Image by: vizzzual-dot-com

In building CMS sites for clients, some may require that you offer certain files to be downloaded off their site. A PDF for example, or perhaps wallpapers or other media. Most browsers, correctly, will display these items inline as a new page or tab however for these purposes you need to force the browser to download the item, not display it. Here’s how it’s done.

The Code

Your .htaccess file is the key to getting this done, and here’s the code you need to add:

AddType application/octet-stream .csv
AddType application/octet-stream .xls
AddType application/octet-stream .doc
AddType application/octet-stream .avi
AddType application/octet-stream .mpg
AddType application/octet-stream .mov
AddType application/octet-stream .pdf

You can of course add as many other filetypes to this list as you may require, but you can get the principle from this example.

Image by Luc Latulippe

More and more corporate sites are using Twitter these days and so you’re more likely to have a client who requires some sort of Twitter activity to be shown in his site. Perhaps he wants his most recent tweet displayed, or a few results from a Twitter search feed.

There are a number of Twitter based widgets and plugins, but in most cases, they’re heavily styled and don’t make it very easy for you to integrate a tweet or two into a very specific area in your design. The script below let’s you do just that and so it’s my method of choice.

Here’s a great and flexible script to grab some recent tweets for your WordPress site:

<?php
$doc = new DOMDocument();

# load the RSS -- replace 'lylo' with your user of choice
if($doc->load('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/INSERT_USERNAME_HERE.rss')) {
 echo "<ul>\n";

 # number of <li> elements to display.  20 is the maximum
 $max_tweets = 10;

 $i = 1;
 foreach ($doc->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
 # fetch the title from the RSS feed.
 # Note: 'pubDate' and 'link' are also useful (I use them in the sidebar of this blog)
 $tweet = $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue;

 # the title of each tweet starts with "username: " which I want to remove
 $tweet = substr($tweet, stripos($tweet, ':') + 1);

 # OPTIONAL: turn URLs into links
 $tweet = preg_replace('@(https?://([-\w\.]+)+(:\d+)?(/([\w/_\.]*(\?\S+)?)?)?)@',
 '<a href="$1">$1</a>', $tweet);

 # OPTIONAL: turn @replies into links
 $tweet = preg_replace("/@([0-9a-zA-Z]+)/",
 "<a href=\"http://twitter.com/$1\">@$1</a>",
 $tweet);

 echo "<li>". $tweet  . "</li>\n";

 if($i++ >= $max_tweets) break;
 }
 echo "</ul>\n";
}
?>

Remember that if your working of a busy site, it’s probably a good idea to integrate this with a caching system to avoid any problems with the Twitter API limits.

Image by PetitPlat by sk_

Your site should always be as usable as possible and site navigation is a big part of that. Aside from your standard sidebars and top navigation, it’s always a good idea to include a breadcrumb to let users track their way back to the home page. Of course there are lots of plugins you can use to insert this, but why use a plugin, when you can do it just as easily on your own.

Here’s the code that you’ll need to add to your functions.php file:

//breadcrumb function
function YLcrumbs() {
 if ((is_page() && !is_front_page()) || is_home() || is_category() || is_single()) {
 echo '<ul id="breadcrumbs">';
 echo '<li><a href="'.get_bloginfo('url').'">Home</a>&raquo;</li>';
 $post_ancestors = get_post_ancestors($post);
 if ($post_ancestors) {
 $post_ancestors = array_reverse($post_ancestors);
 foreach ($post_ancestors as $crumb)
 echo '<li><a href="'.get_permalink($crumb).'">'.get_the_title($crumb).'</a>&raquo;</li>';
 }
 if (is_category() || is_single()) {
 $category = get_the_category();
 echo '<li><a href="'.get_category_link($category[0]->cat_ID).'">'.$category[0]->cat_name.'</a>&raquo;</li>';
 }
 if (!is_category())
 echo '<li><a href="'.get_permalink().'">'.get_the_title().'</a></li>';
 echo '</ul>';
 }
}

Then, in your template, wherever you want to display your breadcrumb, you’d add the following:

<? YLcrumbs(); ?>

Note that the function generates a breadcrumb in a UL element, so your CSS might look something like this:

#breadcrumbs {padding: 10px 0;margin:0;}
#breadcrumbs li {display:inline;padding: 0 10px 0 0;}

That would give you a  list of LI elements in a row. Then you can style it up further as you require.

