This post is the start of an ongoing series entitled “50 Days to a Better WordPress Blog”. Over the next 50 days, Mitch will be providing small snippits of code, plugins, and things you can do to make your blog more attractive, attain new readers, and keep old ones coming back time and time again. To kick things off in this series, I wanted…
WordPress 3.1, codename “Reinhardt”, released today to much fanfare and rejoicing to all. But what’s so special about the new version? Look no further: Internal Linking One of the best new features of 3.1 – this brings Internal Linking to the forefront, allowing you to quickly link to old posts, pages, or other content types. Admin Bar Also super important – this adds a…
One of the best new features of 3.1 – this brings Internal Linking to the forefront, allowing you to quickly link to old posts, pages, or other content types. Admin Bar Also super important – this adds a bar to any logged in user that has commonly used functions or actions within easy reach – I love the fact that I can edit the…
I love search forms. But sometimes, designs call for forms to be placed in a tight space to save room for other elements or where buttons may look out of place. If that’s the case, then you can add a special box that will allow users to search with the enter key (or the Done key on the iPhone). Here’s the code: <form method="get"…
One of the most versitile tags in my arsenal that WordPress gives me is a fun little tag called <?php bloginfo(); ?>. By itself, it’s not much fun, but when you add in a variable, it can tell you anything you need to know about your blog. Like what, you ask? name description admin_email url wpurl stylesheet_directory stylesheet_url template_directory template_url atom_url rss_url pingback_url rdf_url…
For years WordPress has been touted as the number one blogging platform. And without mistake – it is. But as we creep closer to WordPress 3.1 it’s nice to take a step back and see just how far its’ come. From winning the CMS Hall of Fame Award to the multiple thousands of plugins that extend its functionality, the WordPress core has made the…
News from the WordPress.com blog – premium themes are becoming available to WordPress.com subscribers. I am proud to introduce the very first two premium themes on WordPress.com: Headlines and Shelf. Headlines is a sophisticated magazine theme from WooThemes with a Featured Post slideshow, multiple menus, and 15 beautiful color schemes. It’s available now for a one-time price of $45. Shelf, from The Theme Foundry,…
OK – so I’ve tallied up the results from Tuesday and came up with some really interesting results. So, I’m going to do something a little fun. Here are your favorite plugins as determined by the comments, my favorite plugins, and the top 5 plugins from the WordPress repository; let’s see how they match up (plugins aren’t in any order – just the top…
Seeing all the fun plugins you guys posted to the site today has reminded me of a topic that I’ve both seen published on other sites as of late and been pondering myself lately – the authors. I’ve co-created a plugin, and it’s currently residing well in the plugin repository, but it hasn’t been all fun and games. I’ve been very lucky on this…
It’s definitely possible to make a living doing custom WordPress plugin and web development, but I don’t think it’s possible to make a living just building plugins and asking for donations. Do you feel that users are ungrateful for your work?Not really ungrateful, no, but I definitely think that some are blissfully ignorant. I imagine most folks don’t have an appropriate idea of the…