Super Ginormous

Tag: Wordpress

  • Nanideska Now Available

    Screenshot of Nanideska themeAfter a bit of a delay, Nanideska is now available.

    I’m calling this a 1.0 release, simply because it works as is… but future development and improvements are planned. Your feedback will help drive future plans for this theme!

    I’ve purposefully tried to limit the color palette to shades of gray, cyan and lime green. (I know this isn’t going to work for everyone.) The top navigation area is where top-level pages are displayed. Support for sub-pages is not currently included. The main content area on the homepage features a lead-in article, followed by several of the most recent posts. (I borrowed the idea from Bryan Veloso‘s Chaotic Soul theme for WordPress.) A sidebar is included to the right of the content area, and can be switched to a dynamic sidebar with WordPress Widgets, but no work has been done (yet) to stylize any of the default Widgets.

    This theme works best with WordPress 2.3 or higher.

    Nanideska is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States license. If you have any questions as to what rights are granted to you under this license, don’t hesitate to contact me.

    Download Nanideska | View Demo

  • WordPress 2.3 Beta3 Available

    WordPress 2.3 Beta3 Available.

  • WP Theme: Grape Mint

    Another new WordPress theme from Patrick: Grape Mint.

  • Making WordPress work for me

    WordpressThe wide variety of plugins available for WordPress is what sold me on the application. If WordPress doesn’t do something you’d expect it to do, there’s probably a plugin available to fill the void. On my site, I use several plugins to keep things running smoothly or to add functionality not present in a core-install of WordPress.

    (I’m hoping that all of the links below work. If you happen to come across one that doesn’t resolve, please let me know!)

    • Akismet 2.0.2 – This plugin checks comments against the Akismet web service to see whether it’s spam or not. This plugin alone has stopped over 24,000 spam comments from appearing on my site. It’s worth it’s weight in gold. If not for Akismet, I probably would have turned comments off a long time ago.
    • Bannage 0.2 – This plugin lets me ban commenters by IP address, username, email address or by the URI they use in comments. I don’t use it often, but it’s come in handy a couple of times.
    • Download Counter 1.2 – I recently added this plugin to keep track of how many folks were downloading the WordPress theme I posted. You can use it to keep track of any file on your site that you’re offering for download.
    • Google Sitemaps 2.7.1 – This plugin automatically generates a Google-compliant sitemap of your site. You can even specify pages that exist outside of your WordPress install. (The sitemap.xml file it generates is also compatible with MSN Search and Yahoo, but doesn’t currently notify either of those services when the sitemap file is updated.)
    • Gravatar 1.1 – If commenters have a Gravatar account, their globally-recognized avatar is displayed next to comments they make here on my site (and on others that support gravatar).
    • HP Blog Printing 1.0.8 – This plugin gives users the option to print multiple posts into a convenient, easy-to-read PDF. (To be honest, I don’t know if it’s used much on the site but I’ve kept it activated regardless.)
    • Live Comment Preview 1.7 – This plugin lets commenters see what their comment will look like as they are typing. I’ve found this feature useful on other sites, and thought it would make commenting more user-friendly.
    • Ma.gnolia 1.0 – This plugin outputs a list of my most recent Ma.gnolia bookmarks. You can view these on my links page.
    • Official Comments 1.1 – This plugin let’s me stylize comments that I make differently than regular comments posted on the site.
    • Related Posts 2.04 – Returns a list of posts and pages relevant to the current post you’re on. I’ve found this plugin works great and directing traffic to other articles on my site that are similar to posts people have found via search engines.
    • Spam Karma 2.3 rc1-2 – Coupled with Akismet, spam is a thing of the past for me. I’ve only had a few problems with false positives, but it otherwise works great!
    • Subscribe to Comments 2.1.1 – Lets commenters subscribe to a discussion thread, so that if new comments are made, they have a visual cue (email) that invites them back into the discussion. If you want return visitors, I think this plugin is a quick and easy way to ensure people come back to your site.
    • WordPress Database Backup 1.8 – Invaluable plugin. I use it before I upgrade to the latest and greatest version of WordPress.
    • WP Audioscrobbler 0.35 Beta – This plugin lists my most recently scrobbled tracks from Last.fm.
    • WP Movie Ratings 1.4 – Powers my movie page, where I keep track of movies I’ve watched recently. (The list is far from complete.)

