BuiltByBeck

Best and FREE Twitter icons and Themes

2012-02-22T13:53:00.001-05:00

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21 WordPress Plugins for Safer, Smoother, and Better User Registration

2012-02-22T13:52:00.001-05:00

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WordPress Tavern: Creating A Simpler Login URL

2012-02-22T13:51:00.001-05:00

Published on Planet Wordpress | shared via feedly mobile

While most users of WordPress will know that to login to the back-end, you'll need to visit /WP-Admin/ or wp-login.php, but what if you could change that to make it simpler to remember? WPBeginner has a small tutorial complete with a code snippet that you place within your .htaccess file that enables you to rewrite the WordPress Login URL into a custom URL. Telling clients to visit yoursite.com/login is a lot easier than that gobbily gook everyone has to deal with by default. Personally, I've just bookmarked the WP-Admin URL for my site and use that instead of remembering anything.

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Make Your WordPress Website More Secure With Secure WordPress

2012-02-02T12:40:00.001-05:00

Published on WordPress Mods | shared via feedly mobile

Make Your WordPress Website More Secure With Secure WordPress from WordPress Mods

The security of your website is something that most WordPress users tend to forgot about. That is, until your site gets hacked. WordPress forum member Kris recently advised that his own website had been hacked despite the website using the latest version of WordPress. It appears that this was caused by vulnerability in a plugin he was using. The whole thing highlights that security should be made top priority, whether your website is big or small.

One plugin I recommend using is by WebsiteDefender. This free plugin lets you correct 11 security issues that the default WordPress installation has such as deactivating error messages in the login page and removing update options for non admins.

For me, the best feature is the ability to remove the version of WordPress you are using from all areas except for admin. This is particularly useful for those of you who are using an older version of WordPress (though you really should upgrade).

What surprises me is that these security issues have not been addressed in the core version of WordPress. I can't see why non admin would need to see core, theme and plugin updates anyway so why show them. Until these issues have been fixed in the default version of WordPress, I recommend installing Secure WordPress. It doesn't guarantee your site won't be hacked but at the very least it will discourage would be hackers and make things much more difficult for them.

Good luck,
Kevin

Secure WordPress: Information |

Make Your WordPress Website More Secure With Secure WordPress is a post from: WordPress Mods.

Original Article can be found at Make Your WordPress Website More Secure With Secure WordPress WordPress Mods : WordPress Mods - WordPress Themes, Plugins and Modifications

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Retouch: A Free, Responsive Photo Theme for WordPress

2012-02-02T12:38:00.001-05:00

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Why You Hate The WordPress Text Editor and What To Do About It

2012-02-02T12:37:00.001-05:00

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Display a Different Header Image on Each Page of Your WordPress Site

2012-02-02T12:35:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

Our readers want a simple solution for adding dynamic header images in WordPress - can you help?

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Jigoshop 1.0 Released

2012-02-01T00:01:00.001-05:00

Link: http://www.wpmods.com/jigoshop-1-0-released/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A WPMods %28WordPress Mods%29 (via shareaholic.com)

Understand Caching in WordPress, Part 1: The Basics

2012-01-30T12:53:00.000-05:00

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No More Passwords: Log Into WordPress with a QR Code

2012-01-30T12:50:00.001-05:00

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How To Use Trackbacks In WordPress To Boost Your Blog’s Traffic

2012-01-26T13:24:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

Employ this strategy to get your foot in the door with the A-listers that your blog needs the attention of in order to thrive!

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.htaccess Files for the Rest of Us | Nettuts+

2012-01-24T01:46:00.000-05:00

.htaccess Files for the Rest of Us | Nettuts+

How to Increase Pageviews and Reduce Bounce Rate in WordPress

2012-01-24T01:42:00.000-05:00

How to Increase Pageviews and Reduce Bounce Rate in WordPress

The Most Valuable WordPress Tool You’ll Use This Year Has...

2012-01-24T01:35:00.000-05:00

The Most Valuable WordPress Tool You’ll Use This Year Has...

Screencast Video Tutorials » Design The Background – Part 2

2012-01-22T14:07:00.001-05:00

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Make a Plush Material & Embellish a Custom Logo In It | Photoshop Tutorial by Graphisutra

2012-01-22T14:06:00.001-05:00

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Auto Increment in mysql | Tech Digit | The Digtal Life

2012-01-22T14:05:00.001-05:00

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Create A Sales Page Easily With The Convertible Landing Page WordPress Theme

2012-01-22T14:02:00.001-05:00

Published on WordPress Mods | shared via feedly mobile

Create A Sales Page Easily With The Convertible Landing Page WordPress Theme from WordPress Mods

Elegant Themes announced the release of their newest theme the other day. The Convertible Landing Page lets you easily create sales pages to help you market products.

The main focus of the theme is the in built drag and drop page builder that allows you to create your landing pages using modules. Using the builder you can create unique sales pages without ever having to to edit any code.

You can create a wide range of pages easily. Columns, sliders, pricing tables, buttons, tabs, images and more can be added with just the touch of a button.

Elegant Themes have called each type of content a 'module'. Modules such as horizontal bars, lists, images or text blocks can be added to your page by simply dragging and dropping them into area you want them displayed. You can divide content into 1, 2, 3 or 4 columns and columns can be resized with the click of your mouse. One of the coolest things about the builder is that modules can also be added using short codes too. The theme also comes with its own ajax powered options page that lets you change page elements quickly.

Elegant Themes have clearly designed Convertible with affiliate marketers in mind. This is particularly noticeable by the modules that are included in the theme such as testimonial boxes for quotes from past customers, video embedding for displaying your product video and three different list styles for listing the products biggest strengths.

Convertible is free to all Elegant Themes members. A membership retails for only $39 a year and gives you access to over 70 WordPress designs. It's a great deal for anyone who has multiple WordPress websites.

Thanks,
Kevin

Link: Convertible Landing Page

Create A Sales Page Easily With The Convertible Landing Page WordPress Theme is a post from: WordPress Mods.

Original Article can be found at Create A Sales Page Easily With The Convertible Landing Page WordPress Theme WordPress Mods : WordPress Mods - WordPress Themes, Plugins and Modifications

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How To Make An Email Server On Your Home Computer

2012-01-19T14:53:00.001-05:00

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A Simple WordPress Plugin To Integrate Registration And Login Forms Into Your Design

2012-01-19T14:52:00.001-05:00

Published on WordPress Mods | shared via feedly mobile

A Simple WordPress Plugin To Integrate Registration And Login Forms Into Your Design from WordPress Mods

Front End Registration and Login Forms Plugins is a useful form plugin from WP Mods author Pippin Williamson. The plugin lets you insert a registration form, login form and change password form into any area of your site.

The forms can be added as a widget into your sidebar, footer or any other widget ready area of your website. It can also be inserted into posts and pages using short codes. The plugin does not however change your existing registration and login pages (i.e. wp-register.php and wp-login.php). It was designed to integrate the registration and login form into your existing website design rather than sending them away the default pages.

The plugin has a few settings. You can disable CSS and the icons on the login form. You can also choose what page the user is redirected to after logging in and choose from 5 colour schemes: light, dark, blue, red and green.

The great thing about the forms is that they are only shown if the person isn't logged in. For example, if you place all three widgets on your sidebar, the registration and login forms will show when on the sidebar but when the user logins in these will be replaced by the change password form.

The plugin is free to all premium members of Pippins Plugins. You can get a membership for only $2 for a day or $6 for a month, making this a very affordable solution.

It's a simple plugin but it works great. I recommend checking it out if you are looking for a stylish way of integrating a registration and login form into your website design.

Thanks,
Kevin

Link: Front End Registration and Login Forms Plugins

A Simple WordPress Plugin To Integrate Registration And Login Forms Into Your Design is a post from: WordPress Mods.

Original Article can be found at A Simple WordPress Plugin To Integrate Registration And Login Forms Into Your Design WordPress Mods : WordPress Mods - WordPress Themes, Plugins and Modifications

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Would you like a free server for a year?

2012-01-19T14:48:00.001-05:00

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End Piracy, Not Liberty – Google

2012-01-18T07:35:00.001-05:00

https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

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basic php syntax and variables

2012-01-17T14:20:00.001-05:00

Navigated from Pixel2Life.com: Latest 20 Tutorials | shared via feedly mobile

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awesome html registration form

2012-01-17T14:20:00.000-05:00

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Introduction to php for beginners

2012-01-17T14:17:00.001-05:00

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Setup php development enviroment

2012-01-17T14:17:00.000-05:00

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Ninja Forms: A New Free Plugin for Creating Forms in WordPress

2012-01-17T14:15:00.002-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

Every website needs forms – it's an integral part of visitor/customer communication. However, custom forms can be a downright pain to code. That's why most WordPress users benefit from a plugin that does all the work. Introducing : a new form building plugin that allows you to easily create and customize forms through the WordPress dashboard.

All the magic happens within a drag-and-drop interface that looks like a native part of your WordPress dashboard:

Ninja Forms Features:

Fully customizable CSS – make your form look the way you want.
Create any type of restricted input field by using filters.
Add a spam filter to prevent those pesky bots from filling out your form.
Save form submissions and download them in .xsl format.
Show custom help text for any form field.
Send a completion message to the end-user and to a list of email addresses with the ability to customize the email address this comes from.
Use required fields to ensure that your users fill in important information.
Easily create dropdowns, multi-selects, checkboxs, radio buttons, etc. with the drag and drop interface.
Attach a form to a page or post by simply checking a box, or use our shortcodes and functions to place your form anywhere you want.

Creating a new form is easy and very similar to writing a blog post:

All submissions through your forms are viewable in the dashboard and can be easily exported to a .xsl file for use with other programs when managing your contacts:

…Are you sure this is free?

Yes! is free and available for download from the WordPress plugin repository.

What do you get with NinjaForms Pro?

Ninja Forms Pro is just $30 and gives you access to some pretty cool functionality:

Allow users to create posts/pages/etc. from a front-end form.
Make long forms easier to manage by separating them into sections using multi-part forms.
Give users the option to save their progress and come back to complete the form at a later date.
Access to powerful pre and post processing hooks so you can manipulate the form data however you want.

is probably more than adequate for most regular WordPress users who just need a simple customized form for making a connection with visitors. Give the free version a test drive today and post your mini-review in the comments.

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WordPress Question: How Can You Set Up Customized User Roles?

2012-01-17T14:15:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

Our WordPress Question and Answer sessions continue this week. We're asking WPMU readers to tell us about a tricky WordPress problem they're trying to solve.

The most interesting questions we receive will be published here on the blog, and the author will receive a three month membership at WPMU DEV, free of charge. Please submit your own WordPress question for your chance to win.

Today's WordPress question was submitted by a WPMU reader named Andrew.

Is it possible to create a customized user profile on a WordPress site, where the site owner can specify what each user does and does not have access to? For example:

An administrator profile that does not allow access to page and post editing, or…
A content creator profile that does not allow access to the admin functions in WordPress dashboard

Instead of relying on the standard WordPress User Roles (contributor, author, editor etc.), is it possible to create my own?
-Andrew

Over to you, WordPress ninjas! Does anyone have a suggestion for Andrew? Have you ever tried something similar?

If you can offer any wisdom on this subject, please leave a comment below this article and let us know. You can also check out some of our previous WordPress questions here:

And remember to send us your own WordPress question! There's three months of WPMU DEV lovin' to be won, plus you can connect with WordPress experts to help solve your problems.

_{Photo: Carbon NYC.}

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Create Categories for Your Media with this WordPress Plugin

2012-01-17T14:14:00.003-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

If you're someone who works with your uploaded media more than just once, then the plugin may be of help to you.

This plugin allows you to create media categories, assign media to those categories, and then search the categories, filter by categories, and even automatically insert media from a category into a post with a shortcode.

