I have a project that I want you, your friends, your friend’s friends, your friend’s friend’s friends, or anybody to participate in. The project that I talking about is, Wordpress Tips & Tricks Collection.

Let me briefing it first. What exactly that I want to do is I want to combine all Wordpress tips and tricks around the blogosphere into one big collection (collection of links). So, Wordpress newbie or beginner or maybe advanced users can learn all those tips and tricks by using the collection that I will produce.

Phase 1 - The Gathering
For this project, there will be three phases. The first phase is The Gathering. In this phase, I will collect all Wordpress tips and tricks around the blogosphere as many as I could. But to do that by my own is really tough. There are plenty tips and tricks out there. That’s why I’m asking you to join me in this project. But how?

You can help me by pingback (trackback) your Wordpress tips and tricks to this post. I’m sure you know how to pingback your post, don’t you? Lol… This phase will start today (27th March 2007) and will end on next Tuesday (3rd April 2007).

Phase 2 - The Sorting
The next phase will be, The Sorting. I think I can do this part alone where I need to sort all of the tips and tricks into their categories (if any). And if the tips or tricks similiar/same with the another, maybe I will only choose one. But one thing that I want you to keep in mind is, make sure that the tips or tricks that you submit is made by your own. It will save me a lot of time.

Phase 3 - The Release
And the last phase is The Release. Once I finished sort all the links, I will publish them up here. Hopefully I can release the collection on 9th April 2007.

The Benefits
Ok, as a reader, you will learn new things. I’m not sure how many links will be in the collection but I’m sure it will takes you times to finish reading all of them.

And as the contributor, there are no rewards that I can give you but you will get some traffics and backlinks. Thats all I can think right now.

Well, if you have any ideas or suggestions, you can drop them in the comment form below. But don’t forget to tell this to your friends. We want to make a big collection of Wordpress Tips & Tricks, so we need as many as possible contributors that we can get. Better start pingging now.[tags]project, wordpress project, tips & tricks[/tags]

Some may have noticed but they do not know how to do it. Or maybe they don’t bother enough with it.

By default, in Wordpress, your post urls will be displayed by using it’s post id. But with permalinks, you can beautify your urls with something more meaningable. Instead by using post id number like this,

http://www.cypherhackz.net/?p=592

you can change it to something like this

http://www.cypherhackz.net/archives/2007/03/25/beautify-your-urls-with-permalinks/

But how do I do that? Here I will show you how.

1. First, go to your Options and click on Permalinks tab
2. There, you will see, 4 common options that you can choose from. And of course, by default, the Default option is selected
3. If you want to change your post urls to like mine, you can use this structure under Custom option.
   

   /archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

4. Then, click Update Permalink Structure

Actually, what that structure do is, the url will be transformed into according the structure tags we use.

/archives - this will be your archives folder (virtually)
%year% - the year of the post been published. Eg: 2007
%month% - the month of the post been published. Eg: 03
%day% - the day of the post been published. Eg: 25
%postname% - the post title. Eg: beautify-your-urls-with-permalinks

There are more structure tags that you can choose from. All of the structure tags can be found at Wordpress Codex - Using Permalinks.

Btw, do you mind to share your permalink structure with us? You can do that by post it by using the comment form below.[tags]permalinks, tutorial, tips[/tags]

I’m using Sociable wordpress plugin and found out there is a bug with the submit entry link to StumbleUpon.

In sociable.php file, find line 305 to 308 and replace the line with this:

I have contact the author. Hopefully he will fix this issue in the next version. [tags]stumbleupon, stumble, plugin, wordpress plugin[/tags]

I was wrong. I said in my previous post that you no need to update your plugins if you are using my plugins. But lately I found out that there are some plugins that you need to update. If you using these plugins:

• Site Statistics
• Previous Posts
• Today Posts

I recommended you to update them now. Because Wordpress 2.1 using different table structures, there is a really minor problem if you still using the old version.

If you not yet upgrade your Wordpress to Wordpress 2.1, you still can use the plugins. No update is needed. But if you using Wordpress 2.1, update the plugins is a must. [tags]plugins, wordpress plugins[/tags]

After facing some difficulties to upgrade my Wordpress to the latest version, at last my site had successfully upgraded to WP2.1, codename Ella.

