Blog Archives
WordPress 2.8 Features
WordPress Coding & Design WordPress 2.8 has now been released and as always, it’s a great improvement on the previous version. I’ve been using it on a couple of sites and so far the biggest improvement has been the theme editor with its colour coding and line numbering. There are a few other good looking features, the widget interface has improved greatly and you can now arrange your dashboard into four columns. Under your General settings you can change your ...
Continue readingCreate Your Own WordPress Widget
WordPress Coding & Design Widgets make your life easier with sorting out your sidebar in WordPress, however sometimes there’s information or perhaps an external source/item that you want to turn into a widget but just don’t know how. To create a very basic widget it’s quite simple. We just need to add a function into our functions.php theme file which outputs the content, and then register it as a sidebar widget. Sounds easy? It is So, let’s use ...
Continue readingRevisiting WordPress Custom Fields
WordPress Coding & Design A few months ago I wrote about Custom Fields in WordPress. At the time I just gave a small example of how these could be used, and a couple of people still didn’t grasp the point of them so I’m going to give a few more examples of using them which will hopefully shed some light on how useful they actually are! For the basics of using the custom fields in the admin then please read the custom fields post first. Below are just working ...
Continue readingWordPress Theme Inheritance
WordPress Coding & Design The WordPress template system has a relatively unused gem in the template system, Theme Inheritance. Theme Inheritance allows you to set your theme to inherit files from a parent theme, meaning you could create your theme in the colours you choose, but then you can create a number of new themes with just a stylesheet in them, and set each stylesheet to inherit from the main theme, and then just override the styles set. So, if we use the example ...
Continue readingWidgetise Your Theme Part II
WordPress Coding & Design Last week I wrote about how to widgetise your theme, and explained how to turn your sidebar into a dynamic sidebar, allowing you to add widgets from within your admin panel, rather than manually coding them into the sidebar. We can now take this one step further and create multiple sidebars/widget ‘blocks’. These don’t have to always be a full length sidebar, they could be two or three sections in the footer of your site, or ...
Continue readingWidgetise Your Theme
WordPress Coding & Design If you want to use widgets in your WordPress theme, or you’re a theme developer and want to make your theme ‘widget ready’, then all it takes is a couple of steps to add the necessary code in and your theme is good to go. The Function First we need to register the sidebar in our functions.php file (if you don’t have a functions.php file, create one). At the simplest form this is [sourcecode language="php"]if ( ...
Continue readingCreating Theme Options
WordPress Coding & Design If you create WordPress themes then a useful addition to a standard theme is to give the user a simple way to change the logo or header in use, perhaps allow them to change the colour of the background, the width of the site too. These options are designed to save people time but more importantly, to make it easy for non-developers to make a few alterations to their theme without needing to go looking through the code. So first we need to create ...
Continue readingOffer a Blog to your Users
WordPress If you’ve got the capacity on your hosting account or dedicated server, then you could offer a number of your visitors, friends, acquaintances, or the general public, their own blog. Why would you do this? It’s your domain, so having others create content on your site can add to the worth of the site. You could also look at offering a small basic blog package for free and then charge for add-ons and space upgrades. Or you could add ...
Continue readingUsing Conditional Comments
Design & Coding If life was simple for web developers then our sites would look perfect in every browser going, unfortunately that’s not the case and the biggest culprit of causing problems and not following standards is Internet Explorer. It doesn’t help that, despite IE8 being out, plenty of people are still using IE7 and IE6. It was only last summer that I was asked about supporting IE5! Luckily we can target the various versions of Internet ...
Continue readingSelling Products on your Blog
WordPress Plugins If you want to sell digital products such as eBooks, templates, plugins etc. on your site then the WP e-Commerce plugin will do the job for you. On adding the plugin you get a new admin menu called Products. Under this you first need to set up your settings. The free version of the plugin will allow you to take payments by PayPal, Google Checkout or Chronopay. To get started with this plugin, you need to create your product groups. You can ...
Continue readingRecent Posts
Blogging tips writers
Blog Partners