The Media Categories Plugin in Action

Settings

The main settings page allows you to control which user roles have access to the categories.

Media Categories Button

You will notice a new button under your Media section titled Media Categories.

Add Categories

In order to add categories, you will need to go through the backend section.

Manage Categories – Add Shortcodes

The Manage Categories section is for editing your categories. But you will also notice that each category is assigned a shortcode. Using this shortcode will automatically include all the images from that category into your post.

In the Media Uploader

When you are in the media uploader (when uploading media on the post-new page), you will notice that a new link titled Media Categories shows up in the media uploader beside the Media Library link.

Choosing a Category

When uploading an image in the media uploader, you can choose a category for an image (however, you can't create a new category through the uploader itself – it needs to have already been created).

Categories in the Uploader

Once in the media uploader, you can choose from your categories to find the media in those categories. You can also automatically insert the shortcode for the category, which will insert the images from that category into your post.

Images Via Shortcodes

The one potential drawback of this plugin that I found is that there doesn't appear to be an easy way to style images that are inserted via shortcode. The images simply line up in a column one after another. If using them in a sidebar, this may be all right, however.

In any case, the ability to insert media with shortcodes doesn't seem to be the main selling point for this plugin. The categories themselves are. If you are someone who works with your media files a lot, then having the ability to put them in categories makes a lot of sense.

You can download the

Photo: Film from BigStock

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WordPress Tutorial For Beginners: Additional Screen Options In New Post/Page Screens

2012-01-17T14:14:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

A whole world of bonus features await you...

Please note: this tutorial assumes that you are using WordPress 3.3.1 with the default Twenty Eleven theme installed.

If you read the WordPress tutorial on the Add New Post/Page Screens I published yesterday, the additional Screen Options available to you may have caught your eye.

These bad boys.

So let's remove the mystery and see what these features have to offer us.

Excerpt

By default, WordPress displays excerpts of your blog posts in reverse chronological order on your home page. These post excerpts are also displayed in various other places, like category archives, tag archives, date archives, and so on.

And again, by default, the first 55 words of any given post are used as the excerpt. Here's a screenshot of the most recent post on my blog:

As you can see, the content of the post is cut off mid-sentence. This is somewhat jarring, and there are far better ways to engage with your readers than an arbitrary 55 word post excerpt. That's right – I am critiquing my own blog – getting this matter sorted is on my list, I promise!

Fortunately, you have a couple of options to prevent WordPress' auto-excerpt mangling – one of which is covered by the Excerpt widget. I'll leave the description to the WordPress folk:

I'm not going to get into the SEO and conversion benefits of writing excerpts for your posts (although I will do in the near future, so stay tuned), but including excerpts of your posts are good for many reasons. For one, a custom-written synopsis of your post is far more useful to a reader than the first 55 words of your post.

The display of any excerpts that you write depends entirely upon the settings of your theme. Your theme decides if and when excerpts are displayed. For instance, the Twenty Eleven theme does not utilized post excerpts (although you can alter it to do so). However, WPMU's own custom theme does:

Send Trackbacks

A trackback is a communication method between blogs. In a nutshell, if you link to an external blog post, you can attempt to inform that blog post you have done so. If successful, a link to your post with a small excerpt will be displayed in the comments or trackbacks section of that blog post.

Something like this.

If you want to send a trackback to a blog post, you should look out for a link to a trackback URL on the post itself. Once you have it, just copy and paste it into the Send Trackbacks field and Publish/Update your post.

If there is no trackback URL, the blog probably does not support trackbacks.

You may have also heard of pingbacks. I am not going to get tied up in trying to explain the differences between trackbacks and pingbacks, as they are largely academic. What you do need to know is that all WordPress sites are set up by default to send and receive pingbacks automatically (although this can be changed in the settings). So no to be considered a spammer, you should not submit trackback URLs to WordPress sites, as the job has already been done for you.

Custom Fields

This widget allows to create custom meta-data fields which can then be utilized across your blog. This really isn't beginner's stuff, so I am going to skip over this.

If you would like to dive into the world of Custom Fields, check out this WordPress codex post for further guidance.

Discussion

The functionality of this widget is self-explanatory. Just uncheck the relevant box to disallow comments or trackbacks/pingbacks on the post you are currently working on, and vice versa.

You can turn comments and trackbacks/pingbacks off blog-wide in your general settings, but the above widget will only affect one post.

Comments

If you like to handle comments by blog post, this is one way of doing so. When the Comments widget is activated, you will be able to see and manage all comments for that post only.

Just hover over a comment and your options will appear:

Please note that comments are displayed in the date and time order in which they were left, which is probably not how they are displayed on the blog post itself.

Slug

I'm not entirely sure why this widget exists. It allows you to edit the slug (i.e. the part of the URL that describes what your post is about):

But that can already be easily achieved by Editing the permalink at the top of the screen:

There's a shiny gold star for anyone who understands the point of this widget. Beats me.

Author

We finish off with another straightforward widget that simply allows you to change the author of a post.

Say I wrote up some research notes for a post and saved them as a draft. My good friend Jon Badger then picked up the draft in order to convert my rough notes into a beautifully-worded post. WordPress would automatically assume that the post was written by me, so Jon would need to make the manual adjustment in the Author widget.

That's all there is to it!

But There's More…

Depending on what themes and plugins you have installed, you may have many more Screen Options available to you than I have listed above. So what are your favorite Screen Options widgets, and how do you use them? Let us know in the comments section!

Creative Commons image courtesy of woodleywonderworks

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Daily Tip: Automatically Post Instagram Photos to WordPress

2012-01-15T21:31:00.000-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

The new plugin is one of the most complete solutions for integrating your Instagram account with WordPress. It gives you the ability to set up automatic posting of new images into blog posts.

Here's how it works:

Install the plugin. Log in to Instagram, pick your default WordPress post settings, and you are done. Take a photo or lots on Instagram. The next time someone visits your site, a new post will be created with each photo you take with Instagram.

The plugin includes tons of configurable settings for your posts, including the ability to set the post title, post body text, image size, set a custom image CSS class, post category and post author.

Instagrate also includes a helpful admin feed of all of your incoming Instagram images. This is a great plugin for a photoblogger or anyone who just wants an automatic backup of all of their Instagram photos. it for free the WordPress plugin repository.

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JJAntispam

2012-01-15T20:58:00.001-05:00

Published on Joomla! Extensions Directory - New Extensions | shared via feedly mobile

JJAntispam helps you prevent spam registration on your Joomla website by checking the spammer's signature against the spambusted.com spammer database. If the user that tries to register gets a positive hit, he is denied registration.

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Good-Tutorials - Photoshop: Design a Sleek Facebook Fan Page in Photoshop

2012-01-15T20:56:00.001-05:00

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D-Zig - Create your very own Inline image gallery | Free for webmasters

2012-01-15T20:54:00.001-05:00

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Advanced (yet awesome) pure CSS3 boxes without using images - TutorialsWindow

2012-01-15T20:50:00.001-05:00

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Camera Exposure Infographic – PictureCorrect

2012-01-15T20:49:00.001-05:00

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Simple Facial Manipulation with Layer Mask and Custom Brushes in Photoshop - PSD Vault

2012-01-15T20:48:00.001-05:00

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How To Remove The WordPress Stats Smiley Face

2012-01-15T20:44:00.001-05:00

Published on WordPress Mods | shared via feedly mobile

If you use on your site (formerly released as a stand alone plugin called ), you may be familiar with the smiley face image that it adds to the bottom of every page on your site.

The smiley face is used to help track stats on your page. I'm not a huge fan of it so I looked into how you can remove it. Thankfully, the recent release of JetPack addressed this issue. If you go to the configuration page for JetPack stats (found at http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=jetpack&configure=stats) you will now see an option to hide the smiley image. You simply need to check this box.

Alternatively, you can add this short line of CSS code to your CSS stylesheet (stylesheet.css):

img

span style="color:#cc00cc">#wpstatsspan> span style="color:#00aa00">{span> span style="color:#000000;font-weight:bold">displayspan>span style="color:#00aa00">:span>span style="color:#993333">nonespan>span style="color:#00aa00">;span> span style="color:#00aa00">}span>

Another option which many users used before JetPack was updated with a hide option was . The plugin added the CSS code above to your site header though since the update the easiest solution is just to disable the smiley via the configuration page.

Good luck,
Kevin

How To Remove The WordPress Stats Smiley Face is a post from: WordPress Mods.

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WordPress Plugin Releases for 1/14

2012-01-15T20:43:00.001-05:00

Published on Weblog Tools Collection | shared via feedly mobile

New plugins

allows you to create and maintain events, including complex reoccurring patterns, venue management (with Google maps), calendars and customisable event lists.

will help you to generate CSS3 Button from you WordPress admin simply using a GUI.

lets you simply add Google Adsense to your blog.

is packed with all necessary features you must need to build a e-shop for your single product or a full featured complete market place.

Updated plugins

Akismet filters out your comment and track-back spam for you, so you can focus on more important things.

FoxyPress is a custom plugin made to integrate FoxyCart e-commerce functionality into your WordPress website.

allows you to create native Android and BlackBerry applications from your WordPress site.

PollDaddy allows you to create stunning surveys, polls, and quizzes in minutes.

can be used to determine the number of visits to each post or page available in the site.

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WordPress Tutorial For Beginners: Using The Visual Editor

2012-01-15T20:42:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

At its core, WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS). Although it gives you control over every aspect of design and functionality, websites are nothing without content, and content creation and management are what drives WordPress.

With that in mind, today we are going to take an in-depth look at the WordPress Visual Editor. For beginners, this is a comprehensive guide. Having said that, more experienced WordPress users who read this may be surprised to find a few unfamiliar features that have been hiding in plain sight.

What You See Is What You Get

The WordPress text editor can be divided into three feature sections – the Visual Editor, the HTML Editor, and the Media Uploader. We are only focusing on the Visual Editor today because the other two features really deserve tutorials of their own. They will be covered next week.

The WordPress Visual Editor is known as a WYSIWYG editor. For those of you who don't know, WYSIWYG stands for "What You See Is What You Get". To make sure that you are using the Visual Editor, click the "Visual" tab at the top of the text editor box.

The formatting of the text and media you see in the Visual editor is what you will ultimately see in your published post. Using the delightful Yorkshire Lorem Ipsum Generator (which will likely mean nothing to you unless you are from the UK), you can see an example of what the Visual Editor is able to produce:

You may have noticed the little "Woo" icon in the toolbar above. That was put in place by my blog's theme and will probably not appear on your toolbar. So for the purposes of this tutorial, pretend it isn't there.

Before we take a look at the Visual Editor's toolbar, you will want to make sure that you have the full list of formatting options available to you. In order to do so, click the "Kitchen Sink" icon in the toolbar.

This will present you with an additional row of some of the most useful options:

As a new WordPress user, the above buttons are probably all of the formatting options you will need. You will probably recognize the majority of them from your computer's text editor. If you are unsure as to what a button does, just hover your mouse over it and a tooltip will pop up.

So rather than tell you what the Bold button does, let's focus on the buttons that you won't be familiar with.

Add, Edit & Remove Links

As you might expect, you can use these two buttons to add and remove hyperlinks in your post's content. In order to make a hyperlink, all you need to do is select the relevant piece of text and click the "Insert/edit link" button (that's the one on the left).

You will then be presented with this screen:

The top part is pretty self explanatory. Enter the URL of the page you would like to link to, the title of the link (i.e. the words that will pop up when someone hovers over the link), and whether or not you want the link to open in a new window/tab.

The bottom part is a useful feature, but can be rather temperamental at times. If you want to link to another post or page on your blog, all you need to do is select it from the list – WordPress will then populate the URL and Title for you. However, if you have lots of posts and pages, it can take rather a long time to find the one you want. And the search feature leaves little to be desired. You'll have to discover for yourself whether or not you can get along with it.

