Web Design Ledger » wordpress

10 Professional Minimal WordPress Themes

Henry Jones — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 07:24:39 +0000

Whitespace, good typography, and a solid layout are all important aspects of a good design, and especially a minimal design. When these three elements are executed correctly, it translates into a highly professional look. If you’re a WordPress user, the problem is that finding a solid minimal theme can be a challenge. So for this post, we’ve rounded up 10 Professional Minimal WordPress Themes.

Pure

Pure is a super clean and minimal blog theme. Pure will give your blog an elegant and sophisticated feel without getting in the way of your content. Great typography and a good amount of white space make this theme stand out.

ThemeMin

ThemeMin is a minimal, light-weight and typography-focused theme. It promises to provide comfort reading and fast loading. There is no images used in the theme (except the RSS icon).

Structure

Structure is designed to adopt the style of the content added. It features 2 color options — a white version and a black version.

Press

Press is a versatile minimalist theme featuring classic typography and clean lines.

Canvas

Canvas is a highly customizable blog theme with a clean and minimal design.

Specialist

Specialist is a simple elegant theme for small business website. Specially created for small business and individual professionals.

Vigilance

Vigilance is clean, elegant, search engine optimized, and packed with features.

InkDrop

InkDrop is a blog/portfolio/business hybrid with lots of style packed into a minimalist design.

Verbage

Verbage features a clean, modern design with a focus on typography. The theme is developed to function perfectly with — or without photos added.

Monochrome Pro

Monochrome Pro is a minimal theme that is perfect for a news or magazine website.

Disclaimer: The Pure theme is a product of Theme Trust, which is founded by Henry Jones, who is also founder of Web Design Ledger.

10 Excellent WordPress Themes for Portfolios and Galleries

Henry Jones — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 06:00:47 +0000

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Themes can extend WordPress into much more than just a blogging platform, and it’s common for theme developers to create themes with a focus on specific niches. For example, a few weeks ago we posted a collection of business WordPress themes that were aimed at giving business owners an easy way to get a great looking site online. So for this post, the focus is on portfolios and galleries. We’ve rounded up 10 themes that are ideal for designers and photographers who don’t have web design skills to build their own portfolio site. The themes we selected for this post are well designed and do an excellent job of presenting the content in a professional manner.

Work

Work is an elegant portfolio theme built for showing off your work. This theme has a clean and professional style that is perfect for displaying anything from illustrations to photography. Easily build your portfolio with the numerous built-in page templates that give you the ability to create one, two, three, and four column gallery layouts.

On Assignment

On Assignment is primed for photographers, videographers and journalists who need to feature their portfolio and connect with followers and potential clients with status updates and news/blog posts.

Photography

Photography is a theme built for photographers. Includes easy to use galleries, integrated Flickr support, and two gorgeous color schemes.

Portfolio

The Organic Portfolio Theme offers a clean, professional way of displaying artwork, design, photography and more. The theme features a portfolio category template that allows for 1, 2 or 3 column layout, a featured content slider, additional portfolio page templates and an options page for easily changing the content of the home page.

Blogfolio

Blogfolio is an advance theme that provides unique layout options to display your portfolio and blog posts. It is designed to give maximum space to display your work.

Photolist

A minimalist theme for Photographers and bloggers alike with features such as image filters and a unique gallery slider.

Widescreen

Widescreen is a photography theme for WordPress that features multiple homepage layout and design options including a fullscreen slideshow, a homepage video, featured posts and much more.

deLucide

deLucide is a very sleek and elegant portfolio theme to showcase your photos or any other work in a professional and lucent design.

DeepFocus

DeepFocus lets you turn your WordPress blog into a fully functional online photo gallery while still maintaining all of the features of a normal blog. Along with the gallery layout, DeepFocus comes with a robust blog and CMS-style homepage as well, making it an amazing solution for artists/photographers looking to build an online presence.

Aperture

Aperture is a multi-functional photo-blogging theme with a unique home page, consisting of a latest posts slider, a visual category display, a blog module and lots of stylish widgetized spaces.

