Theme Lab » WordPress Tutorials

How to Create a Comments Central Page Template in WordPress

Hafiz Rahman — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:15:57 +0000

One way to increase visitor engagements is to reward their comments by showcasing them on your website. Additionally, you can also feature the top commenters as well, linking back to their website in the process. Here we’ll create a dedicated Page Template to display those comments and commenters in one place.

In short, this tutorial will teach you how to:

create a Page Template,
use SQL queries in your code to fetch comments with varying parameters,
create a section of the Page that’s only viewable by Admin,
add support for a comment-related plugin.

Creating a Page Template

The easiest way to create a Page Template is to open the page.php file in your theme, which will roughly look like this:

Copy and paste page.php’s content and add this to the very top:

And save it. There’s no real rules on naming a Page Template file, but it’s a good idea to go with a prefix to make it recognizable, say “pt-comment-central.php”. We haven’t added anything into this Page Template, but it’s up and running and selectable on the write new Page dashboard area.

Fetching Comments

For this Page Template, we’ll feature four different aspects of comments:

Recent Comments,
Recent Trackbacks / Pingbacks,
Top Commenters,
Most Commented Posts,

First, we’ll do Recent Comments:

Recent Comments

comments c INNER JOIN $wpdb->posts p ON (c.comment_post_id=p.ID) WHERE comment_approved = '1' AND comment_type not in ('trackback','pingback') ORDER BY comment_date DESC LIMIT $max";
  $results = $wpdb->get_results($sql);

  $template = '%g %an on %pt';

  $echoed = 0;
  foreach ($results as $row) {
    $tags = array('%ct','%cd','%g','%pt','%pu','%au','%an','%cid');
    $replacements = array($row->comment_title,$row->comment_date,get_avatar($row->comment_author_email,'32'),$row->post_title,get_permalink($row->comment_post_ID),$row->comment_author_url,$row->comment_author,$row->comment_ID);
    echo '' . str_replace($tags,$replacements,$template) . '';
    $echoed = 1;
  }
  if ($echoed==0)
      echo 'No comment found.';
?>

The SQL query asks for all approved comments sorted by date (latest first). $max is where we set the amount of comments to get, 7 in our case. The output of the code above will be an unordered list of recent comments:

With a little CSS we can straighten that to look better:

#cc-recent-comments li {
  width: 100%;
  float: left;
  list-style-type: none;
}

#cc-recent-comments li img {
  float: left;
  margin-top: -5px;
}

$template determines how the actual text will be written; this is based on the format made by WP Comment Remix, and you can follow that link to learn more on customizing it (look for ‘tokens’).

Next is Recent Pingbacks / Trackbacks:

Recent Pingbacks / Trackbacks 

comments c INNER JOIN $wpdb->posts p ON (c.comment_post_id=p.ID) WHERE comment_approved = '1' AND comment_type not in ('trackback','pingback') ORDER BY comment_date DESC LIMIT $max";
  $results = $wpdb->get_results($sql);

  $template = '%g %an on %pt';

  $echoed = 0;
  foreach ($results as $row) {
    $tags = array('%ct','%cd','%g','%pt','%pu','%au','%an','%cid');
    $replacements = array($row->comment_title,$row->comment_date,get_avatar($row->comment_author_email,'32'),$row->post_title,get_permalink($row->comment_post_ID),$row->comment_author_url,$row->comment_author,$row->comment_ID);
    echo '' . str_replace($tags,$replacements,$template) . '';
    $echoed=1;
  }
  if ($echoed==0)
    echo 'No comment found.';
?>

The code above is very similar to the one we have for Recent Comments, the only differences being that we’re now asking for comments with ‘comment_type’ under ‘pingback’ / ‘trackback’, and the template is a bit different as well. Result:

Here’s the code for Top Commenters:

Top Commenters

comments WHERE comment_approved = '1' AND comment_type not in ('trackback','pingback') GROUP BY comment_author, comment_author_url, comment_author_email ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT $max";
$results = $wpdb->get_results($sql);

