Wordpress For You

13Floor – ElegantThemes (Wordpress Theme)

2010-05-24T07:17:00.002+07:00

With this design I wanted to create something edgy, flashy and fun while still retaining an air of professionalism. I really focused on the homepage with this theme in hopes of giving my users the ability to really grab their visitor’s attention. The homepage contains only a collection of page or post-based slides, but still gives you enough room to tell your readers what you’re all about without drowning them in text.

Download
	Direct Download : Click Here
	Rapidshare Link : Click Here
	Hotfile Link : Click Here
	Size : 7.61 MB

Sleektabs – 3 in 1 Themeforest (Wordpress Theme)

2010-05-23T07:16:00.004+07:00

Sleektabs is a jQuery enhanced, premium Wordpress Theme that loads all contents dynamically via AJAX and displays this content with a smooth sliding transition. Sleektabs comes with 3 different skins you can choose from: standard, grunge and coffee.

Download
	Direct Download : Click Here
	Rapidshare Link : Click Here
	Hotfile Link : Click Here
	Size : 1.59 MB

PersonalPress - ElegantThemes (Wordpress Theme)

2010-05-22T07:14:00.000+07:00

While niche theme that push the boundaries of WordPress are great, WordPress’s core purpose has always been blogging. With PersonalPress I decided to return to my roots, and create a traditional blog-style theme with a personal touch. PersonalPress is a great design for those looking to give their blog a fun and light hearted feel.

Download
	Direct Download : Click Here
	Rapidshare Link : Click Here
	Hotfile Link : Click Here
	Size : 14.86 MB

Classipress - Wordpress theme Classifieds

2010-05-21T06:52:00.000+07:00

- no plugins necessary, it works straight from the box
- paypal integration. you can ask for a fee for each ad that gets submitted

- image upload directly from the form
- image manager for uploaded images in the admin panel
- contact form to message the person who added the ad
- rss displays the latest ads
- subcategories for the main menu
- login box in header for easier access if you want only registered people to be able to post
- navigation arrows in the footer so you can see older ads
- notification email to the admin when a new ad is entered
- notification email to the admin when a new payment has been made
- widgetized sidebar so you can add ads from the admin panel
- allow people posting a classified ad the ability to input text (other than numbers) in the area reserved for for price (with words such as "neg" "negotiable" or "free", etc)
- Allow people to flag posts if there is inappropriate data or spamming
- auto prune feature for posts older than X days (the number if days can be set from the admin panel)
- ClassiPress option page is not at the top level in the admin panel so it is easier to get to it
- the theme validates

download here

Wordpress - How To Deal With The Comments You Receive

2010-05-03T23:22:00.000+07:00

When you have a Wordpress site or blog, you will notice that you get quite a few comments about your posts. At times these comments are related from real readers, but 90% of the time they are spam comments that are nothing more than links that are posted to your site. How can you deal with these comments when using Wordpress?

Askimet is one of the best solutions to commenting problems. This is a plugin that you can use with Wordpress that will help you filter out the common spam and junk comments to keep your blog a bit cleaner. It's fairly effective and suggested by Wordpress to use with their software.

There are also other comment plugins that you can use with your blog. The strategy here is that most spam commenters are looking for certain code that gives away that you are using a Wordpress blog. With a different way of doing comments, their software that looks and posts comments won't work with your blog so that you don't have to deal with them.

There are administrative features that you can use. You can moderate every comment so that the junk ones don't post to your pages. You can set it up so that only users with approved comments can post. You can even go as far as requiring that people make a user account before being able to post. These will keep most of the junk comments off your pages.

You may even go as far to completely get rid of comments. For certain pages that you might be having problems with, you can edit the post and turn the comments off by making sure the box is no longer checked. If you want, you can also edit out the comments portion on your posts template so that you don't have to deal with them any longer.

How to : Get Category ID in Wordpress

2009-09-19T04:58:00.000+07:00

If you’re working on wordpress Theme, sometimes you need to know the categoriesID for some categories. For example, in my cases, i need to exclude “projects” category from my blog posts lists, you can use query_posts(’cat=-3) for example if you know that project assigned with category ID=3. But if your themes using by several sites, you will difficult to define the category ID, because it will be different on another wordpress installation.

You can use function get_cat_id(), You can use this function to take the category name get it’s ID number to use in functions like query_posts
above.

Example :
$id = get_cat_id('projects'); $q = "cat=" . $id; query_posts('cat=-'.$q); if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); the_content(); endwhile; endif; ?>

How to Keep WordPress Secure

2009-09-10T04:02:00.000+07:00

A stitch in time saves nine. I couldn’t sew my way out of a bag, but it’s true advice for bloggers as well — a little bit of work on an upgrade now saves a lot of work fixing something later.

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.

The tactics are new, but the strategy is not. Where this particular worm messes up is in the “clean up” phase: it doesn’t hide itself well and the blogger notices that all his links are broken, which causes him to dig deeper and notice the extent of the damage. Where worms of old would do childish things like defacing your site, the new ones are silent and invisible, so you only notice them when they screw up (as this one did) or your site gets removed from Google for having spam and malware on it.

I’m talking about this not to scare you, but to highlight that this is something that has happened before, and that will more than likely happen again.

A stitch in time saves nine. Upgrading is a known quantity of work, and one that the WordPress community has tried its darndest to make as easy as possible with one-click upgrades. Fixing a hacked blog, on the other hand, is quite hard. Upgrading is taking your vitamins; fixing a hack is open heart surgery. (This is true of cost, as well.)

2.8.4, the current version of WordPress, is immune to this worm. (So was the release before this one.) If you’ve been thinking about upgrading but haven’t gotten around to it yet, now would be a really good time. If you’ve already upgraded your blogs, maybe check out the blogs of your friends or that you read and see if they need any help. A stitch in time saves nine.

Whenever a worm makes the rounds, everyone becomes a security expert and peddles one of three types of advice: snake oil, Club solutions, or real solutions. Snake oil you’ll be able to spot right away because it’s easy. Hide the WordPress version, they say, and you’ll be fine. Uh, duh, the worm writers thought of that. Where their 1.0 might have checked for version numbers, 2.0 just tests capabilities, version number be damned.

Powerfull List of WordPress Lifesavers Plugins

2009-09-07T03:19:00.000+07:00

Post related Plugins

1) WP-Sticky WordPress Plug-in - Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog where you can choose to “stick” certain posts at the top of your blog.

Live Demo View it Here | Download

2) Daily Top 10 Posts- Tracks the number of pageviews per blog post for the current day and cumulatively with options to display sidebar widgets for both. You may also display sidebar widgets containing a list of the most popular posts for the day and most popular posts overall.

Download Plugin: Here

3) Popularity Contest- This Plug-in will help you see which of your posts are most popular. Views, comments, etc. are tracked and given configurable point values to determine popularity.

Download Plugin: Here

4) Homepage Excerpts- A must have plug-in. If your blog uses full posts on the homepage, it makes it more search engine friendly. Also it gives flexibility to people that want to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.

Download Plugin: Here

5) Related Posts Plugin- WordPress Related Posts Plug-in will generate a related posts via WordPress tags, and add the related posts to feed.

Download Plugin: Here

User related Plugins

6) WP-Polls- Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog where you can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.

Download Plugin: Download

7)Gravatar- The Plug-in makes available a tag called gravatar that, when used inside the Comment Loop, outputs the correct gravatar URL based on the commenters email address.

Download Plugin: Download

8 )AJAX Shoutbox- Realtime conversation with sound to alert of new messages.

Download Plugin: Download

Stats

9) Google Analytics for WordPress- This Plug-in easily adds your Google Analytics tracking code to all pages within your blog. That’s it’s main functionality, it also Tracks outgoing links, tracks downloads, Tracks AdSense clicks, Tracks image search keywords and tracks extra search engines.

Download Plugin: Here

10) ‘Subscribe to Comments’ Report and Stats- If you are wondering how many people where actually using "Subscribe to Comments" checkbox on your site, you can use this Plug-in to give you a list of users and their subscriptions and the posts they are subscribed to.

Download Plugin: Here

11) WassUp Plugin- WassUp is a WordPress Plug-in to track your visitors in real time. It has a very readable and fancy admin console to keep tracks of your blog’s users visits.

Download Plugin: Here

Contact Form Plugins

12) cforms- cforms is a Plug-in for WordPress, offering deployment of multiple contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page. The form submission utilizes AJAX, falls back, however, to a standard method in case AJAX/Javascript is not supported or disabled.

Download Plugin: Here

13) Secure and Accessible PHP contact form + multi-user version - Designed to make contacting you from your website easy, accessible, and secure. Deter spam emails from arriving in your mail box with a multi-user plugin.

