Many WordPress user may not be comfortable with the old admin User Interface. So lets talk about a WordPress plugin that gives a new look to your admin dashboard. Using this you can release a lot of space from the left of your admin panel. All admin links are available in a clean horizontal drop down menu, you can find it on the top of your WordPress admin panel.
In order to change the look and feel of your admin dashboard, WordPress has a Plugin called Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu. You can find more options in the settings>Admin Menu.
Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu Features:
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Various color schemes are available.
Compatible with WordPress version 3.0 or higher.
No need to click on “Manage” then “Pages” to edit pages.
Plenty more space on your screen.
You can also define color of your own choice.
Activate the plugin and it appears like in the below image.
Releases plenty of space from the left of your admin panel.
Read more about Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu on WordPress.org
I really find this plugin helpful, if you know any other similar plugin you can share it through your comments.
We started this blog about a year ago to blog about all things WordPress. Currently WpVeda has mostly been updated by our development and blogging teams with tutorials and tips on WordPress. Generally we avoid displaying Adsense Ads on new blogs. Now we have reached the stage were we can go ahead with Adsense Ads being displayed on WpVeda.
We have also now activated Adsense Revenue Sharing Program on WpVeda.
This will mean that you can write a post for WpVeda and can earn 100% revenue of the Adsense Ads displayed on your post.
Join rtBlogs Network as a Guest Author and visit thislinkto activate your Adsense Ads on WpVeda. You will also get information on Google Ad Color Settings.
You will be getting 100% revenue earned from Adsense Ads on your posts with WpVeda.
The latest WordPress version 3.0.2 is available now, and it is a mandatory security update for all previous WordPress versions. You can download it from the official site. It is advisable to update the latest version immediately. The latest stable release is available in two formats .zip and tar.gz, for more details you can visit the download page.
As you can see in the below image there is an update option available click it to get updated with the latest version.
While having an upgrade it is always good to have a database backup first and then you have a choice to update WordPress automatically or you can download latest version.
Showing WordPress Update in progress.
WordPress is now Updated and ready you can visit the dashboard.
Here is your dashboard for updated WordPress 3.0.2
Though it is expected that WordPress 3.1 stable version will be released in early 2011, anyways it’s the time to download latest release.
List of fixes WorPress version 3.0.2
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Fix moderate security issue where a malicious Author-level user could gain further access to the site. (r16625)
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Other bugs and security hardening:
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Remove pingback/trackback blogroll whitelisting feature as it can easily be abused. (#13887)
Fix canonical redirection for permalinks containing %category% with nested categories and paging. (#13471)
Fix occasional irrelevant error messages on plugin activation. (#15062)
Minor XSS fixes in request_filesystem_credentials() and when deleting a plugin. (r16367, r16373)
If you are a developer or a WordPress geek, the you might be interested in downloading WordPress 3.1 beta 1 version. This version is expected to have bugs and is being made available only for testing purposes. Hence, do not upgrade to 3.1 beta 1 on a live site. Try it out on a test server.
WordPress 3.1 Beta 1
Some of the changes to watch out with WordPress 3.1 Beta 1 will be to Post Formats, Theme Search, Admin Bar and much more. See complete list here.
As I mentioned in this post earlier, this is meant only for testing and not to be used with a live website. Once bugs are found and fixed the version will update overnight.
If you have found a bug or any issue with the new feature you can bring it up at their alpha/beta forum.
WordPress 3.1 Beta 1 does not work with BuddyPress as yet. It should be fixed in time.
The final version of WordPress 3.1 should be out in a couple of months. It is slated to release by the end of this year or early next year.
There are lots of features in WordPress 3.0, but we do not use all the features in our theme. These features may keep our theme handy, flexible and secure.
Some of these features are as below :
Custom Navigation Support.
Custom Background Support.
Custom Header Support.
Custom Post Type.
Thumbnail support.
Multi Site Support.
Custom Navigation Support
In WordPress 3.0 we have a new feature which is custom navigation support. Now any one can handle the menu very easily.
Steps to provide this features in our theme are :
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Open “Function.php”
past the following code snippet // This theme uses wp_nav_menu()
add_action( 'init', 'register_my_menu' );
function rt_register_my_menu()
{
t_register_nav_menu( 'primary-menu', __( 'Primary Menu'));
}
Refresh your WordPress 3.0 Admin Dashboard.
In the appearance tab we have a new option named Menu. Click on it.
The following screen will appear in front of you.
When we will click on menu the following screen appears :
As you see in the image above, menu name is Primary Menu so when we have to call it just write the following code.
Custom Background Support
This feature is useful for those who want to change their WordPress Theme background randomly. To enable this option use the following code in the “function.php” .
// This theme allows users to set a custom background
add_custom_background();
After Doing this, refresh WordPress 3.0 Admin dashboard.
We have a new option inside the appearance tab named Background.
Custom Header Support
It provides an option to change the header style randomly. To enable this feature use the following code in the“function.php”
add_custom_image_header( 'rt_header_style', 'admin_header_style' ); // This Enables the Appearance > Header
//This will allow croping features in backend
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define('HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH', 960); // use width and height appropriate for your theme
define('HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT', 70);// Following Code is for Styling the Admin Side
if ( ! function_exists( 'admin_header_style' ) ) :
// gets included in the admin header
function admin_header_style() {
?>px;
height: php echo HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT; ?>px;
}
-->
After adding this code, refresh WordPress 3.0 Admin dashboard.
You will see the an additional tab added below the appearance tab as in the image below.
Custom Post Type
This feature is very useful for designing the portfolio page or a shopping related site. Custom post type is just like post and pages but we can manage or handle it separately within the WordPress Dashboard and through custom queries. When creating custom post type we can use any name.