Disclaimer: The Work theme is a product of Theme Trust, which is founded by Henry Jones, who is also founder of Web Design Ledger.

10 Professional WordPress Themes for Business Websites

Henry Jones — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 05:10:03 +0000

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Custom website designs aren’t right for every business, especially those that are on a tight budget or trying to stay as lean as possible. Many of these businesses turn to WordPress. It’s an excellent CMS solution, and there is a large selection of affordable themes available designed specifically for business websites. The only problem is professional looking themes can sometimes be difficult to find, and when launching a business, the last thing you want is a sloppy website. So for this post, as usual, we’ve done the searching for you…we’ve rounded up 10 Professional WordPress Themes for Business Websites.

Quantum

Quantum is a vibrant theme that will bring your business website to life. It’s packed with features including a built-in icon set and 15 possible color and texture combinations.

Leverage

Leverage is an elegant theme that acts as a CMS for your business website. Included in this theme are options to define your own color scheme, a built-in icon set, and many other features.

deVision

deVision is a complex WordPress theme that lets you create a business website in minutes. Showcase your company or product with clean and professional design without any programming skills.

Inspire

Inspire is a highly functional theme that has a custom homepage with a featured area powered by jQuery, and lovely mini-featured area. This along with the included portfolio page template makes it perfect to use for your business to show off your work or products.

FullSide

FullSide is an adavanced, feature rich, WordPress theme that could easily style both a corporate website and a portfolio or gallery. You can use either a static homepage featured area or create a content slider with posts from a specific category.

BigBiz

BigBiz is aimed at those of you who want a striking CMS orientated theme which you can use to showcase your products, portfolio or services.

TheProfessional

TheProfessional has a sleek and simple design without all of the extra features on the homepage that some people have no need for. The layout is very easy for visitors to understand and navigate.

deNovo

deNovo is a professional business WordPress theme that turns WordPress into a content management system. Powerful tools make it incredibly easy to create a top-class business website.

The Firm

The Firm is a flexible business/cms based theme with extensive features including two custom page templates (Features & Portfolio) and a design which is both neat and professional.

Organic Theme

The Organic Theme comes with a variety of features that make it an ideal candidate for multiple purposes. It could be used as a business site, informational blog, a portfolio and more.

Disclaimer: The Quantum and Leverage themes are products of Theme Trust, which is founded by Henry Jones, who is also founder of Web Design Ledger.

10 Free Clean and Minimal WordPress Themes

Henry Jones — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 05:19:15 +0000

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WordPress has become one of the top choices for content management systems among website owners. This has happened for several reasons, but one is the readily available collection of themes that can transform the appearance and functionality of a site. There are all kinds of themes out there, but some of my favorites are the ones that take a minimalistic approach so the content can do the talking. If you’ve been on the lookout for some nice minimal WordPress themes, then you’re in luck. Here are 10 free ones that you should find useful.

Un.complicated

The Standard

Lifestreaming White

Clear

The Daily Grind

Blue Bubble

Minimal Press

Foliogrid

Clean Home

Vostok

WordPress 3.0: Changing The Way We Manage Content

Shannon Noack — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:00:14 +0000

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As most of you already know, WordPress 3.0 has been released. Although it’s still in a beta release stage, you can take it for a test drive and check out the many new features that are available. Many people already use WordPress for many things other than just blogging but this release will certainly create opportunities for managing content even more effortlessly than before and using WordPress as more than just a blog.

WordPress was first released in 2003 as a content management system intended for bloggers, and today is regarded as the most popular blogging software available. WordPress is constantly being upgraded with great new features that make it possible to use it as a full website CMS instead of just a blogging platform. Many blogs and even large business sites are using WordPress as their CMS: CNN, Wall Street Journal, Nikon, Pepsi, etc. No question about it, WordPress 3.0 has extended the possibilities for creating a full website with a user-friendly CMS for clients.

The full release was set for May 2010, but as of the end of May it hasn’t come out yet and it’s looking like it will be early June before it’s fully released. For this post, WordPress 3.0 Beta 2 was used, and you can download that by going here.

