Tips from that page that got me thinking (things that make you go hmmmmm?) include moving your wp-content directory, increasing your memory limit, changing the autosave interval, turning on debugging and finally the ability to specify a log file for errors. All of this through the wondrous wp-config.php file. The list is quite exhaustive.

While you are there, make sure you subscribe to the blog. Chris and Jeff are putting out some good stuff!

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WordPress Configuration Tricks

10 Exceptional WordPress hacks from Smashing Magazine.: Smashing Magazine has another list of nice hacks for WordPress including resizing images on the fly and automatically including the first image in your posts for your home page. These lists amaze me. Some of the more popular design sites and larger blog houses such as Smashing Magazine and Mashable have become very adept at using lists to link bait. These lists tend to get Dugg very heavily and bring in a lot of traffic for them. I still cannot look away from a good list about WordPress!

3 tools to track and defeat content theft lists three tools available to counteract content theft from your blog. This has become even more of an issue of late with the economy in the lurch, more people are jumping on the blogging bandwagon looking to make some extra money and might not be aware of copyright and Intellectual Property laws. The last tool listed is Tynt Tracer and I have been uysing it for a while. Tracer tracks and lists all the browser actions performed by visitors such as selecting and copying text and then uses Javascript to add a small link back to the original content if it is pasted onto another webpage somewhere. This method of tracking information copying is not really very effective, especially in this automated world of scrapers. While the information provided is interesting, it turns out to be a little useless if your content is not ruled by the lure of SEO but by your desire to just write and disseminate information. I still find myself checking back with the Tynt admin interface once in a while to see which topics seem to be more Search Engine popular this week.

20 Law related questions every blogger should know: Jonathan Bailey puts together the answers to a list of 20 Law related questions for bloggers for the topics of Copyright, Defamation and Trademark. Again, this is for informational purposes only and is not to be considered as legal advice. This is also based on US Law.

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Blogging and WordPress Links for 4/23/09

Learn some new tricks and discover new tools and plugins to speed up your WordPress blog. I have run into some scalability issues with this blog recently and have learned quite a bit.

Jean-Baptiste tells us about 10 awesome .htaccess hacks for your WordPress blog including the ability to redirect visitors to a maintenance page while you can continue to see and work on your blog.

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WordPress News for 3/31/09

New Features (and Some Comments)

• Landscape mode with extra wide keyboard
  
  This is probably the most desired feature for this application simply because it is physically painful to type a full length blog post in the iPhone portrait keyboard. I am glad that the portrait keyboard restriction is now a thing of the past!
• Link creation help
  
  
  I wasn’t sure where this feature was hiding at first, but I soon found the trick to invoking this feature. Basically anytime you are writing, you can type something that resembles a link (for example “www.” or “http”) to invoke a little prompt that asks you if you want to create a link. Answering yes will bring up another prompt asking you to fill in the URL. I think this is slick interface although some people might find it a bit annoying. It would be nice to merge these two dialogs into one dialog and also have the option to turn this feature off.
• Support for editing and creating pages
  
  There’s not much to say here. Previously you weren’t able to create/edit pages. Now you can. Note that this feature is only available for WordPress.org 2.7+ or WordPress.com blogs.
• Comment moderation
  
  This is one of my other favorite enhancements because I usually spend more time moderating comments than writing blog posts. To be able to do this on-the-go without having to continually login and deal with browser cookies is quite convenient. Note that this feature is only available for WordPress.org 2.7+ or WordPress.com blogs.
• Asynchronous publishing
  There weren’t any visible changes for this feature, but I assume asynchronous is better than what was in the earlier version.
• Photo resizing options
  
  When this feature is enabled, all photos attached to the post will be resized to be no larger than 640×480 to save space and publishing time. It’s a nice feature to have, but I don’t think I will be using it personally.

Bug in Version 1.2

I know that you are thinking, “already?” right? Indeed, the WordPress for iPhone App team has confirmed the existence of a photo bug in this version.  They are assuring us that the fix will be pushed out as soon as possible.  It’s best for you to wait on the upgrade if you post photos with the WordPress for iPhone application. If not, then you should definitely upgrade and enjoy these great new features! Version 1.21 is out with this bug fixed.  Go grab it now!

Go grab it!

You can get the WordPress for iPhone (and iPod touch) app for free at the iTunes App store.

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WordPress for iPhone Version 1.2 Available

WordPress excerpts, which are not excerpts, make a WordPress site easier to browse and its content easier to discover. In addition, when also used as META descriptions, good excerpts bring more and better traffic from search engines.

