How to Add Custom Post Types to Your Home Page and Feeds

by Craig Grella July 19^th, 2012 6 Responses

Custom post types are a powerful way to extend the functionality of your website, creating a more personal experience for the viewer, and also the admin. But when you create a new custom post type, it is not automatically added to the site’s main loop. If that custom post type is one you plan to feature on the homepage of you’ll need to modify your theme’s functions.php file.

Luckily, that’s done with just a few lines of code.
Adding Custom Post Type to your Home Page in WordPress
function custom_conference_in_home_loop( $query ) {
if ( is_home() && $query->is_main_query() )

Custom Post Types in Wordpress Loop and Feed

Development

How to Start a Daily Deal Site with WordPress

by Hyder Jaffari July 19^th, 2012 1 Response

You can build virtually any type of site with WordPress, well almost (we’re slowly getting there), so today let’s see how you can set up a bespoke daily deals/flash sale site!

Development, Tutorials

How to Add Shortcodes to Your WordPress Plugin

by Paul Kaiser July 17^th, 2012 Leave a comment

WordPress shortcodes provide an easy way to insert complex content into your posts. Content generated by plugins might be a complex HTML table, a video and playlist, some fancy jQuery interface elements–the possibilities are endless. Shortcodes empower the author to say “put that generated content right here in my post,” and then not worry about it.
Shortcodes for our Simplenotes plugin
Recently I wrote a tutorial showing how to add WordPress Pointers to your plugins. As part of the tutorial, I included a little dummy plugin so people could see the fully-working code. The plugin, called Simplenotes, does the following:

WordPress Shortcodes-Cover of an old-school secret code club book

Tutorials, WordPress Development

Using WordPress Pointers in Your Own Plugins

by Paul Kaiser July 16^th, 2012 6 Responses

May I have your attention please?
Does it annoy you when someone says that? Maybe so, but every now and then they actually have something worthwhile to say. That’s how a lot of people feel about WordPress Pointers that serve to draw attention to new features users may see in core releases.
Can I borrow your sign?

WordPress pointers - Man by lake points to something specific

WordPress Development, WordPress Themes

The Lost Commandments: Applying the Five Ws to Your WordPress Theme

by Thomas Hubbard July 14^th, 2012 Leave a comment

When was the last time you considered “The Five Ws of Cyberspace?” Perhaps you applied them over a decade ago, when you were cranking out your first HTML site and wondering if folks would “surf your page.” Modern webmasters, on the other hand, may have never heard of them. Since the days of static websites, content management systems like WordPress have emerged and simplified the process of web development.Turnkey solutions, while convenient, typically promote ease-of-use at the expense of thought and intelligent practice.

WordPress Development

Cut custom query_posts time in half with pre_get_posts

by Paul Kaiser June 30^th, 2012 5 Responses

A Day in the Life of WordPress
Let’s have a look at a typical day for Mr. WordPress–hereafter referred to as “Big W.” Usually, Big W gets requests from web visitors, figures out what they want, fetches the right information from the database, and then serves it up in the right theme template. The scene goes something like this:

Web Visitor: I’d like to see http://yourdomain.com/good_page/, please.

Big W: Sure, let me get that for you.

Big W steps away to:

Parse the request to figure out which post to fetch.

Development

Shortcodes: Should They Be Done Differently?

by Hyder Jaffari June 28^th, 2012 13 Responses

Shortcodes were introduced in WordPress near the beginning of 2008, and ever since then blogging has never been the same (well, sort of). From dedicated plugins to built–in generators for themes, they have become ubiquitous with WordPress.

But, is that a good thing?

Most themes and plugins offer some sort of input mechanism to enter custom shortcodes to display content, it is then stylized with CSS and/or jQuery effects like tabbing, slides etc…

More often than not, your shortcode will look like this, in the most simplest of examples as provided by the default WordPress gallery function -

[gallery]

wordpress-shortcodes-best-option-for-stylized-content

WordPress Development

WordPress Core: Feature Ideas for a Better Experience

by Hyder Jaffari June 27^th, 2012 Leave a comment

Ever used a plugin, or had an idea, that you wish was a part of WordPress because it would make publishing/managing your content so much easier? Over the years, quite a few features have been integrated into the platform that started off as plugins, random ideas or as features of a theme.

Community, WordPress Development

WordPress Post Formats: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

by Paul Kaiser June 24^th, 2012 Leave a comment

Microblogging gets a nod from WordPress core team
When I first saw the post formats feature in the works for WordPress 3.1, I was in the middle of building a live action scavenger hunt site based on the P2 theme. P2—a microblogging theme—makes it easy to add short posts to your blog from the front-end, classifying them as “Status update,” “Blog Post,” “Quote,” or “Link.”
Post formats work for me

Post Formats angry mob of lego people descends upon the post formats Codex page

Development

Is Your WordPress Website Just Another Business Card?

by Thomas Hubbard June 21^st, 2012 9 Responses

Business and entrepreneurship have fascinated me since my early teenage years. Long before I learned the mechanics of what it takes to launch a successful business, it seemed as if it was an easy feat. I have witnessed many try their hand at entrepreneurship, starting what they believed was an actual business. They’d get a really awesome idea, come up with a clever name for it, and then RUSH to have business cards printed.

Your Wordpress Website is More Than a Static Website