Pro Blog Design

A few weeks back, we put together a way of adding events to WordPress and displaying them in an easy-to-read list. It was simple to maintain and it worked well, but it didn’t take advantage of all WordPress offers.

In this 2-part tutorial, we are going to extend our events list script to set up a new post type purely for the events, and create a new taxonomy for tagging our events. We will then be able to:

• Organize our events easily (e.g. If we’re running WordPress classes, we could label them as Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced)
• Create templates for event lists and individual events.
• Separate events out of the main post list (So they won’t automatically appear on the homepage anymore).
• Add new events more conveniently in the admin panel (Especially when we add metaboxes in a later post!)

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I love reading the comments on each article I post. If you leave one, you’re near guaranteed I’ll reply to you directly and keep the conversation going.

The trouble is that after a day or two of an article being live, the spammers descend and the lovely, informative comment thread descends into “great article, agree with your points, visit my site”. It’s just not cool…

We’re working on a full redesign to Pro Blog Design, and one of the things I’m most interested in is this comments issue. How can I make sure the comment threads stay in that awesome-to-read stage from the first few days when an article is written?

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WordPress 3.1 introduced the admin bar, which adds admin options to the top of your pages as you browse your site (Assuming you’re logged in of course).

It’s easy to extend the bar to add new links of your own, or to remove links you don’t want (e.g. if the “Appearance” menu isn’t something you often need instant access to).

In this tutorial, we’ll be building a simple plugin that will let us add some handy links (e.g. a Twitter search for the current post, analytics, and ad sales), as well as remove the links we don’t want.

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I’ve stacked up a fair few design, development and marketing/business books in the past few months. In this post, I want to share with you the ones I’ve enjoyed most, in case you’re looking to improve your knowledge in any of these areas too.

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Around this time last year, I wrote a post on how to create an Upcoming Events section on your WordPress blog.

The events can be displayed as a list of posts, ordered by the date in which they occur (And events that come and go will automatically be taken off the list of course).

As several of you found out this January though, that code had an issue in it that meant it stopped working with the new year. In this post, we’re going to fix that (Sorry it’s taken me to now to publish a tutorial with the solution!).

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There are several objects in WordPress that we use all the time, namely $post, $comment and categories/tags. If you’re like me though, you never remember everything that’s in there, or the names of the values you want.

This cheat sheet will be a reference which you (and I) can refer to the next time you’re using one of the WordPress objects.

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The Transients API is a WordPress feature that I had never heard of until a few weeks ago, when I wrote a post on getting your Twitter follower count in plain text.

On that post, Otto left a comment with a different way of getting the same result, using the Transients API. Instead of using cron, which can be complicated, transients allow you to use just one or two lines.

In this post, I want to show you how to use transients, and to do that, we’re going to build a simple script that will list the latest commenter on your blog, along with their avatar. The end result will look like the image above.

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