Live Demo: Here
Download Plugin: Here

14) intouch- A customizable contact form Plug-in which allows you to insert a custom build contact form, which on submission will send the information via email, with the ability to specify mandatory fields, Ajax submission.

Download Plugin: Here

Photos Plug-ins

15) Photo Dropper WordPress plugin- This new Plug-in searches flickr for Creative Commons licensed photos for you to add to your WordPress blog.

Download Plugin: Here

16) Lightview for WordPress- Lightview is similar to Lightbox and has been able to overlay not only images but also videos, iframed webpages, and almost anything!

Download Plugin: Here

17) NextGEN Gallery- Adds a powerfull image gallery to your control panel. Features: Sortable Albums, Upload a Zip-File with pictures, Watermark function, Slideshow…

Download Plugin: Here

Navigation

18) Creating a drop down navigation menu using jQuery- Create a navigation menu with drop down menus for you WordPress blog, with a slick jQuery animated sliding down for menus and fading out.

Download Plugin: Here

19) WP Digg Style Pagination- Allows to add or replace the WordPress pagination by one easy and more comfortable paged navigation like Digg website. You can choose one CSS Style for your pagination from those of this list and append the CSS to your theme CSS sheet.

Download Plugin: Here

The site of this plugin was working 2 days ago, but today it is a parked domain. Until the owner of the site fixes this issue, you guys can download this plug-in from Here

20) WP PageNavi- Adds a paging navigation your WordPress blog.» Example: Pages (17): [1] 2 3 4 » … Last »

Download Plugin: Here

21) In Series- Provides navigation controls for “next” and “previous” links within a connected series of posts.

Download Plugin: Here

22) CustomNav- CustomNav is a Plug-in for WordPress that allows the administrator to easily create and add a horizontal navigation menu or even a vertical navigation menu.

Download Plugin: Here

Administrative Plugins

23) Dashboard Editor- Allows you to add or remove whatever you want from the WordPress dashboard to be more useful to you.

Download Plugin: Here

24) Fluency Admin- One of the best interfaces ever created for WordPress. Works with WordPress 2.5.

Download Plugin: Here

25) Lighter Admin Drop Menus- Provides css-enabled drop down menus to speed the use of the WordPress dashboard.

Download Plugin: Here

26) WP Admin Bar Reloaded- Displays links to the Administration Panel at the top of a blog’s page – but only for users who are logged in and have permission to view the given functions.

Download Plugin: Here

27) Wordpress Themed Categories Plugin- The ability to assign different themes for each category.

Download Plugin: Here

RSS

28) From RSS- If you want to give your RSS subscribers a little bit of extra content, or simply leave out some annoying footer about subscribing to the RSS feed.

Download Plugin: Here

29) What Would Seth Godin Do- New visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 3 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location.

Download Plugin: Here

30) Feed Count- If you don’t like the feedburner chickletd, You can use this Plug-in to display the number of subscribers to your feedburner feed by using your own taste.

Download Plugin: Here

31) Feedburner Feed Replacement- Created by Steve Smith, it’s a reliable way to track your entire feed-reading audience by redirecting all your subscribers to using your feed from Feedburner so you could keep track of the actual number of subscribers.

Download Plugin: Here

32) Full Text Feed- WordPress will truncate your feed’s content anywhere you insert a tag. Full Text Feed undos this functionality, allowing your feeds to contain the full text regardless of usage.

Download Plugin: Here

Full Text Feed is no longer required for WordPress 2.5.

33) Subscribe-Remind- An effective way to turn visitors into subscribers by adding some text at the end of each of your posts inviting your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Download Plugin: Here

Database and Server

34) WordPress Database Backup- This popular Plug-in allows users to schedule automatic database backups by creating backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

Download Plugin: Here

35) 404 Notifier README- Log 404 (file not found) errors on your site and get them delivered to you via e-mail or RSS.

Download Plugin: Here

36) WP-phpMyAdmin - Allows to access your PHP databases directly from the WP admin area without having to login to phpMyAdmin.

Download Plugin: Here

Comments

37) Subscribe to Comments 2.1- Allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments on the subscribed post. It is one of the most popular WordPress Plug-ins out there cause it helps encouraging the commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog.

Download Plugin: Here

38) Live Comment Preview- Live Comment Preview is the simplest way to get live comment previews on your site.

Download Plugin: Here

39) Get Recent Comments- This Plug-in shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar.

Download Plugin: Here

40) Show Top CommentatorsThis Plug-in encourages discussion from your readers by displaying their name (linked to their site without a nofollow tag if desired) and number of comments on the sidebar.

Download Plugin: Here

41) NoFollow Free NoFollow Free removes the “nofollow” attribute from your WordPress blog’s comments (precisely from the author’s links) and/or from the comments text links to encourage your users to submit comments.

Download Plugin: Here

CMS

42) Advanced Category Excluder- The main goal is to hide some unwanted categories, from defined parts of the blog. It can override your search results, your RSS feed listing, your category listing, and also your entry page, if you want to. This is great, for SEO reasons, for content separation, for grouping information, and handle them as real sub pages.

Download Plugin: Here

43) Filosofo Home-Page Control- This plug-in lets you put pages on the same Permalink level (or higher) as the blog’s directory and set which page you want to be the “home” page.

Download Plugin: Here

44) Search Everything - Search Everything increases the ability of the default WordPress Search, to search Every Page, Every Tag, non-password protected pages only, Search Every Comment, Search only approved comments, Search Every Draft, Search Every Excerpt…

Download Plugin: Here

45) Custom Query String- After installing this plug-in you will be able to set the number of posts (custom queries) for every single page on your website. Here are some of the pages that you will be able to customize: author, archive, category, year, month, day, home, feed, search.

Download Plugin: Here

46) Manually order your Pages with My Page Order WordPress plugin- Gives you additional Page flexibility by allowing you to manually order your Pages without coding.

Download Plugin: Here

Social bookmarking Plugins

47) Sociable- Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites like Facebook, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Digg and many many others.

Download Plugin: Here

48) Share This- This Plug-in will allow your visitors to share your content via social bookmarking sites and/or e-mailing the post to a friend.

Download Plugin: Here

49) Digg This- Digg this WordPress Plug-in is a Plug-in that detects incoming links from Digg.com to your WordPress post and automatically display a link back to the digg post, for people to digg your story.

Download Plugin: Here

50) Socialize Me!- Socialize Me! will identify where the visitor is coming from, and in the case that the source is a social site where you have a profile on, it will display a tailored message. Imagine if you could reach out to all those visitors from StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious et cetera, right from your articles…

Download Plugin: Here

SEO

51) All in One SEO Pack- Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines by automatically optimizing your titles for search engines , generating META tags automatically and avoiding duplicate content found on WordPress blogs.

Download Plugin: Here

52) Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator- This Plug-in generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog to help google crawl your site.

Download Plugin: Here

53) Meta Robots- This Plug-in allow you to manage your meta robot tags.

Download Plugin: Here

54) Head META Description- Head Meta Description provides an automatic meta description tag for your blog, inserting a dynamic description depending on the query-type (i.e. page you’re on). Some search engines are supposed to love this tag.

Download Plugin: Here

55) Enforce www. Preference- This Plug-in will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference (http://example.com/ vs. http://www.example.com/). Most search engines treat those addresses as two different domains.

Download Plugin: Here

Speed up Your WordPress Plugins

56) WP-Cache- WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make you site much faster by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and the building the page from the database.

Download Plugin: Here

Fignting Spam, Splogs

Splogs are weblog sites which the author uses only for promoting affiliated websites. The purpose is to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors, and/ or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Splogs (spam blogs) scrape content from others and re-post the material as their own in order to earn money.

57) Digital Fingerprint — detecting content theft- To combat splogs use of your content, this Plug-in will place a digital fingerprint into blog posts. Once embedded in your post, the Plug-in allows you to quickly and easily search the blogosphere for references to the digital fingerprint.

Download Plugin: Here

58) Akismet- Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not.

Download Plugin: Here

59) RSS Feed Signature- Provide a simple administration interface to allow the addition of a custom tagline, signature or © copyright message to the WordPress generated rss feeds to protect your content from splogs (spam blogs).

Download Plugin: Here

60) Simple Trackback Validation Plugin- This Plug-in performs simple but very effective tests on all incoming trackbacks in order to stop trackback spam.

Download Plugin: Here

Advertising Plug-ins

61) Got Banners- Got Banners is a simple banner rotating Plug-in for WordPress that displays all the banners provided simultaneously. But, in a different random order each time.

Download Plugin: Here

62) AdSense Deluxe- For quickly inserting Google or Yahoo! ads into your blog posts, and managing when and where those ads are displayed.

