Many WordPress users thought it was a good idea and I quickly had a lot of members, due to the great promotion from WpHacks. Sadly, spammers came too. And they were very, very active.

WpVote was using the Pligg cms. Sadly, this tool isn’t very flexible and modify it isn’t easy at all. I’ve tried a few anti-spam solution but nothing worked. Quickly, the site became a spam-farm and I, as well as the users, abandonned it.

But last month, I thought “If only WpVote was running within WordPress”. I’ve never heard of any “Digg-like” site using WordPress, but I thought that I can give a try. I was easier than it seemed. 2 weeks before, I had a new version of WpVote, ready to be used by the community.

Was it hard to create? Not really. I didn’t modify the WP core, but instead used the TDO Mini Forms plugin, a custom theme I created and a few Ajax functions. Though, the fact that I know WordPress quite well helped me a lot to achieve this goal and think how I can make it work.

Now, a few words about the brand new version of WpVote:

WpVote works just like million other sites like Digg: Once registered, you can submit news, tutorials, hacks and everything related to WordPress. Once your story received at least 5 votes, it is promoted to the front page. Good luck for DoFollow lovers, our Pagerank 4 frontpage IS DoFollow!

So if you’re a WordPress addict and want to promote your posts to the community as well as gaining free backlinks, don’t hesitate to join us. Note that if you were a member of the previous version, you’ll have to register again due to the change of platform.

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The plugin, entitled “Blog Stats” makes available a number of statistics about your blog, including number of posts, comments, trackbacks, users and categories, PageRank, Alexa rank, Technorati rank and Feedburner RSS count.  To ensure you always have the most up to date values, the plugin automatically update statistics on a daily basis.

How to Install and use the Blog Stats WordPress Plugin

First, you have to download the plugin on Wesley’s website or on the WordPress.org page.

Once you have it, unzip it on your hard drive and upload the plugin file to the wp-content/plugins directory of your WordPress blog.

Login to your WordPress dashboard, go to the Plugins page and activate Blog Stats.

You now have a bunch of new shortcodes that you can use in pages and posts. If you don’t know what a shortcode is or want more info about it, I wrote some shortcodes-related posts on WP Recipes.

Ready to use Template

Feel lazy? After you installed the plugin, just create a new page and paste the following code in it. It will output all stats available from the Blog Stats plugin.

user_count: [user_count]
post_count: [post_count]
page_count: [page_count]
comment_count: [comment_count]
trackback_count: [trackback_count]
avg_comments_per_post: [avg_comments_per_post]
category_count: [category_count]
tag_count: [tag_count]
link_count: [link_count]
pagerank: [pagerank]
technorati_authority: [technorati_authority]
technorati_rank: [technorati_rank]
alexa_rank: [alexa_rank]
feedburner_subscribers: [feedburner_subscribers]
google_backlinks: [google_backlinks]
yahoo_backlinks: [yahoo_backlinks]
delicious_bookmarks: [delicious_bookmarks]

That’s all. I must say that I like this plugin a lot and Wesley really did a nice job!

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If you’d like to see a live demo of this tutorial, just click here.

1) – Make sure you’re using a custom field in your posts, with the thumbnail url.

There’s a lot of tutorials available online to add a custom field to your pots. This one is good in my opinion, so you should read it if you don’t know how to define a custom field.

2) – Download the required plugins

In order to customize your recent posts widget, you have to download the Recent Posts plugin by Sebastian Schmieg.

You’ll also need to download and install the Post-Plugin Library, which contains all the php functions needed by the Recent Posts plugin.

3) – Upload and activate the plugins

Once you downloaded the plugin and the library, unzip the files and upload it to your wp-content/plugins directory. Then, login to your WordPress dashboard, Go to “Plugins” and activate both the library and the Recent Posts plugin.

4) – Configure the plugin

After having the plugin and the library uploaded and activated, you have to configure the options so you’ll be able to display the post thumbnail on your sidebar.

