October 29, 2006 By

Plugin: Add Extra Buttons to your WordPress Editor

The Sawchuk Buttons Plugin enables you to add customised buttons to your WordPress WYSIWYG Editor. For instance, if you had three styles of blockquotes; red, blue and green, you would have to manually add in a class name to each of your blockquotes after entering it using the WordPress Editor. The Sawchuk Button Plugin allows you to add in extra buttons for these functions.

This tutorial goes through adding a button step by step and includes a download for the actual plugin. There is some php involved to create your own buttons, and a fair few steps to go through with the entire php file at the end for easy scrutiny. The plugin requires k2 to work.

Filed Under: Free Tips
October 28, 2006 By

WordPress "Ronan" Released

WordPress 2.0.5 has been released and named Ronan, in honour of Ryan Boren’s new son. The release includes around 50 bugfixes, which can be reviewed on the WordPress dev tracker here. The bugfixes include plugins now being sorted by their plugin name, rather than their file name, improved security in the wp-db-backup plugin and multi-line options in /wp-admin/options.php are preserved. A more exhaustive list can be viewed on Mark’s blog.

The new release can be downloaded from WordPress’ site here or an unofficial changed files list can be viewed on Mark’s blog also, which just includes the files that have been changed since 2.0.4. He also provides the same packages for all the 2.0 upgrades from 2.0.0 to 2.0.5.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With:
October 28, 2006 By

Compact Blue Theme

Sonia is a neat and compact theme Ported for WordPress by This ‘N That, based on a design from LanVacation at OpenWebDesign.org. The theme could happily be used for a business site as it is very easy to understand and use, with bold navigation on the sidebar and the same navigation at the top of the theme, to cater for people who tend to hover for links at the top of a page, rather than nearer the content.

The main content area is split into three parts- two main articles in the top section, a list of recent posts on the right and a links list on the left. The only things that possibly could be added would be a larger font for the site name, as it seems to blend in to the content a little too much, and a footer possibly added for copyrights and acknowledgments. Such changes would be easy to implement, and the theme still works with or without them. A fantastic theme, and worth a look.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: ,
October 28, 2006 By

Simple, Big and Bold Theme

Pressrow is described by it’s maker as a “Simple, Big and Bold” (so there’s no prizes for where I got the title from) and simple, big and bold it is. It features a bold Newspaper style site name, with a space underneath for a picture, which can change randomly, whilst on different pages or not at all- the choice is yours. The navigation is also big and bold, above the image, and again makes me think of  newspapers.

The theme is available for playing around with at the demo site here and can be downloaded from the same page, or the page first linked. Pressrow is also a featured theme on WordPress.com.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: ,
October 27, 2006 By

Plugin: Nine Rules Quotes

The Nine Rules provides a little daily inspiration to those who religiously follow each and every one of Nine Rule’s... well, nine rules. It displays one of each of the rules at the top of your WordPress Dashboard (a little like the famous “Hello Dolly” plugin- it’s also based on his code) coloured with one of the colours from the nine rules leaves.

A sweet and simple way to remind yourself daily of your blogging mantras, and just to have a little fun with your Dashboard. After all, you can never have too much blogging goodness.

Filed Under: Free Tips
October 26, 2006 By

WordPress Forum Integration With bbPress

Can you integrate a simple forum into your WordPress blog and allow users to have the same login for the blog and the forum, all without messing around with WordPress plugins and theme modifications?

Yes, you can. The answer, as I discovered on Lorelle’s blog, is NOT a WordPress plugin.

It’s bbPress, another venture by the same great gang that gave WordPress to the world.

bbpress.jpg

On the surface, it appears to be easy to install and looks very much like the design of WordPress official sites and forums. That goes without saying, of course :)

However, if you’re not into trial-and-error, it’s best to wait for the next version of bbPress to arrive. If you decide you want to try this now, read the documentation properly, and you may also want to refer to this guide by Devlounge.

I installed mine and for some reason or another can’t seem to login:

bbpress-ima.jpg

While there has been some independent developers creating forum plugins for WordPress, bbPress allows you to integrate the forum user database nicely into the WordPress user database.

In other words, people use the same login for your forum and for posting comments on your WordPress blogs. As far as themes go, the current version of bbPress does not offer many options, although a WordPress-style theme selector is promised in the near future.

If you want to get your hands dirty, you can use the customizable template files and make it fit right in to your existing wordpress blog theme.

One feature I love about bbPress is the usage of tags:

bbpress-tags.jpg

I’m too tired and sleep to do all the work today, so my wish for tomorrow is to be able to:

  1. Troubleshoot the login error
  2. Customize the header and footer
  3. Integrate the RSS feeds into my blog’s feeds maybe?

Then again, I’m still busy with the existing forum, the directory and the new membership site I’m about to develop. So I could end up just paying someone to do this for me.

The existing forum is already using VBullettin, and I have no intention of switching over to bbPress for this site at least. For new sites though, bbPress is definitely an attractive options simply because:

  1. It works with WordPress, my prefferred publishing platform
  2. It’s free, unlike VBullettin
  3. It looks clean and simple unlike PHPBB

Another excellent tool is introduced to the Internet marketing community. Great :)

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , , , ,
October 26, 2006 By

I’m Now a Niche Market?

A micro-niche actually.

I never thought I’d live to see the day when someone puts up an Adwords ad for the keyword Gobala Krishnan:

Gobala Krishnan

The again, Overture says that last month about 56 people searched for this term:

Gobala Overture

Since as a general rule of thumb it’s about 1/3 of actual searches on the Internet, about 168 people searched for the exact term “Gobala Krishnan”

So I’m now a micro-niche market…haha..

Filed Under: General, Google AdWords, Home Business
October 26, 2006 By

Three Column WordPress Theme

Didactic is a three-column theme in shades of grey and blue. It reminds me of Threadless quite a lot, with the bottom section for comments and links etc. and the navigation at the top with the header. The theme uses minimal images and has spaces for recent comments as well as all the normal categories, archives, blogroll etc. There is also space for adsense should you choose to use them.

The theme has been tested in Firefox 1.5.0.7, Internet Explorer 6, Camino and Opera 9 and encountered no problems. There is also automatic Widget support included.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: ,
October 25, 2006 By

Modern, Citrus Flavoured Theme

Although I wouldn’t recommend licking the screen to find out if it really is citrus flavoured, I would recommend downloading Bitter Sweet immediately. The theme is bright, modern and funky looking, in shades of green, with a great header image.

The theme’s main attraction for me are the dates, however. Sticking out from the blog entries like tabs they look really modern and add a great twist to the theme. The icing on the cake, if we’re sticking to the food theme.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: ,
October 25, 2006 By

Simple Blue and Orange WordPress Theme

Exquisite is simple, elegant and minimal and just works. The header image is small and inobtrusive, next to a short paragraph about your site; the navigation is tabbed on top of the header image, with RSS and Atom feeds above that in the opposite corner. A perfect theme for businesses and professional bloggers.

Personally, the orange colour is a little muddy for me- I would probably change it to a brighter colour, and the dark grey background is a little imposing- I’d have preferred to have seen a light grey or blue background. Otherwise the theme is extremely well designed and perfect for the bloggers who just want to install and go.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: ,