$template = '%g %an (%c comments)';

$echoed = 0;
foreach ($results as $row) {
    $tags = array('%g','%au','%an','%c');
    $replacements = array(get_avatar($row->comment_author_email,'32'),$row->comment_author_url,$row->comment_author,$row->comment_count);
    echo '' . str_replace($tags,$replacements,$template) . '';
    $echoed = 1;
}
if ($echoed==0)
    echo 'No commenter found.';
?>

Nothing too mind-blowing there. Do notice the cool get_avatar() function, though, which will give you the Gravatar for anyone whose email address you specify. In this case, we fetch the avatar image using the commenter’s e-mail address. With the CSS similar to the one we have for recent comments, we can have this result:

#cc-top-commenters li {
  width: 100%;
  float: left;
  list-style-type: none;
}

#cc-top-commenters li img {
  float: left;
  margin-top: -5px;
}

Last is Most Commented Posts:

Most Commented Posts

$sql = "SELECT p.*, c.comment_count FROM $wpdb->posts p INNER JOIN (SELECT comment_post_id, count(comment_ID) as comment_count from $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_approved='1' GROUP BY comment_post_id) c ON (c.comment_post_id=p.ID) ORDER BY c.comment_count DESC LIMIT $max";
$results = $wpdb->get_results($sql);

$template = '%pt (%c comments)';

$echoed = 0;
foreach ($results as $row) {
  $tags = array('%pd','%pt','%pu','%c');
  $replacements = array($row->post_date,$row->post_title,get_permalink($row->ID),$row->comment_count);
  echo '' . str_replace($tags,$replacements,$template) . '';
  $echoed = 1;
}
if ($echoed==0)
    echo 'No commenter found.';
?>

And that’s it. Next, we’ll add some extra coolness by adding some stuff that only the admin can see.

Admin-only Information

To show stuff only for the admins, we can use this code snippet from WPCandy:

Now on the Dashboard, we get a quick glance of a site’s total, approved, pending review and spam comments. Let’s replicate this for our Page Template for easier, admin-only access:


Total Comments: total_comments; ?>
Approved: approved; ?>
Moderated: moderated; ?>
Spam: spam; ?>

wp_count_comments() is a neat function that returns an array of various comment stat numbers. We’re adding links to the respective comment administration area too.

Adding Some Sparks

Last, say you find a cool comment-related plugins you want to incorporate into this Page Template. Instead of adding more codes, let’s just add support for it. For this example, I’ll go with Activity Sparks plugin, which can “display a ’sparkline’ style graph in your sidebar indicate post and/or comment activity. ” Sounds great to me.

Usually, a plugin’s readme.txt file will teach you how to add it into your theme files. In our case, the code can be like this:

'legend','height_px'=>100,'width_px'=>600,'period'=>30, 'ticks'=>24));
  }
?>

function_exists() checks whether a particular function is available; in our case, the activitysparks function, which will be available if the plugin has been uploaded and activated. If it’s there, we show the graph. If not, then our Page Template won’t show anything (but it will still run just fine, no errors).

Result and Example

An example of this Page Template is available here. It uses the codes you see here with a few modifications, mostly to keep the HTML structure consistent with the rest of the website. The whole code for that Page Template is available at Pastebin.

Credits and Further Readings

The codes used to display the various recent and top comments are taken from WP Comment Remix plugin. Take a look at its code to learn more things to do with comments, like excluding admin comments from top commenters or how to take into account recent comments only. The $template we use to format the output can be learned more from that page, too.
Creating Your Own Page Template on the WordPress Codex.
Displaying admin-only content tutorial on WPCandy.

Add a Widgetized Footer to Your WordPress Theme

Leland — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 12:33:34 +0000

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…

I’ll be using the Green Rays WordPress theme as my example in this tutorial. At the moment, the footer just has a standard “copyright” message and credits.

The HTML

The first step is to add the HTML markup. Let’s say we’re going to have three different sections in the widgetized footer with lists of Most Recent Posts, Monthly Archives, and Daily Archives. We’ll place this HTML code above the current “copyright” line.