Insert More Tag

This is a nifty little feature than many WordPress users completely overlook.

As you will probably know, excerpts of your blog posts are shown on various parts of your site; such as the home page, and archives. With the Insert More Tag, you can tell WordPress exactly where the text in those excerpts should be cut off. This is a great tool for anyone that hates their blog post excerpts being cut off in mid-sentence.

Fullscreen Mode

For those who tend to get distracted by clutter, you can click on the Toggle Fullscreen Mode and work in peace. All of the non-essential boxes and buttons will disappear, leaving you with just the content and an auto-hiding toolbar with limited options. If you are into minimalism, you'll love this.

Headers & Paragraph Types

I don't want to stray too far into the world of clean HTML and semantic markup, but it is important that you take a moment to familiarize yourself with the basics of how websites should be formatted.

You will undoubtedly want to format your posts in many weird and wonderful ways, but there should be some structure to it. You will typically have a primary header, then secondary headers, tertiary headers, and so on. You will also have a default format for standard paragraph text, addresses, pre-formatted text, and so on.

All of the aforementioned formatting "types" are determined by your theme. All you need to do is select the appropriate one in the Headers & Paragraph Types drop-down box…

…and then type!

Paste As Plain Text/Paste From Word

It probably won't be long before you discover on the text editor's glitches/shortcomings – one of which is how it handles formatted text from other sources (hint: badly).

If you are posting from external sources, you may wish to cut your losses and use the Paste As Plain Text button. This will ensure that WordPress doesn't mangle whatever it is your are pasting. Alternatively, if you are copying text from Word or Excel, you should use the Paste From Word button.

The feature isn't flawless, but will do a much better job than a standard cut and paste.

Remove Formatting

I have just mentioned that the Visual Editor has an occasional penchant for butchering formatted text, and this button can be an easy way of combating the occasional formatting crime scene.

If WordPress does something to your text that you don't like, just highlight the offending section and hit the Remove Formatting button. It will restore the highlighted text to standard formatting (which is determined by your theme).

Please note that this button will not strip certain formatting types; like headers, blockquotes, etc. It is intended for controlling unruly italicization, underlining, and so on.

Insert Special Character

Clicking the above button will display the following screen:

Pretty nifty, right? Not only can you paste characters into the Visual Editor with the click of a button, you are also informed of the HTML and NUM codes for the corresponding character (should that kind of thing float your boat).

Help

The inbuilt help isn't particularly comprehensive, but does have some useful tidbits (like a list of keyboard shortcuts). It's worth a quick browse.

That's All Folks!

In terms of putting virtual pen to paper, that is really all you need to know. With the above tools, you can create headers, format text as you see fit, add and remove hyperlinks, insert characters, and produce a dynamic-looking blog post.

Stay tuned for tutorials on other related topics, such as the HTML Editor, Media Uploader, and Add Post/Page Screen options!

Creative Commons image courtesy of littleghoti

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Embracing The Spirit Of Open Source With WordPress Trac

2012-01-12T18:20:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

As the vast majority of you are no doubt aware, WordPress is an open source development platform. In practical terms, this means one thing – you can have a hand in maintaining the world's most popular content management system.

Sounds pretty cool, right? However, there is a flip side to this – WordPress lives and dies by the efforts of volunteers. The vast majority of WordPress users will never contribute towards ongoing development. Whilst that is fine – you are certainly under no obligation to do so – if you feel you can help, there is a welcome place for you.

Which brings me to the WordPress Trac.

The WordPress What?

For our purposes, Trac is a web-based bug tracking system. It represents the base of operations for all existing and resolved bug issues in the WordPress source code.

WordPress bugs - cute, but deadly.

Here's the deal. Software will always have bugs – regardless of whether it is open source or not. With WordPress Trac, you have the opportunity to not only report, but actually fix bugs in the WordPress source code.

Are You A Fixer?

You may be wondering how getting involved in ongoing WordPress maintenance benefits you.

If you are a WordPress developer, placing yourself on the cutting edge will ensure that you have a well-rounded and current understanding of the WordPress platform.

Pictured: the cutting edge (yes, I went there).

But besides anything else, getting involved in the WordPress open source project is good karma! There have to be people like you in order for WordPress to exist.

The Process

As is often the case, the WordPress codex has done a great job of detailing exactly how the bug-reporting process should operate.

There is a mandatory two-step process that you need to go through before reporting a bug. Trust me when I say that following these two steps saves everyone a lot of time!

1. Check That The Bug Is In The WordPress Source Code

There are Tracs for every major element of WordPress development. These are the main ones:

When reporting a bug, you need to make sure that it is present in the WordPress source code, as opposed to a theme or plugin. Bugs are much more likely to occur in themes and plugins than in the source code.

For more information on how to locate the source of a bug, click here.

2. Check That The Bug Hasn't Already Been Reported

Duplicate reporting of bugs is a bone of contention for WordPress developers. If you discover a bug, it has probably already been reported. So before you report a bug, you should always search to make sure that isn't the case.

When it comes to WordPress bug reporting, you may not always be the first on the scene.

Don't get me wrong – if you discover a bug, you shouldn't simply assume that it has already been reported and move on with your day. But it probably has, and it will save everyone time if you do not submit duplicate bug reports.

Find out how to search for existing bugs here.

Scratching The Surface

There is a lot more involved in WordPress Trac than I have outlined here. There are two places you should visit in order to take your interest further:

Good luck!

Creative Commons images courtesy of Daniela Hartmann, Ripley Engineering and Jackie

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Add Admin Categories to WordPress for Enhanced Workflow

2012-01-12T18:15:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

WordPress is very good at letting you flexibly organize your content. But the emphasis on organizing content is most definitely weighted toward the frontend – i.e. what the average user sees once the content has been published.

The system that administrators, editors, and authors see in the backend is decidedly less flexible and less robust.

But there's a backend management plugin that can help change that: .

The Content Audit plugin effectively does two relatively simple things:

It lets you create "Admin Categories."
And it lets you assign content to users other than the original author.

Although these two things seem simple enough, when you combine them with their flexibility, you begin to realize how powerful they can be.

Let's take a look at the plugin in action, and then we'll get into how a site might take advantage of what this plugin has to offer.

Create Categories

The first thing you will want to do is create your admin categories. Admin categories are created and handled in the same way that you create regular categories.

Meta Boxes

On the Write Page (where you write new posts or pages), you will see new meta boxes on the right hand side for your admin categories and "owners" – users that you assign the content to for editorial purposes. An owner need not be the original author of the content.

Backend View

With the plugin activated, you will now see extra information and new filters in your edit/backend view when you look at your content.

Enhancing Workflow – How it Works

With "admin categories," you can tag a piece of content to be edited or processed in a certain predefined way. You can then assign that task to anyone you like, be it the original author or someone else.

What naturally springs to mind with this tool is multi-author blogs. If you have an editorial system on your site where an author's work needs to be proofread or checked by an editor before it's published, then this plugin can help you create a relatively simple but powerful way to process these tasks.

If a piece of content needs to go through various hands, then this plugin becomes even more valuable.

But you need not run a multi-author site for this plugin to prove its value. If you personally have a style of writing where you go through various steps before publication, and you find yourself (possibly even intentionally) leaving drafts in different stages of completion, then this plugin could help you easily organize your material.

While the plugin comes with some default admin categories, you can easily change those categories or add to them as you would a regular category. This means that the plugin is highly customizable to your own personal system.

An Example for a Personal System

Let's say you often complete your posts in regular stages, and you often find yourself with a number of different posts in different stages.

For example, let's say this is a typical process for you. (Potential admin categories listed in parenthesis.)

Map out ideas with brainstorming and free-form writing. (Brainstorming)
Organize ideas into basic sections to get an overall structure. (Drafting)
Do extra research on questions/issues raised in the previous section. (Extra Research)
Fill in all ideas and get wording right. (Editing)
Get all graphics for post. (Graphics)
Make sure your post is SEO'ed – optimized for search engines. (SEO)
Make sure all your grammar and punctuation is taken care of. (Proofreading)

If this was your process, you could easily set up a seven admin categories and then simply drop a draft into the appropriate category at the right time. Then when you go to your backend, you could decide on what type of work you were up for. Not in the mood to do research you need to do? Then just filter by "Proofreading" and get all the posts that need to be proofread and do a little cleaning up.

The Options are Up to You

The power of this simple plugin, as mentioned before, is its flexibility. Your admin categories can be customized completely to your own personal system. Use it for one author, use it for many authors, use it on drafts, use it on published posts, use it for private posts and shared work, etc.

The options are as open as your ability to devise a workflow system that works for you.

Photo: Organizational Chart – Colorful Boxes from BigStock

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Daily Tip: Set WordPress Posts to Private by Default

2012-01-12T17:52:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

Want to make WordPress posts private by default? Perhaps you're using WordPress as a journal primarily and don't want to have to remember to make your post private every time.

The plugin is what you're looking for. It works with posts, pages and custom post types. All you have to do is activate it and "Private" will be the default option pre-selected on the Visibility menu. Get the plugin from the WordPress plugin repository.

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12 WordPress Admin Bar Plugins to Increase Your Options and Control

2012-01-11T13:01:00.001-05:00

Link: http://wpmu.org/12-wordpress-admin-bar-plugins-to-increase-your-options-and-control/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A Wpmu-Wordpress-Mu-PluginsThemesAndNews %28WPMU.org - WordPress MU plugins%2C themes and news%29 (via shareaholic.com)

A New Plugin To Make Your WordPress Site Mobile-Friendly

2012-01-11T12:59:00.001-05:00

Link: http://wpmu.org/wp-mobile-detector-wordpress-plugin/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A Wpmu-Wordpress-Mu-PluginsThemesAndNews %28WPMU.org - WordPress MU plugins%2C themes and news%29 (via shareaholic.com)

How to Setup a Dedicated Web Server for Free | Nettuts+

2012-01-06T21:10:00.000-05:00

How to Setup a Dedicated Web Server for Free | Nettuts+

WordPress Plugin Releases for 1/6 « Weblog Tools Collection

2012-01-06T15:07:00.000-05:00

WordPress Plugin Releases for 1/6 « Weblog Tools Collection

Geek to Live: How to set up a personal home web server

2012-01-06T15:05:00.000-05:00

Geek to Live: How to set up a personal home web server

Host Your Site For Free

2012-01-06T15:02:00.002-05:00

CloudAccess.net: A New Company on the Bay

2012-01-05T13:19:00.002-05:00

Navigated from Joomla! Community Magazine | Issues | shared via feedly mobile

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Lightbox Anywhere

2012-01-05T13:19:00.001-05:00

Published on Joomla! Extensions Directory - New Extensions | shared via feedly mobile

Lightbox Anywhere is a content plugin taking images from articles, k2 Content, Virtuemart content and displaying them in lightbox. Lightbox Anywhere shows images in different beautiful lightboxes, and can be used for many components: Joomla Content, K2 Article and Virtuemart. Features: Easy to configure. Able to add plugin in specific article, category, section in Joomla Content. Able to add plugin in each item or category of K2 component. Support using plugin with Content, K2 and Virtuemart. Support many attractive lightbox types: lightboxjs, Evolution and facybox JS.

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Multi Calendar

2012-01-05T13:19:00.000-05:00

Published on Joomla! Extensions Directory - New Extensions | shared via feedly mobile

Multi-View Calendar is a Calendar that allows to show events and information associated to specific dates in several ways. It has various visualization options and predefined color schemes and multiple views: Day View, Week View, Month View, Multi-Month View.

