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: dcdead

I’ve just finished a project for a client who wanted an interesting feature on his site. He wanted a block of content to be turned on and off whenever he needed it. So when he wanted to promote something, he wanted to add some content and have it display until he was ready to ‘turn it off’. I came up with a unique means of doing this using custom fields. Here’s how you can achieve this:

The Content

Firstly create your page in WordPress that you’ll use as your toggle-able content page. Add your title and content and then add a custom field like active and set the value to yes.

SIDENOTE: It might be a good idea to set the slug of this page to something generic like /info/. This way, if the content has a ‘Read More’ link of sorts, the client wont have to continually change the slug each time he changes the title of this content area.

Now you’re done in the WP Admin, now you can get into your WP PHP template file where this toggle-able content will display.

The Functionality

Basically what you’re going to create, is a code snippet that will query the page ID of the page you created above, but before displaying the content of that page, it’ll check if the custom field value is set to yes. If it’s not, then no content will display, if its set to yes, then… well you can guess what’ll happen

The Code

<? if (get_post_meta(73, 'active', true) == "yes") { ?>
<? query_posts('page_id=73'); if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
	<h3><? the_title(); ?></h3>
	<? the_content(); ?>
<? endwhile; endif; wp_reset_query(); ?>
<? } ?>

And that’s that. It’s a pretty simple trick and you should be able to apply the principle to a number of circumstances.

The basics

You’re basically going to setup a number of if/else statements in your template where you want your header image to appear. The final statement will be an else statement so that if none of the above rules apply, it’ll degrade so that you’ll always have a header image on your page.

You’re going to create a custom field that has the name of the image that you want to use as a header image. You don’t have to add the full path to the image. Since you’re uploading your custom image in the WordPress uploader, it’ll always end up in the same folder and so the path to the image will be entered in the template.

The how-to

So firstly create your image, and upload it to your page.

Then add a custom field called “header” and put the name of the file as the value of the field.

Then open up your template where you want your image to appear and add the following PHP – tailored to work as you need it to…

<? if (get_post_meta($post->ID, 'header', true)) { ?>
	<img src="<? bloginfo('url'); ?>/wp-content/uploads/<? echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'header', true) ?>" alt="<? bloginfo('name'); ?>" />
<? } else { ?>
	<img src="<? bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/header.jpg" />
<? } ?>

So what you’ve now done, is tell the template to check if the custom field “header” has a value. If it does, then use that value to display your image. However, if the custom field is empty, then it’ll degrade to the second default image that you specify.

And presto: you can now use your WP admin to control header images on each page. This is also a good way to do it because now your client can update/add his header images on his own without having to bug you.

Every theme will have an index.php file. The index.php file is your home page. This page will have your loop, that will most often bring in your latest posts etc.

Find this line:

<? if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

and just above it add this line:

<? query_posts('page_id=5'); ?>

Note that ’5′ can be changed to whatever page you want to be your home page.

What this does, is generate a specific query that the following loop will carry out. In this case, it will call the content from post_id=5.

Bear in mind that if you have a dynamic WP page list, you’ll probably want to exclude the page you created to be your home page from your normal page list. You can do this by adding the exclude argument to your page list call. Like so:

<? wp_list_pages('title_li=&sort_column=menu_order&exclude=5'); ?>

And presto, you have a static front page.

Choose a page on their site that you know will be kept throughout the life of their site – Perhaps an ‘about us’ page. Create custom fields for each of their contact details, maybe:

• Telephone: 012 345 6789
• Fax: 012 345 6789
• Email Address: info@site.com

Then, use your special query to call the custom field for each of those

<div id="contactdetails">
	<ul>
		<li>Telephone: <? echo get_post_meta(2, 'telephone', true) ?></li>
		<li>Fax: <? echo get_post_meta(2, 'fax', true) ?></li>
		<li>Email: <a href= "mailto:<? echo get_post_meta(2, 'email', true) ?>"><? echo get_post_meta(2, 'email', true) ?></a></li>
	</ul>
</div>

Note that in this example, ’2′ is the page_id of the about us page. Change this number to whatever the ID is of the page that you use to keep this information.

As the above example shows, we have a ‘Projects’ area as well as a ‘random quote’ area to the right. These actually 2 ways that you can accomplish this – either as a page or as a post.

