The other day, my server crashed and Perishable Press was unable to connect to the MySQL database. Normally, when WordPress encounters a database error, it delivers a specific error message similar to the following:

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Importing and displaying external RSS feeds on your site is a great way to share your online activity with your visitors. If you are active on Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, or Tumblr, your visitors will enjoy staying current with your updates. Many social media sites provide exclusive feeds for user-generated content that may be imported and displayed on virtually any web page. In this article, you will learn three ways to import and display feed content on your WordPress-powered website — without installing yet another plugin.

Update: This article applies to older versions of WordPress (less than 2.8). For WordPress 2.8 and better, please check out this post at Digging into WordPress. Thanks!

On the menu for this tutorial:

• Importing and displaying feeds with WordPress & Magpie (simple method)
• Importing and displaying feeds with WordPress & Magpie (advanced method)
• Importing and displaying feeds with SimplePie (WordPress not required)

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After several months of working diligently behind the scenes, I am officially announcing my latest project: a new book on WordPress. Without giving away too much at this time, here are some facts about it:

• It’s focused on WordPress
• It’s co-authored between Chris Coyier and myself
• It’s going to be awesome

Chris and I have been working on the book for several months now and are very pleased with the results. Both of us have some — albeit limited — knowledge of the publishing world. Truth be told, we don’t have a publisher yet and aren’t quite sure about how to go about finding one.

Does anyone happen to know more about finding a good publisher? Are there any publishers out there interested in talking about this book? Any other folks have any ideas or advice? Please share your ideas in the comments area below or contact me directly.

In addition to your choice collection of “Share This” links, you may also want to provide visitors with a link that enables them to quickly and easily send the URL permalink of any post to their friends via email. This is a great way to increase your readership and further your influence. Just copy & paste the following code into the desired location in your page template:

<a href="mailto:?subject=Fresh%20Linkage%20@%20Perishable%20Press&amp;body=Check%20out%20<?php the_permalink(); ?>%20from%20Perishable%20Press" title="Send a link to this post via email" rel="nofollow">Share this post via email</a>

Within the code, you will need to edit both instances of the string “Perishable%20Press” to reflect your own site name. Note that the “%20” is the encoded equivalent of a blank space, and is required to ensure validation of parameterized query strings. As is, the code will generate an email that is populated with the following information:

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WordPress for Business Bloggers by Packt Publishing was a pleasure to read because it approaches many of the important aspects of WordPress from a slightly different perspective: that of the “business blogger”. The book is aimed at the aspiring business blogger who wants to use WordPress to run a successful business blog. The book claims to skip the basics and jump right into the meat of transforming WordPress into a lean, mean business blogging machine. While this may be true for the book’s target audience, the technical aspects of WordPress covered in the book are familiar ground to the seasoned WordPress user.

Digging into the book, readers will find the expected WordPress topics explored from a business-blogging point of view. The books moves along at a quick pace, and quickly makes the case for using WordPress to achieve their business blogging goals. The book then presents a case-study that serves as a working example throughout the remainder of the book. After a quick romp through some basic design and coding principles, the book covers the essentials on integrating image and video content into your blog. The following chapter emphasizes the importance of content in general, and provides some timeless advice on using WordPress to deliver superior content.

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Here at Perishable Press, the number of posts listed in my archives is rapidly approaching the 700 mark. While this is good news in general, displaying such a large number of posts in an effective, user-friendly fashion continues to prove challenging. Unfortunately, my current strategy of simply dumping all posts into an unordered list just isn’t working. I think it’s fair to say that archive lists containing more than like 50 or 100 post titles are effectively useless and nothing more than a usability nightmare. With growing numbers of blogs building up massive collections of posts, finding better ways to display vast quantities of archived material becomes increasingly important.

One solution that seems popular involves breaking the archives down into various categories, tags, and time periods. This provides meta-context to each list of titles and usually eliminates the need for any hideously long post listings. This solution works well, especially when the different category lists are displayed adjacently in multiple vertical columns. For example, a blog with three categories would do well to display each category’s archive listings in its own vertical column. Something like this:

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After hearing about the recently released “premium” version of Dyasonhat’s Smart Sort Plugin for WordPress, I just had to give it a try. Occasionally working on projects requiring customized ordering of posts, I like to keep my utility belt well-equipped with any plugins or code techniques that will facilitate the process of man-handling post order. In this article, I discuss my experience with WP Smart Sort Premium.

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Several months after the release of the Arabic and Spanish versions of Contact Coldform, I am pleased to announce the release of a French translation of the plugin. The new French translation is graciously provided by Tony Tohme, who is also helping with the upcoming Russian translation of the Coldform. Thank you, Tony! :)

To download the French version of Contact Coldform, check out the plugin’s home page, where you will find additional information, future updates, and much more.

