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.

1. WP-Gravatar
Install WP-Gravatar for adding ‘faces’ to your members and your writers. This plugin lets you use Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with your comments. Gives you a Widget with your profile info and your gravatar. Let’s you set your own CSS style to use with the Comments section and the author about box.

2. Ajaxed Wordpress
A highly customizable plugin to add AJAX to your blog. AWP uses AJAX to load posts inline, paginate posts, load and submit comments, and more. For that Web 2.0 look and feel.

3. Members Only
A WordPress plugin that allows you to make your WordPress blog only viewable to visitors that are logged in. This is good for protecting your user’s data and your blog content.

4. Profiles
Profiles allows the easy display and management of personal profiles / biographies, or any other similarly periodic information. In particular, it adds a “profiles” tab to the management section and allows you to easily edit information about the profiles as well as associate an image (with optional watermark) with each profile.

5. WP Super Cache
A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files. When your network does start to receive high levels of traffic, you’ll need this to prevent your site from going down.

6. Post-Plugin Library
Makes calling Similar posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts and Recent Comments easier.

7. Exec PHP
This plug-in is a godsend! It allows you to add PHP markup to wordpress pages and posts. This will give you even greater control over how wordpress looks and acts, allowing you customize with no restriction.

8. Quick SMS
This will allow visitors to send SMS messages to blog owners. It would be ideal for a WordpressMU network as it would allow everyone to stay in constant contact with each other. Could also be hacked to create a “twitter”-like service for all members.

9. UMapper
UMapper plugin is universal mapping platform, which makes it a snap to create engaging maps and add them to your blog posts. Microsoft Virtual Earth, Google Maps, OpenStreet - all are supported by this truly universal (hence the name UMapper - Universal Mapper) plugin.

10. Invite Friends
This plugins main goal was to provide the ability to any of your registered users, to invite more people to the community.

11. NextGen Gallery
Very customizable Gallery option for Wordpress. Turn your blog into a mini ‘Flickr’!

12. Popup Scheduler
If used correctly, a popup is always the best way to achieve great results (be it in sales or subscription rate). It is also the best tool to grab your readers attention. This plugin allow you to customize and schedule a popup to show according to various situation. 1) You can schedule a popup to show a welcome message whenever a new visitor arrives at your site 2) You can schedule a popup to show on the readers returned visit to thank them for reading your blog and invite them to subscribe to your feed/email update. 3) If there is any major changes to your website, you can show a popup to inform your readers of the changes 4) If you are selling products on your blog, you can schedule a popup whenever you have a new product launch 5) During a campaign (such as charity donation drive, blogathon etc), you can schedule a popup to show for a number of days to increase the awareness of the campaign. and many more…

13. SABRE
Sabre is an acronym for Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine. It’s a set of counter measures against spam registration on your blog.

14. Dashboard Editor
This plugin allows you to add whatever you want to the Wordpress dashboard through PHP and HTML even Sidebar Widgets. You can also wipe the entire dashboard or individually remove some of the more irritating sections like the Dev news, Planet Wordpress and the getting started section. This allows for the creation of custom designs for the back end to hide the fact that you’re even using Wordpress!

15. SezWho
SezWho is a distributed context, rating and reputation system for social media sites like blogs, forums, wikis, video/picture sharing sites, discussion boards and anywhere else where people collaborate on the web.

Image via Wikipedia

Are people getting spoiled?

In the last two years or so, the number of free design ‘instruction’ and resource sites has exploded. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think we live in the Matrix, where ideas can just be downloaded into their heads. Well, it’s 2008 and they haven’t invented that technology yet. Until they do we still have to work to come up with new ideas and to learn how to best execute them.

It takes a little bit of time and experimentation to understand design effects, not just how to do them, but why one might use them and when to use one effect versus another. Every good designer has a ‘method to their madness’ and it’s important to try to get into the same headspace as your favorite designer. This means relaxing a bit an realizing that you may not get everything right the first time, or you may spend a few hours Googling around trying to get everything to make sense. Vandelay Design has some good advice:

One of the things that I like about web design is that there’s always plenty to learn, regardless of how experienced you are. I know that my knowledge really only scratches the surface of web design and development, and I appreciate the fact that seemingly unlimited resources are available to allow me to become a better designer.