Download Plugin: Here

63) WPAds- WPAds is a WordPress Plug-in for showing and rotating ads in your blog. You only have to define the ad positions and the ads you want to rotate in each position, and WPAds will serve your ads randomly.

Download Plugin: Here

WordPress Developer’s Plug-ins

64) Code Markup- Code Markup is a WordPress Plug-in that makes it easy to include program code samples in your posts. You can even include HTML markup in the code sample; Code Markup magically knows which characters should be displayed as code and which should be rendered as HTML

Download Plugin: Here

65) Clean Options- Cleans up your blog after removing unwanted plugins.

Download Plugin: Here

66) Theme Test Drive- Theme Test Drive WordPress Plug-in allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one.

Download Plugin: Here

67) runPHP- runPHP is a WordPress plug-in that enables users to embed PHP code directly into their posts.

Download Plugin: Here

68) AJAX CSS Switcher- This WordPress Plug-in allows you to add CSS switching to your theme without any reload. It also stores the users selection for future visits.

Download Plugin: Here

Tags Plug-ins

69) Category Cloud Widget- The Category Cloud Widget is a widget that displays your categories as a tag cloud in your sidebar.

Download Plugin: Here

70) Heat Map plugin- Provides you with two new template tags for displaying a heat map (aka weighted list) of your categories and your monthly archives, can be indicated by varying font sizes, color intensities or both.

Download Plugin: Here

71) Recommended Tags- This is a Plug-in for WordPress 2.3+ that utilizes the built-in tag system for recommending and displaying a list of your current tags. It avoids the troubling issue of creating duplicate tag names that are nearly identical, such as “download” and “downloads.”

Download Plugin: Here

Archive Plugins

72) Extended Live Archive- This Plug-in creates dynamic archive page that helps your readers to easily navigate your archive, has the ability to sort posts by tags, categories, date and popularity.

Download Plugin: Here

73) SRG Clean Archives- This Plug-in is designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion that’s Search Engine friendly on a dedicated page or in your sidebar. It lists the Month / Year, shows total post count for the month, the day of the month the article was published, the title of the article and the number of comments that have been made on each article.

Live Demo: View it Here | Download Plugin: Here

Worth Checking Plugins

74) Author Exposed- Author Exposed is a simple WordPress Plug-in that allows your visitors easy and elegant way to see more details about the post author.

Download Plugin: Here

75) PodPress- This Plug-in makes adding a Podcast to a Post very simple and supports unlimited number of media files.

Download Plugin: Here

76) WP-Print- Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.

Live Demo: View it Here |Download Plugin: Here

77) Comment relish- Developed to send an e-mail message to users who comment on your website who have never commented before.

Download Plugin: Here

78) wpSEO- Have more than 50 different settings for SEO your blog.

Download Plugin: Here

Mastering Your WordPress Theme Hacks and Techniques

2009-09-07T03:09:00.001+07:00

This is the first article in the four-part series,"Powerful guide to master Your WordPress". Throughout this article, we’ll be focus on many WordPress Theme hacks, ideas, tips and useful tutorials you need to have ready in hand when developing WordPress websites.

We’ll keep this post updated during this month. As we’ll check your suggestions and feedback,

select the best, add them to this list and provide a direct link to the person who submitted

the suggestion.

So let’s get started and don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-Feed to keep track on our next post in this series.

This is the Loop
1)The Loop is perhaps the most important thing one needs to understand when customizing WordPress theme. Any HTML or PHP code placed between where The Loop starts and where The Loop ends will be used for each post. When WordPress documentation states “This tag must be within The Loop”, such as for specific Template Tag or plugins, this is The Loop.
```
// the code inside the loop
```
- Further Readings On The Loop
  1)Modifying Individual Posts In The Loop- Sometimes Clients request things like Google ads being displayed after post #2, the top post having a differently colored background, only displaying the title for a few posts. You can’t do any of this inside a single Loop, so here’s how to use multiple loops to display lists of posts differently.How to use multiple loops to display lists of posts differently.
  2)Embed Google Ad in First WordPress Post- One of the more effective places to implement Google Adsense is after the first post, so you want to prevent your ad code from appearing after every single post, as WordPress would just loop and keep showing it. All you need to do is add this code inside the loop.
```
// Insert your Google AdSense code here
```
  You can also publish the advertisement after the second post or the third etc. Just change:
  “count == 1? to “count == 2?
Category Related Techniques
The first step in modifying what happens when someone visits a Category page is to figure out which of your theme’s files is going to be used to display the posts. This is known as the Template Hierarchy.
This diagram, tells us most of what we need to know about organization of WordPress themes.
Change the number of posts displayed in Category Page.
You will need to open index.php file and find the line below,
then add this line right below it:
Where number "4" is the number of posts you want to be displayed on every category page.
Have a different template for specific Category
So, if you want to make the Category whose ID number is 7 look different from what it is currently (and different from other Category pages), just create a category-7.php template file (or whatever your category ID is) in your current theme folder and customize it as you please. WordPress automatically checks for this, and will use the file if it exists. Please notice how we added the "-" and after it the id number of the category.
Displaying single post pages differently in specific category
For example, if you have a category called “News” and a category called “Tutorials” and you want the Stylesheet of the "News" category to be style1.css, and the stylesheet of the “Tutorials” category to be style2.css. Lorelle provides a simple solution by following the directions below:
Open single.php file and delete all the content and add the following code
```
$post = $wp_query->post;

if ( in_category('9') ) {

include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/single2.php');

} else {

include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/single1.php');

}

?>
```
In the most simple terms, the PHP code issues a query that says: Check the post. If the post is in category ID number 9, display single2.php. If not in category ID number 9, display single1.php.
- Further Reading on Categories
  1)What Every Blogger Needs to Know About Categories- You can help your users, improve your SEO, and gain absolute control over your content by implementing your own WordPress category solution!
Conditional Tags
Conditional Tags can be used in your Template files to change what content is displayed and how that content is displayed on a particular page depending on what conditions that page matches.
Styling different categories: If you want to use certain stylesheet for specific category, all you have to do is add the code below to the tag in your index.php file.
```
/cat-15.css"

type="text/css" media="screen" />;



"

type="text/css" media="screen" />
```
Dynamic file content If you want to include a file that will only appear on the home page, Place this code in the index.php:
Better SEO Titles for your pages
```
if (is_home()) { echo bloginfo('name'); }

elseif (is_404()) { bloginfo('name'); echo ' - Oops, this is a 404 page'; }

else if ( is_search() ) { bloginfo('name'); echo (' - Search Results');}

else { bloginfo('name'); echo (' - '); wp_title(''); }

?>
```
Creating Navigation Menu
Menus are an excellent way to create a menu of categories or Pages, highlighting specific areas of interest within your website.
Dynamic menu highlighting is a way to give users a reference point with which to navigate. It is like the dot on the map that says “you are here”.
Nick La created a dynamic highlight menu on Best Web Gallery by using the code below:
```
 >Gallery

 >About

 >Submit
```
- Further Reading on Navigation Menu
  1)Creating Two-Tiered Conditional Navigation in Wordpress- Here is a common navigational scheme, with parent pages on top and child pages (if they exist) on bottom.
  2) Smarter Navigation Menu Mike Cherim has explained how to get a smarter navigation menu using Conditional tags by offering post titles, archive dates, and category names instead of generic terminology.
```
 404 Error









 Search Results









 Selected Article
```
Query Posts
Query_posts can be used to control which posts show up in The Loop. All you have to do is place a call to query_posts() in one of your Template files before The Loop begins.
Show posts from only one category If you want to display a certain number of posts in specific category
Here we want to display the latest “10″ post in category whose ID is “15″.
Exclude Categories From Your Home Page
```
  if (is_home()) {

     query_posts("cat=-3");

  }

?>
```
Retrieve a Particular Post
```
// retrieve one post with an ID of 5

query_posts('p=5');

?>
```
- Further Readings On Query Posts
  1) Query_posts redux- A helpful tutorial to list some of the arguments that you can pass to the query_posts() function.
```
query_posts('page_id=7'); //retrieves page 7 only

query_posts('pagename=about'); //retrieves the about page only

?>
```
Get Posts
get_postsis a simple tag for creating multiple loops to allow you list links of posts in different ways. For example if you want to display the last 5 entries, you use this code:
```
$previous_posts = get_posts('numberposts=5');

foreach($previous_posts as $post) :

setup_postdata($post);

?>

" id="post-">
```
In the above code the variable “numberposts=5? tells WordPress how many posts to retrieve and populate the loop with. WordPress post formatting function, setup_postdata() automatically populates the required variables.
Post excerpts
There are two WordPress template tags, the_content() and the_excerpt() used within the WordPress Loop to display the content of the post.
Post excerpt allows you to display only the first part of your blog’s post, a block of content instead of displaying the full post. While many don’t know the real reason behind and just use it to make things more aesthetic, displaying excerpt has got many advantages both in the SEO and traffic area.
The_excerpt() is used to force only excerpts to be seen on the multi-post pages. Also, HTML tags and graphics are stripped from the excerpt’s content.
So here is how it works when using in the post:
- 1) If the post uses both the_excerpt() tag and the explicit excerpt that is written in the textarea box on the write post panel,
```
Display the explicit excerpt
```
- 2) If the post uses the_excerpt() tag only,
```
Display 120 words of the post
```
And here is how it works when using in the post
- 1) If the post uses the tag to mark the ending post of the excerpt,
```
Display this excerpt
```
- 2) If the tag is not used,
```
Display the entire post
```
- Further Readings on Post Excerpts
  1) Display Post Excerpts Only in WordPress- A good way to ensure your posts don’t show up in suplemental results since Google can find them in various places – ensures that the excerpt is shown on all pages except the full post page.
  2) Use the More Tag on Wordpress- Many readers prefer to have full posts on the homepage so that they can read the content right there, without needing to click around. A simple solution to accommodate both sides is to use the “more” tag on Wordpress.
  3)Custom Excerpts for WordPress
  4)Things you should know when using post excerpt- Things you should be knowing and setting up when using post excerpt is described in this article: why use post excerpt?, Different ways of displaying post excerpt, Displaying excerpt on the frontpage, archives and search results page and Displaying full post in feeds.
Custom Fields
WordPress has the ability to allow you assign custom fields to a post by adding extra information to the post which give your blog a lot of flexibility. Custom fields have a name and a value. The Key is the name of the custom field and the Value is the value you want to give to that name. You can display this information in posts, pages, sidebars, or anywhere on your site. WordPress remembers previously used custom field names and can be selected in the drop down list.
Getting Custom Field Values
```
 get_post_meta($post_id, $key, $single);

ID, 'key name',true) ?>
```
Where $post->ID to get a post’s ID, $key is a string containing the name of the meta value you want and $single can either be true or false. If set to true then the function will return a single result, as a string. If false, or not set, then the function returns an array of the custom fields.
Adding Custom Field in a post
To illustrate, we’ll start with a very basic example— Lets assume you want to display the author name right below the title of the post and add a direct link to the author’s website. For starters, you’ll need to open a new post and add 2 custom fields with their respective values, see the image below.
Now you can display these information inside your template file as below:
```
ID, 'author_name', true); ?>





ID, 'author_url', true); ?>



">
```
- Further Readings On Custom Fields
  1)Using WordPress Custom Fields: Introduction- An ongoing tutorial series for practical uses of WordPress custom fields
- 2)WordPress Custom Fields; laying text over your lead graphic- Adding a photo or image behind a posts title can help to lure a reader into viewing the main excerpt / permalink of your post.
Writing Code in Your Posts
Sometime you might need to add pieces of code like HTML, CSS, PHP, or javascripts in your post and make this code “looks” like code, but “doesn’t behave” like code. WordPress.com changes codes such as <, >, &, “, and ‘ into characters. For example, if you type:
It will erased from your post when you save it. Or it will try to turn the codes into character entity codes, which can really mess some things up. So
To make this WordPress template tag code appear, the code must be converted into character entities:
<? php query_posts('p=5'); ?>