New Menu Management Feature

In my opinion, this is one of the most exciting new features with WordPress 3.0, and it’s included in the default installation. Before this, it was possible to create a dynamic menu with some plugins and/or WordPress ninja skills. But it was never very easy to accomplish and now they’ve made it super simple.

You can add pages, categories, and even custom website links. With the custom website links option, you could link straight to a post, another website, whatever you want. It’s very user-friendly and setup similar to the current sidebar widget area where you can easily drag and drop to customize it just the way you like.

Custom Post Types

Currently, you can only create pages and posts with WordPress. In 3.0, you can create your own custom post types, and set up the appropriate fields to go along with each. When a user chooses a new post type, something like a Podcast, they will just add a podcast, simple as that. You don’t need to walk your clients through a complicated process and explain why they need to add a new post for a podcast and then click on a certain category and fill in a certain custom field. It’s one step now, and clients will love the simplicity. It does require the use of a plugin, but before it required much more work to setup.

Multi-User

WordPress MU has been around as a separate entity for a while but will now be integrated in WordPress 3.0. MU allows you to maintain multiple sites from a single admin panel. It’s great for anyone that runs more than one site or blog and would like the simplicity of logging in once and maintaining them all from one place. This is especially helpful if these sites share content, templates, or plugins. One installation means less work and less time to create the same thing.

This isn’t completely setup in the default installation, but it’s fairly easy to get it up and going. First add this line to wp-config.php.

define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

Now “Network” will appear under Tools in the main menu. Once there, fill in the Network Title, Admin Email Address and press Install. WordPress gives you the option to set these sites up under sub domains or sub directories. If you’ve installed this version of WordPress in a sub directory or you’re using localhost, WordPress requires that you use sub directories.

Other Noteworthy Features

You can now choose your own username and password in the installation process, no more auto generated passwords using the admin username.

The new default theme, Twenty Ten, is much nicer. It’s clean and lightweight with minimal style attributes. I don’t use the default themes myself, but it’s still a nice feature to see.

Additional Resources

WordPress has moved leaps and bounds with this new version and I’m excited to see where it’s going in the future. These new features certainly help us deliver a more user-friendly CMS to clients with less hassle and headache in the setup process.

Have you had a chance to check it out yet? What is your favorite feature and what are you most excited to see in the future?

20 Best WordPress Ecommerce Themes

tom — Tue, 25 May 2010 04:40:03 +0000

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WordPress is a great platform for setting up an online store, and there is a wide range of themes available to help sellers reach target customers. This post presents 20 of the best ecommerce themes, including both free and premium examples, covering storefront templates aimed at a variety of niche markets.

1. Store

The Store template is a great ecommerce WordPress theme, with a really good-looking and functional interface; it’s easy-to install and maintain with accessible backend administration. The theme’s creators are available for pre-sales questions and customer support.

2. Ecommerce Theme

This is a very popular theme enabling users to set up and manage effective ecommerce stores. The theme is search engine optimised and customisable so can be adapted to suit any home-based business niche.

3. AppCloud

AppCloud is a beautifully clean and professional looking theme, with a two-column layout, integrated slideshow and the choice of horizontal or vertical orientation for images and apps. The theme’s ecommerce features include featured, top-selling and categorised product lists.

4. eShop

This theme offers extreme ease of use for both sellers and customers, simple to configure with an intuitive and crisply designed interface. The template has powerful features and can be tweaked to suit any product.

5. WP Store

Sellers can establish an online store from scratch with this theme, showcasing products and with easy payments, shipping and stock management.

6. Auction Theme

This premium WordPress theme offers users the chance to create an online auction or reverse auction website. Whether its cars or bikes, books or antiques, once the easy-to-use theme is setup traders can auction any kind of property online.

7. Market Theme

Market Theme transforms any WordPress into a fully operational online store. In its default setup the theme has the look and feel of a regular blog, but there are many options to customise the design including the choice of a grid-view shop front to showcase products.

8. Kidz Store

This bright and friendly theme is a great way to present products aimed at children and, more importantly, their parents. The colourful and functional shop front is supported with backend administration and all the necessary ecommerce features.