Recent Posts




Featured post


Blockquotes


How the ‘more’ tag works


Order or Unorder





Monthy Archives




March 2008


February 2008


January 2008


December 2007








Daily Archives




March 7, 2008


February 9, 2008


January 4, 2008


December 22, 2007

Basically this code puts each “widget” in a div. Inside each widget is a heading and an unordered list with links. Yes, I know the links don’t go anywhere. We’ll later replace this with WordPress template tags. Here’s what we have so far:

The CSS

As you can see, this isn’t looking so good without any CSS styling. Add the following code to your stylesheet.

.footer-item { float: left; width: 33%; padding-bottom: 10px; } .footer-item ul { padding-left: 15px; }

What this code does is float each footer item to the left, which basically means they can be side by side. The width is set to 33%, which gives enough room for three footer items in a single row. There is also a little bit of padding added below each footer item. The second piece is just padding the lists 15 pixels to the left.

Now you can see the HTML and CSS are starting to come together. Here’s what you should have so far:

WordPress Code

At the moment, we have a bunch of empty HTML links, with no actual WordPress code. Let’s replace the lists under Recent Posts, Monthly Archives, and Daily Archives with the WordPress template tag equivalents. Replace what you currently have with the following:



Recent Posts





Monthy Archives












Daily Archives

The parameters should be pretty self-explanatory, but if you’re not sure about any of them, try looking up wp_get_archives in the WordPress Template Tag Lookup Tool. Remember, I’m just using the wp_get_archives() template tags as a placeholder. We’ll be switching these out with other WordPress widgets later, after we widgetize the footer.

Widgetize It

For this section of the tutorial, I’ll be borrowing parts from my previous widgetizing themes tutorial.

The first step is to register the “sidebars.” To do this, simply replace the current contents of the functions.php file with the following:

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') ) register_sidebar(array( 'name' => 'Sidebar', 'before_widget' => '

',

        'after_widget' => '

',

        'before_title' => '',

        'after_title' => '
',

    ));

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )

    register_sidebar(array(

        'name' => 'Footer',

        'before_widget' => '',

        'after_widget' => '
',

        'before_title' => '',

        'after_title' => '
',

    ));

?>

Now we’ll go into sidebar.php and replace the current dynamic sidebar conditional tag with this:

With this:

Now we’ll go into our footer.php file and wrap the footer items in it’s own respective sidebar conditional tag. Right before the first “sidebar-item” div, add the following.

Right after the final closing “footer-item” div (and above the “clear” div which we added earlier) we’ll add the following:

Okay, now our sidebar and footer should be widgetized. Let’s test it out by adding a few widgets in the footer. I’ll add a Blogroll widget, Recent Comments widget, and a text widget. Here’s what it should look like:

Conclusion

Well, that’s the basics of adding a widgetized footer to your theme. You may want to add separate styling rules for other types of widgets such as the calendar or search box. This probably won’t work with every theme, such as the RS12 theme for example, as it had a non-expandable footer.

If anyone wants the updated Green Rays theme by any chance, you can download it here. This way you can see where exactly I added the code. You can compare it with the original theme as well.

Hope you liked the tutorial. Will you be adding a widgetized footer to your theme? Is there anything in the code I used above you would do differently? Questions, comments, suggestions, and criticisms are all welcome, so feel free to sound off in the comments.

How To Add PollDaddy Polls On WordPress Blogs

Leland — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:17:37 +0000

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…

The Plugin

You can grab this plugin from this page over at WordPress.org. After installing the plugin, you’ll notice a prompt to input your PollDaddy account details.

Signing Up

If you don’t have a PollDaddy account already, not to worry! I’ll walk you through it. You can sign up for a free account here.

Fill in your name, e-mail address, and password choice, and you’re all set.

Configuring the Plugin

After this, you’ll need to go back to your WordPress admin panel and type in the login details you just created. Upon revisiting the PollDaddy admin page, you’ll see a new screen to create and manage your polls.