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Shining up your website with five stunning and free Joomla photo galleries

2012-01-05T13:17:00.000-05:00

Published on Joomla! Community Magazine | Issues | shared via feedly mobile

"A picture is worth a thousand words". In the online world, this adage is still correct. Your website will look more lively and stunning if there is a photo gallery. Yes, photos not only help you share your world with website visitors but they also help you convey your ideas.

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How to rearrange WordPress categories order

2012-01-05T13:16:00.000-05:00

Published on WpRecipes.com | shared via feedly mobile

The code above will look for a specific category (Don't forget to update line 5) and will replace it on top of all other categories. The code has to be pasted in your functions.php file.

name == 'New Publications' ) :     $latest = array($categories[$i]);     unset($categories[$i]);   endif; }  if( isset($latest) )   array_splice( $categories, 0, 0, $latest ); ?>

Thanks to WP Snippets for the great hack!

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Daily Tip: Add Call to Action Buttons to WordPress Posts with a Shortcode

2012-01-05T13:13:00.000-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

Do you need some quick, nice-looking download, demo or call-to-action buttons on your WordPress site? makes a collection of beautiful buttons conveniently available to you inside the WordPress post editor. No coding is required for adding the buttons.

includes 6 colors, 3 styles and 2 sizes to suit your button needs. They are lightweight buttons, created with CSS3, making them very easy to customize.

If you want to define your own custom buttons, check out the quick tutorial on the plugin's homepage. Download for free from the WordPress plugin repository.

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Finding Background Patterns

2012-01-05T13:12:00.000-05:00

Published on Weblog Tools Collection | shared via feedly mobile

One of the easiest things that you could do to customize your blog, besides change your header image, would be to change your background image. Sure, you could just set a background color, but why not bring in some texture?

Using full images can be problematic, as for the most part they will not conform to the size of everyone's screen. Viewers with smaller screens will only see part of the image, and viewers with larger screens will see the image surrounded by white space. Even if you could get the image to stretch for larger screens, it would be distorted and pixellated, and this is where patterns come in.

In a sense, a pattern is a small image file which can be tiled seamlessly, thus adapting to any screen size. In WordPress, you can do this by uploading a small pattern image at Appearance -> Backgrounds in your Dashboard and choosing the "Tile" option under the Repeat section.

I did some digging earlier today for a personal project and found some great free patterns at Subtle Patterns and Background Labs, along with two great pattern builders at Pattern Cooler and BgPatterns. You could also build a simple noise-based background pattern in most photo editors by just dropping a noise texture into a small square with your desired color.

If you have ventured out on the hunt for background patterns before, we'd love to know which resources you prefer.

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How to Add a Background Image to Your WordPress Site

2012-01-05T13:11:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

Perhaps one of the easiest ways to make your site look unique, even if you're using a popular and well-worn theme, is to add a background image. Your header and your background are two graphical components that your visitors will definitely take note of if they're strong.

The problem with background images, however, is that many themes still do not provide an easy way to add them or change them. And so in this tutorial, we will go over how to manually add a background image and control it with CSS.

The default TwentyEleven theme does indeed provide an easy way to add a background image in the Admin section (Appearance > Background); however, in this tutorial we'll go through the steps for adding an image manually to TwentyEleven. The steps involved for other themes will be nearly identical; however, you may find some slight differences in your CSS file (style.css).

Step-by-Step Tutorial for Changing Your Background

Starting with the default WordPress TwentyEleven theme, I want to change the background of the site from gray to a blue background image with a white glowing center.

This is a small version of my blue background image.

Getting Your Image and Uploading It

Depending on what your background image will be, you will need to decide whether you want it to repeat itself on the page or not. In this tutorial, I don't want my image to repeat itself. I just want it to sit behind the content portion of the site and have the "glow" peek around the edges.

Because I'm not repeating my image, I make it large enough so that it will peek around the edges, and then I upload it to the images folder in the TwentyEleven folder on my server:

wp-content > themes > twentyeleven > images

Call Your Image with CSS

Now that I've got my image uploaded, I need to find the section in my CSS (style.css) file that controls the background for the site.

Appearance > Editor > Stylesheet (style.css)

What you are looking for here is the "background" selector for the entire site. If you search for "background" in your CSS file, there's a good chance you will find more than one (there may be a background defined for a sidebar, for example, or for a number of other things).

In the TwentyEleven theme, there is a section conveniently labeled "Global." And under that, we find a background selector for the "body" section.

Now that I've found the section for the background, I'm going to call in my image. We will need to make a few adjustments after we do this, but I will go through this step by step to show how making these adjustments changes things.

Here is the code I add to call my background image (which is blue-glow.gif):

background-image: url(images/blue-glow.gif);

(Remember that I put the image in the images folder of my theme – that's why I can just use image/blue-glow.gif to call the image.)

So this is what my CSS looks like at this point:

body {  background: #e2e2e2;  background-image: url(images/blue-glow.gif);  }

With that CSS, this is what my site looks like. (I have increased the perspective here to get a better picture of what's really going on with my background.)

As you can see, the background is repeating. But that's not what I want, so I will need to add values to my stylesheet in order to control that, and so I add the following "no-repeat value":

background-repeat: no-repeat;

And so now my complete background CSS looks like this:

body { background: #e2e2e2; background-image: url(images/blue-glow.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; }

When I look at my site, everything seems to look all right, but when I enlarge the perspective or I scroll down the site to make sure, I see that things aren't quite right. I can see that the image eventually ends and the original gray background takes over. In addition, while it might look all right on the sides of the site, if someone has a wider view than me, they may see the image ending on the sides as well.

In order to fix these issues, we'll need to change a few more things.

As you can see above, the background image is actually aligned to the left. It may look OK in your browser, but it may not look OK for everyone, so we'll want to align the image to be in the center of the screen and aligned on the top.

To do that, I add the following CSS:

background-position: top center;

That solves the potential alignment problem, but I still have the issue of the image ending and everything suddenly changing to original gray background.

In order to solve this problem, I simply change the original background color from gray to the shade of blue that my image eventually bleeds into at its edges.

The original color was #e2e2e2, and so I change that to my custom color: #6B8CC2.

And so now my complete CSS section for the body background looks like this:

body { background: #6B8CC2; background-image: url(images/blue-glow.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: top center; }

And when I look at the result, everything looks as it should. No matter how much I zoom out to get perspective, everything still looks fine.

Making Backgrounds Work for Your Specific Situation

As you can see, controlling your image with CSS is the most important element in getting your background to look the way you want it to. Because there are so many different things you can do with background images, and so many different situations, the tutorial above may not fit your needs exactly. However, it should give you some basics to start with, and from there you can search out the appropriate CSS for your site.

One of the more popular places to get CSS info is from W3Schools.com (here is their section on backgrounds).

Photo: Vector Website Design Template from BigStock

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How to Find Out Which Plugins are Slowing Down Your WordPress Site

2012-01-05T13:11:00.000-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

It's easy to tell if your site has performance issues. A sluggish website is oftentimes a sign of plugins that are misconfigured or demanding a lot of resources. However, for the average WordPress user it can be difficult to diagnose the root cause of a poorly performing website.

A new free tool called aims to help WordPress users to scan their own sites to find out which plugins are causing a slow performance. It measures the impact your plugins are having on your site's load time.

How does it work?

After you install the plugin, you'll need to go to its settings page and start the scan. The scan takes a few minutes, but it's very thorough. During the process the scanner generates some traffic on your site and monitors your site's performance on the server. Once the scan is finished, click "View Results" and from there you can figure out your next move, based on what you find.

Click on each of the tabs to view different charts, measuring the runtime, timelines and query numbers for your site. You can get a detailed breakdown which will help you visualize which plugins are slowing your site down the most.

The Detailed Timeline
The detailed timeline features a breakdown of how your pages are loaded, including:

Timing information for every plugin
Timing information for your theme
Timing information for the WordPress core

Some plugins only run on certain pages. If you want to profile a specific link on your site, you can select "Manual Scan" and then visit that link. If you want to profile the admin dashboard, click the "X" in the top right of the scan window in order to be returned to your admin area.

What to do with the results…

One cool features of this plugin is that you can email the results to yourself, your developer or hosting support team. This can be very helpful for steering your support professional in the right direction for understanding the source of your site's performance issues. I believe that Godaddy built this in order to help their customers and support staff work together to pinpoint issues with WordPress sites more accurately.

If your site has slowed to a crawl, it's probably a good idea to run the P3 scanner to determine if it's one of your plugins. You can shut the offending plugin(s) down if necessary and get in touch with the developer to find a better way to configure it or perhaps select a different plugin option for your site.

P3 has an extensive help section which details possible things that could interfere with the accuracy of the scan, other possible causes of slowness besides plugins, and many other FAQs. The plugin's glossary of terms at the end of the help section will help you to interpret the results from your scan if you don't know what the numbers are telling you.

is available for free from the WordPress plugin repository. It's one of those tools you'll want to bookmark for future reference. Try it out on your site today and find out how easy it is to track down the plugins that are slowing your site down.

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Post Format Icons

2012-01-04T21:45:00.000-05:00

Post Format Icons

Alltop - Top WordPress News

2012-01-04T21:28:00.001-05:00

Alltop - Top WordPress News

Thematic, A WordPress Theme Framework | ThemeShaper

2012-01-04T21:28:00.000-05:00

Thematic, A WordPress Theme Framework | ThemeShaper

57+ Free Image Gallery, Slideshow And Lightbox Solutions

2012-01-04T21:26:00.000-05:00

57+ Free Image Gallery, Slideshow And Lightbox Solutions

How To Display Different Sidebars On Your Posts And Pages

2012-01-04T19:59:00.000-05:00

How To Display Different Sidebars On Your Posts And Pages

How to Write a WordPress Plugin: 12 Essential Guides and Resources

2012-01-02T15:51:00.000-05:00

Navigated from The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

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Daily Tip: How to Keep Images from Running into Your WordPress Content

2012-01-02T13:22:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

Everyone seems to have issues with the WordPress editor at one time or another. It seems to have a mind of its own and will do things to your content that you don't want done.

One issue that seems to occur occasionally is when your text content creeps up around an image even when you tell it not to. No matter what you do, you can't get the image to simply sit above the text and be separate from it.

The Solution

Here's a solution that should solve your problem.

Go into the HTML view on your editor, and then wrap the image in div tags with some styling that says clear:both;.

(your image)

Or set out more clearly …

(Your image info.)

Here's an example:

Photo: Malicious The Man from BigStock

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Simple Fade Slider

2012-01-02T13:19:00.001-05:00

Published on Joomla! Extensions Directory - New Extensions | shared via feedly mobile

A very simple and nice image slider perfect to be used like a header or just for displaying pictures for any Joomla!® based website. With a more than simple administration panel you can set a header slideshow in a matter of minutes. Features: Support for images: Jpeg,PNG,Gif. *Perfect Resizable by setting the width and height of the module.For a perfect display is better that the images to be smaller than 800X650. Make sure to set the images width and height to the module's dimensions. *You can set the time of displaying for the images. *You have two values X and y for a better placing of the images inside the module. *The option to enable/disable the fade effect. *You can set the transparency for the effect's mask. *You can also choose to enable/disable the external link for all the images. *You can show/hide every slide you want. *All the external links will open in a new window (_blank target).

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JoomShopping Free Slider

2012-01-02T13:18:00.001-05:00

Published on Joomla! Extensions Directory - New Extensions | shared via feedly mobile

The Free_JS_Slider is a native product Slideshow module for the JoomShopping (3.x) Component. Datasource is the top rated product list of a standard JoomShopping installation. Module features: - choose the number of products shown - show/hide product title - enable/disable product title link - limit title in words/characters - show/hide product short description - limit product short description in words/characters - show/hide product image - enable/disable product image link - show/hide readmore - modify readmore name Module parameters: - module width/height - show/hide arrow buttons - 10 different slide effects - 31 different transition effects - set change interval - set slide speed

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Avoid Hardcoding Your Copyright Information

2011-12-31T13:03:00.000-05:00

Published on WordPress Tavern | shared via feedly mobile

How many of you still update your themes footer every year to change the copyright date? Thanks to a small snippet of code, you can add this to your footer.php file which will negate the need to manually change the copyright information every year. The code snippet is php the_time('Y') An excellent primer for how to use this snippet within the footer.php file is explained via Lorelle VanFossen.

