Blog Theme Machine » Wordpress

Wordpress Wednesday: The Trilogy

Mike Smith — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:14:32 +0000

Wordpress Wednesday is back for it’s third week in a row and today we’ve got a ton of awesome links. With the release of wordpress 2.8 baker, we’ve not only got some great links for the release info but also for hacks, tips, tricks and plugins related to wordpress 2.8 Also along with those wonderful links we’ve got tons of great tips, plugins, website launches and more.

So sit back, grab some coffee and enjoy your reading

Remember, use the #wpwednesday hash tag if you’d like your wordpress related articles featured here next week.

Wordpress Wednesday Weekly Round Up

Mike Smith — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:46:07 +0000

Welcome to the second week for #wpwednesday! I found a ton of great links for this week and have already put them up on my twitter page (feel free to follow me to receive updates and also suggest your own links).

Below are 16 links to great wordpress resources, tutorials, tips, hacks and themes. I’ve found every one of these links useful and I hope that everyone else reading this post finds them useful as well. If you have a post you’d like featured, please follow me on twitter and @ me with the link and I’ll make sure to add it in (or just tweet with the #wpwednesday hash tag).

Next week will be featuring wordpress coding services.

DON’T FORGET TO GET YOUR LINKS IN FOR NEXT WEEK – AND DON’T FORGET ABOUT THE WORDPRESS GUERRILLA LAUNCH! IT’S DEFINITELY A WORDPRESS BLOG YOU SHOULD HAVE BOOKMARKED

Today is officially Wordpress Wednesday!

Mike Smith — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:22:29 +0000

I tell you, twitter is a fascinating place. Earlier today I came across a tweet from @pixeldeath who mentioned that it’s looking like wednesdays are quickly becoming wordpress wednesdays and suggested two different hash tags (#wordpresswednesday and #wpwednesday). It got my brain turning and I decided to run with it (thanks for the idea @pixeldeath – you’re awesome!)

So today, for the first Wordpress Wednesday post I am going to post a round up of the links that I have tweeted and found tweeted on twitter today. Each week I will try to come up with a different type of post for wordpress wednesday, but they’ll almost always include a bunch of kick ass links for the wordpress/design community to check out – as well as the bloggers who need to figure out how to update/upgrade, fix security holes, find out the best plug-ins, ect.

So there you have it! The first official WORDPRESS WEDNESDAY! For those of you who would like to tweet wordpress related articles, feel free to use the #wpwednesday tag and I’ll make sure to get them included somehow in the future wordpress wednesday articles! and if you’re curious to see who’s tweeting about wordpress wednesday, just check out the #wpwednesday search results on twitter.

Sociable WP Plugin Update With Vot.eti.me Included

Mike Smith — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 19:08:52 +0000

For those of us in the design community, we all know about the new digg-like design site Vot.eti.me which is a product of the ever popular Styl.eti.me If you haven’t seen vot.eti.me yet, go check it out. Now, the reason I am writing this post on the blog is to let you know that I’ve updated the sociable plug-in which was originally created by Peter Harkins and maintained by Joost de Valk since early 2008. The plug-in now not only includes vot.eti.me in the options panel, but it also makes it one of the default options. The original had the following as the default options:

Digg
Sphinn
Del.icio.us
Facebook
Mixx
Google

For those of us who design for a living or run design blogs, I know that there should be some better default options built into the plug-in to better suit our target visitor. So now the plug-in is defaulted to show the following:

Vot.eti.me
Stumbleupon
Design Float
Del.icio.us
Digg
Twit This
Email

If you think that the plug-in should be defaulted with any others, let me know and I’ll update it here. You can download the plug-in zip file below. Any questions/comments/tips leave me a comment and let me know.

