A customized WordPress login is a nice touch to any site, especially if you’re making it for someone other than yourself. There should be no need to install a plugin to do this for you. In order to keep your site lean, you’ll want to avoid adding loads of plugins that do little things like [...]
Archives for Design
Enabling custom backgrounds is probably one of the easiest things you can do to improve a WordPress theme that you’re building or customizing. It takes one small addition to your theme’s functions.php file: add_custom_background(); Save that and you’ll get Backgrounds added to the Dashboard >> Appearance menu, as shown here. This will allow you or [...]
Registering and adding new sidebars to a BuddyPress site can be quite a task, involving edits and additions to several template files. BuddyPress Sidebar is the newest plugin on the scene, and it makes the creation of multiple sidebars a snap! If manually editing BuddyPress files is beyond your skill level, then prior to this [...]
It’s time for another round of BuddyPress eye candy! Now that WordPress 3.0 is here more users are becoming acquainted with the myriad of possibilities that the WordPress platform affords, not only for multisite blogging functionality, but also social networking in a box with the help of BuddyPress. As the BuddyPress user base expands, we [...]
Time for another roundup of free BuddyPress themes. The good news is that most of these have been updated for the latest versions of WordPress and BuddyPress, so they’re ready for use in your projects right now. BuddyPress theme development is still a small portion of the WordPress community, so updated themes can be scarce [...]
Finding the perfect contact form plugin can be a time-consuming task. Some of them end up looking clunky and need serious CSS revisions in order to be decent. Who really enjoys styling form elements? Wouldn’t it be so much better if you could find a contact form plugin that works smoothly and has a decent [...]
Having a “Print Page” button is especially important for WordPress sites used for education, course management, online magazines, project management, news sources, or any other informational site. The ability to easily print pages can have a significant impact on your reader’s experience with your website. How frustrating is it to want to print a page [...]
WordPress 3.0 has a new standard comment form tag that you should know about. Whereas previously the code for outputting a comment form was much longer, now you have this: <?php comment_form(); ?> This will give you a simple comments form that looks something like this: Now doesn’t that simplify your theme development? If you [...]
WordPress introduced the body_class() template tag in 2.8 to help theme authors style more effectively with CSS. You may not have needed it before, but the body_class template tag is so incredibly handy and versatile that it’s worth knowing how to use. Why the body_class() tag is needed In WordPress there is generally one body [...]
BuddyPress groups just got a big boost this week with two new plugins that are bound to enhance the group experience: BP Group Control The BP Group Control plugin gives group admins the ability to: Create new members for their groups Add existing users to their groups Directly delete members Assign their members an identifying [...]