Topics discussed include:

1. What is the WordPress excerpt
2. Why write excerpts in WordPress
3. How to write excerpts
4. WordPress Excerpt Editor
5. Excerpts as META descriptions
6. Notes, Miscellaneous
7. Links

In Demetris’ style, the tutorial is very well written and well fleshed out.

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The manual Excerpt in WordPress. What, why, how, tips and plugins

• Send to Twitter (or consequently, send to Techmeme via Twitter)
• Create an RSS feed link
• Insert Adsense into a post
• Insert an RSS reader into a post
• Add shortcodes to sidebars

Please let us know if you have used any of these or know of/have created others that might be useful.

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Mastering WordPress Shortcodes

Mac OS X Status Bar integeration

Wordpress Notifier for Mac OSX.: This is a freeware tool that sits in your Mac OS X status bar and displays the current unapproved comment count on your WordPress blog. WordPress notifier works with WordPress 2.7 and above and works for blogs on WordPress.com. The screenshots look pretty cool!

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Wordpress Notifier for Mac OSX

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10 Useful RSS Tricks and Hacks For WordPress

Noupe has listed 11 new “Most Wanted” hacks for WordPress in a nice illustrated list. The new hacks include protecting your pictures from hotlinking and Custom Google Search for WordPress.

WPMU has received 37 nominations for their WordPress MU awards for 2008 and are looking for people to help choose the winners. View the nominations and vote for them.

Michael Kubler has written up a tutorial to make WordPress captioned images work as expected on your WordPress theme. Captioned images were introduced in WordPress 2.6 (I believe). This blog had the same problem till we managed to wrangle the extra CSS code for it to work.

Download Squad is linking to a Firefox add-on that allows a blogger to post screenshots/screengrabs directly to a WordPress blog. This can be very useful if you do a lot of reviews and such where you post screengrabs. Be wary of bugs.

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WordPress News for 11/25/08

I recently talked about a tutorial on creating Custom Write Panels in WordPress and thanks to WPCandy, have now found a pretty slick plugin that mimics that feature and adds a lot more. Flutter lets your modify your write page and post screens to your liking and adds the ability to add custom content types and write panels to these screens. From WP Candy’s review and from the Flutter documentation, it appears that the plugin is not only under active development and quite complex and mature, it also has a lot of potential for the future. For those that are planning to use Flutter, please remember that it is still in beta and there are lots of broken features and options. Upgrades and uninstallations seem to be the most fraught with issues.

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WordPress Favorite Actions and Custom Write Panels

This tutorial makes use of Custom Fields in WordPress using the various functions that help manage Custom Fields (I keep typing customer), and is a shining example of how useful and flexible Custom Fields can be in developing a full CMS with WordPress.

Since the final code is included in the tutorial, if you were to put together a Custom Write Panel for your blog with the help of the tutorial, what would you use it for? I would love to use it to add updates to posts, which would then be displayed with some extra styling and markup to denote the change in status of the item in the post.

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Tutorial: Creating Custom Write Panels in WordPress

Most Desired WordPress Hacks: 11 Common Requests and Fixes: Noupe lists 11 commonly requested WordPress hacks and elegant fixes for them. They include avoiding duplicate content, having category specific menus, sidebar login boxes, most wanted categories etc.

10 WordPress Hacks to make Your Life Easy: Jai lists another 10 hacks to play with. His hack tutorials include adding gravatars to comments, Twitter, image gallery, author bio etc.

Some of these are just tutorials on how features work within WordPress and how to incorporate them into existing themes while others are all our modifications of code in themes and in various other places. None of them look too difficult and some of them can be accomplished with plugins. However, all of them are worth checking out.

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WordPress Hacks: 21 tips to make you smile

WordPress Search as a custom Google Search without addition page or post: Add a custom Google Search to your WordPress blog (and make search advertising dollars?) without too much of a hassle. Complete instructions and examples are included in the post.

Create a Flash Arcade site using WordPress: This set of instructions will help you convert a simple WordPress blog into a Flash arcade site. Pretty cool with detailed instructions on the transition.

Here is a tip which I stumbled upon accidentally, that is somewhat unrelated to WordPress. Visit a NYTimes page such as a news item and double click on a single word. You will need a free registration to view that page or have to be logged in if you are registered already. The javascript file that adds the functionality in question is copyrighted to Answers.com and I wonder if a WordPress plugin exists for the same.

