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Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers

With its latest releases, WordPress has extended its potential well beyond blogging, moving toward an advanced, robust and very powerful content management solution. By default, WordPress delivers a very lightweight, minimal system that offers only basic functionalities. But where the WordPress core falls short, there are a wealth of plug-ins that extend its limitations.

Plug-ins often offer simple solutions, but they are not always elegant solutions: in particular, they can add a noticable overhead, e.g. if they offer more functionality than needed. In fact, some general and frequently needed WordPress-functionalities can be added to the engine without bloated plugins, using the software itself.

This article presents 8 tips for WordPress template developers that address common CMS implementation challenges, with little to no plug-in dependence. These examples are written for WordPress 2.7+ and should also work in the latest WordPress-version.

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10 Useful WordPress Loop Hacks

The loop is a very important aspect of WordPress blogs. In fact, the loop is what allows you to get posts from your WordPress database and print them on the screen. A set of useful and user-friendly functions, the loop is incredibly powerful. With it, you can get a single post, a list of posts ordered by date, title or category, a list of posts written by a specific author and much more.

In this article, we'll show you 10 useful things you can do with the WordPress loop to make your blog even more powerful than it is right now.

The problem. The loop and the query_posts() WordPress function allow you to easily retrieve a list of posts published in a specific week or month. Unfortunately, getting posts published between, for example, March 17 and May 3 isn't that easy. Let's solve this problem.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• Custom Field Hacks For WordPress
• 15 Useful Twitter Hacks and Plugins For WordPress
• Mastering WordPress Shortcuts
• 100 Amazing Free WordPress Themes For 2009

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Wordpress Theme Development Frameworks

If you build and develop Wordpress themes often, you will probably be fed up of all the repetitive code writing, the constantly checking of your mark-up and all you really want to do is focus on the design and the project-specific features. The answer is a Wordpress development framework. A framework is designed to speed up the process of designing and coding a Wordpress theme by minimizing your time, and balancing your patience, on Wordpress’ back-end code that is repeated within every theme.

This post is not about finding the best framework, it is about finding the right framework that works for you. If you are an experienced developer then you will probably go for the powerful and feature rich Thematic or Carrington, or if you are a novice, you could try the Whiteboard framework or , even easier, download a stripped out and bare bones blank canvas theme, which you will find at the bottom of the post.

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100 Amazing Free Wordpress Themes for 2009

In January 2008, we put together a list of 100 Excellent Free Wordpress Themes. Over a year has passed and Wordpress development has progressed very fast and gained even more in popularity. We felt it was the right time to put together an updated post and offer our readers the best free themes that Wordpress can offer.

High quality free Wordpress Themes have become harder and harder to find in the past year, with the influx of premium themes, more and more designers and developers are selling themes (and rightly so, they do amazing work). But, that aside, the quality is certainly there, and we are sure you will be impressed with this Wordpress theme compilation for 2009.

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Custom Fields Hacks For WordPress

In our previous articles on WordPress hacks, we discussed the incredible flexibility of WordPress, which is one of the biggest reasons for its popularity among bloggers worldwide. Custom fields in particular, which let users create variables and add custom values to them, are one of the reasons for WordPress' flexibility.

In this article, we've compiled a list of 10 useful things that you can do with custom fields in WordPress. Among them are setting expiration time for posts, defining how blog posts are displayed on the front page, displaying your mood or music, embedding custom CSS styles, disabling search engine indexing for individual posts, inserting a “Digg this” button only when you need it and, of course, displaying thumbnails next to your posts

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Download “Gallery”: A Free WordPress Theme

Just recently we asked you to let us know what theme you would like us to release next. Among numerous comments we found many request for a gallery-theme that could be particularly useful for portfolios and showcases. At the very same time Christopher Wallace has been designing an advanced gallery-WordPress-theme for the design community and Smashing Magazine's audience. And today finally we are proud to release it – for free, of course.

Gallery is a beautiful, free, gallery-style Thematic child theme for WordPress, designed by Christopher Wallace especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. It is extremely flexible and can be used as a starting point for design galleries and portfolios.

Please take a look at other high-quality freebies as well:

• DelliStore: A Free Professional CSS/XHTML/PSD-Template
• "Magazeen": Free Magazine-Look WordPress Theme
• Flavours Icon Set
• Typography Keyboard Layout

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Ultimate Guide To Using WordPress For A Portfolio

WordPress is often thought of as just a blogging platform. But it's capable of so much more. Even WordPress' documentation includes an entire section on using WordPress as a content management system. Because WordPress is such an easy-to-use platform, it makes sense to consider using it as a platform to build just about any kind of website, a portfolio website included.