9. StorePress

This premium theme allows sellers to transform WordPress blogs into accessible online stores with a sleek and professional aesthetic. The design has widget-ready pages, PayPal integration and a solid range of ecommerce tools.

10. eGoods

eGoods is aimed at traders who sell downloadable products and receive payment via PayPal. The theme options include a choice of light or dark colour scheme, both very visually appealing, and customisable layout for images and text. The design includes featured products, bestsellers, recent releases, reduced items and gift vouchers.

11. Vanilla Cart

Vanilla Cart is an attractively minimal and crisply designed shopping theme with thoroughly customisable template. The simple yet beautiful design, with a light colour scheme and the emphasis on product shots, allows the stock to speak for itself.

12. Color Cart

This theme is based on Vanilla Cart, with the added twist of a colour wheel in the options. A choice of eight hues allows users to bring a splash of colour to ecommerce stores, carefully selecting just the right combination to suit their niche market.

13. Cherry Cart

This theme is absolutely minimalist, pared down to a single column with no side bar or blog category. Built around the concept of ‘embracing simplicity and constraint’, Cherry Cart is a remarkably inviting platform in which to showcase products.

14. Classified Ads Theme

This brilliant theme allows users to turn their blogs into classified ads websites. Users manage the site and in return charge to display ads on the site. The design is PayPal integrated, features an admin panel and is fully customisable to suit any classified ads market.

15. folioShop

The folioShop is aimed at sellers who want an attractive and intuitive interface in which to showcase products to be shipped out or downloaded by customers. The theme features an installation wizard, visual help guide and all layered PSD files.

16. ClassiPress

ClassiPress is a professional theme for turning WordPress blogs into classified ads sites. The latest version of the theme features unlimited custom fields and forms, ad packages, blog option, directory-style homepage, email alerts, featured ads carousel, transaction logging and Twitter feed.

17. wpShop

This premium theme presents a great looking ecommerce store in a choice of light or dark colour schemes. The package includes all layered PSD files, installation wizard, help guide and is available in English and German languages.

18. Simple Cart

Simple Cart is a simple and great looking theme for sellers to present products in a gridded shop front, with a friendly wood effect background. The colour scheme can be switched and users may install their own images into the fully customisable design.

19. Tobashop

Tobashop is integrated with another WordPress ecommerce theme, eShop, to make use of the powerful plugins in order to create an online store with a highly professional feel.

20. enVirashop

This theme requires no plugins and offers users all the tools needed to establish an ecommerce niche. The theme is fully customizable so sellers can tailor the perfect online storefront to cater to their target market.

Tom Walker writes for a UK based ecommerce store offering a range of ink next day. He is the lead editor of their blog about design, art and advertising.

10 Best Free Minimal WordPress Themes

Henry Jones — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 05:54:56 +0000

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Sometimes a lot of color, textures, and design elements can make a web design jump off the screen, but there are times when a minimal style is more appropriate for the content and it’s audience. A clean and minimal design gets out of the way and lets the content do the talking, and it’s a great way to give your site an elegant and sophisticated feel.

If your getting ready to launch a WordPress site and you’re thinking about going minimal, here are our picks for the 10 best free minimal WordPress themes.

Modern Clix

Manifest

Work-a-holic

The Seven Five

Fifty Fifth Street

Neutra

Structure

Satoshi

Ulap

f8 lite

10 Essential WordPress Plugins You Should Be Using

Henry Jones — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 04:04:42 +0000

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There’s good reason why WordPress is the most popular blogging platform. It’s easy to use and has tons of great features. But what’s really made this open source software excel is its passionate community. Yes, WordPress has lots of features built in, but it doesn’t have everything. The WordPress community fills this need. It’s full of talented developers that are constantly creating plugins to extend the features and make it even better.

There are many WordPress plugins out there, but in this article we’re focusing on the most essential. Below is a list of 10 plugins that every WordPress website could use.

All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack optimizes your WordPress blog for search engines. Some key features include:

Advanced Canonical URLs
Fine tune Page Navigational Links
Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
Nonce Security
Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After an html file is generated, your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps generates a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

WP-DB-Backup

WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.

