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Archive for the ‘Tips & Tricks’ Category

Comment Validation update plus fix

By Austin On March 16, 2009 4 Comments

On this site I use the Comment Validation plugin from Jörn Zaefferer.

You can find out more about this plugin at the WordPress directory.

This plugin is an amazing plugin, but the new version breaks W3C validation. Mostly due to typo’s and small oversights. Lets take a looks at the original comment-validation.php file in version 0.3.

function commentValidation() { echo ' '; echo ''; echo ''; echo ''; } add_action('wp_head', 'commentValidation');

Hey, where you able to tell what need to be fixed? Well lets take a closer look.

Corrections

On line 15 you’ll see we need to change

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Remove the title attribute using jQuery

By Austin On March 11, 2009 6 Comments

In WordPress, when you use wp_page_menu your anchor attribute’s usually carry a title with the same name. I’m not sure if it’s correct to do this, but it bother me when I hover over a page menu navigation link and I get a hover of the title.

So on my site I used jQuery to remove the title:

$("#nav a").removeAttr("title");

Pretty simple huh? Click here to continue reading



How to: Open external links in a new window

By Austin On March 1, 2009 5 Comments

Over the weekend, I attended WordCamp Denver, and I was asked by John Hawkins how to force links to open in a new tab with out editing the source code. So, today lets learn a simple jQuery trick to open all external links in your site in a new tab or window. We are going to make sure you have jQuery active on your site, you can do this easily in WordPress, since it’s bundled with the latest installations. Use this code in your header: <?php

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Fixing plugins not compatible with hybrid 0.4.2

By Austin On February 26, 2009 No Comments

Hey everyone, as you may have noticed I have a running on the site. While everything almost everything moved over smoothly, there was an issue with how my parent theme striped text in typography. This caused some plugins, like cformsII to not be allowed to print to the screen. Justin had helped to find a fix to filter the hybrid_typography function.

Originally this function filtered out and changed some text that would not validate as XHTML. This had to be removed by

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Add the twittar plugin for WordPress w/ comment threading

By Austin On February 18, 2009 6 Comments

I talked about the Twittar plugin in a previous post. But learned that the read me text file was only useful for installing the necessary php code into WordPress themes that don’t have comment threading enabled.

Since most new themes past version 2.7, pull the comments section from functions.php file, that is where you have to edit the avatars in order to show the twittar settings.

First open you functions.php, and look for a line of code that says:

function custom_comment()

This is where your new comments are pulled from when you have the threaded comments enabled.

Now just find <?php echo

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Styling your ordered & unordered list items into 2 columns

By Austin On February 15, 2009 4 Comments

In a previous post I showed you how to create a custom widget, then I showed you how to create a widget for your monthly archives, and limit the month’s that show. I am showing the past 4 months in my widget at this time.

One of my readers: Alex asked:

How did you make the archives widget to show the dates separately into two columns?

Now I will show you a CSS trick to create this effect:

First we will give the unordered list a width of 100%:

ul#archives { width:110%; }

Then we will style the <li> nested

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Changing your feedbuner form to work with Google

By Austin On February 12, 2009 No Comments

A lot of you may be using a email form to gather email’s via Feedburner. I am use that by now you know Google has decided to dump feedburner.com and move all feeds through Google Proxy or Feeburner2 which is a Google Server. Here is the new form you will need to put on your site to get new email address’s:

<form action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post" target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=YOUR_FEED_NAME', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true"> <p class="form-label">Enter your email address:</p><p><input type="text" style="width:140px" name="email"/></p> <input type="hidden" value="YOUR_FEED_NAME" name="url"/> <input type="hidden" value="<?php bloginfo('name') ?>" name="title"/> <input type="hidden" name="loc"Click here to continue reading


Jon Asked: How to add thumbnails above post on the THiCK theme

By Austin On February 10, 2009 11 Comments

I was asked by a reader:

I’m using the THiCK theme for my new design blog. I noticed you were able to add thumbnail images above your blog posts on the home page. What would I need to do to enable this on my blog?

Well Jon, this can be done very simple, since the theme is already using the Tim Thumb script.

What you will need to do is find in your index.php file, the second loop. Which you can find on line 40.

<?php query_posts('offset=1&showposts=' . get_option('woo_other_entries') . '&cat=-' . $GLOBALS['ex_asides']Click here to continue reading


How to: Add any authors gravatar to their post

By Austin On February 4, 2009 No Comments

This is an easy one, just add one line to your single.php file where you would like the Gravatar to show up.