I’m not sure what that warning message means, but I’ll just ignore it and see if the polls work anyway. Seems some others are having the same problem as well.

Creating Polls

Click the “Add New” link to set up your poll. There’s an input box for the poll question, as well as three answers. You can click the “Add Another” button for more answer choices. You can also set up multiple choice polls, randomize the answer order, and allow other answers.

I’ll choose the “Simple White” design and leave the default settings for results and repeat voters.

After clicking the “Add Poll” button, I was greeted with a page with two warning messages on it. After re-logging in to the admin panel (somehow I was logged out) and visited the Polls page, it seems the poll I created was indeed successful.

Inserting Polls

The next step is to go write a post, and click the orange button thingy next to Add Media. You should see a screen like this with your newly created poll.

Again, the same warning message pops up. I’ll try my best to ignore those since they seem not to make a difference with the actual workings of the plugin. After sending the poll to the editor, WordPress will generate a shortcode to place in your post.

Help Me! It doesn’t work!

After saving/publishing, you’ll notice the actual poll doesn’t display in your post, just the unparsed shortcode. To correct this, you’ll need to install another plugin from PollDaddy. You can get it here. I grabbed the one for version 2.5 and above.

I’m not sure why this plugin isn’t even mentioned at all on the first plugin’s page. I had to check this support thread to find out why the polls weren’t displaying properly. Apparently the first plugin was just for creating/managing polls. This one is for having them display in your WordPress post.

All Done

That’s it. Here’s the poll I’ve just created in action.

Pretty cool?

Conclusion

First of all, I’d like to congratulate Matt Mullenweg and Automattic on this awesome acquisition.

It’s a mystery to me why the plugin for creating/managing polls and the plugin for displaying polls are separate. Maybe someone can enlighten me. I personally think that these two plugins should be combined into one.

I think it’s also worth mentioning the self-hosted WP-Polls plugin by Lester Chan, if you’d rather not be dependent on a third-party service.

Hope you all liked the tutorial. Feel free to comment with your thoughts on the acquisition, the WordPress integration, and the tutorial. I’d love to hear them.

Dipslaying Code In WordPress Posts

Leland — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:41:49 +0000

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…

Manually Displaying Code

One of the problems most people face when trying to display code in their posts, is how to get it to not execute on the page. To do this, you’ll need to use character entities to replace the actual brackets.

> will become <
< will become >

Manually changing each little symbol like this can become a tedious task. Luckily, I’ve found a tool that can convert < and > to > and <.

WP Code Shield

This is a plugin which will take any code inside tags and convert the brackets into character entities automatically. You can get the plugin here.


SyntaxHighighter Plus
If you want something more interactive than boring old code, then SyntaxHighlighter Plus is the plugin for you.  You can download the plugin here.  This plugin supports syntax highlighting in the following languages:

Bash
C++
C#
CSS
Delphi
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby
SQL
VB
XML/HTML

If you wanted to highlight PHP, for example, you’d type out [php]your php code here[/php] and save.

Saving this would produce a code box similar to this:

As you can see, this plugin produced a feature-filled code box with the ability to copy and print.  Just a note, this plugin cannot be used alongside CodeShield.
Conclusion
As I browsed the WordPress plugin directory, it seems these aren’t the only WordPress code plugins available.  Feel free to look around and see if another plugin better suits you.
If you don’t write code in your WordPress posts very often, you’d probably want to use one of the first two methods listed here.  If you frequently post code examples, something like SyntaxHighlighter Plus will probably be more beneficial to you and your blog.
I hope you enjoyed this guide.  Feel free to subscribe to the feed for more Theme Lab updates.


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Reset Your WordPress Password via phpMyAdmin
Leland — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:33:27 +0000

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.

Open phpMyAdmin
In your hosting control panel software, such as cPanel – there should be a link to access your phpMyAdmin.  Usually this link is bundled close together with other MySQL database management tools.  Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like in cPanel.

Locate the users table
This is almost always called wp_users, unless you changed your database prefix.