To Write Code in Your Posts so that it looks like a box of code which may be copied and pasted within other code or template file, you can use the

 HTML tag with  tag.
Further Readings On Writing Code in your Posts
1)Signatures and Writing Code- Lorelle writes an amazing article on posting code in your WordPress.com blogs, listing the most common character codes (character entities) used in HTML/XHTML, PHP, and other programming languages. Also you need to check her other post “WordPress Plugins That Help You Write Code” sharing some of the WordPress Plugins that help you write code and equations in your blogs.
2)Online Code Converters- There are several online converters that transform the text you type into the standard HTML code that every browser can recognize without altering the character encoding to help you change code into something that WordPress blog can display properly.
Postable- An ajax online code converter created by “Elliot Swan”
HTMLizer Data
HTML Code converter

Organized and Structured Archives page
There are many techniques to customize your Archive Index page. Some involve incorporation of plugins or PHP code to create customized lists of archived posts, and others provide more interesting ways of displaying your archives. You can display Archives By Year, month, categories, day, Weighted Categories, etc…
The example below illustrats how to create an archives page listed by categories and months.
Where wp_list_cats displays a list of WordPress categories as links and wp_get_archives displays a date-based archives list.
If you want to retrieve every single page (perhaps for a custom archive page or a full article listing), you can set this to -1.
```
query_posts('posts_per_page=-1'); //to return all the posts without pagination

?>
```
- Further Readings On WordPress Archives page
  1)How to Create An Archives Page- Here’s how to create an archives page for archive links listing by categories and months.
  2) Creating an Archive Index
  3)Wicked WordPress Archives in One Easy Step!- How to Create Archives with Real Sex Appeal
Permalinks
Setting your desired Permalinks structure is the first thing you should do after installing your WordPress blog because search engines index your blog based on post URLs and if you change from one to another then you will loose your rankings. You can change the Permalinks setting through Admin > Options > Permalinks.
WordPress has to option to use pretty links, turning the numbered links into sentences.
So instead of the default ugly permalink
```
http://example.com/?p=N
```
Use the Pretty Link structure
```
http://example.com/category_name/post-name

or

http://example.com/year/month/day/post-name
```
- Further Readings On Permalinks Structure
  1) Configuring WP Permalinks- Weblog Tools Collection has a useful guide on setting up permalinks on your WordPress blog and how to set up a .htaccess file if you don’t have one.
  2) Understanding WordPress Permalinks- Which Permalink Structure Is the Best?
Identifying author(s) & guest comments and styling them
Through intelligent use of CSS, you can exercise absolute control over author and guest comment layout, presenting the reader with comments so rich with style.
1)How to highlight author comments in WordPress- By default, most themes have comments look the same. Matt Cutts show us a simple: instead of checking the author’s email address, check their user id to see if it’s the user id of the blog owner.
2)How-to style WordPress author comments- Here you will be able to identify author(s) & guest comments under WordPress without the need for extraneous plugins, giving you some extra flexibility by adding code to check if the commenter’s email is the same as the email address of the blog’s author.
3) Styling Your WordPress Comments- Here are three examples to design the guest comments which complements the rest of the site using: Gravatars, Speech Bubble and Alternating Arrows.
Separating Trackbacks from Comments
Trackbacks are the messages displayed in the comments list whenever another blog links back to one of your posts. It is best if they are not mixed with the comments.
1) Separating Trackbacks from Comments- The method described here will lift out all of the trackbacks, and then display them as a numbered list after the list of comments is finished.
2) Managing Trackbacks and Pingbacks- This topic covers separating trackbacks/pingbacks from regular comments, and also how to remove trackbacks and pingbacks from a WordPress theme completely.
Custom 404 Page
Reconsider the value of your 404 page by thinking of it as your home page. Think of it as a gateway to your site, you will find good ideas here:
1)Customizing Your 404 Page- You can often retain the traffic that comes to your 404 page by either offering something funny to grab the readers attention or by offering a variety of methods for them to find the post they are looking for.
2)Customize Your 404 Page- Here are some tips for improving your 404 page on your personal (or even professional) website.
Gravatars
After you sign up for Gravatars service, every time you leave a comment at a blog with your valid email address, your image will appear next to your name, providing the owner has added a few simple lines of code.
How to Setup Gravatars for your Blog – Plug-in Free!- This is a guide custom tailored for WordPress users to setup gravatars on their blog without using a plug-in
Worth Checking Techniques
1) When Your WordPress Theme Keeps Reverting To Default- Have you ever been working on your WordPress blog’s design, when you refresh the page only to find that it’s decided to revert to the default theme?
2) How to place a login form in the sidebar- Want to get your users log in through the front page, Small Potato’s tutorial will show you how.
3) When Your WordPress Theme Keeps Reverting To Default- Have you ever been working on your WordPress blog’s design, when you refresh the page only to find that it’s decided to revert to the default theme?
4) Adding Recent Comments To Your WordPress Theme- Displays recent comments in the sidebar without the need for a plug-in:
5) Creating your home.php quite easily on WordPress- Two easy ways to use if you just want a static front page on your blog.
6) Even Simpler WordPress Contact Form- A simple solution for all your contact form needs. All comments left with this form are displayed in your WordPress administration panel.
7)WP Date Image Hack- Using dynamic images to replace the date entries of your blog post.
8 ) Category Page Hacks- These 2 hacks will increase the usability of WordPress category pages by giving an index of posts instead of a paged overview, and by sorting posts by title instead of post date.
9)Creating a “dynamic sticky”- When we need to have certain articles ’stay at the top’ longer than others.
10)Show Category Images- How to add some simple PHP code to your WordPress template and make linked images appear instead of text for your categories in posts.
11) Displaying WordPress Entries on static pages- A simple solution to include the date, headline, and excerpt of the latest entry from your Blog into your website static pages.
12) Ajax Commenting- How to make your commenting system submit comment without reloading the whole page.
13) Opening Links in New Windows- This hack is for those who want to open links in a new browser window and don’t want to type out target=”_blank” every single time.
Developing a WordPress Theme
1)So you want to create WordPress themes huh?- A step by step guide to create a WordPress theme from scratch.
2) Developing a WordPress Theme- Dezinerfolio wrote a tutorial on how to develop a WordPress theme, you will learn to convert your xHTML CSS site into a Compact WordPress Theme.
3)How to create WordPress theme?- DevBox Wireframe WordPress theme, which is available for download on their site. This is basically a barebones theme that you can use to easily take a XHTML/CSS layout and convert it into a WordPress theme.
4)Widgetizing Themes- Technical instructions on updating a theme for use with widgets.

