages. Seems like a great alternative to free translation services like Google Translate or Babelfish, and you can even publish each translation to its own separate (sub)domain. This complete step-by-step guide shows you how.

[ 404 link removed ]

Two Ways to Limit the Number of Posts without a Plugin

Two Ways to Limit the Number of Posts without a Plugin

Let’s say your blog is set to display ten posts per page, as specified via the WordPress Admin under Settings ▸ Reading. Once set, ten posts will appear on your home page, archive pages, search results, and so on. In other words, if it isn’t a single-view page or an actual “page” page, you’re gonna get ten posts per page. It’s a global setting.

But what if you want to display different numbers of posts for different types of page views? For example, instead of showing just ten posts on your search-results pages, you may want to show a whole bunch, like maybe fifty or something. Perhaps you would also like to limit the number of posts displayed on your category archives to only five.

Why Choose WordPress?

Alex Denning of WPShout.com asks 21 WordPress theme designers, developers and bloggers why they choose WordPress for their projects. This is the first of four questions that will posted over the next couple of days. Some very interesting responses so far, and a nice presentational style to boot!

Editor’s note: 404 link removed.

Redirect Mobile Users to a Mobile WordPress Theme

Redirect Mobile Users to a Mobile WordPress Theme

Let’s say you want to have a special theme for your WordPress site for mobile users. You don’t want to use a pre-canned solution or anything third-party, you just want to create and design the theme yourself. So what you need to happen is for the site to detect mobile users and server up an alternate theme instead. Here is how I might do it.

WPLookup

Enter a search query (normally a function or variable name) and you will get a listing of multiple results:

  1. Link to the page in the Function/Template Tag Reference from the WordPress Codex
  2. Link to a PHPXref page for your query (@ xref.yoast.com)
  3. Link to the phpDoc page at WordPress.org
  4. Finally, you’ll also get a list of resources and pre-populated search links to other Codex documentation and Google web search

Editor’s note: 404 link removed.

WP Questions

Ever had a “WordPress emergency” — your project is due tomorrow, but one line of code is breaking your site and you need answers fast?

WPQuestions is problem-solving community for WordPress, ideal for users seeking quick, succinct answers they can’t find in any WordPress forums. WPQ is also great for established WordPress developers who want to help problem-solve and be paid fairly for their efforts.

Remove Title from Blogroll

Remove Title from Blogroll

Typically when you use one of WordPress functions to output a list of “stuff” from WordPress, you can pass a parameter to eliminate the “title” that WordPress likes to put in there by default. For example, with wp_list_categories you pass along “title_li=” with nothing after the equals sign to remove the title that normally accompanies the output. With the function to output links (e.g. blogroll), you use the function wp_list_bookmarks, but unfortunately using that same parameter the same way is ineffective at removing the title.

WordPress Podcast Merges with Press This

Charles Stricklin’s WordPress Podcast merges with Joost De Valk’s Press This. Should be all the better for it!

Editor’s note: 404 link removed.

Basic Maths

Premium WordPress theme, with heavy use of intellegent grids, from legendary designer Khoi Vinh. Perhaps a little pricey at $45, but may be worth it for some folks who salivate at perfect grids =). Other features include a robust archives page, shortcode functionalities, widgets, and color-based theme options.

Stay tuned for some similar and equally delicious functionality coming to some DIW themes near you!

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