The NETTUTS.com site has an in-depth tutorial looking at the anatomy of a WordPress plugin:
WordPress is well known for its amazing collection of free plugins. There is one for almost every need you can think of, from backing up your WordPress installation to asking for a cup of coffee or fighting spam. But there are times when none of the available plugins seem to quite do the trick you are looking for. To help you in moments like that, this tutorial will guide you through every step of building a simple, widgetized WordPress plugin with settings.
They break it out into a few sections - the plugin template (files and directories), adding in the first functionality, making the widget for the plugin's output, add in a few settings and you're good to go. You can download the source if you want to dig right in and get going.
In this new post to his blog Vinu Thomas shows how to install an application onto his S60 phone to access his WordPress blog.
I just came across this S60 freeware today which allows me to manage my wordpress blog on my E71. Wordmobi is a Python app which can be used to perform the following tasks on the blog: create/publish new posts, include images in the posts, view/approve comments and delete posts.
You'll need to install Python on the phone before you can get Wordmobi up and running. He includes screenshots for quick blog setup and the resulting listing of posts it pulls in.
The NETTUTS.com site has pointed out five new features of the latest WordPress release (2.7) that come bundled in by default.
Wordpress 2.7 is to be publically released in the next week, and a whole bunch of features have been packed in, looking past the obvious such as the new redesign. The new dashboard, Screen options, Plugins, Themes and Core upgrades and the media library!
Here's the list of five:
New Commenting system
New Dashboard Features
Screen Options
Plugin Interface
Media Library
Posts Management
They detail each with subheadings and screenshots of the new improvements in action.
Let's take a look at 10 useful, yet rather unknown RSS-tricks for WordPress. Each section of the article presents a problem, suggests a solution and provides you with an explanation of the solution, so that you can not just solve some of your RSS-related problems but also understand what you are actually doing.
The NETTUTS blog has this new tutorial posted (including a screencast) showing how to make a web application similar to the Address Book on Apple's OS X operating system.
As we all know, WordPress is so extensive that you can use it for nearly anything. There are even articles on sites with crazy titles such as 101 alternative uses for WordPress. So I thought, hey, why not? I bet a lot of people want to create their own Web Apps, and essentially WordPress can do that for you. In this video tutorial, we're going to make an online Address Book.
Building on a WordPress base and including jQuery and a Live Search Plugin, they create the multi-pane look and feel, styled largely with CSS. The end result shows your address groups, the members of that group and the selected member's information in the far right pane.
Stefan Mischook (of the KillerPHP.com site) has posted a new video tutorial about creating WordPress themes:
I just released a new video course on how to create a Wordpress theme/template from scratch. In these 12 videos, we will take someone with some beginner HTML and CSS skills through the steps needed to build a WordPress template from scratch. The videos use only a collection of freely downloadable tools that are available on Windows and Mac.
The full series will cost about $20 USD for a download or $30 USD to have the DVD shipped out to you. The videos focus on different parts of the process like making top-level navigation, setting up content areas and and creation of a custom homepage.
Melvin Rivera has come up with a quick script that allows you approve comments outside of your WordPress installation:
The job of approving comments sometimes falls on a person who does/should not have access to the WordPress admin. By design WordPress only allows a user with admin privileges to do this job. I wrote an an External Web Interface for approving pending WordPress comments via XMLRPC.
Footers are often an overlooked aspect of designing a site - when they can actually be kinda handy and informative. In this tutorial we'll go through some options you can have for your WordPress site.
They take different bits of information - archived posts, the "about" message and some links - and arrange them in a sidebar sort of format. This is then styled to work more like a footer, moving it down to the bottom of the page and laid out horizontally. The complete code for the tutorial can be dropped easily into the wp-content folder (named "WPFooter").
Among other things mentioned in his his latest postBill Staples talks about a new tool that makes the installation of lots of popular web apps (PHP and not) simpler - the Microsoft Web Application Installer.
The Microsoft Web Application Installer (Web AI) is a companion to Web PI, and provides a super easy way to download, install and configure many popular community and open source applications on IIS7. Available applications include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress, with more on the way.
You can find out more about this web installer and the Microsoft Platform tools from this page on Microsoft's site or in this Web AI forum (where you can also provide your own feedback).
The NETTUTS blog has another WordPress-related post today that looks at "context includes" - changing the look and feel of the postings based on the content type they're tagged with.
The great thing about WordPress is that it doesn't limit how content is displayed, but provides a 'framework' of ways to do so. Even better, it's possible to change the display according to the content. When writing this tutorial it was hard to explain what's going on... But the best way is this: the post will be displayed within the loop according to its content - or contextual differences. Either way, it's including specific files that match up to the category of the post.
There's plenty of code to go around introducing you to the parts of the typical WodPress install you'll be working with and some CSS to help you style the resulting changes. You can download the source and check out a live demo of the end result.