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Another 5 Things Your WordPress Site Doesn’t Need

2011-12-31T13:02:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

This is the third segment in a series on removing stuff from WordPress. I recommend you check out Part 1 and Part 2.

You should remove as much junk as possible from your WordPress site

The last couple of articles on this subject garnered plenty of interesting responses and suggestions from our readers, which I thought warranted a third post in the series.

So here we go with yet another 5 things that you can remove from WordPress, all in the name of making your site faster, simpler and more secure.

1. Your WordPress version number

This is a handy WordPress security tip, procured from our very own Mason James. _{(Thanks for doing my work for me)}

Having your WordPress version number output by the wp_generator() function could have a negative impact on your site's security.
Making your WordPress version number available (as it is by default) can make it easier for hackers to use a known weakness in that version. The easiest way to get rid of this is to add the following to your theme's function.php:

remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');

2. Zip files from theme and plugin uploads

If you upload themes and plugins to your WordPress installation manually, you'll be left with a bunch of .zip files sitting around on your server. These are just dead weight and there's no need to keep them. Get on in there and do a bit of housekeeping.

3. The 'Tools' menu

In the left sidebar of your dashboard. You ever used it before? Me neither.

Unless you have some specific reason for keeping it around, the Tools menu is one more piece of dashboard clutter you can safely get rid of.

4. The 'Links' menu

Another less-than-useful dashboard menu. Granted, the links in question point to some very important information resources.

But anyone with a more than a passing familiarity with WordPress knows all these sites already. Unless you're a total WP newbie who's still learning to walk, you're probably never going to use the Links menu.

To remove both the Tools and Links menus from your WordPress dashboard, open the functions.php file in your Theme editor and paste the following code:

5. Any widgets that you're not going to to use

For your own personal WordPress site, useless widgets are just a waste of space. For a client's site, they're a potential headache waiting to happen (if your client decides to do a little widget experimentation without really knowing what they're doing).

Take a long, hard look at that group of widgets, and bring down the axe on anything that's not relevant or useful to the website.

Removing available widgets from the dashboard entirely is a fairly advanced procedure – check out this page in the WordPress Codex for further info.

Got anything to add to the list?

If you can suggest anything else than can and should be removed from WordPress, that we didn't cover in Part 1 or Part 2, please let us know in the comment sections below.

_{Image credits: Goodbye and Businessman Throwing Trash from Bigstockphoto.}

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HACKED! Is Your WordPress Site Being Turned into a Cheap Luxury Store?

2011-12-31T13:01:00.001-05:00

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Daily Tip: Go from 30 Views to 22,000 with this Simple Action

2011-12-31T12:59:00.003-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

According to a report from the 2011 B2B Marketing Summit, one of the speakers, Jay Baer, told a story of a simple little action that increased the views of one of his presentations from 30 to 22,000.

The trick?

He simply put the presentation up on Slideshare. When he had it on his own site, it received 30 views. When he put it on SlideShare, 22,000 discovered it.

The moral of the story is pretty clear: pollinate the web with your content. But don't forget to make sure people know where it came from. They may not be on your site (yet), but you can still pull them in with your content.

Photo: 3d graph showing rise in profits or earnings / vector illustration from BigStock

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How To Choose a Great Color Scheme For Your Website

2011-12-31T12:59:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

You don't need to hire a flamboyant interior designer named Ricardo to pick great colors for your website.

You just need a a sense of adventure and a basic understanding of what works and what doesn't.

Luckily for us web folk, choosing colors for your website is a sh*tload easier than choosing colors for your living room. You can make as many mistakes as you need to in the quest for perfection, and the possibilities for experimentation are endless.

Go nuts - code is much cheaper than paint

3 important considerations when choosing website colors

Does your website need to sync with an existing color scheme? This is often the case for business sites that need to reflect the branding that the company already uses.
What's the purpose of the website? If the aim is to sell something, the colors you choose will need to inspire the right kind of emotion in people. Check out this article on color psychology in marketing for further info.
What kind of photos and graphics will you incorporate into the site? It's important that your color scheme matches your images, and vice versa. Photos can actually be a great source of inspiration when it comes to choosing colors for your site.

How many colors should you use?

This is a hugely debatable question, but a good number of designers recommend using only 3 main colors on your website. The more colors you use, the harder it becomes to keep them all in harmony and create a balanced, consistent look for your site.

As a starting point, you could try following the 60 – 30 – 10 Rule, which has been used by interior and fashion designers for many years and works equally well in web design.

The rule specifies that you should pick three different colors and use them in ratios of 60%, 30% and 10% respectively.

The 60% will be the primary color of your site and set the overall tone of your design.
The 30% should contrast with the 60% to create a visually striking effect.
The 10% is an 'accent color', which should complement either your primary or secondary color.

In conventional design wisdom, it's safer to make either the 60% or 30% a 'neutral' color (white, gray, beige, black and so on). This gives you the maximum number of options when choosing your other two colors, because neutral elements will generally "go with anything".

Shades and tones for greater variety

Remember also that you have a certain amount of room to move within each color. In many cases, you will need to diversify your palette beyond your three basic elements. Rather than add a fourth and fifth color to your site and risk spoiling the design, try different shades and tones of your existing colors instead.

By lightening or darkening tones in certain places, you can create distinction without upsetting your harmonious three color balance.

Free tools to help you choose a color scheme

Fortunately, there's plenty of assistance available when it comes to choosing your website colors. You can find a number of excellent (and free) online tools to help you whip up a professional-looking palette.

There's a tonne of them out there – these are just a few good ones to get you started:

Colors On The Web

This is a brilliant tool for finding complementary colors and experimenting with shades and hues. You just pick your base color and the website provides a whole range of suggestions.

Visit site.

Kuler

A Flash-based library of professional color themes. You'll need an Adobe account to use Kuler, but it doesn't cost anything.

Visit site.

COLOURlovers

A design community where people share thoughts and ideas on colors, patterns and lots of other cool stuff.

Visit site.

PHOTOCOPA

A product of the COLOURlovers community, this tool allows you to create a palette based on colors extracted from a digital photo. Also includes a range of other color creation tools – very handy stuff.

Visit site.

Calling all designers!

If you know a thing or two about mixing colors and can add something to the conversation, please leave us a comment below this article. We're always interested in the wisdom of practicing professionals.

_{Image credits: Choose a Color, Pencil Color Wheel and Open Paint Buckets from Bigstockphoto.}

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Make a Splash with this WordPress Splash Page Plugin

2011-12-31T12:58:00.003-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

If you really, really need to get a message across to a visitor, then one solution may be a splash page, or a kind of pop-up that is present from the moment someone lands on your site.

Yes, they can possibly be annoying to some, but they are also effective – this is why you see them so often.

The could be your answer. It's a relatively simple splash plugin that still gives you a number of nice options.

The WP Splash Image plugin allows you to display images, videos, or html code as your splash page. You can also set the plugin to start and end on chosen dates, set it to automatically disappear after a certain number of seconds, or you can let it remain until the user either clicks on it to go to your chosen page, or they or exit out of it by clicking on the X in the corner or on the webpage behind it.

Take a look at a few examples.

Image Splash

Settings

You can take a look at some of the settings here.

Video Splash

You can also choose from a number of video sites to display a video as the splash. The video sites include YouTube, Yahoo, Dailymotion, Metacafe, or any URL for a flash video.

Video Code

If using the video splash, then make sure you insert only the code into the box and not the complete URL. For example, if the video's URL is the following:

http://youtu.be/-pXBP_EI9Yo

Then you would only insert the last part (the code for the video): -pXBP_EI9Yo

Splash vs Pop Up

The difference from the splash effect that this plugin offers and a pop-up is that the image or the video never actually "pops up." It is present from the beginning. It may be a small difference, but personally, I find that less annoying. It seems to me that popping up on a visitor can be like sneaking up on them from behind, and therefore more annoying.

Free, Easy Solution

There are more sophisticated splash solutions out there, but there's a good chance you will need to pay for them. So if you looking to test out some splash effects, or you don't need something overly sophisticated, then this plugin might be just what you're looking for.

You can download the .

Photo: Fresh lemon dropped into water with splash isolated on white from BigStock

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Free WordPress Tutorials – Recommended by The WPMU Community

2011-12-31T12:58:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

Last week we rounded up a list of 10 free resources for learning WordPress, and asked our faithful readers to help us expand on this with some recommendations of their own.
As expected, we got some great suggestions from our friends in the WPMU community. Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Here are another 5 high quality web resources for learning to use WordPress, all free of charge.

Cats Who Code

This imaginatively-titled site is run by a couple of French/Belgian web developers, and provides a vast knowledge base for coders and designers. They've got a heavy preference for WordPress, but publish plenty of general development stuff too. Highly recommended. Visit Site.

WP Recipes

This is an offshoot of the main Cats Who Code site, run by the same guy Jean-Baptiste Jung, and focuses exclusively on WordPress tips and tutorials. Lots of great stuff for various WP skill levels. Visit Site.

WP Tuts

WP Tuts is part of the Envato empire, and it's definitely one of the more professional WordPress resources out there. The site design pleases the eye, and they've got a well-organized content structure that covers pretty much all the important aspects of WordPress. Well worth checking out if you haven't already. Visit Site.

Digging Into WordPress

Lots of tutorials and ideas for developers and more advanced WordPress users. There's also a decent selection of stuff for non-coders, but this site caters primarily to a more WordPress-experienced demographic. Visit Site.

WP Hacks

Features a wide range of info on themes, plugins and WordPress code snippets. WP Hacks has around 15 authors contributing articles and there's a diverse range of knowledge to be found here. Visit Site.

The list goes on?

If you've got anything to add to the conversation, please leave us a comment below this article. We're always interested to hear about the tools and resources that people use to improve their own WordPress experience. If you didn't catch the first article in this series, check it out here.

_{Thanks for the photos: Leo Reynolds, Andrew Neilsen, rgusick and holeymoon.}

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21 Free WordPress Portfolio Themes

2011-12-31T12:57:00.005-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

Need a WordPress portfolio theme to present your graphic work or photos in an uncluttered and attractive way? No problem. We've collected 21 FREE WordPress portfolio themes for you here.

1. Work-A-Holic

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

2. Viewport

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

3. Visual Theme

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

4. Designer Theme

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

5. Mixfolio

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

6. Mansion

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

7. Fullscreen

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

8. F8 Static

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

9. Folio Landscape

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

10. Imbalance

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

11. Grace Photoblog

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

12. Exhibition

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

13. Grid Portfolio Theme

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

14. Modern Theme

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

15. Contemporary

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

16. Portfolium

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

17. Swiss Dessign

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

18. Style Dessign

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

19. Portfolio Press

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

20. Snapshot

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

21. BigSquare

DEMO | DOWNLOAD

>> Do you know of any good ones we've missed? Mention them in the comments.

Photo: Vector gold frame on a easel from BigStock

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9 Fun Web Tools You can Embed in Your WordPress Blog

2011-12-31T12:57:00.003-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

Embedding is a great way to increase the flexibility of your blog. Pretty much all of us have embedded a YouTube video or Google Map, you might have embedded a Slide share presentation or a tweet. But there are embeddable tools and applications out there that are beyond the day-to-day standards. They can improve your blog by improving the way that content is displayed or increasing interactivity. I've been playing around with a few of them. Here are ten of my favourites.

