Pro Blog Design

The following is a guest post by Andy Walpole.

There are many parts of the Wordpress API which are fantastic but there are also other parts which, I would argue, are lacking.

The Settings API was introduced in version 2.7 to allow the semi-automation of form creation. All credible Content Management Systems and frameworks have their own set of functions or classes for the same purpose. Drupal has a multitude of hooks which can be leveraged, while CodeIgniter uses a combination of the Form Validation Class and the Form Helper .

When creating a Wordpress plugin recently I wanted to create a dynamic form to insert data into a field in the option database table. I decided to create a class for this purpose with the intention of creating reusable code for future projects.

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The following is a guest post by Austin Gunter of WPEngine.com.

If you’re looking to boost performance for a content-heavy WordPress installation, adding a cache like Varnish is a great way to boost your site’s performance.

NB – This is an advanced topic, and only relevant if you have full control over your server (e.g. you’re on a VPS). It does not apply to regular webhosting.

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It’s a relatively simple process to add some flair to your blog comments these days. I want to look at 6 of the best free tools and give you a quick overview of the benefits of each.

Let’s start with one you’ve likely heard of before…

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Around this time last year, I showed you how to embed tweets in WordPress using the Twitter API.

Today, I want to improve on that script by adding a backup to it. Twitter is often down or unresponsive, and when it is, the previous script fails and displays nothing.

With a backup, we store an extra copy of each set of tweets that we find. When Twitter is down, we can then use this backup to display tweets as normal.

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As 2012 begins, I want to look back over the past year to see what can be learnt from it. Learning from your mistakes is less glamorous than a list of grand New Year’s Resolutions (Though I do like those too), but often more effective at ensuring the next year is even better than the last.

With that in mind, what follows are some of the lessons I have picked out from my own 2011. I would love to hear if these resonate with you.

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Recently, one of our clients needed to let visitors create WordPress posts (Or custom post types of course) from the website itself.

In this post, I’m going to walk through some of the WordPress functions I used to achieve this. We’ll go over creating the post itself, adding categories/tags, and adding metadata.

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This is one of the most common questions I get asked; how do you make a floating box with share links?

Today, we’re going to see just how simple it can be. We will:

• Set up the current trinity of search (Facebook, Twitter, +1).
• See how to make sure they share the right URL.
• Align the box to the bottom left of the user’s browser.
• Hide the box if the user’s browser is too small (So it never overlaps our content).

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