We are going to publish the .pdf-version of this series, so subscribe to our RSS-feed to keep track on our next posts.



Wordpress Security Tips and Hacks
2009-09-07T02:50:00.001+07:00
We all agree that having a secure wordpress weblog should be our first priorities when keeping a successful blog. In this post we’d like you to share your knowledge and help us create the Wordpress Security guide to keep the bad guys out.
Below are 10 security tips that you can easily implement on your WordPress blog. Please share one or more life-savers you use permanently to help protect yourself from WordPress security issues.
1) Nobody should be allowed to search your entire server.
WPdesigner advices us to NOT use this search code in the search.php

Nobody should be allowed to search your entire server, or? Use this one instead:
Block WP- folders from being indexed by search engines, the best way to block them in your robots.txt file. Add the following line to your list:Disallow: /wp-* 
2) Directories should not be left open for public browsing
There is a potential problem letting people know what plugins you have, or what versions they are. If there is some known exploit that is linked to a plugin, it could be easy enough for someone to use it to their advantage. Make an empty wp-content/plugins/index.html file or just add this line in your .htaccess file in your root:
Options All -Indexes
3) Drop the version string in your Meta Tags
A large number of WordPress themes have the WordPress Meta Tag that show the version of WordPress that is running on your blog which is an easy way to get your blog prone to hackers if you didn’t upgrade to the security-enhanced file permissions on both which is pointed out by Matt Cutts. Another solution involves a plugin that sets up a secondary new version.
This tag is in the header.php file that displays your current version of wordpress.
4) Protecting your Wordpress wp-admin folder
Attackers can use bots for a brute force style of attack that simply guesses the admin password until they come up with the correct one and login. There are a couple of solutions out there, we will highlight each below.
Limit access to wp-admin folder by IP address- This solution is to restrict which IP’s can access the wp-admin folder via .htaccess. This has one drawback is you may have to update your .htaccess folder if your internet provider assigns you a dynamic IP address, you move to another location or you have authors at other locations.
AskApache Password Protect- The plugin is simple, it adds a 2nd layer of security to your blog by requiring a username and password to access anything in the /wp-admin/ folder. All you have to do is choose a username and password and you are done. It writes the .htaccess file, without messing it up. It also encrypts your password and creates the .htpasswd file, as well as setting the correct security-enhanced file permissions on both.
Login Lockdown plugin- records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery.
5) Stay up to date
You need to keep your on your plugin/widget, theme, and Wordpress versions updated. Also, subscribing to the plugin/widget/theme Author’s RSS feeds makes keeping up with them much easier.
6) Take regular backups of your site and Database
You always have to take regular backups of your file directories as well as the database. WordPress Database Backup plugin creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.
7) Update your wordpress to latest version
Probably the first thing you should do! Install the Instant Upgrade Plugin or the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Plugin. Make sure you back everything up before performing the upgrades.
8 ) Use SSH/Shell Access instead of FTP
It is one of the best tips i found here.If someone gets a hold of your FTP login information (which is usually not encrypted and easy to get), they can manipulate your files and add spam to your site without you even knowing about it! Using SSH, everything is encrypted including the transfer of files, etc.
9)Stop worrying about your wp-config.php file
Keep your database username and password Safe by adding the following to the .htaccess file at the top level of your WordPress install:
deny from all
This will make it harder for your database username and password to fall into the wrong hands in the event of a server problem.
Protect Your Blog With a Solid Password
Creating a strong password that is also memorable is one of the easiest defenses against being hacked. There are a lot of online password strength checker that you could check.
Also you might check lorelle’s article on blogherald called Protect Your Blog With a Solid Password, offering tips and tricks to help create a strong password that is also memorable, and how to deal with all the myriad passwords we seem to accumulate online.





How to Keep WordPress Secure
2009-09-06T03:19:00.000+07:00
 A stitch in time saves nine. I couldn’t sew my way out of a bag, but it’s true advice for bloggers as well — a little bit of work on an upgrade now saves a lot of work fixing something later.
 Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.
 The tactics are new, but the strategy is not. Where this particular worm messes up is in the “clean up” phase: it doesn’t hide itself well and the blogger notices that all his links are broken, which causes him to dig deeper and notice the extent of the damage. Where worms of old would do childish things like defacing your site, the new ones are silent and invisible, so you only notice them when they screw up (as this one did) or your site gets removed from Google for having spam and malware on it.
 I’m talking about this not to scare you, but to highlight that this is something that has happened before, and that will more than likely happen again.
 A stitch in time saves nine. Upgrading is a known quantity of work, and one that the WordPress community has tried its darndest to make as easy as possible with one-click upgrades. Fixing a hacked blog, on the other hand, is quite hard. Upgrading is taking your vitamins; fixing a hack is open heart surgery. (This is true of cost, as well.)
 2.8.4, the current version of WordPress, is immune to this worm. (So was the release before this one.) If you’ve been thinking about upgrading but haven’t gotten around to it yet, now would be a really good time. If you’ve already upgraded your blogs, maybe check out the blogs of your friends or that you read and see if they need any help. A stitch in time saves nine.
 Whenever a worm makes the rounds, everyone becomes a security expert and peddles one of three types of advice: snake oil, Club solutions, or real solutions. Snake oil you’ll be able to spot right away because it’s easy. Hide the WordPress version, they say, and you’ll be fine. Uh, duh, the worm writers thought of that. Where their 1.0 might have checked for version numbers, 2.0 just tests capabilities, version number be damned. 
 The second type of advice is Club solutions; to illustrate, I’ll quote from Mark Pilgrim’s excellent essay on spam 7 years ago, before WordPress even existed:
 The really interesting thing about these approaches, from a game theory perspective, is that they are all Club solutions, not Lojack solutions.  There are two basic approaches to protecting your car from theft: The Club (or The Shield, or a car alarm, or something similar), and Lojack.  The Club isn’t much protection against a thief who is determined to steal your car (it’s easy enough to drill the lock, or just cut the steering wheel and slide The Club off). But it is effective protection against a thief who wants to steal a car (not necessarily your car), because thieves are generally in a hurry and will go for the easiest target, the low-hanging fruit. The Club works as long as not everyone has it, since if everyone had it, thieves would have an equally difficult time stealing any car, their choice will be based on other factors, and your car is back to being as vulnerable as anyone else’s. The Club doesn’t deter theft, it only deflects it.
 Club blog security solutions can be simple (like an .htaccess file) or incredibly complex (like two-factor authentication), and they can work, especially for known exploits. Club solutions can be useful, like using a strong or complex password for your login — no one would recommend against that. (Another club solution is switching to less-used software on the assumption or more like the software’s claim that it’s perfect and more secure. This is why BeOS is more secure than Linux, ahem.)
 In the car world, if someone figured out how to teleport entire cars to chop shops, The Club wouldn’t be so useful anymore. Luckily for manufacturers of The Club, this hasn’t happened. Online and in the software world, though, the equivalent happens almost daily. There is only one real solution. The only thing that I can promise will keep your blog secure today and in the future is upgrading.
 WordPress is a community of hundreds of people that read the code every day, audit it, update it, and care enough about keeping your blog safe that we do things like release updates weeks apart from each other even though it makes us look bad, because updating is going to keep your blog safe from the bad guys. I’m not clairvoyant and I can’t predict what schemes spammers, hackers, crackers, and tricksters will come up with with in the future to harm your blog, but I do know for certain that as long as WordPress is around we’ll do everything in our power to make sure the software is safe. We’ve already made upgrading core and plugins a one-click procedure. If we find something broken, we’ll release a fix. Please upgrade, it’s the only way we can help each other.



