When working on WordPress themes, it’s always nice to have the Template Tags page open to look up anything I may not be sure of. It became a pretty annoying task to switch from page to page, looking for the correct template tag - so I decided to have a custom tool developed called which would speed up the process. I call it the WordPress Template Tag Lookup Tool, and I’m sharing it with all of you.

This tool is powered by Ajax, which means no page reloads. I hope all of you aspiring WordPress coders find this as useful as I have. Enjoy.

You don’t need any custom queries or database calls just to get a list of recent posts. In fact, there’s a function built into WordPress that will do just that. It’s called, wp_get_archives(). You might recognize that as a way to display monthly archives, but with a few parameters, you can modify it to display a list of recently published WordPress posts. Here’s the code:

<?php wp_get_archives('title_li=&type=postbypost&limit=10'); ?>

What this will do is strip any WordPress added formatting and output a nice list of the 10 latest posts, each within it’s own <li> tag.

I came across a blog the other day and was surprised to see a credit link to Theme Lab in the footer. After looking at the source, I soon realized that this blog was using the Inverted Headline theme, available for free here at Theme Lab. Anyway, I Can Also Right is a design blog authored by Tim Benzinger. It looks like it has some really interesting stuff, if you’re into design.

As you can see, you can do some pretty amazing things just by customizing existing free WP themes. If you have a blog using a highly customized version of one of our free WordPress themes, feel free to contact me and I’ll see if I can include you in an upcoming showcase post.

Today we have another very nice theme designed by Rambling Soul and ported into WordPress by me. This one has all the usual features, including 3 widgetized sidebar areas at the top, left, and right.

Live Demo | Download

Every week I’m going to start linking out to some interesting WordPress related articles, themes, plugins, and other worthy resources - starting today. Here it goes…

24 Ways To Contribute To WordPress - A great article by Jeff Chandler of Weblogtoolscollection, outlining several ways to contribute to the WordPress community.

10 Twitter Users You Should Follow - This article by Michael Castilla of WPCandy lists 10 users you should follow on Twitter, who frequently “tweet” about WordPress news. I’ve never really got into Twitter, but just in case…here’s my Twitter profile for future reference.

WP Freemium - A great free WordPress theme by Ptah Dunbar. Premium in quality, freemium in price. Looks like it’s great for ad space too.

Matt M To Be On WordPress Weekly - To those of you who don’t know, Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, is scheduled to be on the WordPress Weekly podcast tonight at 9 PM EST.

Best Resources for WordPress - Round 1 - Pavel Ciorici of WPZoom has an excellent list of even more WordPress resources. Check it out.

That’s all for this week. If anyone has any tips for a Twitter newbie (such as myself), feel free to let me know in the comments.

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…

Read the rest of this entry »

Today we have another excellent template designed by Rambling Soul, and ported into WordPress by me. This free WordPress theme has all the usual features - widgetized sidebar, native Gravatar (WordPress 2.5 and above only) and tagging support. Along with those, there is also a theme options page, details of which will be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the details of the theme options page…

Read the rest of this entry »

I know this tip may be very obvious to some, but I keep seeing “admin” as the author name on many WordPress blogs. I thought I’d write this quick tip post because these WordPress bloggers may not even know how to change the publicly displayed author name. Fortunately, this is very simple to do. In your WordPress admin panel, select Users -> Your Profile. On this page, enter whatever you want as your nickname, and click “Update Profile.”

Once that’s done, select this newly created nickname from the “Display name publicly as” dropdown menu. Update your profile again, and that’s it.

If you want to test out a WordPress theme before it goes live on your blog, then I’ve found the perfect WordPress plugin for you. It is called Theme Test Drive. It’s very simple to use. Get the plugin from here at the WordPress.org plugin directory, install the plugin, and activate. On your design menu, select the theme you wish to preview from the dropdown menu and enable it.

The theme will be visible to you (the admin) only. Make sure you disable any “cache” plugins before using Theme Test Drive, as it will likely cause problems. Enjoy!

Here’s another clean blog layout from Styleshout, ported into WordPress by myself. It would be great for any type of tech-oriented blog. The sidebar is widget-ready and comments have Gravatar support (WordPress 2.5 and above).

Live Demo | Download