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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Ever thought you could make some improvements to your RSS feed? Like letting it cover more (or less!) content? Or adding some extra details onto the end of your posts?

In this post, I’m going to show you how to do exactly that.

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Over on PliablePress, we’ve released our newest WordPress theme. MyBiz is designed for modern businesses who don’t want the “faceless-company” approach that customers are used to receiving.

It’s vibrant, colorful (You even get 5 color schemes to choose from!) and yet still professional and well organized. Most of all, we’ve put an extreme amount of care into the homepage, giving you 3 different ways to ensure your best content is highlighted and that your visitors go to the pages you want them to see.

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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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There has been another GPL storm going on in the WordPress world in the past few days. Yep, again.

I don’t normally make a comment on them, but given that I’m directly involved with it now through PliablePress themes (All of our themes have to come with some sort of license, right?), it seems time to finally step in.

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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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Want to know why so many of our clients in the past few months had to be turned away?

Want to see the biggest project I’ve ever worked on at Pro Blog Design?

So what is it? At its simplest, PliablePress means WordPress themes. But we’ve put everything into this, these aren’t simple little themes that you can turn out in a weekend.

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