    Other plugins that I have used in the past (or an ad hoc basis) include:

    • Admin Theme Preview 2.0 – This allows administrators to test out new themes without effecting what front-end users see in their browser. I usually leave this disabled unless I am testing out a new design.
    • Anti-Leech 1.6 – This plugin helps prevent scrapers from stealing content and bandwidth. I’ve used this plugin off and for a while now. It works well, but I tend to deal with scraping on an individual basis. Many of the other plugins I use on a day-to-day basis make using this one redundant.
    • Bad Behavior 2.0.10 – Denies spambot attempts at accessing your site. I love this plugin, but currently have it disabled, because it causes connection problems with the new Windows Live Writer beta.
    • Tiger Style Administration 3.0 – Steve Smith’s Tiger Style Admin puts a beautiful, app-like face on the WordPress backend. The only reason I don’t use it is because it’s not fully compatible with WordPress 2.2+, and Steve has no plans to updated the plugin any longer.

    If you’re looking to add additional functionality to your WordPress site, definitely check out the WordPress Plugin Directory. The plugins I use only scratch the surface of what’s currently available. Because of the extensibility of WordPress, developers are creating new ways to use this powerful blogging platform in different and creative ways.

    But enough about my plugins. What sort of plugins are you using on your site?

  • Tags in WordPress 2.3

    WordPress 2.3 introduces a new feature to the popular blog platform: tagging. Sure, you’ve been able to do it with plugins like Ultimate Tag Warrior in the past, but WordPress’ built-in tag system is simple, unobtrusive, and easy to use.

    In order to get tags to display on individual posts, we’ll use the_tags.

    <?php the_tags('before', 'separator', 'after'); ?>

    Here’s how I currently have things setup:

    <?php the_tags( 'Tags: ', ', ', ''); ?>

    This gives me something like this at the bottom of each post that has tags:

    Tags: Tag 1, Tag 2, Tag 3

    Another new tagging feature in WordPress 2.3 is the introduction of wp_tag_cloud. The tag cloud takes all of your tags and displays them based on how much you use them on your site. You can see a live example of it on my archives page. To get the tag cloud on your site, you’ll use the following syntax in one of your templates:

    <?php wp_tag_cloud(??); ?>

    Where might you display the tag cloud? Well, you could put it in your sidebar, but I am not sure how system-intensive generating it is… I’d recommend creating a stand-alone page for it, or limiting the use of it on key pages only.

  • WP Theme: Gray Day

    WP Theme: Gray Day. Forgot to mention that Patrick, a friend and coworker, released his first WordPress theme – Gray Day – last week. I really love the use of cyan with the gray in this theme. It’s definitely worth checking out.

  • A Minor Announcement

    I’ve decided to turn my current design into a distributable theme for WordPress. It’ll be available over the weekend after I clean up some of the rough edges. Here are some of the things you can look forward to in the release of Effercio Blue 1.0:

    • Support for WordPress Tags (a new feature in WordPress 2.3)
    • Support for Dynamic Sidebar and Widgets
    • Custom Link and Archive Page Styles
    • and more?

    If there’s interest in it, I might make some colored variations of it… Leave a comment if you’d like to be notified of it’s release.

  • WordPress 2.3 Beta1

    So, a new developmental version of WordPress was released last night. Being the sucker that I am, I went ahead and upgraded to WordPress 2.3 Beta1, and to my surprise, everything installed without any problems at all.

    I haven’t seen a full list of all that’s been changed in this version, but based on my limited usage of it in the past half hour I can tell you about two of the updates that will make the most impact:

    1. Tags. Posts now support tags without the use of a third-party plugin.
    2. Plugin Version checking. When you’re managing your plugins, you’ll now be able to see if a newer version of it is available (assuming it supports update checking).

    According to the announcement, this version also include “faster JavaScript” and “SEO-friendly URL redirection”.

    All in all, it seems pretty stable so far. So, if you do decide to upgrade, know that it’s not a full release, and you’re bound to run into problems. Make sure you backup any WordPress-related site files and database beforehand. Deactivate all plugins. Then upgrade. Reactivate your plugins one by one checking to make sure none of them break your site…

  • Separating Trackbacks/Pings from Comments in WordPress

    I was trying to figure out the best way to separate trackbacks/pings from the comments here on the site. I’ve seen a number of tutorials out there, but none seemed to do exactly what I wanted. The code is piece-mealed from a couple of places, but this is how I accomplished it here on the site:

    Backup your existing comments.php file associated with your theme! I cannot stress this enough.