The design community is filled with sources of inspiration and helpful sites for encouraging growth in abilities. Each of us needs to take our own unique approach to personal development that works for us.

In my post ‘The Tutorial for all Tutorials‘, I listed the rules I try to follow when making good design tutorials. Now I’m going to share advice on how to follow them…

1. Learn Fundamentals
When you’re trying to follow a tutorial about how to turn your little brother into giant Robeast in Photoshop it might help to know what the difference between the burn tool and the shadow tool. Because design tutorials are so common these days, some writers are going to assume a lot about their audience. This means they may not list every single step because they assume some people will be able to follow them regardless. I know this because occasionally I’m guilty of it. No matter what, you simply aren’t the best designer you can be if you don’t at least try learn the basics of your craft. So if you don’t already know, learn what the photoshop tools do.

2. Know when You’re Out of Your League
It never hurts to ask questions. A few people may ridicule you or they may ignore you or they may be a little hard on you. That’s okay because your asking the question didn’t do anything but show your dedication to getting things right. However, rather than emailing the writer directly, why not post your thoughts as a comment? Essentially by reading design tutorial blogs we are crowd sourcing instruction, why not also crowd source support for those tutorials? If you post comments on developertutorials.com or my other blog rest assured, someone will answer them. It also takes the pressure off the tutorial writer because they know they don’t have to answer the same question fifteen times.

3. Reread Before You Give Up
The other day I was having some trouble figuring out Subversion. I was following a tutorial but for some reason at the time everything was coming out greek and I could not figure out the techniques I was trying to learn. I didn’t give up, I didn’t ask questions but somehow I still got everything working. How? I walked away.

The next day I came back and followed the same tutorial word for word and it worked. The only thing that had changed between the first day and the second day was me. I had new perspective and things started to make sense that hadn’t before. I realized I had skipped a few words that turned out to be critical, I had misinterpreted other sections and a few things I was able to guess at. Remember when your people used to tell you to put a study sheet under your pillow the night before an exam? This is because, contrary to popular belief, you still think in your sleep and sometimes the subconscious can solve problems passively without your being aware.

4. You Do Not Suck at Photoshop
No matter what your profession or hobby is, if you aren’t confident about your own prowess, people are less-likely to believe in you. In “Five Point Form: Mastering Professionalism as a Freelance Designer” I talked about this a bit…

Another thing I’ve learned is that most people are completely incapable from recognizing real talent from anything else that might be put in front of them. If they aren’t designers, they don’t think like designers and they don’t really know what makes one designer better than another. Thus, they need to be convinced. I’ve seen people who choose horrible color palettes and layouts make upwards of $10K while people making photoshop designs that are nothing short of brilliant make pennies. The average client is waiting on you to tell them that you’re great, that you know your stuff and to prove it to the best of their understanding. This is why presenting yourself with confidence (not arrogance) is key to getting class “A” projects.

The bottom line is you need to muster up confidence, this will lead to trying new things and making bold creative decisions that can’t be taught. So don’t believe the hype, you do not suck a photoshop!

Ultimately, we all need to be patient with each other. If a tutorial isn’t 100% up to par, don’t try to demean the person who is essentially offering a free service. Make suggestions. A few people have asked me flat out to revisit my posts on how to Design a Wordpress Tutorial from Scratch. They were polite, and brought up valid critiques that made me realize I didn’t cover things as well as I should have. As a result I’ll be revisiting that series later this month.

It just so happens that are a few projects in this space already….

ThemeDreamer is plug-in extension for DreamWeaver that allows users to open Wordpress themes in the DreamWeaver environment and edit them as if they were normal XHTML. It’s a truly powerful extension and only serves to make me question more why Adobe insists on ignoring this market. Something like this should be built right in!