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WordPress Tips for 7/27

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WordPress for iPhone App

How does one use paging with an offset? Doing so breaks the navigation controls.

The problem with using an offset in a query is that WordPress ignores any reference to paging. In other words, you can use an offset and paging, but not both together.

This can be solved by tapping into the post_limits filter.

Step 1: Add the ‘my_post_limit’ Function

The my_post_limit function is what the post_limits filter will use to update the standard loop query.

We’ll use the function to use paging and offsets together. This function should be placed in your theme’s functions.php file.

function my_post_limit($limit) {
	global $paged, $myOffset;
	if (empty($paged)) {
			$paged = 1;
	}
	$postperpage = intval(get_option('posts_per_page'));
	$pgstrt = ((intval($paged) -1) * $postperpage) + $myOffset . ', ';
	$limit = 'LIMIT '.$pgstrt.$postperpage;
	return $limit;
} //end function my_post_limit

Step 2: Add the Filter Reference

<?php add_filter('post_limits', 'my_post_limit'); ?>
<div id="recent">
<h3>Recent Articles</h3>

In the above code, I add a filter for post_limits, which will call the my_post_limit function mentioned in Step 1.

Step 3: Start Your Loop

In this loop, we’ll be declaring a global variable called $myOffset. This will be the offset we’d like to have and is used by the my_post_limit function.

<ul>
<?php
global $myOffset;
$myOffset = 1;
$temp = $wp_query;
$wp_query= null;
$wp_query = new WP_Query();
$wp_query->query('offset='.$myOffset.'&showposts=5'.'&paged='.$paged);
?>
<?php while ($wp_query->have_posts()) : $wp_query->the_post(); ?>
        <li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>

Step 4: Enable Navigation

We’re just adding the standard next/previous links at the end of the loop.

<div class="navigation">
  <div class="alignleft"><?php previous_posts_link('&laquo; Previous') ?></div>
  <div class="alignright"><?php next_posts_link('More &raquo;') ?></div>
</div>
</div>

Step 5: Remove the Filter

In this step, we’ll be removing the post_limits filter and assigning the query back to its original value thanks to a temporary placeholder.

<?php $wp_query = null; $wp_query = $temp;?>
<?php remove_filter('post_limits', 'my_post_limit'); ?>

Step 6: You’re done!

Using the above code, you should now be able to use offsets and paging together.

Here is a downloadable file of all the code mentioned in this post.

Thank you John for asking such a great question.

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How to: Offsets and Paging

In this post we will talk about the quick and easy way to hide advertisements for any particular post by making some minor changes to your theme.

The Condition To Skip Advertisements For Single Posts

Talking about conditions whatever you do there is always a condition under which you perform any action. We will use a similar logic and create conditions under which the advertisements should not be displayed for certain posts.

The condition we will be using is quite simple and will fulfill the following statement, ” if something happens do this otherwise do something else”.

This can be simplified into lay terms as “if you are hungry buy a burger” “else don’t buy a burger”. As you can see the conditions you apply are quite simple and pertain to you to doing some kind of activity under different conditions.

The Code To Skip Advertisements In Single Posts

To skip advertisements for single posts you will have to manually edit the file “single.php” of your current WordPress theme. I recommend you edit your theme through the WordPress Admin Panel since it will help you catch any errors and save you a lot of trouble.

Once you have opened the single.php navigate to the place where you have placed the advertisements and change the code within the WordPress Loop from;

…………

Your Advertisement Code

…………

to;

if(get_the_ID() != xx) {

…………

Your Advertisement Code

…………

}

Replace xx with the post id for the post which you do not want to show advertisements for. You can also skip multiple posts from displaying advertisements by adding the OR condition in the following way;

if(get_the_ID() != xx || get_the_ID() != xx) {

…………

Your Advertisement Code

…………

}

For those who are unaware of programming “||” represents OR in programming language and if you are curious AND is represented by “&&”.

How do you get the IDs of the posts you want to Skip Advertisements for?

To find the IDs for the posts you want to skip advertisements for, you will need to login to your WordPress administration panel and navigate to the Manage option. Once there find the post you want to skip the advertisement for and hover over it, you should see the ID of the post in your status bar. Check the screenshot below;

If you do not see the id in the status bar you can find out the ID by clicking on the post and going into edit mode where you will see the ID for the post in the URL.

Once you make the changes to your advertisements they will not display for the posts you chose to skip.