WP-PageNavi

WP-PageNavi adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress site.

WordPress Automatic upgrade

WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the WordPress installation to the latest one provided by WordPress.org using the 5 steps provided in the WordPress upgrade instructions. It automatically does the backups and provides links for downloading.

cforms II

cforms is a powerful and feature rich form plugin for WordPress, offering convenient deployment of multiple Ajax driven contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page.

Broken Link Checker

This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found. Some key features include:

Monitors links in your posts, pages, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
Detects links that don’t work and missing images.
Notifies you on the Dashboard if any are found.
Also detects redirected links.
Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
Link checking intervals can be configured.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

This plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed and optionally, your main comments feed as well.

13 Useful Code Snippets for WordPress Development

jreyes — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 15:55:34 +0000

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WordPress has grown to be commonly defined as the core solution for your blogging needs. It is the most recognized and sought after Content Management System by writers and designers. Consequently, over the past few years there has been a voluble increase in WordPress blogs, this has caused the “need” for useful tips, tricks, and hacks, all made to allow the customizing of your WordPress powered site. Here are 13 code snippets or hacks that will help you extend the capabilities of your WordPress site.

Customize the Logo of Your WordPress Login Page

After constantly having to visit your WordPress login page, having to see the same logo and design over and over can be a bit boring. This is where this hack comes in handy. All you have to do is place the following in your functions.php file, and replace the image.


function my_custom_login_logo() {
    echo '';
}

add_action('login_head', 'my_custom_login_logo');

Source

Detecting Mobile Devices Accessing Your Site

Mobile web surfing is continuing to evolve on a larger scale. This is why detecting those users who are visiting your WordPress blog through a mobile device and redirecting them to a mobile version of your site is important. In order to achieve this, you first have to get the code from detectmobilebrowsers.mobi and upload it to your theme directory.

Then, all you simply have to do is open your header.php file and place the following at the top of the file. Remember to edit line 5 to where you’d like to redirect mobile users.


include('mobile_device_detect.php');
$mobile = mobile_device_detect();

if ($mobile==true) {
  header( 'Location: http://your-website.com/?theme=Your_Mobile_Theme' ) ;
}

Source

Automatically Resize Images

If you’re accustomed to displaying large quantities of images on your blog, then you know how tedious it can be to have to always resize your images manually. Now you can use this hack to automatically resize any image you’d like to whatever width and height you choose for a more organized look. To do this, copy the following script and create a folder for it anywhere on your site (i.e. scripts) and name it “timthumb.php“. Now, you can use the following syntax to add an automatically resized image to your blog post:

Direct Source

Displaying Your Tags in a Dropdown Menu

Tag clouds are often hard to read, especially for a more busy site. Eliminate this problem by using a dropdown menu to display your tags. You must place the following code in your functions.php file.


 8, 'largest' => 22, 'unit' => 'pt', 'number' => 45,
		'format' => 'flat', 'orderby' => 'name', 'order' => 'ASC',
		'exclude' => '', 'include' => ''
	);
	$args = wp_parse_args( $args, $defaults );

	$tags = get_tags( array_merge($args, array('orderby' => 'count', 'order' => 'DESC')) ); // Always query top tags

	if ( empty($tags) )
		return;

	$return = dropdown_generate_tag_cloud( $tags, $args ); // Here's where those top tags get sorted according to $args
	if ( is_wp_error( $return ) )
		return false;
	else
		echo apply_filters( 'dropdown_tag_cloud', $return, $args );
}

function dropdown_generate_tag_cloud( $tags, $args = '' ) {
	global $wp_rewrite;
	$defaults = array(
		'smallest' => 8, 'largest' => 22, 'unit' => 'pt', 'number' => 45,
		'format' => 'flat', 'orderby' => 'name', 'order' => 'ASC'
	);
	$args = wp_parse_args( $args, $defaults );
	extract($args);

	if ( !$tags )
		return;
	$counts = $tag_links = array();
	foreach ( (array) $tags as $tag ) {
		$counts[$tag->name] = $tag->count;
		$tag_links[$tag->name] = get_tag_link( $tag->term_id );
		if ( is_wp_error( $tag_links[$tag->name] ) )
			return $tag_links[$tag->name];
		$tag_ids[$tag->name] = $tag->term_id;
	}