Yvoschaap’s WpThemeGen is probably the most popular app in this space. It allows users to create Wordpress themes online and then download them for use immediately! If Adobe were particularly smart they’d be looking into this space too, web based graphic design apps are about to explode. Just ask A.viary

WPpal.com is the competitor to Yvoschaap’s web app. It’s somewhat versatile allowing you to upload and suggest themes for inclusion in the editor but is by no means a solution for a power user.

While all these solutions are great for amateurs, advanced users still dream of the day where there will be a DreamWeaver-like application for Wordpress and other CMS’.

Gears. There’s a lot of buzz surrounding Gears support. Some people expect that this means Wordpress 2.6 will enable users to do offline blogging. However, it’s really there more to facilitating faster blogging by downloading static page content (like CSS, icons, etc) to the user’s computer. Since they will be locally available, there will be less server requests, which is great for people with slow connections.

Identicons. Administrators will have the ability to assign a default avatar from a wider range of choices, along with other options. One cool new addition is Identicons, a way to generate unique geometric avatars based on a commenter’s IP address. Let’s face it, even though Gravatars are fun, the vast majority of Internet users don’t have them, and having Identicons is a fantastic idea to bridge the gap. Look at the comments section of creator Don Park’s blog for samples.

wp-config.php. Soon, you’ll be able to move around wp-config.php up to one level above the Wordpress installation. This fueled speculation that you may do multiple WP install using just wp-config.php file. We shall see.

“Press This” bookmarklet. This useful but under-utilized feature disappeared from Wordpress with version 2.5, but it’s set to make a comeback in a big way. This bookmarklet can be used to “insta-blog” existing content on the Internet to make publishing faster and easier. Like if you saw a funny video on YouTube, a quick click on “Press This” will automatically configure a blog post with the embedded video. The same can apply to text and pictures. It will be interesting to see it in action, and it’s especially useful for live bloggers.

Post revisions. I tend to edit posts a lot, sometimes even long after they’re published (either because of typos, new updates, SEO tweaking, or just random stylistic revisions). If you’re anything like me, you’ll be happy about the upcoming post revisions management. And if you made a boo-boo accidentally deleting some parts, well, this feature can act like System Restore does in Windows. More details and screen caps here.

Word count. WordPress.com’s blogs enjoy the benefit of having a word count at the bottom of the post editor. It’s very useful for bloggers who have a word count quota to meet, or over-zealous ones that tend to ramble a bit (which happens to everyone at one point or another, I’m sure). This might just be added into the self-hosted WP 2.6 as well.

Checkbox selection. A nice usability improvement will be the ability to use Shift-Click in selecting/deselecting checkboxes for easier post, category, tag, page, comments and media management. Similar to Gmail in concept, choosing portions of a list for bulk editing becomes much faster. I’m thinking this will especially come in handy with comment spam, and thank goodness for that.

Of course, other than these, we’re all hoping for better security and closure with bug fixes. For a list of other things you can expect in this upcoming version, you can visit the Wordpress Codex. At the current rate of 9% completion, it’s still a long way to go. Thankfully, I’m patient.

Recently, it just added a candle on its cake, and to mark its first birthday, they dropped the Google branding and changed the name to simply “Gears”. It’s their way of showing that this isn’t just the search giant’s project, but more of an open community development to push the web’s boundaries. Aside from allowing web apps to run offline, Gears will be focusing on creating new functionalities for browsers. It’s really a very clever move. Instead of developing a new “Google Browser” from scratch, they are leveraging existing ones that already have high market penetration by offering a plugin that extend their capabilities.

Over the past few days, there have been a lot of announcements about Gears, the biggest of which is MySpace’s adoption of Gears for their users’ mail. Aside from having access to it offline which makes retrieval much faster, it now has added search and sort functions. From the point of view of MySpace, one of the great things about it is that it lessens the computational load on their servers, now that data access is a local chore for the user’s computer. Let’s hope they put that newfound server breathing room to good use.

Another third party application supporting Gears is Wordpress in version 2.6. Now you can manage your blog offline, and faster. Your workflow will no longer be affected (too much) by the bane called “slow Internet connection”. A caveat: Don’t use Gears if you’re using a public computer as this might lead to potential privacy and security issues.

