Tips & Tricks
Creating a custom widget
Today let’s learn a simple quick trick on how to create a custom widget. For my example I will show you how I created my Showcase widget located in the middle, to the right of the posts.
First under your functions.php
file type in the following:
<?php // Custom Widget function MyCustomWidget() { ?> <li class="widget"> <h2 class="heading">Latest Showcase</h2> <ul> <?php include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/includes/showcase.php'); ?> </ul> </li> <?php } register_sidebar_widget('The Custom Widget for Showcase', 'MyCustomWidget'); ?>
- Always make sure your code is between the
<?php
and?>
for it to work. - Once we call the function, the rest is assuming html code that you may or may not need.
- For instance, you may just put in a picture and call it a day. But my code starts with
<li<
because my sidebar’s start and end with<ul<
. - Any way, once your done, just set the final “
register_sidebar_widget('the widget title', 'the name of the function');
“
That’s it! Now you have a custom widget with what ever you want!
Themes
Add additional meta boxes to Hybrid Theme
At the time of writing this post I have Theme Hybrid as my parent theme, and am using a custom version of Hybrid News that Justin Tadlock offers to the public.
Well I want to tell you how you can add additional custom meta boxes to your child theme’s running the Hybrid Theme.
In your child function.php
file just add the following to create a new post meta box:
/** * Add additional post meta boxes * * by WPCult */ function wpcult_post_meta_boxes($meta_boxes) { $meta_boxes['image'] = array( 'name' => 'image', 'default' => '', 'title' => __('Image:'), 'type' => 'text', 'show_description' => false, 'description' => __('Please use a full size image, larger than 500px (this photo will dynamically re-size itself!'), ); return $meta_boxes; } add_filter('hybrid_post_meta_boxes', 'wpcult_post_meta_boxes');
This will create a custom meta box called Image, and will create a custom field with the id of image.
Additionally you can create this on pages as well by copy/paste and replacing “post_meta_box” with “page_meta_box” every where inside the function.
Tips & Tricks
Sick of images being to large for the content area?
Have you ever uploaded an image that might have been a tad bigger than the width of your content area? I know I have! So here is a little CSS fix to handle these situations.
.post img { max-width: 600px; height: auto; }
That’s it, really simple huh. Just make sure that you change the .post
to the correct body class(which starts with a “.“) or body ID(which starts with a “#“).
Would you like a quick explanation?
The CSS is just telling any image inside the class of .post
to not be more than 600px wide. By the way make sure you change it to fit the dimension of your content width. And the height attribute is set to auto to automatically change the height to match the new width. 🙂
Tips & Tricks
How to: Display RSS feeds from anywhere
Here is a simple way to display any RSS feed in your WordPress blog.
<?php include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php'); $rss = fetch_rss('http://feeds2.feedburner.com/WPCult'); $items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, 4); if (empty($items)) echo '<li>No items</li>'; else foreach ( $items as $item ) : ?> <a style="font-size: 14px;" href='<?php echo $item['link']; ?>' title='<?php echo $item['title']; ?>'><?php echo $item['title']; ?></a><br /> <p style="font-size: 10px; color: #aaa;"><?php echo date('F, j Y',strtotime($item['pubdate'])); ?></p> <p><?php echo substr($item['summary'],0,strpos($item['summary'], "This is a post from")); ?></p> <?php endforeach; ?>
The first step is to include the WordPress file rss.php
then will apply code after to style the feeds.
Of coarse I forgot to mention, change the RSS feed to the feed you want to pull.
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Pingback: WPStart.org » Blog Archive » WordPress links week 3 - 2009
Alex
February 13, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Thank You! A Lot!
This really helped me!
BTW How did you make the archives widget to show the dates separately into two columns?
Thank you.
frosty
February 14, 2009 at 8:59 am
No problem, I will write up a post on that, check back or subscribe. Thanks Alex.
Glenn
March 19, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Austin,
I just found this post while checking out my ad. You might want to try this little widget with Widgetifyr.com and see what added features it gives you. In the instant version you’d get all the theme complaint pre and post calls. You can all the nice control panel stuff like a title and description.
I was thinking about just doing it for you and pasting it here, but I wasn’t sure how code would be translated in a comment.
Thanks
Glenn
Widgetifyr.com