To do so, login to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to “Settings”, “Recent Posts”.
On “General”, you can tell the plugin how many posts to be displayed, if it should display posts and pages or only posts, and a lot more.

Once you configured the “General” options to fits your needs, go to the “Output” options. In order to display your custom field thumbnail on your sidebar, you have to enter a bit of html as well as the special parameter to embed the custom field.

Here’s the code that I entered:

<li><img src="{custom:Image}" width="48" height="48" alt="" />{link}
<div class="clear"></div>
</li>

The special parameter {custom:Image} tells the plugin to embed the Image custom field. Don’t forget to replace Image with the name of your custom field!

5) – Add the widget to your sidebar

Simply go to “Design”, “Widgets” and add the Recent Posts + widget to your sidebar. Visit your blog, your thumbs are showing in the sidebar along with your recent posts!

You are reading How to: Using Thumbnails in your Sidebar “Recent Post” Listing © 2008 | WordPress Hacks | WordPress Directory | WordPress Forums | WordPress eBook

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This is probably the most important step of this whole tutorial: always backup your WP Database and files. This tutorial have been tested, however I won’t be held responsible for any kind of data loss.

Once done, you can connect to your server by using SSH. On Mac and Linux platform you can use the Terminal, on Windows I recommend using Putty.

Get the latest WordPress version available:

wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

Uncompress it:

tar xfz latest.tar.gz

Delete the wp-admin and wp-includes directories:

rm -rf ./wp-includes/
rm -rf ./wp-admin/

Go to the wordpress directory:

cd wordpress/

Now, it’s time to copy the downloaded files to your existing WP install, by overwriting old files:

cp -rpf -f * ../

Once done, come back to the WordPress directory and remove the downloaded files:

cd ..
rm -rf ./wordpress/
rm -f latest.tar.gz

Visit your blog and upgrade the database (if needed). That’s all, your blog is now up to date and the whole process didn’t took more than a minute or two!

For more WordPress tips and tricks, you should definitely take a look at my blogs WpRecipes and Cats Who Code!

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I must admit that I prefer answering “Alex” instead of “San Diego Real Estate”. But as I previously said, having the “Top Commentators” and the “Nofollow Free” plugins enabled are good for your traffic. So, is there a solution?

Happily, the answer is yes. Stephen Cronin have created the Keyword Luv plugin, which allow the commentator to specify both his name and his keywords. For example, my initials are “jbj” and related keywords to my blog should be “Web Development” or “WordPress”.  Instead of typing “Web development” as my name, I’ll type “jbj@Web Development”.

Here is the result:

Installing Keyword Luv

Nothing hard here: First, download the plugin, extract it and upload the directory on your server, under the wp-content/plugins directory.  Then, login to your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins and activate the plugin.

That’s all! Enjoy you “keywords free” comments!

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So, I’m very happy to introduce you WpRecipes. On this new blog, you’ll not find any long and detailed tutorials like the ones I write for WordPress Hacks, but only short and “straight to the essential” recipes.

For example, I’ll show you how to redirect WordPress rss feeds to Feedburner with .htaccess, how to restrict page view to authenticated users only or how to get rid of curly quotes on your WordPress blog.

Don’t hesitate to subscribe to WpRecipes rss feed or save the blog to Delicious! And if you have any WordPress related questions, feel free to ask and I’ll se what I can do to help you.

You are reading Introducing WpRecipes © 2008 | WordPress Hacks | WordPress Directory | WordPress Forums | WordPress eBook

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So, I figured out that I definitely should release a similar theme, but make it simple to administrate for both WordPress advanced users and beginners.

On a personal note, I chose to get inspiration for this theme from New York City, where I traveled in June and really enjoyed it. The vector image isn’t from me, but from a designer named Raul. I have sent him an email to ask him if I can use his image for the theme, but never received a reply. After 2 weeks, I decided to make the theme available, anyways most people will use their own image instead.