    Assuming you’re using the default theme, or some variation thereof, you’re going to want to look for this in your comments.php file:

    [php]

    < ?php if ($comments) : ?>
    [/php]

    You’re basically going to replace the logic on comments.php from where it says < ?php if ($comments) : ?> (Line 20) to < ?php endif; ?> (Line 61) with the logic below.

    Define the number of pings and comments (Source: Sandbox theme):

    [php]
    < ?php /* NUMBERS OF PINGS AND COMMENTS */ $ping_count = $comment_count = 0; foreach ( $comments as $comment ) get_comment_type() == "comment" ? ++$comment_count : ++$ping_count; ?>
    [/php]

    Then check to see whether comment_status is set to 'open'. If it is 'open', we then check to make sure the comment_count isn’t equal to zero. Once these conditions are met, I then display only the comments. Some other conditional logic is included, like checking whether the comment’s being held for moderation:

    [php]
    < ?php if ('open' == $post-> comment_status) : ?>
    < ?php if ( $comment_count ) : ?>
    < ?php if ($comments) : ?>

    Stuff said in regard to this entry:

      < ?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>
      < ?php if (get_comment_type() == "comment"){ ?>

    1. ” alt=”” />

    < ?php comment_author_link() ?> < ?php _e('said'); ?>:

    < ?php comment_text() ?>

    < ?php if ($comment->comment_approved == ‘0’) : ?>

    Your comment is awaiting moderation.

    < ?php endif; ?>

    Posted < ?php comment_date('F j, Y') ?> @
    ‘, ”); ?>

    • < ?php /* Changes every other comment to a different class */ if ('alt' == $oddcomment) $oddcomment = ''; else $oddcomment = 'alt'; ?>
    < ?php } ?>
    < ?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>

    < ?php else : ?>
    < ?php endif ?>

    < ?php else : ?>

    Hey, there’s no comments on this post!

    How about being the first?

    < ?php endif /* if ( $comment_count ) */ ?>

    < ?php else : // comments are closed ?>

    < ?php /* Comments are closed */ ?>

    Sorry dude, comments are closed on this post. If you had stuff you liked to say about this entry,
    feel free to contact me.

    < ?php endif; /* if ('open' == $post-> comment_status) */ ?>
    [/php]

    Then we do the same thing for trackback/pings:

    [php]
    < ?php if ( pings_open() ) : ?>
    < ?php if ( $ping_count ) : ?>

    Trackback/Ping Stuff:

      < ?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>
      < ?php if (get_comment_type() != "comment") : ?>

    1. < ?php comment_date('F jS, Y') ?> at < ?php comment_time() ?> < ?php edit_comment_link('e',' ‘, ‘‘); ?>

      2. < ?php /* Changes every other comment to a different class */ if ('alt' == $oddcomment) $oddcomment = ''; else $oddcomment = 'alt'; ?>
      < ?php endif; ?>
      < ?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>

    < ?php else : /* if ( $ping_count ) */ ?>

    < ?php endif /* if ( $ping_count ) */ ?>

    < ?php else : // pings are a no-go bro. ?>

    < ?php /* Pings are a no-go, bro. */ ?>

    Pings are a no-go, bro.

    Maybe next time?

    < ?php endif /* if ( pings_open() ) */ ?>
    [/php]

    Save the changes and you should be good to go.

    Hopefully this is a pretty straightforward implementation… If you have any better ideas, I’d love to hear ’em.

  • First Impressions of WordPress 2.2

    I upgraded my site to WordPress 2.2 without any problems this morning. I’m not sure if it’s enough of a difference from 2.1.3 to justify the upgrade for most users, but I’m a sucker for new software. In this release they’ve added support for WordPress Widgets without requiring a plugin. Among other things, the latest WordPress release also features full Atom support, a new Blogger importer, a revised Comment admin page (with AJAX-y goodness!), and a new plugin “protection system” – that will prevent you from installing a plugin that will break your site.

    • The Comment admin page now displays the last 20 comment, no matter what. When you delete a comment, the next comment dynamically gets pulled into the page.
    • WordPress 2.2 broke the FlickrRSS plugin somehow. I’ll need to look into how to remedy that…

    All in all some nice additions, but again… not sure if it’s enough to justify an upgrade for most folks.