WordPress Blog

Wordpress is a CMS that was built for blogging but many people have repurposed it for magazines, newspapers, blog networks and all sorts of other goodies! But did you know you can hack your Wordpress blog to be a no-cost solution for a social network? Well you can, and here’s fifteen plug-ins that will let you do it.

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One question I hear people asking a lot is how to style the comment section in Wordpress. I didn’t have time to go in depth in my tutorial Designing and Coding a Wordpress Theme from Scratch but here are a few links from my del.icio.us to some blogs that break it down in far more detail.

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I recently developed a new logo for a social networking community. The site needed a logo so I began work right away. Here are a few tips that came to me after completing the task.

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Do you have multiple Wordpress self-hosted blogs? If so, you’ve likely run into a scenario where you just can’t remember your password. With Wordpress 2.5 and 2.5.1 there’s an annoying bug that sometimes generates passwords that don’t work when you click the “Forgot Password” option. Usually that button generates a query that will send an email with a temporary password that allows you to reset your password to whatever you wish. The bug in 2.5 will still do that but when you click on the link that should allow you to reset your password, nothing happens.

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If you’re a wordpress power user, you’ll inevitably have some questions about how you can improve your blog or add new features. Here are five tips that will make life easier for people wanting to maximize their use of Wordpress.

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In my ten part series “Designing and Coding a Wordpress Theme From Scratch” we made our own Wordpress theme starting with a design in Photoshop. But now that you’ve made a theme, what about releasing it to the public?

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Part 3 – “Photoshop to XHTML in 24 Hours”
Part 4 – “Cleaning Up Your XHTML”
Part 5 – “Preloading Images with Javascript and CSS”
Part 6 – “Marking Up is Hard to Do” and “The Anatomy of a Wordpress Theme”
Part 7 – “Beginning with PHP for Wordpress”
Part 8 – “Putting the Press in Wordpress with PHP”
Part 9 – “Marking Up Header.php, Footer.php and Sidebar.php”

So far we’ve made a ton of progress with our theme design. We designed it in Photoshop, we converted to XHTML and then we began the somewhat tedious task of adding PHP. Now that we’ve created index.php, header.php, footer.php and sidebar.php, we can move on to creating the rest of the theme.

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Part 2 – “Layout And Structure” and “Designing Wordpress Themes in Photoshop”
Part 3 – “Photoshop to XHTML in 24 Hours”
Part 4 – “Cleaning Up Your XHTML”
Part 5 – “Preloading Images with Javascript and CSS”
Part 6 – “Marking Up is Hard to Do” and “The Anatomy of a Wordpress Theme”
Part 7 – “Beginning with PHP for Wordpress”
Part 8 – “Putting the Press in Wordpress with PHP”

Because Wordpress is fundamentally a PHP system we can add a few snippets of code to make our header, footer and sidebar files dynamic.

Marking Up Header.php

Your blog header file usually contains the title of your site linked to the homepage. In an HTML page we would simply add text or place an image and link to the homepage using <a href=”"></a>. The key to making our Wordpress theme, however, is we need to make all our links relative so that the end user can install the theme and use it with their own unique site with as little fuss as possible. It should just work.

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Part 1 – “Tools For The Task” and “Preparation”
Part 2 – “Layout And Structure” and “Designing Wordpress Themes in Photoshop”
Part 3 – “Photoshop to XHTML in 24 Hours”
Part 4 – “Cleaning Up Your XHTML”
Part 5 – “Preloading Images with Javascript and CSS”
Part 6 – “Marking Up is Hard to Do” and “The Anatomy of a Wordpress Theme”
Part 7 – “Beginning with PHP for Wordpress”

Wordpress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability as the makers proudly proclaim at wordpress.org. The keyword there being ‘publishing’ and the most important part of the Wordpress publishing engine is the element that allows content to be published online easily and automatically. This element is called the the loop.

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This is the seventh post in series about creating Wordpress themes with your Photoshop designs. You may want to review before we continue….

Part 1 – “Tools For The Task” and “Preparation”
Part 2 – “Layout And Structure” and “Designing Wordpress Themes in Photoshop”
Part 3 – “Photoshop to XHTML in 24 Hours”
Part 4 – “Cleaning Up Your XHTML”
Part 5 – “Preloading Images with Javascript and CSS”
Part 6 – “Marking Up is Hard to Do” and “The Anatomy of a Wordpress Theme”

• First we’ll duplicate index.html and rename the copy index.php. We’re only keeping the original .html file for reference to make sure that the finished PHP operates and looks the same.
• Let’s open index.php in our text editor. Right now it’s just a .html renamed .php. Our job is to make make it true PHP.

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