Features

• Widgetized sidebar
• Widgetized footer
• Custom field to display a thumbnail on homepage
• SEO optimized
• Easy to customize
• Classy design with nice colors
• Integrated pagination

Screenshot & Live demo

If you want to see a live demo of the theme, just click here.

Download NYC Theme!

If you find any bugs or problems in the theme, let me know and i’ll correct it for a future version.

Hope you’ll like it! I plan to release a bunch of new themes in the near future, both here and at my blog Cats Who Code, so you should definitely subscribe to my RSS Feed and/or follow me on Twitter!

You are reading Free WordPress Theme Courtesy of Cats Who Code © 2008 | WordPress Hacks | WordPress Directory | WordPress Forums | WordPress eBook

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This is the easiest solution. A few WordPress plugins allows you to put some clickable flags in your sidebar, that will automatically translate your content to another language using, for example, Google Translate.
This is a great solution if you’re looking for a way to make your content available for people that doesn’t speak your language, but you guessed it, the automatic translation isn’t as good as a human translated text.

Anyways, if you’re interested in theses plugins, here’s a small list. I didn’t tried them all myself, though.

• Global Translator Plugin
• Translate Widget
• Google Translate WordPress Plugins

Using categories and a few hacks

If you’re a perfectionist, you probably don’t really like the automatic translations provided by Google. In my opinion, if it’s okay for a personal blog, but automatic translations should be avoided on a professional blog.

For this hack, we will use categories. Go to your dashboard and create categories/sub-categories following the example below:

English
    One category
    Two categories
Français
    Une catégorie
    Deux catégories
Deutsch
    Eine kategorie
    Zwei kategorien

Of course this is just an example, you can add as many categories as you want. The thing to remember here is that we’re using top level categories for languages, each of them having sub-categories organized by topics.

Now, you should post at least one example post in each sub-category. Once you’re done, we can start editing our header.php template.

The idea is quite simple: First, we must display the available languages, and then, a menu with the sub-category related to the current language. We must also think about defining a default language, which will be English in this example.

1 – Creating the language menu
Insert the following code where you want the language selection menu to appear:

<?php
wp_list_categories('title_li=');
$lang = 1; // Sets the default language
?>

As you can see, we just need the good old wp_list_categories() function to get our available languages.
Then, we have to keep a php variable containing the id of the top level category, in order to display the navigation menu in the selected language. We must give a default value to the $lang variable. This default value will be the category id of the language you want to set as default.

I noticed that many people should have trouble to find the ID of a particular category. If you do, you should definitely read this post.

2 – Navigation menu
Now, we got a php variable containing the id of the mother category. As the top-level categories are languages, we know which language the user is using.

We simply have to display second-level categories.

<ul>
<?php
wp_list_categories('title_li=&child_of=$lang');
?>
</ul>

3 – Retrieving category
Here’s a sample code you can use to automatically list posts from a category. This code get the current category (in this example, the language) and then displays the related posts.

<?php foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) {
      	$thecat = $category->cat_ID . ' ';
    	query_posts('child_of='.$thecat);
	if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();
	   //Classic WP loop
	endwhile;endif;
?>

You are reading How to: Create a Multi-Language Blog © 2008 | WordPress Hacks | WordPress Directory | WordPress Forums | WordPress eBook

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This is probably why many blogs recently stopped displaying their tag cloud, or put it on a separate page. But I got another solution.

My wife owns a blog where she reviews books. She use tags to display author names, which is a great use of tags, in my opinion. The tags were first displayed as a list, and it was perfect. But after she reviewed 60+ books, the list started to be too long.

She asked me about a solution, and after some reflection, I came up with the idea of using a drop-down menu (select html element + a bit of javascript). Happily, I was able to found this code on WordPress forums.

First, we have to create a php function. Copy and paste the following code in the functions.php file of your theme (Be careful with the php opening/closing tags!)