Whether you're a photographer, graphic designer, Web designer or any other kind of visual artist, WordPress makes an excellent starting point for developing your online portfolio. And with the wealth of plug-ins and ready-made themes available, you can usually get a perfectly presentable website up and running in a matter of hours.

Here are additional links that may be useful when designing your portfolio website.

• WordPress Developer's Toolbox
  A list of useful WordPress developer tools and resources.
• Creating a Successful Online Portfolio
  There are some common mistakes designers make in their portfolios. Let’s review these common pitfalls first to make sure you don’t fall into one of these traps.
• 50 Beautiful And Creative Portfolio Designs
  In this showcase, you’ll find a variety of beautiful, unique and highly creative portfolio designs.

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10 Exceptional WordPress Hacks

One of the reasons people love WordPress so much is its great flexibility. You can change the software's appearance with themes. You can enhance its functionality with plug-ins. And, last but not least, you can totally unleash WordPress' power with hacks.

Today, let's do it again with 10 new and totally killer WordPress hacks to make your blog stand out from the crowd. As usual, we won't just list the hacks alone. In each entry, you'll find an explanation of the code as well as the kinds of problems that the hack solves.

The problem. Because Twitter has become a social media revolution, many bloggers and Twitter users enjoy sharing blog posts they have found and liked on Twitter. However, manually creating a TinyURL before tweeting can get a little tedious. As you probably know, Twitter can bring a lot of traffic to your blog, so it is in your interest to consistently provide short URLs to your readers.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 15 Useful Twitter Hacks and Plug-Ins For WordPress
• 8 Useful WordPress SQL Hacks
• 10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks For WordPress

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New Smashing Freebies For Designers and Bloggers

As you may or may not know, we love to smash freebies around. Today we are glad to release the Web Developer icons set, designed by Pedja Rusic, a WP Smashing WordPress theme, designed by Greg Johnson and a Cafe icon set, designed by Enk. All icons and the theme are available for free download and can be used without any restrictions whatsoever. Please feel free to suggest ideas for next icon sets or single icons in the comments to this post.

We have noticed Pedja Rusic from Serbia over a year ago, when we presented his icon sets in our free icons round-up. A while ago we contacted him and commissioned the design of icons dedicated to designers and developers. The icons should pay close attention to the smallest details, look original, cool and still remain recognizable.

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Download “Imprezz”, A Free WordPress Theme

In this post we release Imprezz – a simple and beautiful 3-column-theme, a free WordPress theme designed by Gopal Raju from ProductiveDreams for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The theme can be used in various setting for various purposes - in magazine-blogs, but also in corporate and private blogs.

The theme supports WordPress 2.7.1 and works well with the zdcomments widget (which is used to display the top commenters). The package also include the PSD-source file of the logo.

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15 Useful Twitter Hacks and Plug-Ins For WordPress

Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has grown to create what most people would call a social media revolution. By the very nature of the short messages it hosts, Twitter is a wonderful marketing and promotion tool that no serious blogger can ignore.

In this article, we have compiled 15 most useful Twitter plug-ins, hacks and tips for WordPress to help you get the most out of Twitter in your WordPress blog.

WordPress plug-ins are good, but if you have 50 different plug-ins active on your blog, you should obviously expect longer loading times and even some inconvenience. This is why we love hacks! First let’s dive deep into WordPress and see what hacks can do to enhance our blogging experience. In the second part of this article, we will also show you some useful Twitter plug-ins for your WordPress blog.

You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

• 50 Twitter Tools and Tutorials For Designers and Developers
• 8 Useful Tips To Become Successful With Twitter

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“Magazeen”: Free Magazine-Look WordPress Theme

We love our readers. We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe. And we do our best to make the web design community stronger and the Web a little bit prettier. Therefore we ask talented artists and creative professionals to showcase their skills and release something unique and beautiful as a gift to the community. And when designers agree, truly impressive works see the light of day.

Today we are glad to release Magazeen — a free advanced Wordpress-theme in a magazine-llok created by the talented WeFunction Design Agency. This bold magazine 2-col-theme was designed with the main focus being on typography, grids and magazine-look. It was created especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

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Compositio: Clean, Beautiful and Free WordPress Theme

In comments to our recent freebie releases you asked for a simple, clean and beautiful WordPress-theme; the theme should be easily customize for different purposes and in a variety of settings. We've been listening to you and we heard you: and today we are release (hopefully) exactly what you've been asking for.

In this post we release Compositio – a simple, clean and user-friendly WordPress-theme, created by talented Elena Gafita for Smashing Magazine and its readers. Compositio is a two column theme, made to for those who want to put their content at the front with a unique light blue design. Random square shapes are the defining graphics of this theme. They are used throughout the background, bringing a special rhythm to the theme.