DOWNLOAD NOW:
Download the updated Sociable Plugin

Listing Wordpress Pages Multiple Levels Deep

Mike Smith — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 05:09:33 +0000

I was recently working on a client project that required the ability to show a “sub menu” when you’re on a specific page and also the sub-sub page for the first sub page. So for instance I have the following:

HOME PAGE
HOME PAGE – FIRST PAGE
HOME PAGE – FIRST PAGE – SECOND PAGE

Now, I needed to be able to call a list for the FIRST PAGE to showcase any of the SECOND PAGE links, but also pull a list on the SECOND PAGE for anything under that one (ie: THIRD PAGE). I found a quick solution to show sub pages by using a simple piece of php code, but that wouldn’t work for a SUB – SUB PAGE, thus, after some digging and piecing together, the code below works like a charm.

global $post;

if ( $post->post_parent )
$parent = wp_list_pages(”title_li=&echo=0&hierarchical=0&include=” . $post->post_parent); else

$thispage = wp_list_pages(”title_li=&echo=0&hierarchical=0&include=” . $post->ID);
$children = wp_list_pages(”title_li=&echo=0&depth=1&sort_column=menu_order&child_of=” . $post->ID);

if ($children) { ?>

/images/side_subnavigation.jpg” alt=”Navigation” />

Now you’ll notice that I added a

around my ul list because thats what my design called for but you can remove the div, change it to fit your needs, or style the ul by adding a class to it, ect. That is a whole other subject, but for now, at least I have a working piece of php code that will display a SUB navigation and also a SUB SUB navigation when needed on the site.

*Please note due to the way that the blockquotes work in wordpress, the above code will need the ” replaced. Just highlight each ” and retype it out yourself once you paste the code into whatever editor you’re using.

25 Awesome Wordpress Designs

Mike Smith — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 04:21:17 +0000

This post covers some of the best wordpress designs that were designed in the last year or so. I used We Love WP to pick and choose my favorites but there are many more gems there, so head on over to We Love WP and check them out. (a plus: if you hire me to design your blog, I will submit it to We Love WP to gain you exposure ).

Go Innovate

Ronin Snowboards

Loodo

Howard University African Students Association

Alma Latina

Northern Classics

The Piss Biscuit

Ribbons of Red

Dead Metropolis Recordings

Richcorner

Santzzz

Ciao Cimba

Sketchy Premise

Soap Media

Matt Brett

Boards and Decks

WP Glamour

Go Media Zine

WOO Themes

Pixel Criminals

That Indie Dude

Matt Mullenweg

Cake Journal

Dark Motion

The Resume Girl

If you are looking to have your website featured in a list similar to this, please contact me and let me know about your awesome wordpress design. Alternately, if you’d like to be featured in a list similar to this but have not yet created an awesome wordpress design, please contact me and we can discuss creating a design for your blog that would be utterly AWESOME!

As a final note, if you liked this list, please feel free to stumble this post, or submit it to digg/design float.

Thanks

Simple Affiliate URLs in Wordpress

Mike Smith — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 02:26:06 +0000

Gone are the days that a 100 character link with a bunch of id’s and question marks makes it past the viewers eyes when you’re trying to promote your sponsors or affiliate links. So, what can we do to change that and make it easier to generate leads and clicks? There is one simple way to do this and it’s being done by some of the biggest wordpress users out right now. I’m talking about the www.blogthememachine.com/go/sponsor.php links you see on blogs. This is simple to create and will only take you 1-2 minutes per link (even less once you get used to it.

Your first step needs to be opening up notepad or any other text editor you might like and pasting the following code into it:

*note: make sure you retype the four ” because they will not work when copy and pasting from the box above.

Now, after you paste this into the text editor and add your actual link in, you’ll want to save it as “sponsor.php” replacing the word sponsor with whatever name of the company/product you’re linking to is.

All that’s left to do is create a “go” folder in your favorite ftp program (or cpanel, ect) and add the file to that folder.

Optionally, you can also make the folder “favorite” or “product” or “site” or “out”. You don’t have to use “go” if you don’t want to. Personally, I use “recommend” on some of my websites. It’s your call.

So, there’s not many steps. I hope you weren’t looking for a long drawn out process That’s not what we do here. Simple solutions to simple problems is our motto!

Enjoy