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!
Tips & Tricks
Styling your ordered & unordered list items into 2 columns
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 inside.
ul#archives li { display:inline; float:left; width:120px; }
And that is it. Please make sure that you clear the float
after your closing </ul>
.
Tips & Tricks
Changing your feedbuner form to work with Google
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" value="en_US"/> <input id="submit" type="submit" value="Subscribe" /> </form>
That’s it, just be sure to change YOUR_FEED_NAME
to your feed name. For example, my feed is now http://feeds2.feedburner.com/WPCult. Where WPCult is now my ID.
Themes
Jon Asked: How to add thumbnails above post on the THiCK theme
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=-' . $GLOBALS['ex_asides'] ); ?> <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> <div class="post"> <h2><a title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2> <div class="post-meta"><?php the_time('j/m/y'); ?> <span>|</span> <?php comments_popup_link('0 Comments', '1 Comment', '% Comments'); ?></div> <?php the_excerpt(); ?> </div> <?php endwhile; ?>
Now we are going to add in the code. At line 43
we are going to add:
<?php if (get_option('woo_resize')) { // Check if we should use the image resizer ?> <a title="Continue reading this entry..." href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><img src="<?php echo bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/thumb.php?src=<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "image", $single = true); ?>&h=80&w=280&zc=1&q=90" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" /></a> <?php } else { ?> <a title="Continue reading this entry..." href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><img src="<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "image", $single = true); ?>" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" /></a> <?php } ?>
That’s it, just make sure that in the THiCK options panel you choose the “resize” option, or the image might break the layout. Or you may change the this code: $post->ID, "image",
to: $post->ID, "image_thumb",
and use a separate image for the lower blog.
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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