After selecting the users table, you’ll need to click the Browse tab at the top, then click the little pencil icon next to the password you wish to change.
Change your password
You should now be on a screen like this.

In here, type in the new password of your choice in the appropriate input field.  Make sure you select MD5 from the dropdown menu.  Click “go” and your new MD5′d password should be saved.
Login to your account
You should now be able to login to your account with the password you chose.  WordPress 2.5.1 will automatically upgrade your password to the new encryption when you do this.
Conclusion
WordPress 2.5.2 is right around the corner, and hopefully this password problem will be corrected in that release.  Make sure to always keep your passwords safe and to yourself.  I hope you found this tutorial useful if you have been locked out of your WordPress 2.5 blogs.  Thanks for reading and don’t forget to subscribe to the feed.


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Use FeedBurner to Manage Your WordPress Feeds
Leland — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 12:05:47 +0000
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…

Burn Your Feed
To get started, type your blog URL into FeedBurner’s front page.  If all is well, it should automatically detect your feed and verify it.  If you don’t already have an account with FeedBurner, it’s easy to sign up.  All you need to do is input your e-mail, as well as choose a username and password.

Now that you’ve claimed your feed, you should be on a screen which tells you you have completed step 1.

On step 2 of the FeedBurner process, it will prompt you to set up additional free FeedBurner stat tracking.  Besides this, you’re all done – unless you want to optimize and publicize your feed more, which will be gone over later.
Integrate with WordPress
Luckily for self-hosted WordPress users, FeedBurner provides an easy to use plugin to redirect your native WordPress feeds to your brand new FeedBurner-managed feed.  It’s called FeedBurner FeedSmith, and you can download it here.
Once you have installed and activated the plugin, a new Settings page will be created where you can input your FeedBurner feed URL, as well as a FeedBurner comments feed URL (optional).

After saving the settings, your WordPress feed URLs will now redirect to FeedBurner.
Recommended FeedBurner Services
FeedBurner offers a multitude of free and paid services you can use to optimize, publicize, and monetize your feeds.

BrowserFriendly – This will make your FeedBurner page more presentable to all browsers, making it easier for potential readers to subscribe to your feed.
FeedFlare – Provides links such as “Add to del.icio.us” and “Digg This” to each of your feed items, so your readers can share content across social networks with ease.
Email Subscriptions – Integrate your feed into an e-mail subscription service provided by your choice of either FeedBurner or FeedBlitz.
PingShot – Automatically ping several web-based feed reading services such as Technorati, Bloglines, Ping-o-matic, and many more.

This is just a small selection of many useful free services provided by FeedBurner.
Conclusion
If you don’t already use FeedBurner on your WordPress blogs, you should.  It’s super easy to sign up and get started, as I’ve gone over in this guide.  Once you build up a good amount of subscribers, you can also use the FeedCount to show off your subscriber count.  Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to subscribe to my feed (served by FeedBurner) for more Theme Lab updates.


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Display Inline Ads With Custom Fields and WordPress
Leland — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:24:03 +0000
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…

Inline Ad Diagram
Please note that I’m not an artist or designer by any means.  The following diagram was done in MS Paint.  Go ahead and laugh.

If you were unsure of what exactly I meant by an “inline ad” hopefully this clears it up.
Custom Fields
Custom fields can be assigned to any WordPress post or page.  You can use them to add additional data to be displayed elsewhere in your theme, within the Loop.  The basics of custom fields can be read about on the WordPress Codex.
Edit Your WordPress Theme
Here’s the fun part.  Now it’s time to edit your WordPress theme to accommodate the custom field values and keys you’ll be adding to specific posts.  Here’s the code I use myself on this blog, minus the actual ad code.
ID, $key, true) == "300x250") { ?>



[Your 300x250 code here]



ID, $key, true) == "250x250") { ?>



[Your 250x250 code here]



ID, $key, true) == "200x200") { ?>



[Your 200x200 code here]