Answer Garden

Answer Garden is a minimalistic feedback tool that you can embed in your blog or website. You can use it for feedback, brainstorming or even for creating a simple poll. You can choose whether to allow your visitors to only submit one answer (like I have below – useful for polls) or submit unlimited answers (useful for brainstorming).

What is your favourite embeddable web tool?… at AnswerGarden.ch.

Xtranormal

Xtranormal lets you create fun movies that you can upload to Youtube and embed in your site. You can sign up for an account for free or you can grab a Pro account. You can embed straight from Xtranormal or you can publish to Youtube and embed from there. The free account is fairly limited but it's still possible to make a cool video, like this one I made just for you (includes swearing!):

The Trials of a WordPress Plugin Developer
by: spmckeown

Wallwisher

Wallwisher is a fun tool for brainstorming, making announcements, taking notes and asking for opinions. It's really easy to get started with and embed in your blog or website.

ToonDoo

ToonDoo is a fun tool for making cartoons for your website or blog. If you're like me then you have absolutely no talent when it comes to drawing. Long-term readers of wpmu.org will remember some of my crappy cartoons. Below is a cartoon I made of an actual exchange that happened between my husband and I.

By spmckeown | View this Toon at ToonDoo | Create your own Toon

360 Cities

You may have encountered 360 cities before – recently the images have been used on Google Maps. A free 360 cities lets you embed images in your personal blog – if you want to use them for commercial purposes you'll have to upgrade to a Pro account. Here's a 360 cities image of the Cathedral near my house.

Canterbury Cathedral, interior, door to Choir in England

Dipity

Dipity is a fun tool for making timelines. You can set the up yourself and then invite people to contribute to them. As well as having a standard timeline like the one below you can create flipbooks, lists and maps. I've made a WordPress timeline with all of the WordPress releases. Feel free to add any WordPress events that you want to it!

WordPress Timeline on Dipity.

PhotoPeach

PhotoPeach is a useful tool for making slideshows. You can easily embed captions in them, and add quizzes. Below is one of the popular slideshows made on PhotoPeach.

Kwout

You can use Kwout for quoting websites. Just install the addon and then you can grab areas of websites and embed them in your blog. What makes Kwout so useful is that it creates an image map of the area you have taken the screengrab from. Check out the image below from our G+ account. If you roll your mouse over the image you can click on any of the links. It even works on video!

WPMU.org – Google via kwout

Voki

You can use Voki to add a talking avatar to your website. The one I've created below is pretty basic but there are all sorts of different ways you can put Voki to use. If you want tips on how to set it up you can check out this post on Edublogs.

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How to Change the WordPress Login Logo to Your Own Custom Logo

2011-12-31T12:57:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

One of the more annoying aspects of the default WordPress install is that the login page is plastered with a large WordPress logo that links to WordPress.org.

Unless your visitors are somewhat blog savvy, most probably have no idea what "WordPress" is. They thought they were on Big Bob's Blog, and now they're seeing a logo for something called WordPress. Even worse, when they click it, it even takes them to a place called WordPress. What the …? Where is Big Bob?

Not to worry. There are a number of simple plugins that will take care of this problem for you.

There are some fairly complex plugins that I've seen that will change nearly everything about your Admin areas, including the logo on the login page, but many people just need a simple solution to do this one simple thing.

Below are three plugins that will get the job done for you, changing the WordPress logo for your logo.

1. Uber Login Logo ()

The first option, the "Uber Login Logo" is so simple, it should be called the "Uber Simple Login Logo." It's so simple, in fact, it doesn't even have a "Save" button on the Settings page. Just upload your logo and it's done. It automatically links your logo to your home page, so you don't even have to worry about that. You'll probably spend more time looking for options and buttons that aren't there than you will actually getting your login page changed.

2. Customize Admin ()

The second option is slightly more sophisticated than the first, but not by much. It has a spot to upload your image, and a place to insert a URL for where you'd like the image to link to. There are a few other options on the page, but if you're just looking to change the login logo, then the first two are all you will need to worry about.

3. Admin Customization ()

The final plugin has the most options. It will let you change other elements such as the backend favicon, the dashboard widgets, update notices, and the admin footer text. This plugin still remains relatively simple, even with the added options. If you're looking to change a little more than your login page without worrying about reconfiguring everything, you might check this one out.

A Simple Fix

Changing your login page logo is a simple fix that can eliminate a lot of confusion on behalf of your visitors. We know WordPress needs the love, but sucking away unsuspecting surfers into a world they don't understand and don't want to understand is not the way to go about it.

Reverse WP's bad decision with one of these plugins.

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Stop Your Clients From Deactivating Important WordPress Plugins

2011-12-31T12:56:00.003-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

There's nothing worse than a client stumbling through their WordPress installation and messing with things they don't understand.

You know how it goes. One fine day the curious client decides to experiment with all those shiny knobs and buttons in the WordPress dashboard. Within a few minutes they've broken their site, and they get straight on the phone to blame the whole mess on you.

Many developers try to avoid this unfortunate scenario by restricting the client's options to a bare minimum.

Stop right there, client!

If you build WordPress sites for a living, you probably have an arsenal of core plugins that you use on all (or at least most) of your projects.

If these plugins are vital to the functioning of your site, you sure as hell as don't want your client deactivating them by accident, and then sending you a barrage of abusive emails because their site has gone belly-up.

Disable plugin deactivation in WordPress

You can entirely remove the option of deactivating plugins in WordPress, to safeguard all your hard work against the wandering fingers of an unsuspecting client.

To get started, add the following code to the functions.php file of your WordPress theme.

add_filter( 'plugin_action_links', 'disable_plugin_deactivation', 10, 4 ); function disable_plugin_deactivation( $actions, $plugin_file, $plugin_data, $context ) { 	// Remove edit link for all plugins 	if ( array_key_exists( 'edit', $actions ) ) 		unset( $actions['edit'] ); 	// Remove deactivate link for important plugins 	if ( array_key_exists( 'deactivate', $actions ) && in_array( $plugin_file, array( 		'wpmu-dev-plusone/plusone.php', 		'plugin-folder-name/plugin.php',                 'plugin-folder-name/plugin.php' 	))) 		unset( $actions['deactivate'] ); 	return $actions; }

_{Thanks to WPBeginner for the snippet.}

You'll need to change the array of $plugin_file for each of the specific plugins that you're targeting here. The format is plugin-folder-name/plugin.php.

As you can see in the example above, I'm targeting the Google + plugin from WPMU DEV. The plugin file is called plusone.php, and lives in the folder wpmu-dev-plusone, which is in the wp-content/plugins directory on my server.

This code also removes the 'edit plugin' option, which is very unlikely to be used in any constructive manner by your client. If you want to keep the 'edit plugin' option for whatever reason, just remove that section of code from the snippet.

Hey presto – the 'deactivate' and 'edit' links are removed from your important plugins, and you've got one less potential headache to worry about.

Got any more suggestions for 'client-proofing' your WordPress projects?

Please leave a comment and let us know about any tools and tricks you use to secure your sites and stop clients messing everything up.

_{Image credit: Construction Stop Isolated from Bigstockphoto.}

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Making The Most Of The WordPress.org Website

2011-12-31T12:56:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

The WordPress crew are a generous bunch. Many people (myself included) occasionally lose sight of the fact that we are using a completely free and open source piece of software. Yes, Matt Mullenweg isn't doing it all for charity, but we've got a lot to be thankful for.

Not only do we have the awesome WordPress platform to work with, we also have a fantastic resource in the form of the wordpress.org website. I hadn't fully explored the site until recently, and was pleasantly surprised by the wealth of useful information within.

So let's take a look!

The Blog

Like any self-respecting website in the modern age, wordpress.org has its very own blog. A fairly tight-knit group of WordPress experts (including Matt Mullenweg himself) post around once per week. Most recently, as you might expect, Matt published a post on the WordPress v3.3 update, complete with a funky video.

If you have an interest in WordPress (and if you're here, I'm going to guess that you do), the wordpress.org blog should be on your radar.

Showcase

Two of the sites highlighted on the Showcase today.

Seeking inspiration? Look no further than wordpress.org's very own Showcase. Sites are rated by WordPress users based on their "implementation and use of WordPress", so there is no particular bias.

Not only that, they are categorized by type (e.g. standard WordPress, multisite, BuddyPress, and so on) and tagged – if you are looking for inspiration in a particular field, you can customize your search accordingly. For instance, if you were working on a corporate site, you could check these out for inspiration.

& Themes

I'll only touch on these two areas briefly as you would have to call your home the underside of a rock to not be familiar with them. Having said that, the themes and plugins sections on wordpress.org, although not without their faults, are without a doubt the best resources on the web when you're looking to customize your WordPress site.

Ideas

Plugins and themes can be found in the Extend section of wordpress.org, as can Ideas. Now we're getting into the true spirit of open source collaboration. Here you can make suggestions for improvements to WordPress, and other users can vote on your suggestions.

The ideas with the highest votes are taken into strong consideration for future updates. If you have ideas as to how WordPress can be improved, here is your outlet! For instance, check out this little suggestion…sound familiar?

Kvetch!

Who doesn't love to complain? I'm British, so I absolutely love to do it, but usually by muttering under my breath or writing a really terse letter. That'll do the trick.

So I can't help but love wordpress.org's anonymous complaint feature. Just drop "what ails you" into the box and Kvetch it!

Mobile

I dare say that the majority of WPMU readers use smart phones. What can I say – you're the technologically enlightened type. The team at wordpress.org recognize this and are working very hard to produce genuinely useful and usable apps for smart phones and tablets.

I personally use the WordPress app for iOS whenever I am away from my laptop – its features have come on in leaps and bounds recently.

About WordPress

If you are interested in learning a bit of history and also getting a better idea of where WordPress is heading, you should check out the about section. It is hard to believe that the world's most popular CMS has only been in existence for a few years.

The humble codex has come a long way...

The Codex

This is the holy grail. I don't know what I would do without the WordPress codex. It is to WordPress what Wikipedia is to the world (and Wikipedia helped me get my degree – you've gotta love that).

It's got you covered on everything from a basic introduction to WordPress, to plugin and theme development. If you have a question, there is a pretty good chance that it has already been answered here. And if not, I know where you can head next…

The Forums

The word comprehensive is somewhat obsolete when it comes to the WordPress forums. At today's count, there are nearly 2,500,000 posts on a multitude of topics – from installation to meetups. That right folks – nearly 2.5 million posts. That's a whole lotta information for you to sift through and get the answers you need.

One Last Thing…

The folks at wordpress.org seemingly aren't happy enough with what they're offering at the moment and are working on an update. If you're interested in helping them out, just fill in this simple 5 question survey. Open source software such as WordPress runs off the input of its users, so what are you waiting for?

Creative Commons images courtesy of Beinecke Library and Chuck Coker

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How to Find the IDs of WordPress Categories, Posts, Pages, and More

2011-12-31T12:55:00.003-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

Find Your IDs

For many plugins and themes, you need to insert the ID of a category, post, page, etc. in order get them working as they should.

Unfortunately, a number of versions ago, WordPress stopped showing IDs in an obvious way in the Admin area. However, there is still a way to find the IDs you're looking for.

When you're in the Admin area, and you hover over the title of whatever it is you want to find the ID for (a post, a category, a page, a tag, a piece of media, etc.), you will see a status bar pop up in your browser. You should be able to find the ID there.

Plugin Options

If you have issues seeing the status bar in your browser, or if you would simply like the IDs to be more readily available, there are a number of plugins you could go with.

All of the plugins place an extra column on the right hand side of your edit pages in the Admin area.

There are two simple plugins you could use to achieve this. With each of these plugins, you simply activate them and the column appears.

1. WP Show IDs ()

2. Simply Show IDs ()

A third option gives you a little more control.