If you do have any questions feel free to ask them in the comments and I would be more than happy to answer them.

Note: This trick will not work if you use external plugins to display your ads and is only valid when you display ads by hard coding them into your themes.

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Hiding Advertisements For Single Posts

Within this post I will present several techniques plugin and theme authors can take in order to prevent deactivation issues.

Method 1: function_exists

In this example, let’s assume we have a function named related_posts.

When in a theme, we could use this code to call the function if only it exists.

<?php if (function_exists("related_posts")) {  related_posts(); } ?>

The PHP function_exists checks for the existence of the function, and if it does exist, it calls the function.

Method 2: function_exists and Actions

Using the same function name, the theme author could add some code into their functions.php file and use an action and function_exists combination.

if (function_exists('related_posts')) {
	add_action('my_related_posts', 'related_posts');
}

In the above example, we create a new action called my_related_posts.

The end user would use the do_action function where he wants the function used:

<?php do_action('my_related_posts'); ?>

Method 3: Actions

To use pure actions, the plugin author would have to take the initiative and add associated actions to their plugin code.

The code would look very similar to method 2, but would be included in the plugin file.

add_action('my_related_posts', 'related_posts');

The end user would then do the simple do_action call.

<?php do_action('my_related_posts'); ?>

Method 4: function_exists and Filters

Say, for example, there’s a plugin with a template tag that returns some code that you can then echo out in a theme.

Let’s pretend for a minute that the related_posts function could return a string instead of automatically spitting out the code to the screen.

In this case, the template author could add some code into their functions.php file.

if (function_exists('related_posts')) {
	add_filter('my_related_posts', 'related_posts');
}

The end user would then add the following to their theme:

<?php $s =  apply_filters('my_related_posts'); echo $s; ?>

Method 5: Filters

Again, the plugin author would have to take the initiative to only use filters. The plugin author would add the following to their code.

add_filter('my_related_posts', 'related_posts', 1, 2);

The above filter has a priority of one and accepts two arguments.

The end user (aka, theme tweaker), would add very similar code as used in method 4.

<?php $s =  apply_filters('my_related_posts', 4,10); echo $s; ?>

Method 6: Actions and do_action_ref_array

Let’s assume the plugin author has added in the appropriate code to their plugin:

add_action('my_related_posts', 'related_posts', 1, 1);

The above related_posts action just adds an action at priority one, which accepts one argument.

The themer could then add a reference to this action using the do_action_ref_array function.

<?php do_action_ref_array('my_related_posts', array(3,20)); ?>

Assuming the my_related_posts action takes two arguments, we use an array to pass the necessary arguments.

Conclusion

As mentioned in the introduction, it’s the plugin or theme author’s responsibility of adding in the necessary actions and filters so that the end user can deactivate plugins without any major headaches.

The methods I mentioned are not exhaustive, and can be far more advanced if need be. If you have any questions, please leave a comment.

For any code, please use Pastebin and provide a link.

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Plugin Deactivation Issues Solved With Actions and Filters

Is there a way to prevent WordPress from inserting the width and the height for images in the new 2.5 media manager?

In short, yes, but it requires you to insert some code into your theme’s functions.php file.

Fortunately, there is a WordPress filter we can use called image_downsize, which takes in three arguments (a boolean, an attachment ID, and a size string).

add_filter('image_downsize', 'my_image_downsize',1,3);

All I’m doing in the above filter is setting the filter name, the function to call (my_image_downsize), what priority I want the filter, and how many arguments the function takes.

From there, I mimic the function image_downsize in the ‘wp-includes/media.php’ file, but do not return a width or a height. As a result, when the image is sent to the editor, no width or height is present.

function my_image_downsize($value = false,$id = 0, $size = "medium") {
	if ( !wp_attachment_is_image($id) )
		return false;
	$img_url = wp_get_attachment_url($id);
	//Mimic functionality in image_downsize function in wp-includes/media.php
	if ( $intermediate = image_get_intermediate_size($id, $size) ) {
		$img_url = str_replace(basename($img_url), $intermediate['file'], $img_url);
	}
	elseif ( $size == 'thumbnail' ) {
		// fall back to the old thumbnail
		if ( $thumb_file = wp_get_attachment_thumb_file() && $info = getimagesize($thumb_file) ) {
			$img_url = str_replace(basename($img_url), basename($thumb_file), $img_url);
		}
	}
	if ( $img_url)
		return array($img_url, 0, 0);
	return false;
}

Download the Code

Here is a sample functions.php file of the code presented in this article.

