As 2008 closes out and we welcome 2009, I figured what better way to close out the year than with a quick ”year in review” post featuring our best work during 2008. 

I’ve always felt reviewing was a good process as it allows us to both learn from our mistakes and appreciate the progress we’ve made through the past year.   This is a good way to stay motivated and loving what we do each day!

Here are the top WordPress Hacks posts, according to our internal analytics (based upon traffic/popularity):

1. How to Add an Author Page to Your WordPress Blog (January 2008)
2. How to Add Biography Info to Your WordPress Blog Posts (February 2008)
3. How to Tell WordPress to Function Like a CMS (March 2008)
4. How to Use WordPress as a Static Site (April 2008)
5. Best Free WordPress Themes Gallery (May 2008)
6. CSS Techniques: Using Sliding Doors with WordPress Navigation (June 2008)
7. Huge Compliation of WordPress Hacks (July 2008)
8. How to Add a Store to Your WordPress Blog (August 2008)
9. How to Create an AJAX-based Auto-Completing Search Field for Your WordPress Theme (September 2008)
10. How to Move WordPress Blog to a New Domain (October 2008)
11. WordPress Review Site: Premium Theme and Plugin (November 2008)
12. Free and Premium WordPress Themes Gallery (December 2008)

I’d also like to take a moment to thank those that helped contribute to the growth of WordPress Hacks in 2008.  Your guest posts, inbound links, and comments help make the site the WordPress resource it has become today. 

Happy New Year!

This guest post was written by V Scott Ellis of Blackbox Technologies, a business that helps companies to maximize their web presence.  If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

One of the more common issues with embedding a flash object on your home page (or any page for that matter) is that if it is near the navigation and you have CSS drop-down menus, then you may find your drop-down menu getting lost behind the flash object. If you haven’t dealt with this before it can feel like a nightmare, but fortunately it’s a pretty easy fix.

The Problem: You have a CSS based drop-down menu in your navigation and a flash element near it the menus may get “hidden” behind the flash object.

The Solution: Set the z-index of the div holding the flash to 1 and the z-index of the div holding the nav to 2.

In the flash element:

Look for the flash <object> tag and add the following code:

<param name="wmode" value="transparent">

You’ll want to insert this code right below the <param name=”quality” value=”high”> tag and include the code wmode=”transparent” in the flash <embed> tag .

I know a lot of you also check our WordPress Forums daily, but for those of you that don’t, I wanted to pass along the following alert from Nick Roy regarding the WP Marketer WordPress plugin.  

For those unfamiliar with this WordPress plugin, it allows you to select keywords on your posts and pages and automatically convert them into in text ads and affiliate marketing links.

Unfortunately, it looks like there is a problem with this plugin.   According to Nick:

A word of caution about the WP Marketer plugin. The WP-Marketer plugin was is causing the /feed URL and PHP to core dump. The system was segmentation faulting (segfault) when performing a regex for display of a particular portion of the page. For example, when I would click on my feed url, it would say page could not be displayed. Also, it would create a bunch of core dump files on my server causing the diskspace to fill up rather quickly. I deactivated and activated each plugin separately until I found that it was the WP Marketer plugin.

I have removed 50+ core files from my website account that had been generated through accesses of the /feed.

Hopefully the author will catch this and get a fix in place here shortly!

Are you a visual learner (a person who learn better through viewing rather than reading)?   One of the challenges when writing WordPress hacks is trying to take something you know how to do and explain it in a way that others will understand.  A well explained hack will allow just about anyone to successfully implement the hack on their own WordPress blogs.

For visual learners, this can sometimes be difficult.   For these people, a better solution is typically to watch one of the many WordPress video tutorials you can find scattered throughout the internet.   We’ve posted a few here before, but I wanted to draw your attention to a recent post over at Six Revisions where they’ve covered 30+ WordPress video tutorials. You’ll find a bunch of the better WordPress video tutorials from around the internet, all in one convenient location!

Have you been around since the early days of WordPress?   For those that have, I think you’ll really enjoy a recent post over at Planet Ozh which covers A Journey Through Five Years of WordPress.   For those that are new to WordPress, you may also enjoy Ozh’s post, as it shows just how far WordPress has come over the past 5 years!

Of course, back in 2003, blogging was still in its very early stages as well, so probably the thing I most enjoyed about this post is seeing how well WordPress has grown along with blogging.

Out of curiosity, I thought it might be fun today to see when everyone else started using WordPress.  My first WordPress installation was the start of the WordPress 2.0.x branch.   I used Blogger briefly, tried Typepad, but fell in love with WordPress quickly and the rest is history.

How about you?  What was the first version of WordPress you used?