<?php
function dropdown_tag_cloud( $args = '' ) {
	$defaults = array(
		'smallest' => 8, 'largest' => 22, 'unit' => 'pt', 'number' => 45,
		'format' => 'flat', 'orderby' => 'name', 'order' => 'ASC',
		'exclude' => '', 'include' => ''
	);
	$args = wp_parse_args( $args, $defaults );

	$tags = get_tags( array_merge($args, array('orderby' => 'count', 'order' => 'DESC')) ); // Always query top tags

	if ( empty($tags) )
		return;

	$return = dropdown_generate_tag_cloud( $tags, $args ); // Here's where those top tags get sorted according to $args
	if ( is_wp_error( $return ) )
		return false;
	else
		echo apply_filters( 'dropdown_tag_cloud', $return, $args );
}

function dropdown_generate_tag_cloud( $tags, $args = '' ) {
	global $wp_rewrite;
	$defaults = array(
		'smallest' => 8, 'largest' => 22, 'unit' => 'pt', 'number' => 45,
		'format' => 'flat', 'orderby' => 'name', 'order' => 'ASC'
	);
	$args = wp_parse_args( $args, $defaults );
	extract($args);

	if ( !$tags )
		return;
	$counts = $tag_links = array();
	foreach ( (array) $tags as $tag ) {
		$counts[$tag->name] = $tag->count;
		$tag_links[$tag->name] = get_tag_link( $tag->term_id );
		if ( is_wp_error( $tag_links[$tag->name] ) )
			return $tag_links[$tag->name];
		$tag_ids[$tag->name] = $tag->term_id;
	}

	$min_count = min($counts);
	$spread = max($counts) - $min_count;
	if ( $spread <= 0 )
		$spread = 1;
	$font_spread = $largest - $smallest;
	if ( $font_spread <= 0 )
		$font_spread = 1;
	$font_step = $font_spread / $spread;

	// SQL cannot save you; this is a second (potentially different) sort on a subset of data.
	if ( 'name' == $orderby )
		uksort($counts, 'strnatcasecmp');
	else
		asort($counts);

	if ( 'DESC' == $order )
		$counts = array_reverse( $counts, true );

	$a = array();

	$rel = ( is_object($wp_rewrite) && $wp_rewrite->using_permalinks() ) ? ' rel="tag"' : '';

	foreach ( $counts as $tag => $count ) {
		$tag_id = $tag_ids[$tag];
		$tag_link = clean_url($tag_links[$tag]);
		$tag = str_replace(' ', '&nbsp;', wp_specialchars( $tag ));
		$a[] = "\t<option value='$tag_link'>$tag ($count)</option>";
	}

	switch ( $format ) :
	case 'array' :
		$return =& $a;
		break;
	case 'list' :
		$return = "<ul class='wp-tag-cloud'>\n\t<li>";
		$return .= join("</li>\n\t<li>", $a);
		$return .= "</li>\n</ul>\n";
		break;
	default :
		$return = join("\n", $a);
		break;
	endswitch;

	return apply_filters( 'dropdown_generate_tag_cloud', $return, $tags, $args );
}
?>

Once you have your function, you must call it somewhere on your theme. Just open the file where you want the list to be displayed (Most of the time it is sidebar.php) and paste the following code:

<select name="tag-dropdown" onchange="document.location.href=this.options[this.selectedIndex].value;">
	<option value="#">Liste d'auteurs</option>
	<?php dropdown_tag_cloud('number=0&order=asc'); ?>
</select>

Now, you have a very cool drop-down list to display you tags. No more unreadables tag clouds!

You are reading How to: Display your WordPress Tags in a Drop-Down Menu © 2008 | WordPress Hacks | WordPress Directory | WordPress Forums | WordPress eBook

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Please note that even if this code is fully functional, this is an experimentation, and the SQL query isn’t really optimized.

The idea

We will use tags as a list of keyword to suggest to the readers.

When someone will start to type on the search field, we will use Javascript to send a request to a php page which will do the following SQL request SELECT * FROM matable WHERE ‘name’ LIKE ‘$search%’. Via Ajax, we’ll send back the request results to our page, and display it to the visitor.

