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Wave for WordPress

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While I may have not been writing many new articles lately, I have been doing something else. With the success Prebuilt / Prebuilt 2 has had, I thought it was time to release a new theme, and that theme comes in the form of Wave.

Wave is a three column white / tan / red theme, sporting a clean look while remaining valid XHTML & CSS. Give it a look and download it today.

Leave all your comments about the theme here, as this is serving as the “Announcement Post”.

Note: This is not Prebuilt 3, but an entirely different theme. 🙂

WordPress 2.0.4

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Just a few hours after release WordPress 2.0.4 Beta 3 to the public, the WordPress camp jumped along and released a final of version 2.0.4. The release is being called a security release, with around 50 bugs fixed. It is important that you download and upgrade to the latest version.

You can’t even tell, but we’ve made the upgrade to 2.0.4 without any problems.

Get the latest release now.

Customizing WordPress: Plugins

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In our WordPress Customization Series, you’ve learned how to handle the header, make some basic layout changes, and most recently, go from html to a wordpress theme quickly and easily. Now, we want to review some of our favorite plugins which are essential to any WordPress installation.

Spam Protection

First and foremost, comment spam has to be stopped in it’s tracks. There are two plugins that combine to do an absolute excellent job at stopping comment spam.

Akismet – An included plugin with WordPress 2.0+, Akismet uses a globally managed blacklist to automatically detect comment spam. Akismet requires an API-Key obtained from WordPress.com, and running it afterwards is effortless.

Spam Karma 2 – Spam Karma 2 is another spam killer. SK2 uses a “karma” system to decide if comments are posting to many links and repeating to many words. SK does a great job at detecting what is and isn’t spam, and you can set various levels of intensity for it’s filters.

Spell Checking

Corrector – The most recent spell checker plugin I stumbled upon is by far the best I’ve seen. Corrector uses ajax to check and correct spelling, without even leaving the post. This plugin is quick and is essential in eliminating costly grammar mistakes in posts.

Recent Comments

Get Recent Comments – Get recent comments is a comment getter that can pull the x latest amount of comments without any other unnecessary features. Get Recent Comments only takes a line of php code to display comments wherever and however you want to anywhere on your blog.

Subscribe To Comments

Filosofo Enroll Comments – There are many similar plugins, by my personal favorite is Filosofo’s Enroll Comments. Enroll comments allows someone to automatically become a “subscriber” of a post that they comment on if they check off that they’d like to receive notification of followup posts. When the user is logged in, at the end of each comment form the user is allowed to manage their subscribed comments.

Gravatars

Gravatars – Gravatars allow your users commenting to have an avatar for themselves, as assigned by gravatar.com, which serves avatars all over the place (Globably Recognized Avatar). They are very easy to implant and can be customized using a small amount of css.

Tags

Ultimate Tag Warrior – UTC is the best system for tagging posts in wordpress. Tags allow your posts to be found much easily by searching, and it also indexes them on places like Technorati. UTC is a highly adapatable plugin that gives you many options in a simple, drop in plugin.

Conclusion

These are just some of the many WordPress Plugins available today, which allow you to take wordpress to the next level quickly and easily. This is only a short list, because we wanted to focus on plugins you really need to have, not list every great plugin in every category. All these plugins can be obtained from the WP Plugins database.

Coming up next week, the release of our anticipated Prebuilt theme for wordpress, with support for some of the best plugins right out of the box. Stay tuned for more information.

Customizing WordPress: Advanced

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On a day where more of the focus is on 9Rules, we’re back to finish the layouting elements of our WordPress Customization series.

In our last few articles, we’ve covered the importance of the WordPress Header file, and beginning layout changes, which were mostly minor code edits to accomplish certain things. Now we get to the heart of WordPress – taking advantage of it’s features to use it as much more than a blog.

Here We Go Again

Most beginners accept WordPress as what it is – a simple way for them to get their own ideas and opinions out by posting blog entries. Then there are the designers or more code-knowledgeable people who take WordPress to the next step, by adding there own graphics and customizing design elements in css files. Finally, there are those who understand everything wordpress is capable of, and they take advantage of all those features.

Multiple Post Queries

One great feature of WordPress is it’s ability to run multiple post queries. So, what does that mean in English? First, you must understand that WordPress knows what it’s doing by using a function called “The Loop“. The loop is how everything is done in WordPress, and it is used over and over again (hence, the loop ;)).

The loop decides how each post will be displayed, and what parameters go into certain functions. So what exactly is multiple queries? By default, WordPress themes tend to have a standard loop on their main index, which gathers all posts from every categories, and displays a certain amount as set in the options page. Sometimes by making small changes like indicated last week, the posts can be full or excerpts. Multiple queries allow you to layout posts from different categories in different areas of the site. For example, a three column layout with posts from one specific category in each.

In our case, we use multiple queries to display posts from our “Articles” and “Interviews” categories in their own columns, spacing them out from regular site news so they are more easily recognizable.

Devlounge - Multiple Post Queries Example

Let’s take a look at our code to see how we did this:

[php]

have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>

have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>

[/php]

The first thing we did was enclose both sets of code in their own css classes, allowing the posts to appear in two columns, rather than crammed together. As you can see in line 1, we start with a opening div class tag calling for “cusleft”. The tag is closed on line 10, before an opening tag for div class “cusright” is opened for the next column of posts.

Let’s take a closer look at lines 2-9, which contain the php code for displaying posts.

[php]have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>

[/php]

The php code starts off by stating that you’re starting a new WordPress query, then goes in to ask for category name and showposts. In our case, the category name we wanted to pull articles on the left for was called “articles”. We wanted to pull only one post, so our showposts number was one. Let’s say you had a category called “reviews”, and you wanted to show the last 10 posts from that category. Your php code would look like this:

[php]have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>

[/php]

Notice that the category name has been changed to “reviews”, and the showposts number has been increased from 1 to 10. The function continues, this time saying to itself, do not repeat the post (which eliminates the post showing more than once.) The next part of code determines how the post will be displayed. Let’s say you wanted the title to link to the full post content, and you wanted to display the whole post content. The code would look like this:

[php]

[/php]

Notice how we changed “php the_excerpt to php the_content. By wrapping the code in a div, we tell it to output each post the same way. In this way, you can define style elements to be applied to each post being displayed.

WordPress Hops on the Shuttle

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What happens when a bunch of designer greats get together to work on improving the WordPress Admin Panel? Great things.

Brokenkode unvailed the future of the WordPress admin panel, which is codenamed “Shuttle”. Shuttle has been in the works since December 2004, long before WordPress was such a staple in the blogging industry.

The project combined the likes of Michael Heilemann (K2 and Kubrick WordPress Fame), Joen Asmussen, Chris Davis, Joshua Sigar, Ryan Boren, and Bryan Veloso. The multi-talented designers and coders worked together for a good year in a half, and the result is superb.

WP Shuttle Dashboard

It becomes evident looking at these screenshots, that WordPress is heading in all the right directions. Currently, the wordpress admin is lacking. It is easily bogged up with multiple things all jumbled together (say, a write post page with plugins installed), but Shuttle hopes to change all that. Everything is neatly organized and clean, the whole interface itself is more like running a desktop application than a web application. Be prepared for WordPress beauty in it’s future versions.

WP Shuttle Writing With Descriptions

For more, check out brokenkodes project page.

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