3. Reveal IDs ()

This plugin allows you to choose which elements you would like to show IDs for, as well as who should see the IDs – Admins, Editors, Authors, Contributors, Subscribers.

Photo: Driver´s licence from BigStock

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Daily Tip: How to Automatically Resize Very Large Images in WordPress

2011-12-31T12:55:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

Do you ever have the problem of having images that are so big they run into your sidebar and make your site look as if it's been hit by a hurricane?

Maybe you know enough to control the size of images, but what if you have users who don't?

A good theme should take care of this problem for you. Unfortunately, some don't – even some you pay a pretty penny for.

The Solution – Automatically Limit Max Width of Images in WordPress

Just put this into the bottom of your style.css file. (Appearance >> Stylesheet: style.css) Or even better, put it into a custom.css file – this way it won't get overwritten if you update your theme.

img {max-width:98%; height: auto;}

This tells WordPress to make the maximum width of the image 98% of the space available in your content area. (Of course you can change this to whatever percentage you'd like.) It then tells WordPress to adjust the height of the image and keep the original aspect ratio. This way you don't get stretched out images.

The Result – Before and After

This first screen shot is of a very large image in a blog post. No, this is not a background for the entire blog. It's an image so large that it only looks like a background.

Now here's the blog after adding the one line of CSS styling.

Photo: Woman After Diet from BigStock

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How to Set Up a WordPress Private Blog

2011-12-31T12:54:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

Although it's easy to make individual posts private or password protected in WordPress, what if you wanted your whole blog to be private? We're not talking about partially private here. We're talking about a blog that's completely off the grid except for those who have access.

I'm sure there are several ways to set one up. This way seem simple enough. It only takes three easy steps.

1. Private Only Plugin ()

Install and activate the Private Only Plugin. There isn't a lot to this plugin. It will automatically re-route all visitors who aren't logged in to a login page. And from there, either they know the magic password or they don't.

This plugin also allows you to upload your own logo on the login page if you like.

2. Disable RSS Plugin ()

Although the Private Only plugin above does a good job of keeping front-door visitors out, unfortunately it leaves your RSS feed completely wide open. This means that people can still read everything that goes on by accessing your site's feed.

This plugin will take care of that.

3. Block Search Engines

For good measure, it probably wouldn't hurt to block search engines just in case. You can do this from you Privacy settings page: Settings > Privacy > "Ask search engines not to index this site."

And that should do it. Now you can get down to those secret handshakes in private.

Photo: Private Sign from BigStock

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How to Create a Unique WordPress Category Archive Page

2011-12-31T12:53:00.002-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

In WordPress, if you would like make your category archives different from each other (for example, giving them different styles or including different types of information on each), then it's pretty easily done. You will only need to make a new category template file for the categories you would like to change.

How to Make a New Category Template

Create a New File

You will need to go into your theme's folder on your server to make your new category template.

Go to wp-content > themes > (your current theme). You should see a file there named category.php.

(Note: Some themes do not have a file named category.php. If that's your case, look for a file named archive.php.)

To make a new category template, create a new file and name it "category-(name).php" where (name) is the name of your category.

For example, say you want to make a category template for your "Food" category. Name the new file:

category-food.php

(Note: You are really naming the file according to your category "slug." Unless you changed the slug to something different when you set up your categories, it should be named exactly the same as your category. If your category has more than one word, you will have hyphens between the words – e.g. Breakfast Food = breakfast-food, and so your category template would be named category-breakfast-food.php.)

Copy Your Original Category File

Probably the easiest way to create a new category template is to start with the same information that's in your original category file. So open up your original category.php file. (In many systems you will need to click "Edit" to open it). Copy the original file and then open your newly created file (e.g. category-food.php) and paste everything into that new file.

You can then change the new file to suit your purposes for your Food category. You can give it new styling through your stylesheet, you can include or delete functions, etc.

An Example

For a quick example, I will add a line of text to my new category-food.php file that I created.

After saving it, this line of text should appear only on my Food Category archive page. And taking a look at it, it does.

New Category Template Pages

You can change your new templates to look however you like – giving them completely different styles or making them "behave " in a completely unique way. You're only limited by your imagination.

Photo: Be Unique from BigStock

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7 WordPress Time and Date Plugins to Keep Your Site Ticking

2011-12-31T12:53:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

As a new year approaches, thoughts naturally turn to the subject of time. And so in that vein, here are seven WordPress plugins that revolve around the time/date theme.

1. WP Scheduled Themes ()

Do you have a special theme you'd like to display on New Year's Day? Will you be sleeping in instead of attending to your site?

No problem. Enter the WP Scheduled Themes plugin.

This plugin lets you schedule a change in your site's theme on whichever day you'd like. It also lets you set an end date for the theme. One other nice function is that it lets you set up this schedule to occur yearly. So if you regularly switch to a certain theme at certain times of the year, you can set it up once and have your site change at just the right times.

2. Dynamic Dates ()

The Dynamic Dates plugin lets you insert shortcodes to automatically create user-friendly dates on the fly.

For example, let's say you had a meeting every Sunday. You could insert a shortcode that would automatically let a visitor know the actual date of next Sunday's meeting.

This is a relatively simple example, but you can get more sophisticated with it if you like. In order to see different types of options, you will need to read the instructions on the WordPress plugin page (there is no settings page for the plugin).

3. Auto Future Date ()

This plugin allows you to randomly automate publishing future posts within certain parameters. For example, you can tell it to publish a post between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. anywhere from one day from the last published post on the site to five days from the last published post on the site.

This is good for bloggers who write a lot of posts at once but then want to space them out.

4. Date/Time Now Button ()

This plugin adds a "Now" button to your publish screen that lets you change the publishing time of a post, page, or comment to the current time.

This is a handy plugin for anyone who does a fair amount of editing on posts, pages, or comments and would like to republish the page at the current time and date (as opposed to leaving it published at the original time and date). It's also a nice feature for reconfiguring scheduled posts to be published at whatever the current time and date are.

In the example below I scheduled a post to publish at 10:32 p.m. (22:32). I then hit the "Now" button and it automatically changed the time for the current time – 2:32 p.m. (14:32).

5. Magic Dates ()

This handy little plugin lets you use shortcodes to calculate the number of years from a certain year and insert that number into your text.

For example, let's say you wrote something last year that read, "He has 12 years experience in his field." That's fine, but now it's a year later, and so he has another year of experience. Enter the Magic Dates plugin.

See an example of it in action:

6. Hetjens Expiration Date ()

This plugin adds a meta box to your visual editor page that allows you to set the post to expire. When the post expires, it is moved to the trash. It is not automatically deleted permanently, however, unless you have your trash set to automatically empty.

7. Easy Timer ()

The Easy Timer plugin provides you with a huge number of shortcode options for counting down to something, counting up from something, revealing hidden content when a certain date is reached, and more.

For a very simple sample of this plugin in action, see below.

But this plugin can do A LOT more than this. I recommend looking at some of the extensive documentation for it here.

Photo: 2012 – Wall Calendar Displaying New Year Date from BigStock

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Spice Up Your WordPress Site by Giving Categories their Own Icons

2011-12-31T12:52:00.003-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

One way to liven up your site a little and give it a little extra flair is to associate different icons with different categories. Or, you can do it for only one or two categories to really mark those off as different.

When you assign a category an icon, the image that you've chosen will show up all over your site whenever a post from that category is present.

Before we get into the code, let's take a look at how these icons might look on your site.

Music Category Example

Let's say you have a category for music, and you want to assign that category an icon. Although you could assign every category an icon, you choose to only assign the Music category an icon. (Maybe you're a musician, and you know that a lot of people come to your site for your take on music. But you write about other things too. In order to help people easily identify the music posts at a glance, you include your icon to help them out.)

Front Page

When not every post gets an icon, you will see only icons on Music category posts in places like the homepage of your site.

Category Page

Of course on your Music category archive page, all the posts will be music posts, and so each one will have an icon associated with it.

The Music category page will even get an extra little icon up in the corner (or wherever you position your icons to be.)

Single Page Post

You will also see your icon show up on your single page post.

How to Do It

The code you need is very simple. You will only need a line of CSS styling.

When you have the URL of your icon (make sure to size it so it's not too big – I used 60×60 pixels for mine), go to the Stylesheet for your theme. (Appearance > Edit > Stylesheet – style.css)

Place the following code in your stylesheet and save it.

.category-music { background: url(http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/musicman60.jpg) no-repeat top right; }

As you can see, all you need to do is name your category and then style it, using a background image. You can do this for any category. Just put ".category-" and then put the category slug (in this case it's "music").

Unless you changed your category slug when you set your categories up, it should be the same name as your category.

And that's all there is to it.

Photo: stars from BigStock

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Daily Tip: WordPress Settings Backup Tip

2011-12-31T12:52:00.001-05:00

Navigated from The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

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WordPress Plugin Releases for 12/29

2011-12-31T12:50:00.004-05:00

Published on Weblog Tools Collection | shared via feedly mobile

New plugins

allows you to get rid of auto generated HTML id's for your widgets.

adds a widget to your sidebar to track real time visitors to your website.

Updated plugins

is a lightweight plugin to protect email addresses from email-harvesting robots by encoding them into decimal and hexadecimal entities.

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WordPress Theme Releases for 12/27

2011-12-31T12:50:00.003-05:00

Published on Weblog Tools Collection | shared via feedly mobile

Bizz is a very clean and minimal theme that is ideal for business and portfolio websites.

Sunny Blue Sky is a blue theme which includes a cloudy blue sky and sun that is shining and good looking.

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WordPress.com News: Kick Off 2012 with Project 365

2011-12-31T12:50:00.001-05:00

Published on Planet Wordpress | shared via feedly mobile

If you were going to blog about one thing for an entire year, what would you choose?

Would you post photographs of your favorite place? Interview different people from your hometown? Create a new piece of art each day?

Here are eight unique blog projects (some are updated every single day) to inspire you to kick off 2012 with your own Project 365:

Blog Radstone

RichardRadstoneBlog.com

The goal, every day for the next year, approach one stranger, photograph them and promptly blog the experience. Rain or shine, hot or cold, healthy or ill, no days missed. I'll do my best to create interesting photos, and for the sake of entertainment, work to get myself into a sticky situation from time to time. It's a huge commitment. I'm sure there will be some hero photographs and some not so magnificent ones. Let's see what happens!

The Creative Panic

TheCreativePanic.com

The project right at this moment is to illustrate something (anything!) as quickly as possible every day.

36ixty5

36ixty5.WordPress.com

Each day a new image will be uploaded with a small caption, phrase, quote, poem or whatever.

Everything Burger

EverythingBurger.WordPress.com

I created 365 pieces of burger artwork for a year from May 17, 2010 until May 16, 2011.

An Afternoon With

AnAfternoonWith.com

This is a project about people. It is a project about our space and the things we keep and the things we don't throw away. It is a project about looking for and finding connections we all have. It is about seeing yourself in these spaces. Every picture is a portrait of the owner – be it a room, an object or a view. Every portrait in the end becomes a self-portrait. So in the end this is a project about me.

Footballists

Footballists.WordPress.com

I often walk around the city in my beloved Liverpool FC jersey. I never miss to notice every other person wearing a soccer shirt, no matter how big the crowd. I've decided to approach and meet them, and photograph. Here are my brief encounters, far away from the pitch.

A Drink with Chicago

ADrinkWithChicago.com

Since making Chicago our home, we have found that all it takes is one great conversation over one drink to create a long lasting friendship, change your outlook or learn something new. We have had so many of these experiences that we thought we'd start to share them as we continue getting to know the many fascinating people around our city. Join us as we sit down and have a drink with local entrepreneurs, chefs, celebrities, socialites, artists and athletes who all love Chicago as much as we do.

{365} Breakfasts

OneBreakfastADay.WordPress.com

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. A blog to celebrate this is worth it.

