Fire Studios

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.

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.

Google Syntax Highlighter may be WordPress' most popular syntax highlighter plugin, but it's not the most efficient. With plenty of extra JavaScript and sloppy PHP writing, it's quite the bloat-ware if left unchecked. So here's 2 fixes showing how to put GSH on a diet and still get all the features of the plugin.

Thumbnails in WordPress themes are a critical part of relaying the topic or aspect of the article/post you've written. With some simple tricks you can add your own to your theme, and there are even plugins out there to do it for you. The fact of the matter is that these systems you have in place have faults, so here's a video detailing how to create an advanced WordPress Thumbnail generator in your own theme.

WordPress was developed to be extremely user friendly on both the front-end and the back-end, but also allow for some complex functions and features to be implemented for the more advanced and code knowledge of us. FS-2009 (the name of the theme released to FS at the start of the 2009 year) takes advantage of the many functions that WP has to offer, so I've created a screencast that covers all the PHP involved with creating this theme.

Anybody who is old enough to remember sites from before WordPress and CMS'es knows that the number one hardship of owning and running a site was updating it. You had to go through and update every file, move content from one document to another, it all took too long and was too much trouble.

Now we all use blogging engines and CMS'es because they remove this hardship. But what do you do if you have a site and implementing one of the many engines available would be too much hassle or over-kill? You create a simple system that updates the frequent areas that you change.

This is a guide we'll be using our podcast site FS-Air. Using only PHP and jQuery we'll create everything you see on the site. This tutorial assumes you have a understanding of HTML, CSS, jQuery, and PHP.