Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category
How to Build the Perfect WordPress Sitemap
I was recently asked how I built the sitemap on Binary Moon so I thought I would share the code. The sitemap layout is actually one of the many custom page templates available in my WordPress theme, Elemental - however the code is very loosly based upon that in the original SRG Clean Archives plugin (before it was taken over by Geek With a Laptop).
Sitemaps are a single ...
WordPress Caching, Part 1: The Basics
Caching (on the internet) is the act of storing computationally expensive calculations in a way that can be recovered very quickly with the smallest possible impact on the server.
Or, in short, 'speeding stuff up'.
In this series of posts I will be showing you how you can speed up your WordPress blog. I'll start with the basics and then move on to how I cache external data in my WordPress theme - Elemental.
10 WordPress query_posts tips you probably don’t know
I have written a really brief query_post tutorial before, and it did quite well, but both WordPress and my own skills, have advanced considerably since then. So I thought it would be interesting to revisit the query_posts command and see what has changed.
The query_posts command is one of the most useful in all of WordPress. It is this command that allows all the content to be queried (extracted ...
Quick and Easy Popular Posts for Your WordPress Blog – in Only 1 Line of Code
Adding a list of popular posts to your website is a great way to increase user engagement on your site. It shows your readers what people are reading and interacting with the most - which in turn should encourage people to browse around your website more.
There are lots of posts across the blogosphere describing how to do this. Some look at the number of comments, and others track the page views, ...
Using the Yahoo Weather API (in your WordPress themes)
When developing our Hyperlocal WordPress theme called The Local Darren came up with the idea of adding the local weather to the themes header. After a bit of research I decided that the Yahoo! Weather api was the best solution.
Before writing the code I Googled around to find something that would speed up development but all the solutions I found were overly complicated and cumbersome. I wanted some small fast code - so decided to write my own.
WordPress Http – Read Content From Other Websites
Recently I have been doing a lot of work with API's and these often involve loading text content (rss/ xml/ json etc) from another website and then displaying the results - for instance the Twitter feed at the bottom of this website uses the Twitter Search API to get my latest updates.
There are all sorts of ways to access this data, but different servers require different methods so it's good to ...
How to Use Akismet in your Plugin or Theme to Stop Spam Dead
So far I think I have been rather lucky, there hasn't been much spam on WPVote, and that's great. But I know these types of sites can be a haven for spammers, so I have used a few different tricks to stop the spam in its tracks. One of those is adding Akismet support.
The function below is something you can add to your plugin without any customisation. The code is only really useful in certain situations but I ...
Creating Your Own WordPress Permalink Structure For Custom Content
The latest feature I have added to WPVote is a page that shows you all pages submitted to the site for a specific domain. Below I will show how I created the custom permalink structure without creating custom pages.
The process took me a while to work out but it ended up being quite simple code. I wanted to have the urls in the format 'http://wpvote.com/domain/www.domain.com/'. I didn't want to have to ...