I also used Andrew’s plugin generator to quickly put together a plugin that I will creatively call No Image Width or Height (download link). It will accomplish the same thing for those not comfortable with code. Just unzip, place in your WordPress plugin’s folder, and activate.

Thanks Vivien for the interesting question.

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Removing Width/Height from the Image Uploader

I’m developing a new theme and I’m having trouble getting duplicate posts from showing when running two loops (one standard loop and one from a specific category). Even when I copied the specific code from directly from the codex, it was not working.

The Codex article the reader mentioned was regarding the Loop. Although the example shows how to avoid a single duplicate post, it doesn’t show how to avoid duplicating multiple posts.

Here’s how to show two individual loops without duplicating posts in either loop.

Step 1: Add a ‘posts_where’ Function

A WordPress filter is needed to accomplish this, and we’re going to be tapping into the ‘posts_where‘ filter.

The reason being is we need to modify the query used for the loop and exclude some posts.

Here’s the function we’ll be using called post_strip:

function post_strip($where) {
	global $myPosts, $wpdb;
	$where .= " AND $wpdb->posts.ID not in($myPosts) ";
	return $where;
}

In the above code, I use a global variable called $myPosts, which is comma-separated string of post IDs to exclude.

Step 2: Start the First Loop

Within this first loop we’ll be keeping track of the post IDs being used. Nothing fancy is being done here. We’re just pulling the last five posts posted.

<?php
global $myPosts;
$myPosts = '';
?>
<div>
<?php
$my_query = new WP_Query();
$my_query->query('showposts=5');
if ($my_query->have_posts()) : while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
<?php $myPosts .= $post->ID . ","; ?>
<div><?php the_title(); ?></div>
<!-- Post Stuff -->
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
</div>

Pay special attention to the $myPosts variable, which is used to keep track of all of the post IDs.

Step 3: Add the Filter

We’ll now need to add a posts_where filter for the second loop. This filter will use the post_strip function we started in Step 1.

<?php add_filter('posts_where', 'post_strip'); ?>

Step 4: Start the Second Loop

The second loop is a repeat of the first loop to demonstrate that the posts are not being duplicated. The second loop uses a different loop technique since paging isn’t necessary.

<div>
<?php
$my_query = new WP_Query('showposts=5');
while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();?>
<div><?php the_title(); ?></div>

<!-- Post Stuff -->

<?php endwhile; ?>
</div>

Step 5: Remove the Filter

The filter we added in Step 3 now needs to be removed.

<?php remove_filter('posts_where', 'post_strip'); ?>

Step 6: Admire the Results

Before - Duplicates Being Shown

After - Duplicates Removed

Downloadable Code

Here is a sample index.php for download.

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How To: Avoid Duplicate Posts

There are two ways to export specific categories. The first is to read this forum post where HandySolo explains how to use the category RSS feed to export specific categories from a self hosted blog to a WordPress.com blog. The problem with this method is that, none of the meta data attached to the posts are carried over with the posts.

The second method is not pretty but it gets the job done. What I ended up doing was creating a new user account on my blog. I then used the post manager and filtered the posts by the category for which I wanted to export. I went through each individual post and quickly changed the post author from the original account, to the newly created user account. In my case, I had to do this to 25 individual posts. What is annoying about this method is that, when you save a post under a new author name, any blogs or posts that you have linked to within those posts will end up resending PINGs. However, I believe if you turn off this setting under the SETTINGS-DISCUSSION link in your administration panel this will prevent that from happening. Just remember to turn that back on after you’re finished.

After all of the posts within the category have been reassigned to a new author, you are ready to export. In your WordPress administration panel browse to MANAGE - EXPORT. Now here is the important step. Underneath where it says OPTIONS, you have a drop down box where you can restrict the export to a certain author.

In the drop down box, select the newly created author and click on the DOWNLOAD EXPORT FILE and a WordPress WXR file will be downloaded to your desktop. This file will contain all of the posts from the category you wanted to export because the new user you created was assigned to only those posts within that category. This method actually allows you to export specific categories while maintaining the meta data associated with those posts such as comments and tags.

This is probably not the best way to obtain these results but it’s the only method that I’ve found that allows me to export specific posts/categories while still having all of the other data attached to those posts. If you have a better solution or know of a plugin that can obtain the same results, I’d be very interested to know about it.

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Exporting-Importing A Category