How to create WordPress Plugin from a scratch
2009-05-23T09:31:00.000+07:00
Wordpress blogs are getting more popular then ever, there are literally hundreds of new weblogs popping up everyday. However WordPress is not a new software, so I think it is about time to learn how to create decent plugins for it, and once you learn how to write plugins you will discover that this is not only fun but can be very profitable as well.
 I want to show you how to write very simple WordPress (WP) plugin. General purpose behind every plugin is to enhance WP possibilities in some way or another, so I started to think: what kind of plugin will contain no more then 100 lines of code, (so someone who is new to WordPress API won’t get lost in tons of code) and will be somewhat useful at the same time.
 I decided that together we will write plugin which will count search engine bots visits.
 Let me explain shortly what I mean by “search engine bots”, every search engine has some kind of bot that is responsible for indexing pages on the Internet, and as you probably already know there is no other way of indexing pages, then visiting them via HTTP protocol. Basically that makes all bots virtual Internet users, the one thing that makes them different from real Web users is the fact that bots use other browsers then us.
 For example Googlebot uses Web browser that is compatible with Firefox, but it’s name is actually “googlebot” and we can check that with $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] variable.
 Knowing this info we will want to design our plugin in a way that, every time WordPress page is loaded our plugin will check this variable to find out if person which is currently viewing our site is bot or real person. If bot then script will increase bot visits count variable (which we will store in database).
 That’s it. Nice little plugin. I know it maybe very easy for you to write such script, but our goal is actually not the script itself. Our goal is to understand how WordPress plugin API works, this is what is important not the code.
 If I convinced you to reading further this article then great, I am confident you will enjoy it.
 Let’s get started.
 If you didn’t installed WP on your localhost or yet, then go get it at www.wordpress.org do not make a common mistake of thinking that you can understand everything by just reading this text, you will actually need to do the work.
 First thing we need to know is where to put our plugin, WordPress programmers selected specific folder for all plugins, if you start browsing directory with your WP files you will find out by yourself that all plugins located here:
 /wp-content/plugins/
 Note that it is not necessary to create new folder for your plugin, you can put your files straight into plugin directory, but I think it is good to do so only, if your plugin consists from one file.
 We will use two files so let’s create directory and name it “bot”.
 You maybe thinking if there will be more then one file in a directory how will WordPress know which file to use, which file should be started first?
 This is a great question, with very simple answer: files which are treated by WP as main plugin files are those with specific info called: standard plugin information header. You won’t make your plugin work without this information, mainly because, Wordpress will have no idea that your plugin exists, and it will not be listed at Plugin Management page, so you won’t be able to activate it.
 My information header looks like this:
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/*
Plugin Name: Bot Counter
Plugin URI: http://ditio.net/bot-plugin
Description: Plugin is counting bots visits
Author: Greg
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://ditio.net
*/
  You are of course free to edit these information, but do not remove any line, they all need to stay within our file it is very important. If you wish to you can copy and paste these info to your file and save it as “bots.php” in our “bot” directory, it should look like this:
 /wp-content/plugins/bot/bots.php
 Now you can go to admin area, select plugins page, browse available plugins and you will find out that list of plugins already contains your plugin, more over it looks like it is ready to be activated.
 However we know it actually do nothing, so we need to “teach” our plugin what to do and when. These is very simple thanks to “Plugin Hooks”.
 Let me explain it. You can think of every Plugin Hook as an action, and in WP action can almost anything: publishing post, editing comment, loading header and so on. However all actions are predefined by WordPress programmers, so you can’t write whatever you want. For more info on this checkout http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference for complete list of actions.
 When we finally choose an action that suits as best, we need to assign function to it, we do this by using add_action($predefined_plugin_hook, $our_function_name); command. Predefined plugin hook is one of the actions, while “function name” is function which we wrote, or which we will wrote in our case.
 Enough talking it is time to write some code, let’s start with function, which will be responsible for creating additional table in our database and populating it with two records. In this table we will keep information about different bots and their visits number.
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function bot_install()
{
 global $wpdb;
 $table = $wpdb->prefix."bot_counter";
 $structure = "CREATE TABLE $table (
     id INT(9) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
     bot_name VARCHAR(80) NOT NULL,
     bot_mark VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL,
     bot_visits INT(9) DEFAULT 0,
 UNIQUE KEY id (id)
 );";
 $wpdb->query($structure);

 // Populate table
 $wpdb->query("INSERT INTO $table(bot_name, bot_mark)
     VALUES('Google Bot', 'googlebot')");
 $wpdb->query("INSERT INTO $table(bot_name, bot_mark)
     VALUES('Yahoo Slurp', 'yahoo')");
}
  I admit, whole script can be written without using MySQL and it would be much better solution then creating additional table like we did, but again it is not about the script it is about learning WordPress API, and I thought: if you will want to write plugin by yourself later then you will be probably using MySQL, so I decided to show you how WP want us to do it.
 About our function, it’s name can be whatever you want I choose bot_install, because this is what this function really do (installs our plugin), but you can name func1 as well, it is not how you name it, but rather how you assign it to certain Plugin Hook, however it is good practice to avoid function names that were already used by WordPress programmers, then try keeping your function names unique.
 Earlier i talked about assigning function to certain action, so how to do it and which action choose?
 Obviously we want action that will run once, possibly right after activating our plugin, we do not want to create new tables over and over again, so our best shot will be “activate” Plugin Hook, but be careful these one is a bit tricky.
 All of WordPress actions are predefined, all except these one. Look at the code:
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add_action('activate_bot/bots.php', 'bot_install');
  Like was said before first argument is Plugin Hook, it is let’s call it half predefined, what I mean by this is simply that first part ‘activate_’ is constant, but second part of argument is a path to script which contains activate function. We keep our install function in the same file as the rest of functions so we need to point to file we are editing right now.
 Also note that you need to use relative path, WordPress knows that install file must be located somewhere in wp-content/plugins/ directory, so we only need to show him which file in these directory it really is.
 Second argument is our function name, nothing more nothing less.
 Inside our bot_insall function we use global variable $wpdb, it is object responsible for communication with database, of course we still can use old fashioned mysql_query() instead of $wpdb->query(), but let’s make these script like WordPress team wanted us to make it look.
 I believe I do not have to comment on the rest of the code there are only three MySQL queries so I am confident you easily understand what these script do.
 If we activate our plugin now, bot_install function will start, additional table will be created and some data will be added, finally our plugin can actually do something, besides being visible in admin area.
 Now we will create function which will be responsible for counting bots visits:
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function bot()
{
 global $wpdb;
 $browser_name = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
 $bots = $wpdb-&gt;get_results("SELECT * FROM ".
     $wpdb->prefix."bot_counter");

 foreach($bots as $bot)
 {
     if(eregi($bot-&gt;bot_mark, $browser_name))
     {
         $wpdb-&gt;query("UPDATE ".$wp->prefix."bot_counter
             SET bot_visits = bot_visits+1 WHERE id = ".$bot->id);

         break;
     }
 }
}
  This is very simple as well, first we make $wpdb variable “visible” for our function by making it global. Then we select all data from table we created earlier and we loop thru results by using foreach. When it turns out that $browser_name, contains $bot->bot_mark value, then script makes query which increases bot_visits field value by one, then we brake foreach because it is impossible to have two bots using one browser.
 When I first wrote these function I assigned it to wp-head Plugin Hook, it means that WordPress will start this function when header is loading, but then I decided to reassign it to wp-footer action because this function will only make simple operations in our database without even showing results to visitor, so I think you will agree with me on this one, that it is good idea to send page to client first and then call these function. It will actually save some time to our visitor which is always great
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add_action('wp_footer', 'bot');
  Almost everything is ready, new table can be created by our plugin, bots visits are counted now we want to see how many bots visited our blog, but we want these data to be visible only to blog admin and displayed in administration area.
 Sounds like a lot of work? Actually it is NOT. WordPress programmers created set of Plugin Hooks that will allow us to add pages to admin area, this new pages will be automatically shown in admin panel in appropriate category which is selected by us .
 First we need to write a function which will create whole layout for our new page at admin site, then we need to use add_option_page(…) function, but we have to add it within some kind of let’s call it “container”. What is ths container? Basically container is another function which has got set of add_option_page(…) commands within it.
 Note that we are not limited to creating only one additional admin page, by using container we are able to create many pages in different categories, for example one in “users” category and another in “options” category. However we are writing quite small plugin so we will create only one additional page.
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function bot_menu()
{
 global $wpdb;
 include 'bot-admin.php';
}

function bot_admin_actions()
{
 add_options_page("Bot Counter", "Bot Counter", 1,
"Bot-Counter", "bot_menu");
}

add_action('admin_menu', 'bot_admin_actions');
  Look at bot_menu function it includes bot-admin.php file which currently does not exists, but this is not important for now, we will create it a bit later.
 More interesting then bot_menu is bot_admin_actions function – this is our container.
 Whole code works like that: first add_action function is run with Plugin Hook admin_menu, so WordPress knows that something will be added to admin menu. What will be added? He have to check it by executing bot_admin_actions function, second parameter of add_action, bot_admin_function tells WordPress that he have to add to options page (add_option_page) new menu item named “Bot Counter” and when user will click these menu item then WordPress will have to get code for it from bot_menu function, simple isn’t it?
 But in order to make it work we have to create bot-admin.php file, because bot_menu uses it, so let’s create this file and put some code into it:
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 query("UPDATE ".$wpdb->prefix."bot_counter SET bot_visits = 0");?>


Bot Counter Stats Reseted.