Have you used this somewhere? Leave a link in the comments to your implementation of this breadcrumb system.

// add google analytics to footer
function add_google_analytics() {
 echo '<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js" type="text/javascript"></script>';
 echo '<script type="text/javascript">';
 echo 'var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXX-X");';
 echo 'pageTracker._trackPageview();';
 echo '</script>';
}
add_action('wp_footer', 'add_google_analytics');

Remember to change UA-XXXXX-X to your own analytics ID.

Enjoy!

Firstly, I logged into PHPMyAdmin and browsed the users table. I edited the entry for my ‘admin‘ account and found the ‘user_pass‘ field.

This field will by default have an encrypted version of your password, something like $P$BERsVRczS226JkUY29j72YuVSzm3yP/ .

Instead of trying to decrypt this, I just generated a new MD5 password and pasted the encrypted version in this field.

I encrypted a new password using the iWebTool website. Type in the password you’d like to have, and then click ‘Encrypt’. That then generates your MD5 password. For example I typed in ‘wpguru‘ as my password and that generated ‘f1c061320553d089aa807e975e2a936f‘.

All you need to do then is paste that encrytped password into the WP database field and presto, your lost password problem is fixed.

Image by yaz36

The WordPress loop is arguably the heart of any WP powered site. With all this power at its fingertips, it obviously has some serious customization potential. I’m going to explain a couple of ways here of how you can fully use the potential of your WP CMS’s loop to display custom content anywhere on your site. Get ready to own your WP Loop!

The Scenario

Remembering that content is king, I always recommend to my clients that they have a blog of some sort: a style blog, Pokerblog, Tech blog – whatever it is they do, they need a blog. Thus somewhere in your custom WP theme, you’re going to want to display maybe the latest 2 or 3 articles from their blog. Usually, you could just use query_posts() to bring in posts from a specific category.

However, I’ve found in the past that if I use this method before the normal loop for the page’s content, it messes with the functionality of the main loop because of issues with rewind_posts() and such.

To altogether avoid this issue, it’ll be best if you get used to making your own WP query.

Making your loop

Before looping, you need to tell WordPress what to loop through. So firstly, setup your query.

<?
 $recentPosts = new WP_Query();
 $recentPosts->query('showposts=5');
?>

Then you can join it up with a loop to process the information that your query finds.

<? while ($recentPosts->have_posts()) : $recentPosts->the_post(); ?>
<!-- LOOP STUFF HERE -->
<?php endwhile; ?>

So when you add it all together:

<?php
 $recentPosts = new WP_Query();
 $recentPosts->query('showposts=5');
 while ($recentPosts->have_posts()) : $recentPosts->the_post();
?>
<!-- LOOP STUFF HERE -->
<?php endwhile; ?>

The query itself can have many different arguments to help you filter down to exactly what you’re looking for. For example:

• cat=3 – specify the category that you want to display. If you have more posts that you want to include than exclude, then it might be easier to just filter out the ones you don’t want to see by using: cat=-1, -2, -3 etc
• showposts=3 – specify how many posts you want to show
• orderby=name – determine how you want your results to be ordered by: author, date, category, id, title, modified, parent and rand. orderby=rand is a great means of having a news area that displays a random news article from the archives.
• year=2004 – display posts from only a specific year

You can string a whole bunch of these arguments together like so:

<? query_posts('cat=3,4,5&showposts=10&orderby=date'); ?>

With a little imagination, your query can retrieve any number of configurable results.