As for support, Gears is reaching for the stars. Development for Firefox 3 compatibility is ongoing, and it already supports Firefox 1.5 up to the latest version 2 release, as well as Internet Explorer. Mac users will also be enjoying Safari support, and Opera is onboard as well. Currently, Gears can run on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Windows Mobile platforms.

You can install the Gears add-on from http://gears.google.com/.

Actually something does happen, Wordpress resets the password internally (in the MySQL database) but the link that it sent you to activate that password fails to connect with the database effectively locking you out of your blog. In this scenario, at least for me, all the potentially viable solutions lead to dead ends.

Although it should’ve, launching the database manager to reset the password manually didn’t work. I tried doing this in various ways including this method from Codex, this one from Watching The Net and this one from Thought Outflux. But none of them worked!

Opening up wp-config.php and trying to reset the password there didn’t work there either.

I was at a loss as to what to do. That is until I found the Village Idiot Emergency Password Recovery software. Using it is simple:

1. 1. Download the script from Village Idiot WordPress Emergency Password Script.
2. 2. Unpack the downloaded zip file.
3. 3. Upload the file emergency.php to the root of your WordPress installation (the same directory that contains wp-config.php).
4. 4. In your browser, open http://example.com/emergency.php.
5. 5. As instructed, enter the administrator username (usually admin) and the new password, then click Update Options. A message is displayed noting the changed password. An email is sent to the blog administrator with the changed password information.
6. 6. Delete emergency.php from your server when you are done. Do not leave it on your server as someone else could use it to change your password.

For whatever reason this worked flawlessly where the other methods failed and I was able to regain access to my wordpress blog and set the password to something I’ll (hopefully) never forget again. I’m not ruling out operator error on the other methods but the aptly titled Village Idiot software makes the process fool-proof.

Note: Keep in mind that all of these options will only work if you are the site administrator or have direct access to the server at which the blog is hosted.

1. Quickly Find Page/Post ID

One question people often ask is how to find a Page or Post ID when you’re using custom permalinks. Custom permalinks rewrite your URLs to be easier to read and memorable. Finding the ID of a post is not as tricky as it looks. Simply log into to your admin panel and click “Manage” then select either posts or pages. Find the item that you need the ID of and click your post to edit it. In the navigation bar of your browser, you will see a IRL for editing this post. At the very end of this URL you’ll find your post or page ID number!

2. Custom Front Page

Another common problem is people having trouble figuring out how to create a custom front page that doesn’t look exactly like the rest of their blog. This has never been too obvious but it is simple enough to do.

1. 1. Open a blank document in a text editor. Then paste the following codes in it:

   	<?php
   	/*
   	Template Name: YourCustomPageTemplateName
   
   	*/
   	?>
   
   	<html>
   

2. 2. Save the new page template as a .php file. Something like static.php but make sure you do not call it page.php because that file already exists as part of your theme. Then upload it to your hosting account in the root folder of your current WordPress theme (http://yourblog/blog/wp-content/themes/default. Where default is the active theme.).
3. 3. Now you can design this page however you wish either in your text editor or in the ‘Design’ tab of Wordpress. I usually copy and paste everything I want to keep from the preexisting page.php that I want to keep, leaving out things like the sidebar and footer.
4. 4. When you create a new page under ‘Write’ you will notice a new area below the content area called “Page Template”.

   

   Here you will select ‘YourCustomPageTemplateName’. When you publish it, only this page will look like your design for ’static.php’ or whatever you called your custom page theme.

5. 5. To set this as the front page click ‘Options’ then the ‘Reading’ subpanel. Choose the Static Page option, specify your new custom page as the front page. To see this in action click here.