So, do you have any ideas for your own Project 365?

For tips on choosing a topic, check out the Learn WordPress.com tutorial on Getting Focused. You can also find writing ideas, blogging tips, and photo challenges at The Daily Post.

Happy New Year from all of us at Automattic!

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Daily Tip: Develop Richer, More Personal WordPress Blogroll Links

2011-12-31T12:47:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

If you haven't looked at the Links (Blogroll) settings section in WordPress recently, you might be surprised at how much it's developed. (Links > Add New)

When you want to add a new link, there are a number of different options available to you. One of the more obviously practical ones is the ability to choose how a browser should open the link (in a new tab, in the same tab).

Images with Links

Another nice feature is the ability to include an image to be placed alongside of the link. Unless you specifically style your links for large images, then typically you will want to use a very small image, something along the lines of a favicon. In the example below, I used a 16×16 favicon.

Define Relationships with XFN

An interesting feature that may be less obviously practical is the ability to provide extra information about your relationship to the site or the person you are linking to. This is done in conjunction with XFN. XFN stands for XHTML Friends Network.

You can attach information to the link that says, for example, whether you are a personal friend of the person you are linking to, whether you are related to the person, whether the person is a co-worker, and a lot more.

This information is not obviously visible to a visitor of your site. It is meant to be read by machines (i.e. computer programs that map out social connections). How is this valuable? Well, at the moment it might not be so valuable for the average user, but the idea is to eventually create a more social web where you can define relationships and connect with people in a way you might on Facebook or LinkedIn – without having to be on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Beefier and Better Links

If you haven't checked out the Links section of your blog in a while, you might give it a fresh look. It's probably beefier and better and more powerful than you remembered it.

For more info on all the options available, you can see the WordPress Links Manager page.

For more info on XFN, visit the WordPress Defining Relationships with XFN page.

Photo: Link from BigStock

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WordPress constants overview - WP Engineer

2011-12-31T12:46:00.001-05:00

Navigated from Planet Wordpress | shared via feedly mobile

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5 WordPress Scrolling Ticker Plugins to Liven Up Your Site

2011-12-31T12:45:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

We live in a fast-paced media world. Turn on any 24-hour TV news station and you will be bombarded with all sorts of information flying at you from every corner of the screen – newscasters talking to you, infographics appearing, photos popping up, and the ubiquitous "news crawl" of stories, scores, stock prices, and more swimming along the bottom of it all.

But here's the thing – we're used to it. And because we're used to it, anything less can sometimes look stale or boring.

And so if you'd like to give the sense that your website is as current and information-rich as a 24-hour news station, it might help if you borrow some of their tactics.

One such tactic that is easily achieved is the "news ticker" or the scrolling crawl of stories that you see running along the bottom of the screen.

The following five plugins can give you a personalized news crawl for your site based on your own content (and in some cases others' content if you like).

1. Vertical Scroll Recent Post ()

Main Features

Widget-ready or add directly to theme
Control number of posts to display in the scroll at the same time
Control max number of posts to display
Control which categories posts come from

Potential Drawback

One issue is that long titles tend to overlap onto the next title down the list. This can be fixed by controlling the height of the titles on the settings page; however, you may end up with more space between your titles than you wish.

2. Post Scroll Excerpt ()

From the same plugin author as Vertical Scroll Recent Post plugin above, this plugin works the same way except it includes excerpts along with the titles of the posts.

The overlapping issues in this plugin are more easily controlled than in the Vertical Scroll Recent Post plugin because the increased amount of space needed for the excerpts makes each title and snippet appear in a more evenly spaced manner.

Main Features

Widget-ready
Control number of posts to display in the scroll at the same time
Control max number of posts to display
Control which categories posts come from
Control excerpt length

3. Post Title Marquee Scroll ()

From the same author as the first two plugins, this widget-ready plugin scrolls recent posts titles horizontally.

Main Features

Control the direction of the scroll
Control style – color and font
Control style of "splitter" – the dividing symbol between titles
Control number of posts
Control post categories
Short codes for posts and pages
Add directly to theme (or use widget)

4. Flash Feed Scroll Reader ()

Main Features

Works by putting in an RSS feed (so of course you can put in your own feed)
Allows you to control the width and height of the scroll
Allows you to control the speed of the scroll

Potential Drawback

No widgets – need to place code in your theme's files
***Adds a link in the scroll to the plugin's author

5. News-Ticker ()

The News-Ticker plugin gives you a number of nice options. It's one potential drawback, depending on what you're looking for, is that it presents each item one at a time instead of in a continuous crawl. In other words, the first item will completely leave the screen before the second item appears.

Especially if you are using excerpts with your items, however, that may not really matter much.

Main Features

Display recent posts, most popular posts, most commented posts, or specific posts
Display RSS feeds
Filter by category
Control number of posts
Control excerpt length
Control ticker speed
Control ticker height (scroll left, right, up, down; fade in; etc.)
Control ticker animation

Potential Drawback

No widget
One item at a time – not a continuous crawl

Photo: Stock market tickers abstract from BigStock

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Konstantin Kovshenin: Snippet! Change the year of all posts in a particular category to 2012 with a …

2011-12-31T12:43:00.001-05:00

Published on Planet Wordpress | shared via feedly mobile

Snippet! Change the year of all posts in a particular category to 2012 with a single SQL query (use with phpMyAdmin or the MySQL command line interface)

UPDATE wp_posts AS p   JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr ON tr.object_id = p.id   JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON tt.term_taxonomy_id = tr.term_taxonomy_id   JOIN wp_terms AS t ON tt.term_id = t.term_id   SET p.post_date = REPLACE(p.post_date, YEAR(p.post_date), 2012)   WHERE t.slug = 'my-category-slug' AND tt.taxonomy = 'category';

Obviously replace my-category-slug with the category you'd like to target and perform the same magic on the p.post_date_gmt field. Not entirely sure why you would use such a technique, but it was asked by James Edwards on Twitter.

Source: Snippet! Change the year of all posts in a particular category to 2012 with a ... by Konstantin Kovshenin

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Daily Tip: How to Insert Shortcodes into a WordPress Theme

2011-12-31T12:41:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

What are Shortcodes?

Shortcodes, which many plugins take advantage of, are an easy and quick way to insert special kinds of content into your posts or pages.

A shortcode typically looks something like this one from a plugin that is supposed to display the number of categories on a site:

[catcount]

You just pop your shortcode into your post, and then behind the scenes everything gets called into the post in the way it should.

So in the case above, I might write a post that says the following:

The total number of categories is [catcount].

If I have 21 categories, then when the post is published it will read:

The total number of categories is 21.

If I add a category, then that number will automatically get bumped up to 22.

Inserting a Shortcode into a Theme

But what if you wanted your shortcodes to work outside of your posts or pages? What if you wanted to have a shortcode work in your header, for example?

Putting a regular shortcode in your theme's files will not work as it would if you put it in a post or a page. But there's a way around that.

Simply insert your shortcode into the following line of code, and place it where you like.

Of course you will need to substitute [my-shortcode] for your actual shortcode. For example, I placed my category counting plugin shortcut above in my header like this:

Actually, I made it part of a complete sentence like this:

The total number of categories is .

The result looks like this:

And that's all there is to it. Voila! A shortcode inserted wherever you like.

Photo: Short pencil from BigStock

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How to Change Your WordPress Username: Even Shakespeare Would Dig It

2011-12-31T12:40:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

"What's in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet."

- Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare

Although we may smell as sweet no matter our name, sometimes we'd like a name that's as sweet as we are.

And in WordPress, that appears to be a problem if you didn't choose a username wisely when you first set up your site.

WordPress says that usernames cannot be changed.

But that's not exactly true. What they mean to say is that they can't be easily changed via the backend Admin area. However, if you dig into the database a little, it's a different story. … Maybe not as compelling a story as Romeo and Juliet, but a story you'll be interested in nonetheless.

How to Change Your Username

Note: Because many WordPress users have Cpanel with their webhost, this tutorial will demonstrate changing your username via Cpanel. If you do not have Cpanel, you will need to navigate to your database via the system you have. You may need to contact your webhost if you run into problems.

* It's recommended that you back up your database before proceeding.

1. Login to your account on your server / your Cpanel Admin area.

2. Access your database(s) via phpMyAdmin (found in the Databases section of Cpanel)

3. Click on your database name (left hand side)

If you have more than one database, you will need to choose the correct one. Most people will probably only have one database, however.

4. Choose wp_users

Once you're into your database, on the left hand side, click into wp_users

5. Find User & Click Edit

Find the user you would like to change by searching under the user_login column. Then click "Edit."

6. Replace Username

Replace the original username with the new username in the user_login row. Then click "Go" at the bottom of the page to save your change.

(Note: You can also change the user_nicename here if you like, or you can change that in the Admin area of your site. This corresponds to the "Nickname" in the Admin area of your site.)

7. Login to Your Site

Once you change your username, you will need to login with your new one.

8. Confirm New Username

Once logged in, you should see your new username under your profile..

That's It

And that's all there is to it. So simple even The Bard wouldn't object.

Photo: Poet from BigStock

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Automatically Embed Videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and More in WordPress

2011-12-31T12:39:00.001-05:00

Published on The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org | shared via feedly mobile

Did you know that you can embed videos in WordPress from a number of the most popular video sites by simply pasting the URL of the video page into your editor?

For those who know this little trick, it's so useful you probably don't even think of it as a "trick" anymore. You probably just take it for granted now.

But for those who are learning of it for the first time, like most, you'll probably say, "Oh, cool."

How It Works

1. First, you must make sure you've checked the box in your Media Settings page to allow automatic embeds.

Go to Setting > Media > (check Auto-embeds)

2. Place URL on its own line in your editor

Control Size of Video

You can also use shortcodes with the URL to control the maximum height and width of the video (not the exact height and width, just the MAXIMUMS).

Do this by placing shortcodes such as the following around your URL:

List of Currently Supported Sites

WordPress currently supports the following sites for auto-embed:

YouTube ("unlisted" and "private" videos will not be embedded)
Vimeo
DailyMotion
blip.tv
Flickr (both videos and images)
Viddler
Hulu
Qik
Revision3
Scribd
Photobucket
PollDaddy
WordPress.tv (only VideoPress-type videos)
SmugMug (WordPress 3.0+ required)
FunnyOrDie.com (WordPress 3.0+ required)

If you'd like more information on auto-embedding, you can check out the WordPress Embeds page.

Photo: Movie Number 1 from BigStock

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WordPress tip: Restrict user access to specific templates

2011-12-04T00:30:00.001-05:00

Published on WpRecipes.com | shared via feedly

Simply create a new page template and paste the following at the very beginning of the file:

 <?php /* Template Name: Restricted to Authors only */  if ( !current_user_can('author')) { 	wp_die('You don't have access to this page.') } ?>

Thanks to Kevin Chard for this snippet!

Looking for WordPress hosting? Try WP Web Host. Prices starts at $5/month and you can try it for free!

WordPress tip: Restrict user access to specific templates

Daily Tip: Protect Your WordPress Site With The AntiVirus Plugin

2011-12-04T00:24:00.001-05:00

Published on WordPress News at WPMU - The WP Experts | shared via feedly

Falling victim to a malicious WordPress attack can really spoil your day.

Daily Tip: Create Your Own Social Bookmarking Site With WordPress

2011-12-04T00:20:00.001-05:00

Published on WordPress News at WPMU - The WP Experts | shared via feedly

The surest way to build a community around your WordPress blog is to allow as much input from your readers as possible. Make them feel like they're part of the process – not just members of the audience.

11 Ways To Explain Social Business Benefits

2011-11-10T00:49:00.000-05:00

11 Ways To Explain Social Business Benefits: Consider these strategies to explain social tools to people without drowning them in social speak or meaningless jargon.