There are many new updates and options in this new version but I’m not using them really much. I upgrade because I just want to fix the security flaws and to test my Wordpress plugins. Fortunately, all my plugins work without any problems.

Btw I want to announce here that I will not do anymore support to Simple Image Linking plugin. If you have any problems with it, I feel very very sorry. The plugin is not supported anymore. There are many more plugins that are far better than this. Anyway, thanks for using my plugins.

And I also want to tell here that, I have submitted my CypherFS Bliss theme to Themes Wordpress. Click here to see the demo. [tags]plugins, themes, download[/tags]

Download CypherFS Bliss

This is a great opportunity for those who are really have much time to spend. For Malaysian peoples, you can be the Wordpress Translator to translate the English strings for Wordpress.com.

This project is for those who are speak in English and another language (Eg: Malay) to make Wordpress.com available in their national language.

This is a project where people who are speak English and another language can make WordPress.com available in their language of choice for themselves and their country.

Based on the rankings, currently, Bahasa Melayu has only finished about 500 words (still increasing). There are about 3000 words need to translate though.

This is not limited to Malaysian only. It is open to all. There are many languages that you can translate. If you interested and don’t have any things to do, go and participate in the project. Wishing you good luck! [tags]translate, dictionary, translator[/tags]

Thanks to Ejon.

You are reading Make your Own Wordpress Theme - Part 7. To read other parts, click on the link below.

• Part 1 - The Layout
• Part 2 - Header
• Part 3 - Index
• Part 4 - Comment
• Part 5 - Sidebar
• Part 6 - Footer
• Part 7 - Finish!

Yay… This is the final part for my Make your Own Wordpress Theme tutorial. As I said in the first part , my tutorial only covers basic parts needed to make your own Wordpress theme to work. So, there are some other advanced method that I didn’t mention here.

Beside than use single index.php file, you also can modified it to single.php and page.php file. What it does is, single.php will use to display your post in single display, while page.php is use to display your page.

Other files that you can create are

• archive.php
• search.php
• 404.php

You can get more info in Wordpress website and Wordpress codex .

I hope this tutorial will give you some little helps to guide you in making your own Wordpress theme. If you has successfully make your own theme from this tutorial, feel free to give comments or post a link on your website that you learn it from here. I really appreciate it. I’m sorry if there are so many grammar mistakes (I’m sure there are) or you did not understand some parts in this tutorial.

What I will do next? Hurm…I guess I need some rest. Lol… Just kidding. I will update this site as usual. I will post new and interesting stuffs here. Till then. Thanks for your time… [tags]diy, how to, skin, theme[/tags]

You are reading Make your Own Wordpress Theme - Part 6. To read other parts, click on the link below.

• Part 1 - The Layout
• Part 2 - Header
• Part 3 - Index
• Part 4 - Comment
• Part 5 - Sidebar
• Part 6 - Footer
• Part 7 - Finish!

Now we are in the second last part in my Make your Own Wordpress Theme. In footer, you can put your credits or anything that you want. But make sure don’t forget to put

<?php wp_footer(); ?>

before </body> like this.

Some plugin need this tag to make it work. So if you decided to make your theme to public, make sure to put it in your theme.

Next, Part 7 - Final! [tags]diy, how to, skin, theme[/tags]

You are reading Make your Own Wordpress Theme - Part 5. To read other parts, click on the link below.

• Part 1 - The Layout
• Part 2 - Header
• Part 3 - Index
• Part 4 - Comment
• Part 5 - Sidebar
• Part 6 - Footer
• Part 7 - Finish!

For sidebar, there are some Wordpress tags that we can use here. For an example, to display the pages, categories, archives, etc.

First what we will do is to put unordered list to make it easier to manage our sidebar. Here what I mean.

In sidebar id, we put the <ul> and <li> like this.

Read more…

You are reading Make your Own Wordpress Theme - Part 4. To read other parts, click on the link below.

• Part 1 - The Layout
• Part 2 - Header
• Part 3 - Index
• Part 4 - Comment
• Part 5 - Sidebar
• Part 6 - Footer
• Part 7 - Finish!

In Part 4, we will learn steps taken to make our comments.php file. First I will show you how to create the layout for the comments and then we will put the tags needed.

This comments.php will be called by our index.php file when we view our entry in single or page. The function that will call the file is

<?php comments_template(); ?>

Note: This part is kinda tricky. So make sure you give 300% of consentration.

Read more…