Pro Blog Design

WordPress shortcodes are used frequently in plugins and themes as a way to achieve extra functionality, without the need to modify template files. You just type the shortcode word right into your post. Some plugins and themes use them to add event calendars, some for making announcements, while others use them for inserting contact forms.

Simply, WP shortcodes are awesome.

However, what if you’re a theme / plugin developer wishing to use them for your next great product, but you have no idea where to start? We’re going to fix that in this tutorial.

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WordPress theme option panels were a tremendous stride in the world of theme development; they gave site owner’s the ability to modify various aspects of their site, without ever having to touch the code. Every great theme either has or should have an extensive options panel.

In this tutorial, I’m going to demonstrate how to add a custom font uploader to your options panel. This will allow site owners to upload any number of font files and apply them to different sections of the site.

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Automatically grabbing thumbnails from posts is cool. But what about automatic excerpt lengths that match the height of those photos?

I recently redesigned a blog for a client and it had an automatic thumbnail for each post, with a fixed length excerpt beside it. It was okay, but our client didn’t like the fact that it was “cutting” his pictures off sometimes. Our goal then had 3 steps:

• 1 – To set a thumbnail’s height proportional to the original picture, so that we would not cut parts of it off.
• 2 – Use this height value to display excerpts about the same size.
• 3 – Set up an automatic Lightbox on images that are too large for the content area.

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WordPress is an awesome publishing tool, and one of the best features is its flexibility to customize its core functions with plugins. The simplest definition of a plugin is:

A plugin is a snippet of code which is used to extend the functionality of WordPress.

And one of the nicest things about plugins is that the barrier to entry is extremely low. It takes very little technical knowledge to make your first plugin!

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Ever get tired of installing and setting up WordPress yet again so you can show a client a theme in development? Why yes, there is an easier way.

Enter WordPressMU, the multi-user, multi-blog version of WordPress which will soon be merged into the core. For those of you ready to jump-start some development, read on.

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Cheat sheets has several benefits from saving you a lot of time to also helping you improve your skills and productivity in that cetrain task.

They provide a great and quick reference and also helps your learn faster by showing all the necessary information needed. There are documentations, but they can sometimes be a hassle.

It is pretty hard to remember everything and thankfully, there are cheat sheets. So, here are the list of some of the most essential cheat sheets every web developer and designer should have.

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Social bookmarking and link sharing is probably the largest source of traffic for most of us. Sites like Stumbleupon and Delicious send hundreds of thousands of visitors across the blogosphere.

So how can we encourage more people to share our links? One of the easiest options is to include a set of links at the bottom of your posts which readers can click to automatically vote for your article.

There are plugins which can do this of course, but that requires you to work with their settings, names icons in their banner and it means having yet another plugin installed on your site.

If you would rather avoid that and have complete control for yourself, then you might prefer to code the links into your theme yourself.

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