The functions.php file is one of the most useful files in your theme. If you’re developing lots of themes, the chances are you’ve got some sort of framework either that you use yourself or is published by a third party. This is a collection of snippets you can put in your functions.php file and they’ll perform a number of handy functions which makes your life running WordPress just that bit easier.

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I recently set up a blog for my band, Ellipsis. Just using a simple theme which I customised a little so it worked better as a band website. There’s also a load of fancy CSS3 goodness, naturally.

I ran into a problem, though. The blog was getting a ton and a half of comment spam. All of it was being blocked by Akismet, which is great, but that wasn’t stopping it getting there in the first place.

This is where we roll out the super-duper-ways-of-stopping-comment-spam.

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A couple of weeks ago I ran a series of posts on Shout about making WordPress run faster. We explored concepts like caching, CDNs; the usual. I always felt the series never really got off the ground and wasn’t suited to small posts, hence I embarked on writing what I thought would be WPShout’s first eBook!

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Digging into WordPress is a blog and book by Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr and something I’ve repeatedly recommended and even given away here on Shout. It’s therefore with great pleasure I can recommend you get the book for roughly half the normal price — $15 instead of the usual $27 — from Appsumo, who are offering the deal for today only. They’ve also offered three lucky commenters on this post a chance to win the book for free — just comment on this post before Friday and you could win one of three copies! You’ll need to be following me to find out if you’ve won. To recap, you can get Digging into WordPress for $15 today only! Appsumo are offering the deal (you may wish to follow them too). They’re also giving away a copy to three commenters. Winners will be chosen and notified on Friday. Good luck!

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The title says it all: there’s only 48 hours left before the WordPress Hosting Review finishes! If you’ve not already entered, please do! Thanks to the help of some lovely folks, I’ve had over 200 entries but in order for the survey to be as representative as possible, it needs as many entries as possible. If you needed further incentive to enter, all entrants who tweet about the survey can win one of five six month standard memberships to the WooThemes Theme Club. The survey can be found here. Thanks very much for your help

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