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To enable this features use the following code snippet in the “function.php”
After adding this code refresh the WordPress 3.0 Admin dashboard.
You will see the additional tab added below the appearance tab as shown in the image below.
Now we have a same post page dashboard for portfolio page.
There is an option inside portfolio “Add new “. On clicking a screen appears as below from which we are familiar. 🙂
Thumbnail support :
This feature was introduced with WordPress 2.9, but after the launch of WordPress 3.0 it is widely used. There is an option while writing a post named as Featured Image.
To enable this features use the following code in “function.php”
/* add post thumbnail support */
add_theme_support('post-thumbnails');
For more details on this click here.
?Multi Site Support
This is a WordPress MU feature. To enable this feature add the following code in the in the “config.php”. You can find this file under WordPress installation directory.
Open wp-config.php
add this line
define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true); above where it says /* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */:
Save the file.
Refresh the WordPress dashboard.
Go to Dashboad->Tools->Network(Newly added)
Click on it you have following option see the screenshot.
After installing these options now it provides some code and will display a message. We just have to follow these steps and we have an option like WordPress MU. See the below image
If you know any other good features that can be helpful feel free to tell me through your comments.
You can decorate your search result page in WordPress by displaying search count in page title. Most WordPress themes show search results on search.php. We have to add just a few lines of code in our page title.
Code
<h2>
<?php
$rt_search = &new WP_Query(“s=$s&showposts=-1”);
$rt_search_key = esc_html($s, 1);
$count = $rt_search->post_count;
echo ‘Search Result for <span>”‘ . $rt_search_key . ‘”</span> – ‘.$count;
NetBeans is such an awesome IDE that I use for all my WordPress projects. This tutorial will help you understand how to create WordPress project using NetBeans IDE.
I have downloaded WordPress version 3.0.1 and unzipped it to a new folder in “C:xampphtdocs” directory. I then created a database with xampp server for this demonstration. Check out details on installing WordPress on your PC.
Everyone is quite good in using WordPress 3.0 custom menus. I am going to write about a hack. with which we can put an image inside the Menu. 🙂
Some basic information about menus :
Theme Location : Shows where to place the menus.
Instead of pages or categories we can also place a Custom Link with custom URL inside Menus.
The main container area: Which has the actual Menu.
To place an image inside WordPress 3.0 menu, we will go for a Custom Menu. In the custom menu there are two options:
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URL :- Link of the menu
Label: – What should be the label of the Menu.
See the Image below to add an image over the Menu: –
Place your URL
Place your complete image path
Click on the Add to menu
After doing this , you will get the following screen:
After clicking on save menu refresh the web page, the final output is like this as seen below :
Image through custom menu.
WordPress default pages.
You can see the image code inside the code.
Now you can see, that you have an image inside a menu or we can say you have an image over the menu. The main purpose to show you this example is that we can place an image inside a WordPress custom Menu. Basically this is a hack to place an image inside the Menus, but it can come handy in some other situations also. 🙂
If you have any other such hack do share it with me through your comments. 🙂
When I started using WordPress I always used to search for tools that help in coding, save search time, provide rich features and all content should be available at the same place.
wpseek is an excellent web application that helps in searching WordPress stuff. It’s a centric searching tool. This helps developer find all the WordPress Functions, Hooks, Function Sources, Actions, Template Tags and a lot more just at one place.
While searching for functions with wpseek, you get auto-suggestions making it very easy to look up those functions.
The search results show up top Google search links for that keyword along with links to related codex documentation.
You can look up the general information for the function along with code snippets.
You can add wpseek as a search engine in your browser.
If you are a WordPress developer or theme author then you will find wpseek useful. If you know any other such web application do share it with me through the comments.
WordPress provides rich interface for adding images to gallery. These gallery images then can be inserted into posts. Further, different plugins are available to customize the end result of uploaded gallery images. But what if you want to have an additional custom field while uploading images to gallery, say link for the image being uploaded. WordPress has provided filters with the help of which we can achieve the same.
Newly added custom field in media gallery.
Which are these filter hooks?
1) ‘ attachment_fields_to_edit ‘ : We will attach a function to this hook which will do the job of adding a custom field to Media Gallery.
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/* For adding custom field to gallery popup */
function rt_image_attachment_fields_to_edit($form_fields, $post) {
// $form_fields is a an array of fields to include in the attachment form
// $post is nothing but attachment record in the database
// $post->post_type == 'attachment'
// attachments are considered as posts in WordPress. So value of post_type in wp_posts table will be attachment
// now add our custom field to the $form_fields array
// input type="text" name/id="attachments[$attachment->ID][custom1]"
$form_fields["rt-image-link"] = array(
"label" => __("Custom Link"),
"input" => "text", // this is default if "input" is omitted
"value" => get_post_meta($post->ID, "_rt-image-link", true),
"helps" => __("To be used with special slider added via [rt_carousel] shortcode."),
);
return $form_fields;
}
// now attach our function to the hook
add_filter("attachment_fields_to_edit", "rt_image_attachment_fields_to_edit", null, 2);
2) ‘ attachment_fields_to_save ‘ : This in turn will accept and save the user input.
function rt_image_attachment_fields_to_save($post, $attachment) {
// $attachment part of the form $_POST ($_POST[attachments][postID])
// $post['post_type'] == 'attachment'
if( isset($attachment['rt-image-link']) ){
// update_post_meta(postID, meta_key, meta_value);
update_post_meta($post['ID'], '_rt-image-link', $attachment['rt-image-link']);
}
return $post;
}
// now attach our function to the hook.
add_filter("attachment_fields_to_save", "rt_image_attachment_fields_to_save", null , 2);
And that’s it, we are done…! Refer the following video to know what you get after carrying out the steps above. Also do drop in your comments.