First part: PHP

The first thing to do is to create a php page. This page will send a request to our WP database and display the tags as a html unordered list.

<?php
if (isset($_POST['search'])) {
        $search = htmlentities($_POST['search']);
} else  $search ='';
$db = mysql_connect('localhost','root',''); //Don't forget to change
mysql_select_db('wp', $db);		     //theses parameters
$sql = "SELECT name from wp_terms WHERE name LIKE '$search%'";
$req = mysql_query($sql) or die();
echo '<ul>';
while ($data = mysql_fetch_array($req))
{
        echo '<li><a href="#" onclick="selected(this.innerHTML);">'.htmlentities($data['name']).'</a></li>';
}
echo '</ul>';
mysql_close();
?>

This code is simple: It receive a POST parameter (The letter(s) typed in the search field by the visitor) and then sends a request to our WP database in order to gets all tags starting with the letter(s) typed in the search box.

Part two: Ajax

Now it’s time to start the client-side programming. We need to code 4 Javascript functions in order to make our auto-completion work:

• Function ajax() will create a XMLHTTPRequest object.
• Function request() will send an Ajax request to our gettags.php file.
• Function return() will return gettags.php contents.
• And the selected() function will update the search field.

Here’s our gettags.js file and the 4 functions needed:

var myAjax = ajax();
function ajax() {
        var ajax = null;
        if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
                try {
                        ajax = new XMLHttpRequest();
                }
                catch(e) {}
        }
        else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
                try {
                        ajax = new ActiveXObject("Msxm12.XMLHTTP");
                }
                catch (e){
                        try{
                                ajax = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
                        }
                        catch (e) {}
                }
        }
        return ajax;
}
function request(str) {
	//Don't forget to modify the path according to your theme
        myAjax.open("POST", "wp-content/themes/openbook-fr/gettags.php");
        myAjax.onreadystatechange = result;
        myAjax.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
        myAjax.send("search="+str);
}
function result() {
        if (myAjax.readyState == 4) {
                var liste = myAjax.responseText;
                var cible = document.getElementById('tag_update').innerHTML = liste;
                document.getElementById('tag_update').style.display = "block";
        }
}
function selected(choice){
        var cible = document.getElementById('s');
        cible.value = choice;
        document.getElementById('tag_update').style.display = "none";
}

Part three: Editing your theme

Now that we have our php and javascript ready, we can edit the searchform.php file from your WP theme:

Your searchform.php file should look like this:

<form method="get" id="searchform" action="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/">
        <div>
                <input type="text" value="<?php the_search_query(); ?>" name="s" id="s" />
                <input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search" />
        </div>
</form>

We have to add a div, which will display the received data from the request, as well as a Javascript event on the search form:

<form method="get" id="searchform" action="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/">
    <div>
        <input type="text" value="<?php the_search_query(); ?>" name="s" id="s" onkeyup="request(this.value);"/>
        <input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search" class="button" />
    </div>
    <div id="tag_update"></div>
</form>

Final part: CSS

Due to the fact that every theme use different color schemes, this is only an example. Anyways, I thought it could be a good start:

#tag_update {
        display: block;
        border-left: 1px solid #373737;
        border-right: 1px solid #373737;
        border-bottom: 1px solid #373737;
        position:absolute;
        z-index:1;
}
#tag_update ul {
        margin: 0;
        padding: 0;
        list-style: none;
}
#tag_update li{
        display:block;
        clear:both;
}
#tag_update a {
        width:134px;
        display: block;
        padding: .2em .3em;
        text-decoration: none;
        color: #fff;
        background-color: #1B1B1C;
        text-align: left;
}
#tag_update a:hover{
        color: #fff;
        background-color: #373737;
        background-image: none;
}

That’s all. You now have a very nice auto-completing search form! If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below.

You are reading How to: Create an Ajax-based Auto-completing Search Field for your WordPress Theme © 2008 | WordPress Hacks | WordPress Directory | WordPress Forums | WordPress eBook

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