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Mastering WordPress Shortcodes

Introduced in WordPress 2.5, shortcodes are powerful but still yet quite unknown WordPress functions. Imagine you could just type "adsense" to display an AdSense ad or "post_count" to instantly find out the number of posts on your blog. WordPress shortcodes can do this and more and will definitely make your blogging life easier. In this article, we'll show you how to create and use shortcodes, as well as provide killer ready-to-use WordPress shortcodes that will enhance your blogging experience.

Using shortcodes is very easy. To use one, create a new post (or edit an existing one), switch the editor to HTML mode and type a shortcode in brackets, such as [showcase]. It is also possible to use attributes with shortcodes. A shortcode with attributes would look something like [showcase id="5"]. Shortcodes can also embed content, as shown here: [url href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com"]Smashing Magazine[/url]. Shortcodes are handled by a set of functions introduced in WordPress 2.5 called the Shortcode API. When a post is saved, its content is parsed, and the shortcode API automatically transforms the shortcodes to perform the function they’re intended to perform.

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10 Steps To Protect The Admin Area In WordPress

The administration area of a Web application is a favorite target of hackers and thus particularly well protected. The same goes for WordPress: when creating a blog, the system creates an administrative user with a perfectly secure password and blocks public access to the settings area with a log-in page. This is the cornerstone of its protection. Let's dig deeper!

This article focuses on defending the administration area of WordPress, meaning all those pages in the wp-admin folder (or http://www.yourblog.com/wp-admin/) that are displayed after a user a verified. We highlighted the phrase "after a user is verified" deliberately: it should be explicitly understood that only a simple query stands in the way of an evil hacker and the powerful admin area of your whole blog. The latter is only as strong as the passwords that are generated.

To make an attack more difficult, you should perform the following actions manually. These solutions do not guarantee 100% security, but you can create effective stumbling blocks on a hacker's way to the administration area.

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Introducing Tweetbacks Plugin for Wordpress

Just yesterday we introduced Twitter Avatars In Comments plugin for Wordpress that enables bloggers to have both Twitter and Gravatar avatars in blog comments. We are certainly not going to turn Smashing Magazine into a repository of Twitter plugins for Wordpress, but we are confident that it does make sense to introduce another plugin that enables another kind of Twitter integration in blogs.

This is why this post releases the Twittbacks WordPress Plugin that was developed and released especially for Smashing Magazine — this plugin imports tweets about your posts as comments. You can display them in between the other comments on your blog, or display them separately.

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Twitter Avatars In Comments Wordpress Plugin

Over the last months Twitter has become extremely popular across the Web, with more blogs, magazines and companies using it to communicate with their audience and their customers. Even we started twittering a couple of months ago and have over 3,650 followers now. Please feel free to join us and follow Smashing Magazine on Twitter as well.

Although we aren't sure if "Twitter" will actually revolutionize blogs, Twitter is definitely changing the way site owners communicate with their visitors and we, designers, need to be aware of that and use appropriate tools to meet the expectations of our clients. Unfortunately, there are not that many plugins and extensions for Twitter out there, so we decided to release one — the Twitter Comments Wordpress Plugin.

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10 Killer WordPress Hacks

2008 was a very good year for the WordPress community. The software was updated numerous times, leading to the recent release of version 2.7, and many new blogs dedicated to WordPress were created. Of course, tons of new hacks were discovered, which helped lots of bloggers enhance their blogs.

In this article, we'll show you 10 new useful killer WordPress hacks to unleash the power of your favorite blogging engine. Each hack has an accompanying explanation, so you'll not only unleash the power of WordPress but also understand how it works.

You may be interested in the following related articles as well:

• 8 Useful Wordpress SQL Hacks
• 10 Useful RSS Hacks For Wordpress

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Christmas WordPress Theme For Free Download

We may be a little bit late to the Christmas party, but late is usually better than never. In this post we release a very compact, magazine-like theme designed especially for events such as Christmas. We hope that the theme may be useful not only for this Christmas, but can also be used in general, for various purposes. This theme was designed by InstantShift as an exclusive Christmas gift for Smashing Magazine readers.

The theme has a 2-column-based layout and, is based on Christmas and holidays and has some fresh appealing funky icons. The PSD source file of the logo image has also been included with the package. This theme design can be used for any project and will be useful especially for event-related projects.

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8 Useful WordPress SQL Hacks

Over the past 10 years, the MySQL database has become incredibly popular on the Web. Every WordPress blog is driven by a MySQL database, which contains the blog's posts, settings, comments and much more.

While plug-ins and even coding hacks can solve some problems and achieve some tasks, sometimes you don't have any other choice than to execute SQL commands in phpMyAdmin or directly to the database via SSH. Let’s take a look at 8 useful SQL hacks for WordPress. Each section of this post presents a problem, suggests a solution and provides an explanation to help you understand the solution.

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