I’m going to try and do something a little different for my business model here: I’m giving my WordPress expertise and service away for free. That’s right, FREE. There is a catch (there always is though, right?). This is only for newcomers to the internet world.

The reason for this stipulation is I plan on making at least a couple bucks from affiliate sales of hosting and/or domain name sales. It’s not going to be much, but since I enjoy working with WordPress so much, I also want help promote it.

The process will work like this:

1. Contact me via my web form, and let me know you are interested in the Free WordPress Installation.
2. After I receive your email, I will email you back letting you know that I’ve gotten your request and we will start right away.
3. You will need to purchase hosting from one of the providers listed here.
4. After you’ve confirmed your purchase with one of those providers, please email me your new account’s username and password.
5. You get in return a newly setup WordPress site with plugins, themes and ME… I will be there to answer any questions on how to use WordPress. (Having a site means nothing if you don’t know how to work it)

I pre-install a ton of essential plugins and themes with your setup, but they may not be everything you need to get your idea/business off the ground. So in the meantime feel free to peruse WordPress Extend for other plugins and/or themes you want included with your FREE package.

If you already have hosting and/or domain name, contact me via my form anyway. It won’t be free, but we can always work out something.

When creating a new project of mine, I needed a way to protect certain page ids from being deleted because I was hard coding them into my WPMU themes. I was using the WPMU Blog Templates plugin, and after figuring out what IDs those new “pre-setup” pages were, I needed a way to protect them from ever being deleted by my users.

This plugin does just that – protects a list of post or page ids. It also gives you the ability to change the error message they see when trying to delete one of these protected pages.

Download

Download the latest from WordPress Extend…

Screenshot of Administrator Panel

Last March I wrote an article for WPDesigner (then subsequently republished it here) detailing the ways you could use a base install of WordPress (then on version 2.3) into a membership directory with the help of just a few plugins. This worked, and still works beautifully for me over at my Pittsburgh Designers community site. But since writing this article new plugins have become available with the unveiling of the completely revised WP core update 2.7.

Replacing the Old Plugins

In my previous installations I used only three plugins: Dealsway’s User Manager and IWG’s Role Manager. This time around I wanted more customization and more control over what was being shown to the users. I ended up trying every plugin I could find that might have a remote chance in helping me accomplish my end objective. The following is my final list of plugins and customization tricks that I used in creating my latest membership project: BUYAPITTSBURGHHOME.com.

Profile Setup & Customization

While this is arguably the most important part of the membership site, I really wasn’t looking for a replacement to the User Manager plguin I was currently using. I had no problem with it, and it was a fairly easy to use plugin. On my membership tutorial, someone suggested looking at the Register Plus plugin. I decided to give it a shot, and I am glad I did. While I still needed to hack the /wp-admin/users-edit.php file to get my profile fields in the order I wanted them, I was happy with the noticeable improvements this plugin had over User Manager.

There are many things that Register Plus does well, but I chose it for the fact that I may need some of it’s features down the road, not particularly right now. I did like the fact that it gave you the ability to replace some of the outgoing WP themed emails surrounding the registration events, but after some testing I decided that it wasn’t the best plugin to handle this. New User Email Setup did the trick, and made the outgoing emails completely customizable.

I also added the old and reliable User Photo plugin. I had installed this on many client WP directory sites, but this is the first time I used it myself. There are a ton of options, but once you find the right combination – it’s a set it and forget it type of plugin.

Plugins I Use

• Register Plus
• New User Email Setup
• User Photo

Plugins I Tested (but came up short)

• WP User Manager

Admin Interface & Branding

One of the most important things I wanted more control over this time was to have a more customizable admin section where the members enter their profile data. There are a slew of plugins that add various levels of branding the admin dashboard, but only one went to the extent I needed.

Customize your Community (or CYC) was created by one of the true WordPress gurus, Joost De Valk. It is extremely easy to use, and works like a charm when paired with the WP Hide Dashboard plugin (without it, members can type in /wp-admin/index.php and get to your dashboard).

I ended up hacking the CYC plugin so I could order my custom profile fields the way I wanted them displayed, but this was just my preference, and not required at all for it to work perfectly.

