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Turn Your Wordpress Blog into a Social Network

Monday, July 14th, 2008

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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WYSISYG Wordpress Theme Generators

Monday, June 30th, 2008

I’ll go out on a limb and say Wordpress is one of the finest software applications to come out this millennium. Its put the power of the press and the ability to reach thousands (or millions) of people in the hands of the people live never before. People from every walks of life can create powerful websites without needing to know a shred of code and it’s all open source. That said, for people who want to dig deeper and learn a little bit more about how to create their own themes, the process can be incredibly daunting. In took me ten posts just to cover the subject a few months back on this post. What Wordpress truly needs is a WYSIWYG editor to really empower people to get creative with their blogs!

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Wordpress Comment Styling Round Up

Friday, May 30th, 2008

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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The Fundamentals of Strong Logo Design

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

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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Hacking Wordpress When You’ve Forgotten Your Password

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

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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Five Wordpress Tips for Power Users

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

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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Packaging a Wordpress Theme for Distribution

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

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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Designing and Coding a Wordpress Theme From Scratch (Part 10)

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

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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Designing and Coding a Wordpress Theme From Scratch (Part 9)

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

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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Designing and Coding a Wordpress Theme From Scratch (Part 8)

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

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”


Putting the Press in WordPress with PHP

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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