Fire Studios

As you continue writing for WordPress more and more, the level of difficulty and complexity of your plugins will eventually reach far beyond the simple back-end data manipulation, as demonstrated in our beginner’s article. In this installment we’ll cover in-depth: database interaction, Admin Widgets, and Sidebar Widgets. Today’s example will be a custom built “Most Popular by Views” plugin, which creates an admin area widget for us to view, and a sidebar widget for visitors to see.

WordPress is the largest blogging platform available on the internet today; and with the official release of version three just around the corner, it’s only going to get bigger. As such, over the next few self-contained tuts, we’re going to learn the ins and outs of WordPress plugin development, starting with the creation of our first simple plugin, “Simple Optimization.”

A couple of days ago I showed you how to make a category menu. In this post I'm going to show you how to create an even more advanced version of the same function, that not only has all the same features, but also includes the ability to be sorted into a different order.

One of the most common features on any blog or website is category highlighting showing you which category you're in or the page is in. WordPress, by default, does not have a function to do this. Thus it's up to us developers to write our own custom functions to do this, and that's exactly what's I'm going to be teaching you in this tutorial.

With an ever increasing amount of content building on your WordPress site, your users will inevitably need to search your site to find that specific helpful article from way back. To help narrow the search results, I’m going to show you how to code a plugin that allows the user to search based on category.

This is a Nettuts +Tut.

While reading though some twitter updates this morning, I stumbled across one that was asking if anyone knew a way to exclude a specific category in WordPress from the loop, unless it was certian page template. After a quick minute of thinking, I came up with this small function that will do just that.

Search by Category allows your visitor to select which category they want to search your blog inside of. This allows visitors to find the exact article they're looking for and helps increase viewer loyalty.

Not that long ago I released my WordPress Plugin Templates and they were greatly received by you all. Through this wide spread attraction, it was inevitable that a flaw would be found and some improvements be suggested. So I took these suggestions and an idea I had, and updated these templates to allow for less editing of the template files and faster plugin development all around.

About 3 weeks ago I did a screencast on how to build a dynamic thumbnail selector for WordPress. When I wrote that function, I noticed that if the post was in more than 1 of the specified categories, then it choose the first one (alphabetically). This bothered me enough that today I devised a system that will select the category based on a hierarchy we give to the options.

WordPress plugins have become my new addiction in the WP environment, thus I've noticed that I'm using the same few beginning steps every time. This led me to create a template file so that I just open, edit, and continue on my merry way of coding my plugin. I'm posting these templates for free use no matter what you're working on. I'll even be a nice guy and let you repost them as your own.