The Tutorial Blog » Wordpress

10 Excellent Free WordPress Themes

Wez Pyke — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:13:48 +0000

WordPress is one of the most used blogging software on the web. Because of the popularity that is has there are also a lot of themes; some good, some bad. In this short list you will find 10 free attractive WordPress themes.

Notepad Chaos

The Web News

Trifecta

FreeStyle

One Fine Day

SuperMag

Irresistible

Imprezz

Elegance

Smashing Theme

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Boosting traffic to your website with submission websites

Wez Pyke — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:45:55 +0000

There are many ways of getting traffic to your website such as with search engines, social network websites and telling friends. The best way that I have found besides search engines of getting traffic to your website is by submitting your tutorials to tutorial submission websites.

There are tutorial websites that allow for submission of specific tutorials such as only PHP or Photoshop tutorials and there are websites that allow you to submit a lot of different types of tutorials to that website.

CodeBounce is one of the tutorial submission websites that allow you to submit a range of different tutorials. Its system is somewhat similar to that of Digg's. CodeBounce is a great website and is easy to get to grips with. They allow for the submission of ASP.NET, PHP, CSS, Photoshop, WordPress, Graphic Design, Web Design and Java.
Developer Links and Tutorials.

LearnPHP is a website that I recommend submitting your PHP tutorials too because I receive a lot of visitors from them and overall the website is easy to navigate and understand. They only allow for the submission of PHP tutorials as you can probably tell from the name.

Tutorialized is a great website that allows for the submission of many different types of tutorials. Tutorialized has been a website that has been around for a long time and if you submit a tutorial to this website and you get accepted then expect quite a lot of hits from here as they have a lot of visitors.

If there are any other websites that you like submitting tutorials too and have received a good amount of visitors from then share it with everyone and let us know by posting a comment.

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Creating a WordPress plugin

Wez Pyke — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:10:34 +0000

The plugin that I'm going to show you how to create within this post is a plugin that I created for MakeUseOf.

Creating plugins for WP is relatively easy and uses actions to call functions that are included in pages within the main WP files. To learn more about creating plugins for WP go here.

Ok so lets get started with creating the plugin.

When creating a plugin for WP make sure that you include your own unique word or acronym to your functions so that they don't conflict with any other plugins that may be installed.

Because I created this for MakeUseOf the acronym I use is MUO and then AF because I named the plugin author footer so every function within this plugin begins with MUO_AF.

So to start our plugin we add this

/*
Plugin Name: MUO Author Footer
Description: Authors type in the footer that will be attached to the end of their articles with modifications
Author: Wez
Version: 1.0
*/

Here is where we add the name of our plugin, a description, your name and the version number of your plugin.

The next bit of code that we add is the register_activation_hook and register_deactivation_hook so that when the plugin is activated and deactivated the code within functions that we will create in our next step will be executed.

register_activation_hook(__FILE__, 'MUO_AF_activate');
register_deactivation_hook(__FILE__, 'MUO_AF_deactivate');

We're now going to create two functions called MUO_AF_activate and MUO_AF_deactivate so that the register hooks work correctly.

function MUO_AF_activate() {
$query = mysql_query("CREATE TABLE `muo_author_footer` (
`author_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`author_name` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
`author_signature` text NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`author_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;");
}

function MUO_AF_deactivate(){
$query = mysql_query("DROP TABLE `muo_author_footer`");
}

What this code does is when the plugin is activated it will create a table within the MySQL database that the plugin will use to store and retrieve information. When the plugin is deactivated it will delete the table that was created in the database.

In the next step we will write code that will be called and displayed within the Your Profile page in the admin-cp.

function MUO_AF_profile() {
global $userdata;
get_currentuserinfo();
$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM muo_author_footer WHERE author_id='$userdata->ID'");
$row = mysql_fetch_array($query);
$author_signature = $row['author_signature'];
echo '

Author Post Signature	'.$author_signature.' Preview: '; echo $author_signature; echo '

Author Post Signature

'.$author_signature.'

Preview:

';
echo $author_signature;
echo '

';
}

When the Update Profile button is clicked the information from the previous bit of code will be retrieved in the next bit of code and the database will be updated.

function MUO_AF_edit(){
global $userdata, $current_user;
get_currentuserinfo();

$MUO_Author_Sig = $_POST['MUO_Author_Sig'];

$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM muo_author_footer WHERE author_id='$userdata->ID'");

if( mysql_num_rows($query) > 0 ) {
$query = mysql_query("UPDATE muo_author_footer SET author_signature='$MUO_Author_Sig' WHERE author_id='$userdata->ID'");
} else {
$query = mysql_query("INSERT INTO muo_author_footer VALUES ('$userdata->ID','$userdata->user_login','$MUO_Author_Sig')");
}

}

The code we will write now is the code that will grab the contents of the post and then attach the authors signature to the end of that post.

function MUO_AF_publish_post( $content ) {
global $wpdb;
$num = 0;
if (get_the_ID() > $num) {
$the_author_id = get_the_author_id();
$author_query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM muo_author_footer WHERE author_id='". $the_author_id ."'");
$author_row = mysql_fetch_array($author_query);
$author_signature = $author_row['author_signature'];

$content .= '';

if(strstr($author_signature, 'by') == false) :

$content .= '

(By) '.$author_signature.'

else :

$content .= '

'.$author_signature.'

endif;

return $content;
}
else {
return $content;
}
}

We will now add the functions to actions, this is the most important part of the code because without this none of the functions would be called and nothing would happen.

add_action('show_user_profile', 'MUO_AF_profile');
add_filter('profile_update', 'MUO_AF_edit');
add_action('the_content', 'MUO_AF_publish_post');

Then at the end of the file close the php tags with

I have not been very descriptive in this tutorial of what the actual code within the plugin is doing because I created this tutorial wanting to show people the basics bit of code that are needed to call functions and make a plugin work.

I hope that you have learnt something by reading this tutorial and feel free to post a comment with your thoughts on this post.

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