Blogging Tips

Using the WordPress Lightbox

Since version 2.5 of WordPress, jQuery and its popular lightbox, thickbox, have been included in the WordPress files. Plenty of people are still using plugins to create their lightbox when they don’t need to now (although, of course some may prefer the design or additional control and options that the plugin may bring).

First off you’ll need to include the call to jquery.js in your header as explained in enhance your …

Written by Sarah from Stuff By Sarah
Posted on October 19th, 2008 and filed under WordPress Coding & Design
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Enhance your Blog Design with jQuery II

Last week I explained a simple show/hide method with jQuery to allow you to declutter your sidebar. However, the show/hide methods are not very graceful, but now that you have a basic understanding of jQuery, we can look into the other methods available for you to try out.

Sliding

Rather than an instant show or hide, a sliding animation is much nicer. This is a fairly quick change on what we had last …

Written by Sarah from Stuff By Sarah
Posted on October 12th, 2008 and filed under WordPress Coding & Design
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Enhance your Blog Design with JQuery

Recently I visited a blog site where the sidebar was so neat and tidy it looked great. There was plenty in the sidebar but thanks to a bit of simple JavaScript the ‘busy-ness’ was contained well. It was using a simple show/hide but worked very effectively. I’ve also seen it in use with hiding a comment form out of the way until it’s needed.

JQuery

JQuery is a JavaScript library that simplies event …

Written by Sarah from Stuff By Sarah
Posted on October 5th, 2008 and filed under WordPress Coding & Design
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Accessible Comment Form

I’m not a designer so the idea of designing my own theme doesn’t appeal to me, however there are plenty of free themes available which means I can have a decent looking site and use my time to actually write content for it rather than procrastinating over how it should look.

However, the first thing I do when I download a new WordPress theme for my site is fix the markup. Unfortunately, whilst …

Written by Sarah from Stuff By Sarah
Posted on September 28th, 2008 and filed under WordPress Coding & Design
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Create a Magazine Style Theme II

Last week I gave an example of how to create a magazine style theme. This method allowed you to have a main post followed by a list of titles. This week I’ll explain how to separate these on the page so that you can have a far greater control over your layout.

The Latest Post

Rather than using the WordPress loop to display the latest post in full, we can use the …

Written by Sarah from Stuff By Sarah
Posted on September 21st, 2008 and filed under WordPress Coding & Design
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Create a Magazine Style Theme

A few weeks ago I wrote about how to create your own template for WordPress. A type of design growing in popularity is the Magazine style theme. Probably because it comes across as a more professional look and is maybe a bit less overwhelming to first time visitors, as it typically only displays the most recent post in full, …

Written by Sarah from Stuff By Sarah
Posted on September 14th, 2008 and filed under WordPress Coding & Design
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Create a Contact Page Part III

I recommend you read Part I and Part II of this series if you haven’t already.

In the previous posts on this subject, I’ve explained the basic page template and the validation that we need to do for our contact form. Finally we can deal with the actual emailing of the form content and then put it all together.

Emailing the form content

The theory behind this is to grab all of the …

Written by Sarah from Stuff By Sarah
Posted on September 7th, 2008 and filed under WordPress Coding & Design
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