First question you’d need to ask is, “Is that content area going to change often, or will it remain mostly static?” In the case of the former, your best best would be to accomplish this as a blog post.

Using blog posts

Firstly, create a category that will be used for entering these random quotes. If you do not want this information to form part of your company blog etc, then you’ll want to exclude that particular category from your normal listings. This can be done by simply adding &exclude=9 to your WordPress category query.

<? wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&optioncount=0&exclude=9'); ?>

Then on your page where you want this information to appear, you’d call it like this:

<? query_posts('cat=9&showposts=1'); ?>
<? if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<!-- LOOP STUFF HERE -->
<? endwhile; endif; ?>

Additionally, you can also add orderby=rand() to bring in a random quote on each page reload.

Using pages

If however, the content you’re wanting to display will hardly change, like a company vision statement or contact details, then you can simply create a custom loop that brings in the content from that 1 specific page.

<? query_posts('page_id=2'); ?>
<? if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<!-- LOOP STUFF HERE -->
<? endwhile; endif; ?>

In this way, you’ll display just that particular content area and your or your client will be able to update this information as & when they need to.

What are they?

Custom fields are essentially extra fields attached to a post. There’s the key which is the ‘name’ of your extra field. Then there’s value which is pretty self explanatory – its the value of the key that you’ve inserted. You can add any number of values to one specific key, and you can add as many key/value combinations as you like.

Ways of using Custom Fields

Lets say that you’re starting an accommodation listing site, and you have 3 or 4 images for each listing that you’d like to show.

• Upload the first image
• Enter the key ‘images’
• Paste the path to the uploaded image as the value of this key
• ‘Add Custom Field’
• Repeat as many times as necessary

Now you have an array of values assigned to the key ‘images’. Now in your single.php template, you want to show these images. No problems. What you’re going to do, is create a loop that will repeat for as many images as you’ve uploaded. Like so:

<? $images = get_post_meta($post->ID, "images", false); ?>
<? foreach($images as $image) {
echo "<img src=\"".$image."\" /><br />";
} ?>

Alternatively, lets say that you want to have a thumbnail for each entry in your archive.php template. You can combine some crafty CSS with a PHP query to bring in 1 of the images in the ‘images’ array and presto!

Here’s how to display your image:

<div class="thumb">
	<a href= "<?&phpMyAdmin=01d7dd3a1764f33b9145cd20ad99db24 the_permalink(); ?>" title="<? the_title(); ?>"><img src="<? echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'images', true) ?>" alt="<? the_title(); ?>" /></a>
</div>

*NOTE: The alt tag uses the_title() function which will name your image according to the page/post that its on.

and the CSS:

.thumb {
width:80px;
height:80px;
display:block;
overflow:hidden;
}

The CSS is required because the image that you uploaded is probably larger than what you’d want as a thumbnail. So the overflow:hidden command in the div thats wrapping the image will cut if off to a size that’ll suit you better.

Image by: moonjazz

When you’re actively using the page hierarchy in WordPress, many times you’ll create a parent page simply so that you can create the sub pages. For example, a page called Team might only be created so that you can have Joe Soap and Jane Doe as sub pages. There’s no real content to be put on that parent page, because the child pages are where the real information lies.

Instead of simply typing “Click the links to the left” and leaving the page largely empty, you can create a dynamic page template that will display a title and excerpt for each of the child pages.

You can do this by inserting this below the main loop of your page.php file.

<? $pageChildren = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_parent = ".$post->ID." AND post_type = 'page' ORDER BY menu_order", 'OBJECT');	?>
<? if ( $pageChildren ) : foreach ( $pageChildren as $pageChild ) : setup_postdata( $pageChild ); ?>
<!-- loop stuff here -->
<? endforeach; endif; ?>

In cases where you actually do have content for your parent page and you don’t want to display this title/excerpt setup, then you can make use of conditional tags to exclude the posts where you don’t want this to happen. For example:

<? if (is_page('3')) { } else { // if its page 3 then show nothing ?>
<? $pageChildren = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_parent = ".$post->ID." AND post_type = 'page' ORDER BY menu_order", 'OBJECT'); ?>
<? if ( $pageChildren ) : foreach ( $pageChildren as $pageChild ) : setup_postdata( $pageChild ); ?>
<!-- loop stuff here -->
<? endforeach; endif; } ?>