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As we have seen in our previous post, WordPress Custom Fields Part I, custom fields provide an excellent way to add flexible content to your posts and pages. By assigning various types of content to different custom fields, you gain complete control over when, where, and how to display the associated information. For example, sub-headings may be displayed in the sidebar, footnotes may be consolidated into a single region, post images may be displayed before the post title, and so on. In this follow-up article, we will review the basics of custom fields and then jump into a few custom-field tips and tricks.

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I recently developed a theme that makes heavy use of WordPress’ custom fields. The custom-field functionality of WordPress makes it possible to rig up just about any customized layout quickly and easily. Custom fields enable designers to organize post content into different sections, making it possible to create non-linear page layouts, with different types of content easily removed from the normal post loop and relocated to different parts of the document. This organizational and design flexibility has the added benefit of making it super-easy to update your content, redesign your theme, and handle blog maintenance in general. In the first part of this mini-series, we walk through the process of implementing and using custom fields; then, in part two, I will share some delicious tips and tricks to help you get the most out of everything that custom fields have to offer.

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Time for another Feedburner redirect tutorial! In our previous FeedBurner-redirect post, I provide an improved HTAccess method for redirecting your site’s main feed and comment feed to their respective Feedburner URLs. In this tutorial, we are redirecting individual WordPress category feeds to their respective FeedBurner URLs. We will also look at the complete code required to redirect all of the above: the main feed, comments feed, and of course any number of individual category feeds. Let’s jump into it..

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In my previous article on WordPress title tags, How to Generate Perfect WordPress Title Tags without a Plugin, We explore everything needed to create perfect titles for your WordPress-powered site. After discussing the functionality and implementation of various code examples, the article concludes with a “perfect” title-tag script that covers all the bases. Or so I thought..

Some time after the article had been posted, Mat8iou chimed in with a couple of ways to improve thie script by cleaning up tag names and specifying page numbers for archive views. Apparently, by replacing the $tag variable with WordPress’ built-in single_tag_title();, titles for Tag-Archive page views will display the tag’s “pretty” name rather than the unformatted version. For example, the tag for Pink Floyd will be displayed correctly as “Pink Floyd” rather than the less friendly “pink-floyd”. And so on.

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Recently, Joost de Valk shared an excellent technique for adding spam and delete buttons to comments on your WordPress-powered blog. The idea is to save administration time by providing links to either “spam” or “delete” individual comments without having to navigate through the WordPress admin area. Joost provides the following plug-n-play solution:

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With the explosion of social media, networking, and bookmarking services, there are a zillion ways to add “Share This Post” functionality to your WordPress-powered sites. In addition to the myriad services and plugins, we can also add these links directly, using nothing more than a little markup and a few choice PHP snippets. Such individual links provide full control over the selection, layout, and styling of each link without requiring the installation of yet another WordPress plugin.

This article shares SEO-friendly code snippets for ten of the most popular social media sites using completely valid XHMTL-Strict markup. All of the following code snippets feature:

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Recently, I discussed how to implement a horizontally sequenced display order for WordPress posts in two columns. In that tutorial, I explain how to separate odd and even posts using a dual-loop configuration and PHP’s modulus operator. Such technique serves well a variety of configurational scenarios, but is limited to the display of the default (admin-specified) number of posts from all categories. In this tutorial, we adapt this odd-and-even loop configuration to accommodate a much greater degree of customization. Specifically, we will focus on separating any number of odd and even posts from any specific category or group of categories. Several additional configurational customizations will also be covered.

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Recently, a client wanted to deliver her blog feed through Feedburner to take advantage of its excellent statistical features. Establishing a Feedburner-delivered feed requires three things: a valid feed URL, a Feedburner account, and a redirect method. For permalink-enabled WordPress feed URLs, configuring the required redirect is straightforward: either install the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin or use an optimized HTAccess technique. Unfortunately, for sites without permalinks enabled, the Feedsmith plugin is effectively useless, and virtually all of the HTAccess methods currently available on the Web are designed for permalink-enabled configurations. In this article, we will modify our existing HTAccess technique to work with default WordPress feed URLs.

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One of my first article series, the WordPress Basics series walks beginning users through some of the most rudimentary but essential WordPress tasks. From logging into the WordPress Admin and creating posts to setting post options and uploading images, the WordPress Basics series takes absolute newbies from zero to published in less than an hour.

• WordPress Basics: Login to Admin
• WordPress Basics: Publishing Posts
• WordPress Basics: Saving and Editing Posts
• WordPress Basics: Setting the Date, Author, and other Post Options
• WordPress Basics: Uploading and Displaying Images

Once you feel comfortable working with the WordPress Admin, I invite you to explore the many other useful WordPress articles here at Perishable Press:

• Explore the WordPress Tag Archive
• Explore the WordPress Category Archive

And, to stay current with future WordPress content from Perishable Press, I encourage you to subscribe to the Perishable Press RSS feed.