Single Page Portfolios With WordPress
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I'll admit, I wasn't quite sure how I was going to do this. I was tasked with making a single page design easily editable. Obviously, I looked to WordPress so that I had a nice backend. Question was how to do it? Posts were out of the questionso I looked to pages. But you can't display multiple pages on the same page, can you?
(read more)Integrating Facebook With WordPress
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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)Premium WordPress Plugins Discussed
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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)Documenting A Premium Theme
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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)Really Easy Custom Post Backgrounds For WordPress
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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 For WordPress
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"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)Featured Content For WordPress
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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)Backwards Compatible WordPress 3.0 Functions
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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)Using WordPress As A CMS
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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)Smashing Custom Fields
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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)How To Stop An Ethical Hacker Breaking Into Your WordPress Site
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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.
(read more)Sprucing Up Images and Captions in WordPress
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In post images and captions aren't usually a very exciting affair. Most themes don't offer any support for captions and those that do don't do anything exciting with them. In this post we'll explore how to automatically spruce up your images, videos and captions the easy way.
(read more)Creating a Tumblog with WordPress
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For the recent (first) design of my personal site I added in some Tumblr style functionality. In this post we'll look at how WordPress can be used to create a Tumblog.
(read more)HTML to WordPress Case Study
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Converting HTML to WordPress has just got easier with this post 'case study' looking at a real world example of the DesignInformer redesign.
(read more)Speeding Up WordPress With If Statements
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Speeding up WordPress has just got easier; using PHP's if statements you can only load the stuff you need.
(read more)Change CSS Styles with Different Categories in WordPress
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A very neat trick that allows you to apply a different stylesheet to each category (and therefore change colors), all with the power of WordPress.
(read more)Some thoughts on SEO
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Search engine optimisation, or SEO is the art of optimising your content so that search engines will rank it more favourably. This post is some of my thoughts on the subject.
(read more)Customizing the “Subscribe to Comments” Plugin
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Have you wondered how to change the layout of the WordPress plugin subscribe to comments subscription manager? There's no easy solution provided by the author of the plugin. So after looking at its core file I found out it's actually quite easy by using an extremely simple tweak. With this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can give it a nice custom design.
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