Articles tagged as “WordPress” [ page 2 ]

PHP and JavaScript Fallbacks for Your Public Feedburner Count

With the recent Feedburner service outage, many sites across the Web experienced severe drops in their Feedburner subscriber counts. Apparently, Google is requiring all Feedburner accounts to be transferred over to Google by the end of February. In the midst of this mass migration, chaotic subscriber data has been reported to include everything from dramatic count drops and fluctuating reach statistics to zero-count values and dreaded “N/A” subscriber-count errors. Obviously, displaying erroneous subscriber-count data on your site is not a good thing. Fortunately, there are several ways to ensure that this doesn’t happen. Over at ...

Time for a New Design?

As you may know, Perishable Press was redesigned only several months ago. As much as I enjoy the transparent imagery of the Quintessential theme (opens new window or tab), I find it too distracting and complicated for everyday use. So I have redesigned, yet again. The new theme is called “Requiem” (opens new window or tab) and is return to my minimalist roots (opens new window or tab). There is something calming and yet energizing ...

Critical Review of Dyasonhat’s Premium Smart Sort WordPress Plugin

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. About the Smart Sort plugin There are now two different versions of the Smart Sort plugin. The first version is a free WordPress plugin that provides advanced sorting capabilities ...

French Version of Contact Coldform Released

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. Update: The French translation of the ...

Feedburner Alternative: Homegrown Feed Statistics for Your Blog

If, for whatever reason, you don’t want to use Feedburner to track your feed statistics, this article describes a relatively simple, “roll-your-own” alternative. Instead of redirecting your feed traffic through Feedburner, keep your original feed URLs and place the following code into a file named “feed_stats.php” (or whatever) and upload to your server: Next, create a log file called “feed_stats.log” and enable write permissions via 755 or 777. After uploading the log file to a choice location on your server, ...

WordPress Custom Fields, Part II: Tips and Tricks

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 ...

WordPress Custom Fields, Part I: The Basics

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 ...

Redirect WordPress Individual Category Feeds to Feedburner via HTAccess

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.. Initial Setup As we are redirecting our ...

Miscellaneous Code Snippets for WordPress, Windows, and Firefox

One of the original purposes of Perishable Press involved serving as a “virtual dumpster” for all of my miscellaneous code snippets. Over time, I continued elaborating to greater degrees on the various code recipes that I was posting, until eventually those brief snippet posts evolved into complete, richly detailed articles (at least from my point of view). Now that I enjoy the luxury of writing for an incredible audience, I try to avoid posting anything that doesn’t include an accompanying explanation. “If it’s worth posting, it’s worth explaining,” I always say. When you have people ...

Perfect WordPress Title Tags Redux

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 ...

Valid, SEO-Friendly Post Translation Links

Ever wanted to provide automatic language translations of your web pages without installing another plugin? Here is a valid, SEO-friendly technique that takes advantage of Google’s free translation service. All you need is a PHP-enabled server and you’re good to go. Just copy and paste the following code into the desired location in your page template and enjoy the results. Once in place, this code will produce translation links for eight common languages for every page on your site. Grab, gulp and go: &langpair=en%7Ces" rel="nofollow">Translate this page to Espanol...

Backwards-Compatible Spam and Delete Buttons for WordPress

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: // add this code to your theme's function.php file:...

How to Write Valid URL Query String Parameters

When building web pages, it is often necessary to add links that require parameterized query strings. For example, when adding links to the various validation services, you may find yourself linking to an accessibility checker, such as the freely available Cynthia service: WCAG Accessibility Check Another example is seen when linking your feed to a feed validation service: RSS Feed Validation And one final example showing a more complex query string: Bookmark at Delicious As is, however, these links won’t validate due to a number of issues. Let’s fix ‘em up with a few quick-and-easy changes. Replace ampersands with & One of the reasons these links aren’t ...

Fully Valid, SEO-Friendly Social Media Links for WordPress

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 ...