Please insert your own 300×250, 250×250, and 200×200 ad codes in the appropriate areas.  Feel free to alter this code and use other ad sizes.  It’s up to you.
Edit Your Styelsheet
You probably are wondering with the 
 and 
 surrounding your ad code is for.  This is so we can add a class called “inline ads” to your stylesheet, so you’ll be able to easily manipulate the ad positining by editing just one line in a CSS file.
.inlineads {float:left;padding:0 5px 5px 0;}
This code will float your ad to the left and pad it 5 pixels on the bottom and right sides.
Start Displaying Ads
Here’s the what we’ve all been waiting for – actually displaying the ads.  Fortunately all the hard stuff has already passed.  In a post, add the custom field key “ad_size” (without quotes) with the ad size (300×250, 250×250, 200×200) you want as the value.

Once you’re done, and everything has been done properly, you should now have an inline ad in your post.
Conclusion
Like I mentioned at the beginning of the guide, there are plugins that may help you do this exact same thing.  However this guide wasn’t just about adding ads to your posts, but also to get a better understanding of custom fields and altering WordPress themes.  There is literally limitless possibilities when it comes to custom fields, this is just one of the ways you can use them.  For another creative way to display ads on your WordPress blog, check out this article I wrote on HackWordPress entitled Display Adsense On Your First Post Within The Loop.
Subscribe to the feed for more Theme Lab tutorials and theme updates.  Feel free to comment and share if you liked this tutorial.


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How To Get Rid of the WordPress Visual Editor
Leland — Sat, 17 May 2008 10:57:38 +0000
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.

Make sure before reading on you know how to install a WordPress plugin.  Installing with OneClick will also work with both of these plugins. 
TinyMCE Advanced
TinyMCE Advanced is a plugin which will add on to the current functionality of the WordPress visual editor.  You’ll be able to add and remove items from the write menu.  You can get the plugin here.

You’ll be able to add items such as font size and face, tables, smilies, among other things.  It can also disable the automatic adding of paragraph and line break tags.
Dean’s FCKEditor
Now, if you want something completely different than the WordPress default editor.  Try FCKEditor for WordPress.  What this does is replace WordPress’ default editor with FCKEditor, a powerful editing software – similar to MS Word, except for the web.

The picture explains it all, complete transformation of the editor.  Convinced yet?  Download the plugin here.
Disabling the Visual Editor
If you’re comfortable with HTML code, and would rather just get rid of the visual editor altogether – there’s a quick way to do this.  In your WordPress admin panel, simply navigate to Users -> Your Profile.

Uncheck the box that says: Use the visual editor when writing.  And that’s that, no more visual editor.  You’ll be stuck with the code editor from now on – unless you check off that box again.
Conclusion
Hope you found some good alternatives to the WordPress visual editor after reading this post.  Thankfully with WordPress, if there’s functionality you don’t like, there’s usually a plugin to fix it.
If you liked this article feel free to comment and share.  Subscribe to the feed for the latest Theme Lab updates.


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Is your uploader broken in WordPress 2.5?
Leland — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:20:26 +0000
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


Flexible Upload
One plugin (which I use on Theme Lab) that is very helpful to me is Flexible Upload.  This will override the default WordPress 2.5 upload screen.  Not only will uploads work, but you’ll also be able to resize images and place watermarks automatically.  If you just upload a few images (not full galleries) I highly recommend you check out this plugin.  You can get the plugin here.
.htaccess Hack
If you’d rather get the batch uploads to work how they’re supposed to, but you keep getting the HTTP Error, the problem probably lies with your web host’s security settings.  There is a quick fix to this.  Simply create a .htaccess file in your /wp-admin/ directory with the following:




SecFilterEngine Off

SecFilterScanPOST Off




This may fix it, it may not – but it’s worth a try.  I’ve had success with this fix and it seems to work great.
No Flash Uploader
This should be considered a “last ditch” effort to get your WordPress 2.5 uploader to work.  What it does is disable the flash portion of your uploader, which may help those who don’t have a compatible browser.  You can get the plugin at WordPress.org.
Conclusion
If you were having problems with your image uploads with WordPress 2.5, I hope you found this guide to be of some use.  The batch uploader is a great feature with WordPress and hopefully you can use it how it’s supposed to work now.  If not, the Flexible Uploader should help too.
If you ever need support, I suggest you search the WordPress support forums first.  There may be someone having the same problem as you.
If you found this guide useful, feel free to comment and share it.  Subscribe to the feed for more Theme Lab updates.