<?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_id(), $size = '96', $default = '<path_to_url>' ); ?> Click here to continue reading


How to: Add a contact me via Skype™ button

By Austin On February 3, 2009 3 Comments

This little trick is really simple and easy. All you need to do is plug this line of code anywhere you would like to use the text.

<a onclick="return skypeCheck();" href="skype:austin.passy?call">Call me on Skype!</a>

That’s is, pretty simple huh? Just make sure you change skype:austin.passy to your user name!

Want a test? Well, please use the text button, as I was getting to many call’s and hangups: Call me on Skype! Message me on Skype!

Thanks to Shayne for this code!

Update:

I was reminded by Click here to continue reading



How to: Show what a user is searching for in the title

By Austin On February 2, 2009 No Comments

Want to show what any user was searching for?
It is simple, just add this line where your title would be.

<h1>Browsing search results for <strong>"<?php the_search_query() ?>"</strong>.</h1>

The important line is the_search_query() Click here to continue reading



Build a classic MyBlogLog widget

By Austin On January 30, 2009 4 Comments

In this post I will show you how I created my custom widget showcasing mybloglog readers.

In your function.php file add this simple line of code:

<?php // MyBlogLog function MyBlogLogWidget() { ?> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pub.mybloglog.com/comm2.php?mblID=ReplaceWithYourID&amp;c_width=220&amp;c_sn_opt=n&amp;c_rows=6&amp;c_img_size=h&amp;c_heading_text=&amp;c_color_heading_bg=e0e0d4&amp;c_color_heading=E8A02C&amp;c_color_link_bg=e0e0d4&amp;c_color_link=d54e21&amp;c&amp;c_color_bottom_bg=e0e0d4"></script> <?php } //register the sidebar 'the widget name', 'the widget function'// register_sidebar_widget('MyBlogLog Widget', 'MyBlogLogWidget'); ?>

That’s it, just replace the “ReplaceWithYourID” with your mybloglog ID. You can also change the width at c_width=220 to what ever you like.

If you look closely at the code you may also see color codes, you may change them to corresponding hex codes, for example: c_color_bottom_bg=e0e0d4 is the color for the bottom background. e0e0d4 is a light gray,

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How to: Creating an Archive page

By Austin On January 30, 2009 1 Comment

Many weblog sites these days have some form of an archive page. In WordPress it might be the built in auto generation of permalinks by: /Month/ and /date/.

But in some blog’s, for instance this one here (as I said in a previous post) you can’t get the post to paginate or link to http://youblog.com/page/2 if you have nice permalinks active or http://youblog.com/?paged=2.

By any means, In this theme I have to have an archive link at the bottom. So..

Archive WordPress Plugins

There are many plugins which allows you to automatically create an archive page. The

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Limit the characters that display on the_title

By Austin On January 19, 2009 2 Comments

Ever wanted to display the title of a post somewhere but limit the amount of characters that are shown? For instance, this post has a very long title, and if I were to use <?php echo the_title() ?> it would show as follows: Limit the characters that display on the_title.

That may not fit well on one line in lets say a widget or small width div. So here is a neat trick you can use:

<?php $title = the_title('','',FALSE); echo substr($title, 0, 11); ?>

Pretty simple huh, just note the bold numbers, in this case 11 character would output like this: Limit

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Can′t add pagination on WooThemes Thick Theme

By Austin On January 17, 2009 No Comments

Everything I have tried has led to nothing. And I have tried six way’s from Sunday to get my main posts to paginate.

example one:

<?php $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1; query_posts('offset=1&showposts=' . get_option('woo_other_entries') . '&cat=-' . $GLOBALS['ex_asides'] . '&paged=$paged' ); ?>

example two:

<?php global $myOffset; global $wp_query; $myOffset = 1; $paged = intval(get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1; $temp = $wp_query; $wp_query= null; $wp_query = new WP_Query(); $wp_query->query(array( 'offset' => $myOffset, 'category__not_in' => array($GLOBALS['ex_asides'],7,84), 'paged' => $paged, 'showposts' => get_option('woo_other_entries'), )); ?>

example three:

<?php global $myOffset; $myOffset = 1; $wp_query = new WP_Query(); $wp_query->query(array( 'offset' => $myOffset, 'category__not_in' => array($GLOBALS['ex_asides'],7,84), 'paged' => $paged, 'showposts' => get_option('woo_other_entries'), )); ?>

And after those tries, I just can’t get more pages beyond the option’s that I choose, and can

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