Despite Facebook being the most successful of all of the social media sites, I've never made WPShout a presence on the site or attempted to integrate Facebook onto WPShout in any way. I tend to view Facebook as more personal and other sites such as Twitter more appropriate for both marketing the site and interacting with the people who read it.
(read more) I recently worked on a typical small e-Commerce site: about twenty products, a couple of buying options, a couple of pages for about and whatnot and a little blog added on the end. Naturally, I looked to WordPress to handle everything -- the products, the blog and the pages. With custom post types, this wasn't a problem; a custom post type for the products and then an individual entry for each of the products, with standard posts being used for the blog and custom page templates for the pages. We're not going to look at those, though, instead we're going to look at how the e-Commerce part of the site worked.
(read more) 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.
(read more) 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!
(read more) Following on from Faster WordPress, which went up on Shout a couple of weeks ago, this post explores how to optimise WordPress for high traffic. We'll take high traffic in a small blog context -- 1,000 or so visits in a day, but exactly the same techniques apply to much larger traffic blogs. The average WordPress theme isn't optimised. Whilst it may claim to be or may in fact be to an extent, the nature of WordPress themes means they have to be able to fit in any situation and so they are never going to be as well optimised as a theme which has been designed specifically for a single purpose. I'm not saying don't use an off-the-shelf theme, just you'll need to customise it in order to get the best performance out of it. This post shows how to make your site faster.
(read more) Premium plugins have been around for a while now. They started off as a way for people to express their support for a plugin developer and over the past year have started to take off. GravityForms, PluginBuddy and CodeCanyon have all contributed to the rise to prominence. But where next for premium plugins? This post explores.
(read more) As you may have heard, on Friday evening I got what was to be the first of a couple of emails from some very helpful people telling me that there was a big message up from Google saying that WPShout contained viruses, spyware, the lot! I took a look for myself and sure enough, WPShout had been hacked somehow. This isn't good. I'm fairly happy with my security; there are lots of little tips and tricks I use that make the site harder to hack than most, leaving me with the impression most hackers just wouldn't bother and move on to the thousands more WordPress blogs without the extra layer of security. I was wrong, evidently.
(read more) Documentation is the first thing that a customer will see once buying a WordPress theme, but it's often very poor. Why? Documentation is done last
(read more) Hello! It's a new WPShout article! That hasn't happened for way too long! Sorry for the unexplained absence. What have I been doing? Excellent question. I've been uber busy at college, to answer it. In this post I just wanted to clear up a couple of things and ask for your help in maintaining WPShout in the future.
(read more) Recently there's been a lot of (mis) information around about "how to start your own premium WordPress themes site". They make all make it sound fairly easy: just make a design, hack it into a WordPress theme, buckle on a zillion theme options using the old Woo options panel and you have yourself a wonderful theme that'll make you rich. Not so, this tutorial explains some of the things to look out for when building a premium theme.
(read more) As I mentioned before, I've been having great fun with the new Nometet.com design. It's now sporting a feature that allows the author to set a custom background for the post just by uploading an image. This image doesn't even need to be the correct size; that's all done on the fly. Uploading isn't hard either; I've implemented an uploader that sits inside a meta box so the hardest bit is choosing the image! In this post we'll have a look at how it's done.
(read more) "Art direction", custom post designs, whatever you want to call them have taken off in a big way recently. First it was Jason Santa Maria amongst others, then Smashing Magazine picked up on it and as a trend it exploded. For good reason too; they're awesome and great fun to do. In this post we'll see how art direction and WordPress can be combined to create something awesome.
(read more) Your iPhone optimised WordPress theme doesn't have to be the single column look we often see; there's no reason at all why you can't just slightly simplify your theme and still give iPhone users a decent experience when visiting your site. That's what we'll be doing in today's post, using just CSS.
(read more) Nothing Much is a free WordPress theme especially made for WPShout readers! It's a super minimalist, single column, simple WordPress theme that's the first to join WPShout's new Theme House. Image-less and only two files small, Nothing Much loads in a flash and would look great in use on a personal blog.
(read more) Ever since I and Alex Cragg launched our WordPress theme store earlier this year, it's been chugging along nicely. We still only offer the one theme, ShiftNews, but we've been quietly updating it. Just last Friday we pushed out an update that adds in support for a couple of the new 3.0 functions. Yesterday we also introduced a rather interesting new pricing plan which makes ShiftNews available for a fantastically low $29.95!
(read more) It's surprisingly easy to build a neat little featured content area in WordPress, using a custom query to grab a couple of posts from a selected category, tag or even custom field. In this post we'll find out how to build a simple featured content area for your blog, rather like the one I recently added to WPShout.
(read more) We all know that WordPress 3.0 is coming and there are a whole plethora of new features, but actually adding them to themes? I had to do that today in an update to WPShift's ShiftNews. Trouble was I wanted to ensure the theme remained compatible with 2.9 and below, which meant I needed some good ol' conditionals. In this post we'll find out how to make backwards compatible 3.0 functions.
(read more) We've all heard it before: people don't read, they scan. But yet, we never really try and do anything about it. Or at least we never do anything effective about it. Sure, things like bold and italics do help, but they don't solve the underlying problem that people don't read. Which is a problem for people like me. It takes a good couple of hours to write a WPShout post so I'd like to think it's appreciated. Turns out I'm wrong; in this post we'll find out how.
(read more) I'll let you into a little secret. WordPress is a CMS. Arguably it's a simple one, but it's still a CMS; I'm currently writing my content and using WordPress as a system to manage my content. WordPress needn't just manage content for my blog though. With pages and page templates you've got a quick and easy way of making a killer content management system.
(read more) Just a quick note to let you know that my first article on SmashingMagazine has been published. It's all about custom fields. Specifically, Extending WordPress With Custom Fields, a great little topic. In the post I go through just about everything I can think of that's awesome to do with custom fields. One of the topics, setting a different background with each post is something I'll expand on here on Shout at a later date.
(read more) Backing up your blog is something you'll probably only start doing once you've lost everything. That's probably not the best idea. In this post we'll look at the various options available -- the plugins, services and manual ways of backing up your blog.
(read more) Drop caps are a really simple way of making your posts just that bit more interesting. They're easy to do too - in this post we'll find out how we can use a mixture of CSS3 and plugins in order to spark up posts with minimum effort.
(read more) Well this is exciting! WPShout is now sporting look number three. The third incarnation of the site is quite a bit different from the last.
(read more) In this month's .net magazine (known as Practical Web Design in the US) there was an interesting article where an ethical hacker showed how he would break into your site -- and what you can do to stop him. In this post we'll look past "X Plugins To Save Your Blog" and see what effective steps you can take to stop a real life hacker.
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I don't want to join most other blogs in publishing a useless list of features that will be coming to WordPress 3.o. Instead, I thought I'd do it a bit differently. Recently I interviewed Adii, Nathan Rice, Alex Cragg, Cory Miller and Ian Stewart. In that post I asked "what in 3.0 are you looking forward to working with?" today's post will have a look at what 3.0 means for themes.
(read more) I've recently being developing a new design for my first ever WordPress powered site, Nometet.com. The design is looking a bit shabby at the moment, that's the kind way of putting it! I digress though. The new design is what I'd call advanced WordPress. It's got things like a background that is automatically resized (ie the background-image), a choice of three post templates, a fancy review section which holds the score and things like blockquotes that change depending on which category you're in.
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