3. Password Protect Wordpress

A growing trend is to use Wordpress as a CMS to sell premium content. This means the owner may want certain sections of their blog to be free, while the rest is a paid premium. For example http://www.wpdesigner.com/ is a wordpress theme site that offers a free content but only people who subscribe get the premium content. How is this done? You’ll need to password protect wordpress. Here are some options for doing that:

Password Protect by User level - allows you to create member classes that can have different content privileges than other classes. (ex. premium subscribers)
.htaccess Password Generator - a free way to protect your content, this option password protects EVERYTHING
Bravenet - an inexpensive solution that offers protection for sites that it hosts

4. Protect from the ‘Digg Efect’ with HTML

Has Digg brought your site to a grinding halt? Are you sick of waking up to find out your site has been down for hours and you’ve had no idea? WP Super Cache will save your page from the hundreds of visitors per second that Digg can bring by caching pages and serving less server heavy html pages.

5. Stop Hackers

Occasionally you may attract some unwanted attention to your blog from either people jealous of your success or people just looking to cause damage. How can you discourage people from hacking your site? Try the following:

1. Protect the Admin Folder - This folder is the door to the rest of your blog so putting up a fortified fence will help prevent attacks.
2. Deny Access to Other Folders - Many web hosts by default allow people to browse a folder if there is no default index.html file. Adding a blank index.html file to these folders will add an extra level of protection.
3. Remove the Wordpress Version - Hackers look for vulnerabilities that they sometimes know exist in specific versions of your CMS, if they can’t figure out what version you’re using it will make it that much harder for them to know which vulnerabilities to exploit. Try this plugin which does exactly that.

So far I’ve released two themes: Tech Blogger and Unstandard Remix). A third, my first completely original theme, is still in development but I released it early for the sake of my tutorial.

What do you need to do when you’re releasing your first theme be it modified or bespoke? Here’s a checklist:

• Include a readme.txt file. This file should contain installation instructions, release info and any notes you want the reader to be aware of before using your theme. It really sucks when novices are downloading themes only to be 100% confused by what they’ve downloaded. It only means that they may delete your theme and download another one that they can more easily digest. If your goal is maximum adoption, that’s not the route you want to go.
• Test it. Think of every scenario you can possibly remember from your own blog use. Try to be the use, do all the things that you think no one would ever do because (rest assured) that person is out there. Are all your links functioning? Are all your pages displaying correctly? If not, is your 404.php page popping up when it should? Make sure you’ve thought of EVERY possible scenario before you release your theme. I can’t tell you how annoying it is download a theme that you like only to spend the next few hours debugging it to make it truly functional.



• Organize it. You want your theme to be well organized so that it doesn’t take any longer than necessary to install and use it. Put your actual theme in a parent folder labeled ‘theme’ so the user can just drag and drop. Place any plug-ins or widgets your theme uses in a parent folder called ‘plugins’ so that the user can do the same. If you’re including .psd label those in a folder that tells the user what it is.
• Compress it. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a file host that makes it easy to share uncompressed folders. This is because a folder is a directory and if you upload it virtually any service online it will be treated like a directory (if accepted at all). Compress the file as either a .zip, .sit, .gzip or .tar.gz file. This will make the files faster to download and it will allow the user to download with one click instead of several
• Publish it. Where will your theme live online? Do you want it on your own web server or do you want it hosted on at repository like themes.wordpress.net? I prefer to use repositories or file hosting services like mediafire.com
• Announce it. Unless a lot of people read your bog or visit your website, there’s no way for people to know what you’ve done. If you’ve posted your theme to a repository like themes.wordpress.net then the job is already done. However, you should tell your friends and submit it to some other sites so that the world is aware.

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.

In “The Anatomy of a Wordpress Theme” we noted that Wordpress needs certain files for your theme to function properly. Here’s that list again:

1. 404 Template = 404.php
2. Archive Template = archive.php
3. Archive Index Page = archives.php
4. Comments Template = comments.php
5. Footer Template = footer.php
6. Header Template = header.php
7. Links = links.php
8. Main Template = index.php
9. Page Template = page.php
10. Popup Comments Template = comments-popup.php
11. Post Template = single.php
12. Search Form = searchform.php
13. Search Template = search.php
14. Sidebar Template = sidebar.php
15. Stylesheet = style.css

