This extended category features quality articles about developing clean, smart and fast websites with WordPress. The articles are intermediate level, with an emphasis on practical, hands-on discussions related to WordPress. Curated by Jeff Starr. Subscribe to the RSS-Feed.
Popular tags in this category: Essentials, Techniques, Hacks, Templates, PHP, Themes, Plugins, Resources.
In our previous articles on WordPress hacks, we discussed the incredible flexibility of WordPress, which is one of the biggest reasons for its popularity among bloggers worldwide. Custom fields in particular, which let users create variables and add custom values to them, are one of the reasons for WordPress' flexibility.
In this article, we've compiled a list of 10 useful things that you can do with custom fields in WordPress. Among them are setting expiration time for posts, defining how blog posts are displayed on the front page, displaying your mood or music, embedding custom CSS styles, disabling search engine indexing for individual posts, inserting a “Digg this” button only when you need it and, of course, displaying thumbnails next to your posts
Read more...WordPress is often thought of as just a blogging platform. But it's capable of so much more. Even WordPress' documentation includes an entire section on using WordPress as a content management system. Because WordPress is such an easy-to-use platform, it makes sense to consider using it as a platform to build just about any kind of website, a portfolio website included.
Whether you're a photographer, graphic designer, Web designer or any other kind of visual artist, WordPress makes an excellent starting point for developing your online portfolio. And with the wealth of plug-ins and ready-made themes available, you can usually get a perfectly presentable website up and running in a matter of hours.
Here are additional links that may be useful when designing your portfolio website.
One of the reasons people love WordPress so much is its great flexibility. You can change the software's appearance with themes. You can enhance its functionality with plug-ins. And, last but not least, you can totally unleash WordPress' power with hacks.
Today, let's do it again with 10 new and totally killer WordPress hacks to make your blog stand out from the crowd. As usual, we won't just list the hacks alone. In each entry, you'll find an explanation of the code as well as the kinds of problems that the hack solves.
The problem. Because Twitter has become a social media revolution, many bloggers and Twitter users enjoy sharing blog posts they have found and liked on Twitter. However, manually creating a TinyURL before tweeting can get a little tedious. As you probably know, Twitter can bring a lot of traffic to your blog, so it is in your interest to consistently provide short URLs to your readers.
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Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has grown to create what most people would call a social media revolution. By the very nature of the short messages it hosts, Twitter is a wonderful marketing and promotion tool that no serious blogger can ignore.
In this article, we have compiled 15 most useful Twitter plug-ins, hacks and tips for WordPress to help you get the most out of Twitter in your WordPress blog.
WordPress plug-ins are good, but if you have 50 different plug-ins active on your blog, you should obviously expect longer loading times and even some inconvenience. This is why we love hacks! First let’s dive deep into WordPress and see what hacks can do to enhance our blogging experience. In the second part of this article, we will also show you some useful Twitter plug-ins for your WordPress blog.
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Introduced in WordPress 2.5, shortcodes are powerful but still yet quite unknown WordPress functions. Imagine you could just type "adsense" to display an AdSense ad or "post_count" to instantly find out the number of posts on your blog. WordPress shortcodes can do this and more and will definitely make your blogging life easier. In this article, we'll show you how to create and use shortcodes, as well as provide killer ready-to-use WordPress shortcodes that will enhance your blogging experience.
Using shortcodes is very easy. To use one, create a new post (or edit an existing one), switch the editor to HTML mode and type a shortcode in brackets, such as [showcase]. It is also possible to use attributes with shortcodes. A shortcode with attributes would look something like [showcase id="5"]. Shortcodes can also embed content, as shown here: [url href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com"]Smashing Magazine[/url]. Shortcodes are handled by a set of functions introduced in WordPress 2.5 called the Shortcode API. When a post is saved, its content is parsed, and the shortcode API automatically transforms the shortcodes to perform the function they’re intended to perform.
Read more...Just yesterday we introduced Twitter Avatars In Comments plugin for Wordpress that enables bloggers to have both Twitter and Gravatar avatars in blog comments. We are certainly not going to turn Smashing Magazine into a repository of Twitter plugins for Wordpress, but we are confident that it does make sense to introduce another plugin that enables another kind of Twitter integration in blogs.
This is why this post releases the Twittbacks WordPress Plugin that was developed and released especially for Smashing Magazine — this plugin imports tweets about your posts as comments. You can display them in between the other comments on your blog, or display them separately.
Read more...Over the last months Twitter has become extremely popular across the Web, with more blogs, magazines and companies using it to communicate with their audience and their customers. Even we started twittering a couple of months ago and have over 3,650 followers now. Please feel free to join us and follow Smashing Magazine on Twitter as well.
Although we aren't sure if "Twitter" will actually revolutionize blogs, Twitter is definitely changing the way site owners communicate with their visitors and we, designers, need to be aware of that and use appropriate tools to meet the expectations of our clients. Unfortunately, there are not that many plugins and extensions for Twitter out there, so we decided to release one — the Twitter Comments Wordpress Plugin.
Read more...2008 was a very good year for the WordPress community. The software was updated numerous times, leading to the recent release of version 2.7, and many new blogs dedicated to WordPress were created. Of course, tons of new hacks were discovered, which helped lots of bloggers enhance their blogs.
In this article, we'll show you 10 new useful killer WordPress hacks to unleash the power of your favorite blogging engine. Each hack has an accompanying explanation, so you'll not only unleash the power of WordPress but also understand how it works.
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Read more...Over the past 10 years, the MySQL database has become incredibly popular on the Web. Every WordPress blog is driven by a MySQL database, which contains the blog's posts, settings, comments and much more.
While plug-ins and even coding hacks can solve some problems and achieve some tasks, sometimes you don't have any other choice than to execute SQL commands in phpMyAdmin or directly to the database via SSH. Let’s take a look at 8 useful SQL hacks for WordPress. Each section of this post presents a problem, suggests a solution and provides an explanation to help you understand the solution.
Read more...
Company Description hetras is the first company to build a fully cloud-based application for hotels and global chains of all sizes with offices in Zell am…
Company Description hetras is the first company to build a fully cloud-based application for hotels and global chains of all sizes with offices in Zell am…
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