Plugin I Use

• Customize Your Community

Plugins I Tested (but came up short)

• Custom Admin Branding
• Add Logo to Admin
• Easy Admin Color Schemes

Displaying Authors

As soon as I found Custom Author Permalink, I knew it was a godsend. Anyone wanting to get rid of the awful /author/ permalink structure needs this plugin. The great thing about it is that you can activate the plugin just to set the permalink, then deactivate immediately afterward – it doesn’t have to always be ‘on’ to work.

In my old setup, I needed to ‘approve’ a member by creating a new post on their behalf in order for their profile page to become visible. Now, the plugin Show authors without posts takes care of this for me. One problem is that now that every profile is visible, I had to reverse engineer a little PHP code to check to see if certain profile fields met certain criteria, otherwise I would just do a redirect back to the site’s homepage.

Plugins I Use

• Custom Author Permalink
• Show authors without posts

Plugins I Tested (but came up short)

• List Authors Plus

WordPress Security

To be honest, I didn’t have much in the way of security back when I created my original membership directory. Now, since there are a slew of great security related plugins available, I definitely made this a high priority.

My biggest problem was that I had a ton of spam registrations – a problem that seems to plague many WordPress site administrators. While you can never stop a registration strictly because someone wants to look around, I found that WP-reCAPTCHA took care of all the spam registrations once and for all. Although the Register Plus plugin gave me the ability to implement CAPTCHA, this plugin gave me more customizable options.

Another problem of mine was that although I relied on Role Manager (and I still do) to restrict a member’s movement within the admin panel, I realized that there could be plenty going on in the background that I had no clue about. In came Audit Trail – a plugin that tracks every movement and attempt of a logged in user. The only thing I would change is for it to do is to track what was changed when a member updated his or her profile. Audit Trail already tries to capture this, but when you start adding custom profile fields it loses its functionality.

As I mentioned above, I still use IWG’s Role Manager plugin to restrict which actions can be done by logged in members. I teamed this with the already mentioned WP Hide Dashboard plugin, and my users can now only see what I want them to see.

I also installed WP Security Scan just to see what I could find – which at the time was nothing, but I figure this will end up finding its way onto my regular checklist.

Plugins I Use

• WP-reCAPTCHA
• Audit Trail
• Role Manager
• WP Hide Dashboard
• WP Security Scan

Plugins I Tested (but came up short)

• Register Plus

Miscellaneous & Vital Plugins

Statistics: For this project, I wanted to see how far I could integrate a statistics package into the WordPress backend. I tried out StatPress Reloaded and WordPress Reports, but in the end kept with my reliable stalwarts Statcounter and Google Analytics. I think the next plugin I want to test is for Mint.

Database Backups: Backups are essential to preserving an online community in case of a disaster and should be scheduled to run on at least a weekly basis. For me, I originally started using WP-DBManager, but after finding that it never really took a complete backup (presumably because of my horrible host) I switched to WordPress Database Backup and never looked back.

SEO: I am not sure how useful sitemaps are to the search engines, but I figured creating one wouldn’t hurt. I only tried Google XML Sitemaps, and stuck with it because looked to be the best right from the start. I also chose to install Platinum SEO Pack for the flexibility it gave when creating the page titles.

Development: WP-phpMyAdmin and WP Easy Uploader were essential for me when I was doing development work on the site. With these two, my time in development was greatly reduced.

Other Usefuls: Here is the rest of the list I used when creating my community: WP Super Cache, Weasel’s HTML Bios, Article Templates, WP125, WP-Components

Very Promising: These are quality plugins that I just don’t have a use for yet. They are ones I want to keep in my back pocket just incase I ever have a need for them: SimplePie Plugin for WordPress, RegLevel, WordPress Newsletter, Member Access

WP-Components is a new WordPress plugin that allows theme developers to embed a short template tag instead of short bits of text and code that the website owner might want to change later on.

Before creating this plugin, if I had semi-static text within a theme I was developing (such as a short “About Me” blurb) I would either embed the text directly into the template page (sidebar.php) or I would create a “Page” within WordPress and use the iinclude plugin to “include” that page. That way, if the site owner ever wanted to change that text, he or she would just have to edit that particular page.