As you may have noticed, the items listed in bold are the only items we’ve created in our lessons thus far and there is still a lot of work to be done! Anything struck through is optional therefore this lesson won’t cover it but I have linked to pages where you can read about them on your own. While I can’t go into complete detail I will highlight some major points about each and then I’ll give you links to four sites that break the process down in detail and more thoroughly:

single.php

Single.php is the file referenced when someone clicks on the permalink for one of your posts. Thus it is the template for displaying a single post on your blog. On most blogs single.php an index.php are very similar except that in addition to querying <? the content(); ?> we also have to query the comments page. We do this just before we close the loop with:

	<?php comments_template(); ?>

page.php

Page.php is the template for any page in your theme that doesn’t have it’s own .php template or that is not a blog entry. This is also the template for the static “Pages” that you create within the Wordpress Admin panel. It is usually also just like index.php except that it doesn’t include the loop or the_content().

links.php

Ignores Page content and instead displays your links using get_links_list.

404.php

Where you users land when they follow a bad link on your blog or click through to something that’s been removed. Codex offers some advice….

While you work hard to make sure that every link actually goes to a specific web page on your site, there is always a chance that a link clicked will slam dunk and become a famous 404 ERROR PAGE NOT FOUND. Some errors are avoidable, you should regularly check and double check all your links. Also, if you are deleting a popular but out-of-date post, consider deleting the body of the post, and replacing it with a link referring visitors to the new page.

This concludes “Designing and Coding a Wordpress theme from Scratch” . This guide was written as a starting point and a reference guide I can always be contacted at jongos [at] gmail if you are having trouble or need advice. Alternatively I’ve compiled a list of resources that I often reference when creating themes below.

In this tutorial I mentioned a theme that I was developing quite a bit. You can download it along with the PSD used to create it here. Keep in mind that the version you’re downloading is an early beta release. It’s bulky, clunky, not very pretty under the covers and has a mind of it’s own so I’m dubbing it the Rosie O Donnell release. Feel free to give me feedback on it, use it to double check your own code, or modify it to suit your needs.

DOWNLOAD THE AQUA MARINA WORDPRESS THEME

Stepping_Into_Templates
HTML to XHTML
So You Want To Create Wordpress Themes
From XHTML/CSS to Wordpress
Tamba2’s Guide
Slizing a Wordpress Theme

Things a Blogger has to Contend With

1. Time-consuming. Serious bloggers put in a lot of hours everyday just to be able to keep abreast of the latest in their niche and churn out relevant posts. Updates are usually posted on a daily basis, but it really depends on the nature of the blog. Try to find your own rhythm and stick to it. If you can’t, hire someone competent to write for you.

2. Not every business is blog-friendly. There are some niche markets that are really compatible with blogs, and others that just isn’t the right match (at least not yet). It’s all about Internet demographics and your target audience. Although people over 40 are spending more time online, it’s still the younger people who dominate the scene. There’s also the issue of location, as in some countries Internet penetration isn’t high enough for business blogging to be feasible. Again, there’s a big “YET”.

3. Naysayers. In all the things you do, there will always be critics hounding you (and sometimes it’s yourself). Although blogging has been around for a long while, in terms of technology, its application as a business tool has only been recently explored, and people fear what they do not know. Their comments are best taken with a grain of salt. Use them as a way of making reality checks, but don’t let them become too much of a distraction.

4. Info overload. One thing you have to be wary about when blogging is saying too much. With the pressure and excitement of putting things out there, something might slip by that’s better kept as a company secret. Also, do check all your facts before publishing anything as whatever goes on the blog does not only reflect on the author but the entire company as well. For opinion columns, a disclaimer notice is usually found on the sidebar as a legal precaution.

5. No direct earnings. Business blogging is different from blogging as a business. The former is using blogging as a tool to promote an existing business, while the latter uses blogging to earn revenue (from ads, affiliate marketing, etc) by writing about certain topics like magazines or news sites. Business bloggers, for the most part, don’t really count on their blogs for direct earnings, because the benefits are largely intangible. However, this is not a hard and fast rule as there are many enterprising bloggers out there you can emulate, if you should choose to play it both ways.

Do you have a business that uses a blog? How has your experience been so far?