Fruit Loop: Separate any Number of Odd and Even Posts from any Category in WordPress

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 ...

WordPress Feedburner HTAccess Redirect for Default (Non-Permalink) Feed URLs

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 ...

Perishable Press Redesign 2008

New design in effect at Perishable Press. With this 17th incarnation of the site, I drew heavily upon psychedelic influences, spiked it with the essence of the previous dark minimalist theme, and mixed in a healthy dose of cutting-edge JavaScript and PHP functionality. I will be writing more on the details of the new design very soon. In the meantime, I encourage you to check things out and let me know what you think. For this design, I went to great lengths to ensure pixel-perfect precision across ...

WordPress Basics — Series Summary

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 Option...

Multiple Loops and Multiple Columns with WordPress, (X)HTML and CSS

Recently, I have been getting a lot of requests for multiple-loop configurations in WordPress. It seems that multiple-column, multiple-loop configurations are in high demand these days, especially ones that display posts like this: First column, first loop: display posts #1-5 Second column, second loop: display posts #6-10 Third column, third loop: display posts #11-15 Using WordPress and a little CSS, this configuration is relatively easy to accomplish. Let’s cut right to the chase.. Step 1: Multiple-Loop, Multiple Column PHP Configuration The first thing we want to do is replace the standard WordPress loop with the following code: // FIRST LOOP: display posts 1 thru 5...

Secrets of the Conditional Tag Revealed: How to Gain More Control Over Your WP Templates

More and more these days, we are all finding WordPress being used as a content management system. It shouldn’t be too tough to see why — highly customizable, a community growing in size and knowledge, and a plethora of options in the way of plugins and simple yet highly effective PHP edits. Thanks to these, you have access to an open source script that allows you to show what you want, when you want, where you want, and how you want in virtually no time. But what happens when you only want a simple variation from one page to the next? ...

WordPress Plugin: Authenticate Lite

Authenticate Lite is a follow-up version of the original Authenticate custom-content plugin for WordPress. Just as with the full version of Authenticate, Authenticate Lite enables universal and/or targeted inclusion of custom content for both feeds and posts. Ideal for adding copyright information, distribution policy, thank-you messages, custom links, special offers, etc. Custom content may be added to any location within posts or feeds — before, after, or even within post content. This highly flexible content-addition plugin works great on all 2+ versions of WordPress (i.e., 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.5+). Usage examples include: Selective display of targeted advertisements Invite readers to ...

Horizontally Sequenced Display Order for WordPress Posts in Two Columns

Most WordPress-powered blogs display posts in sequential order within a single column. Like this, for example: But what if you wanted to display your posts in two columns, sequentially ordered from left to right? For example: This is easily accomplished using two default loops and the rewind_posts() function. The first loop will display the posts in the first column, while the second loop will display the posts in the second column. To do this, we use PHP’s modulus operator to filter out every ...

Choosing the Best Title Separators

While writing my previous article on creating the perfect WordPress title tags, I deliberately avoided discussing the use of separators in titles. I feel that the topic is worthy of its own article, enabling a more thorough exploration of the details. Title separators are the symbols, punctuation, and other characters used to distinguish between various parts of the page title. For example, a title may include the blog name, post title and blog description, with each element separated by a hyphen. Any Google search will reveal that some of the most commonly ...

WordPress Error Fix: Unable to Parse URL

Note: This information is intended primarily for WordPress versions previous to 2.3, but may be applicable in other versions as well. For those of you running an older version of WordPress that is generating errors such as: Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse ...

How to Generate Perfect WordPress Title Tags without a Plugin

Keeping an eye on all things WordPress, I have noticed an ongoing fascination with configuring the ultimate WordPress tags. Many bloggers use various plugins to generate differently configured tags depending on particular page views. A good example of this is seen in the All in One SEO Pack, which, among many other things, enables users to specify custom titles for several different types of pages. While there is nothing wrong with this approach, some of us prefer to ...