Category: Wordpress

With WordPress 2.3 expected out on September 24th, I’ve been giving the beta releases a whirl to see how what I need to do before I make the final change over.

I currently have 17 plugins(!) installed but I’m most concerned about Ultimate Tag Warrior – will it work in WP2.3?

Short Answer: Not really.

UTW doesn’t play well with WP2.3. Tags show up on posts but there’s a “No Posts Found” error on the link to see other posts with the same tag.

Since I’m only using a small portion of UTW’s capabilities: tagging posts, displaying those tags in my posts and a tag index, I ended up using the UTW importer.

The UTW Importer

While all the post relationships and tags are passed over, tags with more than two words are hyphenated. Yikes! It seems that the importer considers tag names and tag slugs to be the same thing. Hopefully, that will be fixed soon.

Formatting Tags

With WordPress 2.3, there’s a number of tag-related template tags you can use: the_tags(), wp_tag_cloud. Rich Gilchrest has a helpful guide for updating your theme.

But wait, aren’t tags generally lowercase? Yes they are but as you can see in the screenshot above, there are some tags like “post avatar” and “wordpress” that appear as “Post Avatar” and “WordPress”.
This happens when a term, in this case “Post Avatar”, is shared by both a tag and a category. To get around this issue, you can define a css class to use in your templates and set text-transform to lowercase.

.post_tags { text-transform: lowercase}

So, inside index.php, archive.php and single.php I changed the format of the_tags to:

<?php the_tags('Tags: <span class="post_tags"', ', ', '</span><br />'); ?>

For wp_tag_cloud(), your styling options will depend on the cloud format that you choose.

By default, tag cloud formats to “flat”, generating a space separated list of your tags. So your template could look something like this:

<p class="post_tags"><?php wp_tag_cloud(); ?></p>

If you format it to “list”, you will get an unordered list (ul) with the class “wp-tag-cloud”.

Update your css file to reflect this new class:
.post_tags, .wp-tag-cloud { text-transform: lowercase }

The Tag Index

Creating an index of all your tags is quite simple.
First, create a new template (I called mine “Tag Index”) which contains the wp_tag_cloud with the following parameters:

<?php wp_tag_cloud('format=list&smallest=12&largest=12'); ?>

1. format: I set this to “list” to create an unordered list
2. smallest and largest: I made the font sizes equal so there would be no trace of the cloud effect. In this case the font size is 12pt

Using the Default Theme as an example, this is what your final template will look like…

<?php
/*
Template Name: Tag Index
*/
?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="content" class="widecolumn">
<h2>Tags</h2>
<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=12&largest=12');?>
</div>
<?php get_footer(); ?>


Now upload your template and once you’ve done that, create a new Page and assign the “Tag Index” template to it.

Also make sure that the Page Slug is “tag”. If you’re using pretty permalinks you can access your tag index from http://yourdomain.com/tag/.

Whew! One plugin down, 16 more to go!

I’ve had my Livejournal account for at least 5 years but until a year ago I was only using it to catch up with friends who had journals there.

But since I’ve discovered icon-making, I’ve become quite versed in using LJ and I’d like to have similar functionality on my blog as well.

One such function is The LJ Cut which lets you hide various blocks of text from view on the main page. This is incredibly useful if you have spoilers

In WordPress the closest we get is the <!–more–> tag which makes all succeeding text visible on the individual page entry.

To achieve the LJ Cut with WordPress, I use Scott Riley’s Hide or Cut Post Text Plugin.

The basic option is:
<!–cut–> All my text goes here <!–/cut–>

To put a custom text link you just use:
<!–cut=what other text to put–> Even more text <!–/cut–>

How easy is that?! With a few tags I can cut text, hide text and do other nifty things!

I’ve been playing around with widgets and they’re fantastic – you can drag and drop stuff that you want to appear in your sidebar without having to go into your themes to edit the html or wordpress tags.

This is great for theme designers who want to give users more functionality on the content that they want to display.

But why relegate your widgets to the sidebar only?

You can potentially use them everywhere! Right now my “listening to” and search modules are widgetized. Change your css and update your functions.php file to allow multiple sidebars and your options are endless!

Integrating WordPress with FanAdmin Plus

Here’s a tutorial to help you integrate WordPress with FanAdmin Plus as I did for the Ben Affleck fanlisting and weblog. I may make other tutorials for the other types of fanlisting scripts later on. This tutorial assumes that you know your way around both WordPress and FanAdmin Plus. So let’s get started!

What you’ll need:

• WordPress
• FanAdmin Plus (Currently in Beta)
• Include Page Plugin
• NL-Convert-To-PHP
• Patience and perseverance 🙂

Could you run a website using WordPress?

I’ve been thinking about that and a few weeks ago I got a chance to put that thought into practice when Pia launched the beta of FanAdmin Plus

With a bit of organization, customization and add-ons it’s easy to turn a blog tool into a content management system.

Organizing Content
This was the first thing I had to consider: what will I need the site to do? what type of content will I have? Basically I want the FanAdmin Plus site to :

• document the script with explainations and how-tos;
• provide screenshots;
• track problems and feature requests;
• let people keep in touch with Pia and me;
• allow people to download the script (eventually)

A great thing about WordPress is the ability to organize content by entries and pages. This way I can mix up my content – general information, bug tracking, feature requests while using the entries for the actual documentation and site updates. So now, each link in the main menu is a link to a WordPress page.

Add-Ons
A powerful feature of WordPress is that you can easily set up plugins to extend the functionality of your blog.

We wanted to have a gallery of screenshots of the script so visitors can get a feel for what to expect. I’m using Hivework’s Gallery Manager plugin to organize screen shots.

Even though posts are organized by categories I wanted link together a particular set of tutorials. For that I used In Series which bills itself as “easy, future-proof way to connect a series of posts”. As the figure shows, I can group together posts under different headings even if they are in the same category.

By default, WordPress displays the most recent entries from all categories on the main page. I only want to show posts from the “Site Updates” category so I used Front Page Categories

And for a contact form I used In Touch plugin. What I like about this plugin is that I can put a contact form anywhere I want, on a page or in a post!

Later on I’m going to put in download monitor plugin to keep track of the number of times the script is being downloaded. But that’s for the future, once we work out all the kinks and bugs in the script.

Customizing Layouts
This is another thing I love about WordPress, the themes! Setting up a theme simply involves uploading the necessary files and activating the theme.

But since we didn’t want a canned look for the site, I customized the Kubrick theme to match the look of the FanAdmin Plus script.

Using WordPress? Not sure about how the themes are set up?

Urban Giraffe dissects a WordPress Theme