The inspiration for this tutorial comes from a tweet I received with feedback for the soon-to-be-released RS12 theme.

Although the widgetized footer did not ultimately make it in the release of the RS12 theme, I decided to write this tutorial to show people how exactly to add a widgetized footer in your theme. In this guide, you’ll learn:

• The HTML and CSS code needed to produce the widgetized footer
• How to add commonly used WordPress template tags as placeholders
• How to widgetize the footer and place widgets inside it

There’s going to be a lot of code in this post, so if you’re up for it, read on…

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It’s been a long time since I’ve written a tutorial here. I thought with Automattic’s acquisition of PollDaddy, this would be a good opportunity to write one about adding polls to your self-hosted WordPress blogs, more specifically - PollDaddy polls. In this tutorial I’ll go over:

• Installing the PollDaddy plugin
• Signing up to PollDaddy (if you don’t already have an account)
• Creating and managing polls from within your WordPress admin panel
• Inserting the polls you create into your WordPress posts and pages

And now onto the tutorial…

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Sites that frequently publish code examples, such as tutorial sites, need an easy way to display code on their pages. Fortunately for WordPress users, there are several great ways to display codes in your posts. In this tutorial, you’ll learn about:

• Manually displaying code
• The WP Code Shield plugin
• SyntaxHighligter Plus

If you run a tutorial site, or any other website that may require code examples, read on…

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It seems since the release of WordPress 2.5.1 - WordPress users have been experiencing issues with the built in password reset function.

Basically, the reset password function doesn’t work because the e-mail that’s supposed to contain the reset link never comes.

Not to worry, there is still hope if you have forgotten or lost your password. You can reset it via phpMyAdmin, a MySQL database administration tool.

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FeedBurner is an essential tool for many bloggers. FeedBurner is a tool for managing, syndicating, and promoting your blog feeds. Best of all, it’s a free service. It’s very easy to get started and in this guide, I’ll show you how.

• Burn your FeedBurner feed
• Redirect your WordPress feed to FeedBurner
• Recommended FeedBurner services

Start taking advantage of FeedBurner and read on…

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ProBlogger.net, an extremely popular blogging blog, recently published an article about ad positioning, and how inline ads outperformed other ad positions for him. After this is done, you’ll be able to add inline advertisements to specific posts using custom fields. Not just that, but you’ll be able to specify the ad size as well. Now I know there may be WordPress plugins that are able to do this for you, but this tutorial will go over how to do it manually by editing your WordPress theme.

• A simple diagram of a layout with inline ads in the content
• What a custom field is, what they do, and what their purpose is
• Edit your WordPress theme to accommodate custom fields
• Add a class to your stylesheet to properly display inline ads
• Use a custom field key and value to specify which ad size to use

Maximize your ad revenue by implementing these techniques in your WordPress theme and read on…

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There have been lots of complaints about WordPress’ visual editor. It adds extra (usually unwanted) formatting whenever you have a line break. It’s just a pain to deal with. Understandably, I personally never use it. For those who may not be knowledgeable at HTML, there are excellent alternatives available. In this guide I’ll go over:

• TinyMCE Advanced
• Dean’s FCKEditor
• How to disable the visual editor

If you’re fed up with the default WordPress visual editor, I suggest you read on.

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If you’re getting one of those HTTP Error messages after crunching your batch uploads in WordPress 2.5, I have some solutions for you. These errors have plagued people on the WordPress support forums ever since 2.5 was released. The problem may lay with your web hosting configuration, your browser settings, or maybe something else. Don’t give up yet. In this quick guide I’ll go over how to:

• Use an alternative uploader plugin to get images uploaded
• Use an .htaccess fix to allow batch uploads
• Disable flash on the batch upload screen

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After a few different people requested Gravatar support in the comments for the popular Choice WordPress theme, I decided to look into it more carefully. I came across this great post by HackWordPress which gives you a small code snippet to add Gravatars to your comments loop. Since then, I’ve been adding Gravatar support to all the themes here, just because it’s so simple to do. In this guide I’ll show you how exactly I integrate Gravatars into themes.

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Sitemaps can be an important factor in making your site more navigable and accessible. And no, I’m not talking about the Google XML Sitemaps which you submit directly directly to Google - never to be seen by human eyes. I’m talking about an actual page on your site that has a list of all your posts and pages. There are a few helpful plugins that can help you out with this. I’ll go over some of them in this guide.

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