Free WordPress Themes

WordPress Comments Plugins

We spend enough time on the blog content and then tend to forget about the comments part. Comments are the way to get people involved – build up a blog’s readership etc etc. A few, sensible, comments trickling in will freshen up a page’s content and make it not seem completely dead in the water to passing search engine crawlers…

And the good news, there’s plenty of comment-related plugins available to get the job done.

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WordPress Action Hooks – the simplified version

WordPress action hooks allow you to access the functions of the core WP code, without messing around with that code. It’s the basis for most plugins (the whole business essentially started out as the plugin API), but themes are using them more and more and there’s no reason not to…

do_action/add_action are also the means of getting external scripts, CSS, javascript/jQuery correctly on the page.

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How’s Twitter doing these days?

Some thoughts on Twitter and how it affects the average WordPress blogger presently :- how to get value out of it, what to avoid and how to maintain a decent etiquette – it does seem to have grown slightly in the last year or so.

Success requires 2-way communication. “Broadcasters” – you know the ones… Their profile says 3 following 12,455 followers – they’re not being a success via Twitter, they’re trading off an established reputation.

It would be nice not to have to do the work, but if you’re starting at the bottom… you’ll have to do the work, no one else will. Follow those who follow you.

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Intrepid Free WordPress Theme

Intrepid is a free WordPress theme, two-column with a right sidebar, compatible with WordPress version 2.8 upwards, with threaded and paged comments. 3 styles of pastel shades to choose from – blue-green, green-brown and purple-gray as default… You can also replace the header completely with your own image.

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WordPress 2.9 – Using Post Thumbnails

With WordPress 2.9 comes a revised image thumbnail system – previously, support for posts with attached thumbnails was a little haphazard (it is a fiddly business in terms of the programming), but this is a significant step forward. The need is for a series of images, of given size, associated with a series of posts [...]

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Using Google Code libraries with WordPress

By default, WordPress loads the version of jQuery that comes with the package. But there is an alternative way of doing it and that’s to use the AJAX Libraries API at Google Code – use their bandwidth, why not… A few lines added to your functions.php in the theme you’re building and you’re ready to [...]

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WordPress SEO – the Post Title

The one thing you have instant control over is the post title – and, usefully, this can make a huge difference, far out of proportion to any time and effort spent in other SEO directions.

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Fatal Error – Cannot modify header information

You’ve been hacking around in WordPress and you get… Fatal Error – Cannot modify header information – headers already sent … Why? Very simply, because the script has output something (… ie. printed it to your browser) before trying to execute a  PHP header(“…”) statement – which just isn’t allowed with PHP. Often, it’s a [...]

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WordPress – Display Random Posts

So you want to display a random list of posts, maybe in a sidebar widget… One way to do it is to use the query_posts() function, but this isn’t always the best…

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WordPress Theme Frameworks

Since the arrival of WordPress 2.7, the true framework is based on the concept of parent/child WordPress themes. A child theme is dependent on its parent – here, the framework – for its template files and functions, it’s not going work without it.

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