Bot Counter Admin


get_results("SELECT * FROM ".$wpdb->prefix."bot_counter");
foreach($results as $result)
{
 echo $result->bot_name." : ";
 echo $result->bot_visits."";
}
?>

 echo $_GET['page']; ?>&bot-counter=reset">
 Reset Stats

  Not much to talk about here, these script shows us how many times particular bot visited our website and at the end is link which allows us to reset stats. Notice that we are using 
…
 and …
 These makes our admin page look similar to other admin pages.
 Also take a look at our  tag, we can submit forms and click URLs within our admin page, but we need to remember to always send ‘page’ parameter via GET (page=), otherwise WordPress won’t display our admin page.
 For more information on adding administration menu visit http://codex.wordpress.org/Adding_Administration_Menus
 That is pretty much it. Last thing we can do is to display bots visits count to people who are visiting our site, but it requires to edit templates, if we want to display bots stats in certain position like sidebar for example.
 The best way to embed our stats into template is to write (in bots.php file) function which will display these stats, then all you need to add in WordPress template is or whatever you named your function..
 Conclusion
 My goal was to show you as much WordPress Plugins API features as possible, however if you didn’t found here answers to questions you had before reading this article then my best advice for you is to go to www.wordpress.com and read WP API documentation. I am confident that with knowledge you gained by reading these text you will have no problems with finding solutions and answers to all questions you have.



How To Display Ads Only To Search Visitors
2009-05-23T09:30:00.002+07:00
In the past, I’ve written about only showing Google Adsense to search engine visitors, so as to decrease the chance of being smart priced. In this post, you’ll see how to improve the technique outlined previously, so that you can make more money.   Note: Although this post is about showing Adsense to search engine visitors, it’s really about determining whether a user came from a search engine or not. The technique can be used to show search engine visitors whatever you choose, not just Adsense.
  Background On Smart Pricing
 By now, most people know that Smart Pricing is a penalty Google applies to Adsense accounts that don’t convert well for the advertiser, resulting in you earning only about 10% of what you’d normally earn per click. 
 I’m not going to go into more detail than is absolutely necessary in this post, so if you want more information on Smart Pricing, see my post on how smart pricing may cost you money or for the ultimate description, see Grizzly’s Optimization Tips for Adsense.
 For now, you just need to know that only certain visitors are going to click Adsense ads and buy something from the advertiser. Who? It’s not your regular readers. It’s not the stream of visitors from StumbleUpon, Digg or Sphinn. It’s the search engine visitors.
 Search engine visitors provide targeted traffic for the advertiser, which converts well. The other sources don’t. If the majority of your traffic comes from the social news sites, then you’re in danger of being smart priced. That’s why I chose to show Adsense only to search engine visitors.
 The Original “From Search” Function
 In my original Shylock Adsense Plugin - Hack To Avoid Smart Pricing post, I provided two approaches: one based on hacking just the Shylock Adsense plugin; another on a more generic solution that can be called from wherever you want (within the Shylock Adsense plugin, the sidebar, single.php, etc). 
 In this post, I’m using the second approach as it has a wider application. This was originally explained in the Hacking Shylock Adsense AND Sidebars section of the previous post. This worked by adding the following function to functions.php in your theme’s folder (wp-content/themes/yourtheme folder, where yourtheme is the name of your theme):
 function scratch99_fromasearchengine(){
  $ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
  $SE = array('/search?', 'images.google.', 'web.info.com', 'search.', 'del.icio.us/search', 'soso.com', '/search/', '.yahoo.');
  foreach ($SE as $source) {
    if (strpos($ref,$source)!==false) return true;
  }
  return false;
}
 Note: This function is based on the ‘only show search engine’ functionality from the Who Sees Ads plugin.
 This function was then called from the Shylock Adsense plugin, a sidebar widget, or anywhere else you may want to, via the following code:
 if (function_exists('scratch99_fromasearchengine')) {
  if (scratch99_fromasearchengine()) {
    INSERT YOUR CODE HERE
  }
}
 Obviously, INSERT YOUR CODE HERE needs to be replaced with whatever code you want to show the search engine visitors: your Adsense code if it’s in the sidebar (using the ExecPHP widget) or the Shylock Adsense code (see my original post for more details).
 Problem With The Original Function
 As Zath pointed out in the comments, the original function only works on the first page the visitor lands on. If the visitor subsequently navigates to another page on your site, the ads disappear. This is because the http_referer is no longer the search engine, it’s now the page where they landed on your site.
 Of course, that means they no longer have the option to click an ad before leaving the site. I wasn’t worried about this, because I figured not many search engine visitors would go to another page on my site. I was wrong!
 Leaving Money On The Table
 According to Google Analytics, over the last month, visitors arriving at this site from a search engine read 1.54 pages per visit. That means that every second visitor is clicking another page. 
 Every second visitor! That means I could be serving up 50% more ads to the sort of visitor who is likely to click ads!
 I decided I better change the way I was doing things, so that search engine visitors see ads on every page they visit at my site. Fortunately, this is fairly easy to do, by setting a cookie that identifies search engine visitors.
 New “From Search” Function Using Cookie
 Here is the solution I’m now using on this blog. 
 First, the you need to add some code to functions.php in your theme’s folder (wp-content/themes/yourtheme folder, where yourtheme is the name of your theme). The following should be added immediately before the ?> at the bottom of the file:
 $ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$SE = array('/search?', 'images.google.', 'web.info.com', 'search.', 'del.icio.us/search', 'soso.com', '/search/', '.yahoo.');
foreach ($SE as $source) {
  if (strpos($ref,$source)!==false) {
    setcookie("sevisitor", 1, time()+3600, "/", ".scratch99.com");
    $sevisitor=true;
  }
}

function fromasearchengine(){
  global $sevisitor;
  if ($sevisitor==true || $_COOKIE["sevisitor"]==1) {
    return true;
  }
  return false;
}
 Note: In the setcookie line, you must change “.scratch99.com” to your own domain!

The fromasearchengine function can then be called from wherever you want to use it (to check if a visitor is from a search engine or not). This is explained further below.
 Notes About The New “From Search” Function
 The code that detects whether the user is from a search engine has been moved out of the fromasearchengine function, into the body of functions.php. This means it will only run this code once per page load, rather than every time the function is called, which may be several times per page load (I call it from Shylock Adsense and from the sidebar).
 Also, the $sevisitor variable was introduced because the cookie can’t be detected on the first page view. The cookie is set on the first page view, but the $_COOKIE function won’t see it until the next page view. The above code checks whether the $sevisitor variable is set (ie it’s the first page view) or whether the cookie is set (ie it’s a subsequent page view).
 I had one problem with setting the cookie via WordPress, but it doesn’t affect the final solution above, so I leave that for a future post.
 Calling The New “From Search” Function
 To call the new fromasearchengine function from Shylock Adsense, edit the shylock_adsense.php file which comes with the plugin. Look for the following code (on line 325 in version 1.2):
 function shylock_adsense_filter($content){
  global $id,$user_level;
  $output = $content;
 and replace it with:
 function shylock_adsense_filter($content){
  global $id,$user_level;
  $output = $content;

if (function_exists('fromasearchengine')) {
  if (fromasearchengine()) {
 Then go down to about line 364 and look for:
   return $output;
 and replace it with:
 } } return $output;
 Note: I’ve just noticed that the Shylock Adsense Plugin has been renamed to the WhyDoWork Adsense Plugin. The name change seems to be the only difference, so the line numbers above are still correct, but the function is called whydowork_adsense_filter instead of shylock_adsense_filter.
 Alternatively, to call it from a PHP sidebar widget or somewhere else (such as single.php), you would add the following code in the appropriate place:
   if (fromasearchengine()) { ?>
    INSERT YOUR CODE HERE
 replacing INSERT YOUR CODE HERE with your Adsense code or whatever else you wanted to show the search engine visitor.
 Final Thoughts
 Using this technique, to set a cookie to identify search engine visitors, then only serving Adsense to such visitors, should help you make more money, while avoiding being smart priced. However, as always, it pays to experiment with Adsense and monitor the affects on your income.
 Of course this technique will have other applications as well, allowing you to serve whatever content you like to search engine visitors. I hope some of you find it of use.