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Add Gravatar Support to Your WordPress Comments
Leland — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:02:11 +0000
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.

Before you continue, please understand this is guide is written for WordPress 2.5 and above only.  The code gone over will not work in previous versions.
The Gravatar Code
Just plopping in the following code in your comments loop will work, but it probably won’t look very good as-is.


Basically this code will check to see if you have the get_avatar (native to WordPress 2.5), then display the avatar of the commenter in a 50px square.
Use a Ruler
If you want to make sure your Gravatars are at a suitable size, I recommend the MeasureIt Firefox extension.  This will help you measure out an area in your theme to determine a good size for Gravatars.
Where to put the code?
In the Choice theme, I found that 40 was a good size.  So where did I put this code exactly?

Anywhere within the foreach and endforeach (the comments loop) will work.
Styling your Gravatars
Once you have Gravatars displayed on your comments template, you’ll probably want to style them too.  You’ll notice the Gravatar code spits out the “avatar” class on each image.  Let’s add a line to the CSS stylesheet to float this to the left, and add a small right margin.
img.avatar {float:left; margin-right:5px;}
There you go, you have nice looking, perfectly sized, styled Gravatars.  Of course themes will differ, you can style them however you like.
Conclusion
Remember, this code will only work on WordPress 2.5 and above.  The function_exists conditional tag will cause your theme not to break, but nothing will show up in previous versions.  More information on other methods of using Gravatars are detailed on the WordPress Codex.
If you just read this whole article and have no clue what a Gravatar is, I suggest you read this one first by Lorelle on WordPress.  It goes over the basics of how to get your own Gravatar by signing up at Gravatar.com as well as using Gravatars on older versions of WordPress with plugins.
Not only can Gravatars be used for comments, but they can also be added to author’s individual posts as well.
If you enjoyed the article feel free to comment and share.  I’d like to hear your thoughts.  Subscribe to the feed for the latest Theme Lab updates.


Related posts:
If A Commenter Does Not Have A Gravatar
How to Add WordPress Tag Support To Your Theme
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Theme Lab » WordPress Tutorials

How to Create a Comments Central Page Template in WordPress

Creating a Page Template

Fetching Comments

Recent Comments

Recent Pingbacks / Trackbacks

Top Commenters

Most Commented Posts

Admin-only Information

Adding Some Sparks

Result and Example

Credits and Further Readings

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The HTML

Recent Posts

Monthy Archives

Daily Archives

The CSS

WordPress Code

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Monthy Archives

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Widgetize It

', 'after_title' => '

', 'after_title' => '

Conclusion

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The Plugin

Signing Up

Configuring the Plugin

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Help Me! It doesn’t work!

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WP Code Shield

SyntaxHighighter Plus

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Open phpMyAdmin

Locate the users table

Change your password

Login to your account

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Use FeedBurner to Manage Your WordPress Feeds

Burn Your Feed

Integrate with WordPress

Recommended FeedBurner Services

Conclusion

Display Inline Ads With Custom Fields and WordPress

Inline Ad Diagram

Custom Fields

Edit Your WordPress Theme

Edit Your Styelsheet

Start Displaying Ads

Conclusion

How To Get Rid of the WordPress Visual Editor

TinyMCE Advanced

Dean’s FCKEditor

Disabling the Visual Editor

Conclusion

Is your uploader broken in WordPress 2.5?

Flexible Upload

.htaccess Hack

No Flash Uploader

Conclusion

Add Gravatar Support to Your WordPress Comments

The Gravatar Code

Use a Ruler

Where to put the code?

Styling your Gravatars

Conclusion

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