	$min_count = min($counts);
	$spread = max($counts) - $min_count;
	if ( $spread <= 0 )
		$spread = 1;
	$font_spread = $largest - $smallest;
	if ( $font_spread <= 0 )
		$font_spread = 1;
	$font_step = $font_spread / $spread;

	// SQL cannot save you; this is a second (potentially different) sort on a subset of data.
	if ( 'name' == $orderby )
		uksort($counts, 'strnatcasecmp');
	else
		asort($counts);

	if ( 'DESC' == $order )
		$counts = array_reverse( $counts, true );

	$a = array();

	$rel = ( is_object($wp_rewrite) && $wp_rewrite->using_permalinks() ) ? ' rel="tag"' : '';

	foreach ( $counts as $tag => $count ) {
		$tag_id = $tag_ids[$tag];
		$tag_link = clean_url($tag_links[$tag]);
		$tag = str_replace(' ', ' ', wp_specialchars( $tag ));
		$a[] = "\t";
	}

	switch ( $format ) :
	case 'array' :
		$return =& $a;
		break;
	case 'list' :
		$return = "\n\t";
		$return .= join("
\n\t", $a);
		$return .= "
\n\n";
		break;
	default :
		$return = join("\n", $a);
		break;
	endswitch;

	return apply_filters( 'dropdown_generate_tag_cloud', $return, $tags, $args );
}
?>

Now, to finalize your dropdown menu you have to open the theme file where you want the list to be displayed (i.e. sidebar.php) and insert the following code:

Source

Custom “Read More” Links for Your Posts

This is a really useful hack if you want to better define or customize the look of your “Read More” links for posts. The first thing you have to do is to edit your posts and create custom fields. Give them custom_more as a key, and whatever text you want to be displayed as the value. Then you have to edit your index.php file (and also your category.php, search.php, etc) and find a line similar to this:


the_content("Read more");

Now just replace it with this code:


ID, 'custom_more', true); ?>

Source

Scheduling Posts for RSS

If you regularly publish articles and you care about the quality of your posts then this is a good hack for you. The main purpose of this hack is that it lets you schedule your posts to be viewed in your RSS at a later time, this will allow you enough time to get those last minute fixes and additions in before your post is forever published in your feed. Place the following code in your .htaccess file. In order to change the length of the delay, change the value of the $waitvariable on line 9.


function publish_later_on_feed($where) {
	global $wpdb;

	if ( is_feed() ) {
		// timestamp in WP-format
		$now = gmdate('Y-m-d H:i:s');

		// value for wait; + device
		$wait = '5'; // integer

		// http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/date-and-time-functions.html#function_timestampdiff
		$device = 'MINUTE'; //MINUTE, HOUR, DAY, WEEK, MONTH, YEAR

		// add SQL-sytax to default $where
		$where .= " AND TIMESTAMPDIFF($device, $wpdb->posts.post_date_gmt, '$now') > $wait ";
	}
	return $where;
}

add_filter('posts_where', 'publish_later_on_feed');

Source

Display the Most Commented Posts of 2009

As the New Year is about to role in, it would be fun and resourceful to let your readers know which of your posts were most popular in the past year. This hack will allow your visitors to view the top 10 most commented/popular posts of 2009. This is a great way to give your posts a second shot at being noticed. In order to do this, you’ll need to place the following code on your sidebar.php file, or wherever else you’d like on your theme:



get_results("SELECT comment_count,ID,post_title, post_date FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_date BETWEEN '2009-01-01' AND '2009-12-31' ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0 , 10");

foreach ($result as $topten) {
    $postid = $topten->ID;
    $title = $topten->post_title;
    $commentcount = $topten->comment_count;
    if ($commentcount != 0) {
    ?>

Source

Allow Only Your IP Address to Access the wp-admin Directory

If you don’t have multiple writers or contributors to your blog, then realistically speaking only you should be allowed to visit the wp-admin directory. Especially since a great deal of security risks entail the wp-admin directory. All you have to do is enter your static IP adress on line 8. You can add more IPs if needed, by creating a new line. Place the following in your .htaccess file.


AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Example Access Control"
AuthType Basic

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from xx.xx.xx.xx

Source

Styling Your WordPress Comments

When your blog has lots of comments, then it’s a great way to get visitors to interact more by styling the way your comments are displayed. If this is what you’re looking to to, then open your comments.php file and replace your comments loop with the following code:




	user_id;
	$role = ( isset( $roles[$user_id] ) ? $roles[$user_id] : '' );
	?>
	
	By  -

Now to structure your comment you’ll need to open your style.css file and place the following code:


#commentlist li { border:2px solid white; } /* not logged or subscriber */
#commentlist li.administrator { border:2px solid red } /* blog admin */
#commentlist li.editor { border:2px solid blue } /* editor */

Source

Remove Widget Areas on Your Homepage

If your WordPress powered site is more than just a blog, then you probably want to get rid of the widget areas in your default sidebar and create your own. This hack doesn’t require any editing, just code insertion. Now, all you need to do is add the following to your functions.php file:

Source

Insert Author Bio for Each Post

A multi-writer blog usually means everyone who writes or contributes a post will have section that speaks about them. If your blog doesn’t have this feature, then start giving your authors proper credit by inserting the following code into your functions.php file. An author bio will be automatically be displayed at the end of every post.


function get_author_bio ($content=''){
    global $post;

    $post_author_name=get_the_author_meta("display_name");
    $post_author_description=get_the_author_meta("description");
    $html="\n";
    $html.="\n";
    $html.="\n";
    $html.="Author: ".$post_author_name."\n";
    $html.= $post_author_description."\n";
    $html.="\n";
    $html.="\n";
    $content .= $html;
    }

    return $content;
}

add_filter('the_content', 'get_author_bio');

Source

Remove Certain Categories From Being Displayed

Place this code inside The Loop and whichever category you choose, it will not be displayed. This can be an interesting hack for those who only wish to display a certain category to chosen or registered users.

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Redirect Your WordPress Feed to FeedBurner

If you’ve found out how useful FeedBurner really is after you’ve set-up your WordPress site, and you have a few RSS subscribers on your default WordPress feed, then you’ll need to redirect your feed to FeedBurner. Every time a user follows a link to your default feed (i.e. http://www.yourblog.com/feed) they will be redirected to the location of your FeedBurner feed ( i.e. http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourblog). This way, even if a user manages to somehow subscribe to your old RSS feed, they will always be redirected to your new feed. Place the following code in your .htaccess file.


# temp redirect wordpress content feeds to feedburner

 RewriteEngine on
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner    [NC]
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator [NC]
 RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/WebDesignLedger [R=302,NC,L]

Source

11 Useful jQuery Powered WordPress Plugins

Henry Jones — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:10:19 +0000

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We all know the kind of dynamic and engaging functionality that jQuery can add to a user interface, but integrating jQuery does require some technical know-how. This isn’t a big deal for many of us, but some WordPress users prefer the simplicity of a plugin. The purpose of this article is to help you discover some of the useful WordPress plugins available that gives you jQuery powered functionality in an easy to implement package.

Carousel Gallery (jQuery) for WordPress

This plugin builds on the builtin WordPress gallery, and replaces any gallery inserted using the tag with a neat jQuery powered carousel. By carousel it means you can browse through all the pictures in the gallery and they’ll slide from the right to the left and seamlessly start over at the end.

jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries

jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries makes the native WordPress galleries use a lightbox script called ColorBox to display the fullsize images.

jQuery Image Lazy Load WP

This plugin adds Lazy Load to WordPress. Lazy load delays loading of images in (long) pages. Images below the fold (far down in the page) wont be loaded before user scrolls down.

jQuery Comment Preview

This plugin gives commentors a live preview without taking up any extra screen real estate. It includes a simple HTML editor and you can customize comment preview block as you wish.

Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.