Tutorial: Automatic Site Map for WordPress
2009-05-23T09:30:00.001+07:00
To improve the navigation of your users as well as search engine traffic and ranking to your WordPress blog I suggest making a good site map of your posts - a map of your site. A kind of user friendly archive of your posts. This is not “Google sitemap”!
 The benefits:
 The user can quickly find a specific post he wants anytime he wants.
The user can quickly see and get an idea how big the blog is get an overview on what the person is writing about.
All your posts are linked to from a single page to make sure they are not forgotten by the search engines. Basically PageRank is passed to all of them and they are not buried deep down in the archive. If there are no links to your old posts Google will put them in the supplemental index which is not good at all.
 There are 3 different versons of site maps that you can use, depending on how you want it. I have used the other 2 until I reached my final which is the first I want to brief you about.
 The First WordPress Site Map Example
 This one is the nicest, most flexible and best if you write about different subjects but takes some time to set up. Once it is set up it is all automatic. If you have many categories and subcategories this is the best choice for user experience. You can fully decide the headings, order and basically everything. This is the final one for this blog which I currently use and developed myself.
 Demo: See my site map here.
 Guide how to set it up
 Download and activate the PHP Exec plugin (for newer versions of WordPress use Exec-PHP) that makes it possible for you to parse PHP in your blog posts.
Download and activate the WP Category Post Plugin that makes it possible for you to list posts per category. (I revised the file a bit, credits to Brian Groce and CrazySerb).
Create a new WordPress page (not post) with something like this:
Major category


Subcategory




Subcategory




Subcategory




Other posts on main category







The numbers are the IDs of the categories. Repeat this code until you cover all your categories. You can then place a index with anchor links that jumps to sections like I did. You don’t need to include all posts and you can choose the exact sequence you want.
In your template footer file and or at some other visible place, make a link pointing to your site map for full visitor and search engine link benefit.
 The Second WordPress Site Map Example
 Use the DDSitemapGen. It is an extensive plugin with a lot of options and is 100% automatic. Just follow the instructions on that site on a new site map page and then in your template footer file and or at some other visible place, make a link pointing to your site map for full visitor and search engine link benefit.
 The Third WordPress Site Map Example
 This is best if you have a blog in just one subject and is simply just a list of all pages of your blog which can be sorted by date.
 Demo:
 Here is a demo of just 5 posts:
  Make Firefox run up to 4 times faster
Redesign of JimWestergren.com
Display Links to Latest Items of a RSS Feed
Hacks to boost your WordPress 2.7 blog
Fourth Annual Report: My Success
  Guide how to set it up
 Download and activate the PHP Exec plugin (for newer versions of WordPress use Exec-PHP) that makes it possible for you to parse PHP in your blog posts.
Create a new WordPress page (not post) with some text and then the following lines: 










 There is more about wp_get_archives here. 
In your template footer file and or at some other visible place, make a link pointing to your site map for full visitor and search engine link benefit.
 Which kind of site map do you use for your WordPress blog? If you are using the first version it would be nice if you commented with a link to it so we can see how it works for your WordPress blog.



Build A Dynamic Design Portfolio with Wordpress
2009-05-23T09:28:00.000+07:00
Any content pulled from Wordpress qualifies as “dynamic” by definition, but there are varying degrees of how to break down and print that data. As seen in other articles, I’m a fan of exploiting Wordpress’s query_posts function for purposes other than blogging.  The Scenario
 I recently needed a solution to power the Portfolio section of my company’s website. Ideally, we wished to have a custom database to handle data tables like these, but our programming team was indefinitely busy with client work. So since Wordpress was being used to publish the flat pages and the News section anyway, I decided to create a new post-category for portfolio items and use the query_posts function to call them.
 Homepage Excerpts
 Take a look at the “Recent Projects” section of the homepage. Each sample contains a thumbnail image, title and summary. Each is actually is a separate post under one category called “Portfolio”, and when clicked they take you to the corresponding details on the main Portfolio page. How do we get this all to work?
 Creating the Post
 Let’s start with the SOCA project. Begin a new post and a new category called “Portfolio”:
 
 Make sure you have the WP visual editor turned off. Then paste in the necessary table data (what appears on the detail page), making sure to insert an anchor jump like this:
 
 This will allow excerpts on the homepage to jump to the corresponding item on the main Portfolio page. Scroll down to the “Optional Excerpt” field and insert whatever text you want for the homepage:
 
 Scroll down even further and we’ll create a custom field for the thumbnail image. Name your key “Thumbnail”, and for the value just type the image filename:
 
 The Homepage Template Code
 We will now need a piece of template code to query the “Portfolio” category for its last four entries, print the thumbnail, title and excerpt for each, and wrap the entire thing with a jump-anchor:
 view plaincopy to clipboardprint?
'showposts=4&cat=46'); ?>  
while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>  
class="sample">  
"/portfolio#" title="Read more about ">  
"/images/Thumbnail"); echo $values[0]; ?>" />  
  
  

  endwhile; ?>  
   " title="Read more about "> " />   
  
 The Portfolio Template Code
 If you’re already familiar with template tags, the code for this page be self-explanatory. I’ve also hardcoded in the little flower icon (”divider”) which appears between portfolio items:
 view plaincopy to clipboardprint?
'showposts=10&cat=46'); ?>  
while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>  
  
class="divider"> 
  
endwhile; ?>  
    
  
 Excluding the Category
 After all portfolio items are entered in the database, we’ll need to make sure they don’t show up in the “Latest News” section of the homepage. That’s as easy as creating a category called “News” and making sure to call only those items:
 view plaincopy to clipboardprint?
'showposts=3&cat=44'); ?>  
 
 Using Wordpress to drive our portfolio is not a permanent solution, but it will make future updates much easier than they had been. It’s another example of how Wordpress can function as much more than a blog.

Wordpress For You

13Floor – ElegantThemes (Wordpress Theme)

Download

Sleektabs – 3 in 1 Themeforest (Wordpress Theme)

Download

PersonalPress - ElegantThemes (Wordpress Theme)

Download

Classipress - Wordpress theme Classifieds

Wordpress - How To Deal With The Comments You Receive

How to : Get Category ID in Wordpress

How to Keep WordPress Secure

Powerfull List of WordPress Lifesavers Plugins

Post related Plugins

User related Plugins

Stats

Contact Form Plugins

Photos Plug-ins

Navigation

Further Reading on Navigation Plugins

Administrative Plugins

RSS

Database and Server

Comments

Further Reading on Comments Plugins

CMS

Further Readings on WordPress CMS Plugins

Social bookmarking Plugins

SEO

Speed up Your WordPress Plugins

Further Reading on speeding up your WordPress

Fignting Spam, Splogs

Further Readings on Spam Fighting Plugins

Advertising Plug-ins

WordPress Developer’s Plug-ins

Tags Plug-ins

Further Readings on WordPress Tags Clouds

Archive Plugins

Worth Checking Plugins

Further Readings on WordPress Plug-ins

Mastering Your WordPress Theme Hacks and Techniques

This is the Loop

Further Readings On The Loop

Category Related Techniques

Further Reading on Categories

Conditional Tags

Creating Navigation Menu

Further Reading on Navigation Menu

Query Posts

Further Readings On Query Posts

Get Posts

Post excerpts

Further Readings on Post Excerpts

Custom Fields

Further Readings On Custom Fields

Writing Code in Your Posts

Further Readings On Writing Code in your Posts

Organized and Structured Archives page

Further Readings On WordPress Archives page

Permalinks

Further Readings On Permalinks Structure

Identifying author(s) & guest comments and styling them

Separating Trackbacks from Comments

Custom 404 Page

Gravatars

Worth Checking Techniques

Developing a WordPress Theme

Wordpress Security Tips and Hacks

1) Nobody should be allowed to search your entire server.

2) Directories should not be left open for public browsing

3) Drop the version string in your Meta Tags

4) Protecting your Wordpress wp-admin folder

5) Stay up to date

6) Take regular backups of your site and Database

7) Update your wordpress to latest version

8 ) Use SSH/Shell Access instead of FTP

9)Stop worrying about your wp-config.php file

Protect Your Blog With a Solid Password

How to Keep WordPress Secure

How to create WordPress Plugin from a scratch

Bot Counter Admin

`Organized and Structured Archives page`

`Further Readings On WordPress Archives page`

`Permalinks`

`Further Readings On Permalinks Structure`

`Identifying author(s) & guest comments and styling them`

`Separating Trackbacks from Comments`

`Custom 404 Page`

`Gravatars`

`Worth Checking Techniques`

`Developing a WordPress Theme`