That worked OK, but there were a few quirks to it. First, the pages would show up in search results. I could get around it by installing a second plugin called Search Everything – that would allow you to exclude certain pages from the search results. But needing to use both these plugins wasn’t ideal for such a simple problem. That’s why I developed WP-Components

Download

Download latest stable version from WordPress Extend

Installation

1. Upload wp-coponents.php to your wp-content/plugins/ folder.
2. Go to Settings->WP-Components to set new components.
3. Add the template tag shown below into your theme’s template files.

Usage

Template tag syntax:

<?php get_component('component_slug'); ?>

Template tag “safe” syntax:

<?php if (function_exists('get_component')) { get_component('component_slug'); } ?>

• component_slug: [required] The slug given within this plugin’s settings page.

Requirements

• Only tested on WordPress 2.5+, but there is no reason it should not work on any older versions.

FAQ

• Where can this template tag go within my theme?
  Anywhere. Literally…

• How can I ensure this plugin doesnt break my theme?
  The best way would be to use the safe template tag that first checks to see if the function exists before it calls it. See “Usage” above for details.

Version Changelog

• Ver 0.7 – 2/23/2009 – Fixed javascript issues with the WP image uploader and other plugins.
• Ver 0.5 – 12/11/2008 – Added Expand/Collapse features for each component, and a few minor style fixes for both the 2.7 and the 2.5.X versions of WordPress.
• Ver 0.2 – 12/7/2008 – Added deletion confirmation, components are sorted properly, and an ‘undo’ function in case of an oops.
• Ver 0.1 – 12/5/2008 – Plugin developed

ToDo List

• TinyMCE – Add TinyMCE support for those that have enabled it within their profiles.
• Nonce – Add nonce protection to all procedures.
• i18n Support – Add internationalization support for the plugin.

1. Multiple & Dynamic Sidebar Templates

Does trying to remember the TEMPLATEPATH syntax get to you sometimes? Do you think this is way too complicated?

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebar-sample.php'); ?>

Ok, maybe not, but now starting in WordPress 2.5, we can use this code to include the same exact template file (sidebar-sample.php):

<?php get_sidebar('sample'); ?>

Now that we know this, it is easy to create a much more streamlined sidebar based on categories…

<?php
    //to be able to use this outside the_Loop
    if ( have_posts() ) { the_post(); rewind_posts(); } 

    if ( in_category('1') ) {
        get_sidebar('cat1');
        //gets sidebar-cat1.php
    } elseif ( in_category('2') ) {
        get_sidebar('cat2');
        //gets sidebar-cat2.php
    } elseif ( in_category('3') ) {
        get_sidebar('cat3');
        //gets sidebar-cat3.php
    } elseif ( in_category('4') || in_category('5') || in_category('6') ) {
        get_sidebar('catRest');
        //gets sidebar-catRest.php
    } else {
        get_sidebar()
        //gets sidebar.php
    }
?>

or by page type…

<?php
	//to be able to use this outside the_Loop
	if ( have_posts() ) { the_post(); rewind_posts(); }

	if ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) {
		get_sidebar('home');
		//gets sidebar-home.php
	} elseif ( is_archive() ) {
		get_sidebar('archive');
		//gets sidebar-archive.php
	} elseif ( is_page() ) {
		get_sidebar('page');
		//gets sidebar-page.php
	} elseif ( is_single() ) {
		get_sidebar('single');
		//gets sidebar-single.php
	} else {
		get_sidebar()
		//gets sidebar.php
	}
?>

2. If Comments are Allowed…

On a recent project, I had to find a way to display comments if they were enabled for the specific post, but otherwise display no evidence that comments ever existed on the page. I ended up wrapping the comments.php template call like this and it worked perfectly.

<!-- Added to show no evidence of comments when
the status has been changed to allow no comments -->
<?php if ('open' == $post->comment_status) : ?>
	<div class="commentsblock">
		<?php comments_template(); ?>
	</div>
<?php endif; // If Comments are Open Wrapper ?>

3. Category Slogans

Some blogs not only show what category a post belongs to, but also offer up a witty slogan to go along with it. You could always just name your category “The Amazing Open Source PHP Language ” instead of simply “PHP”, but how extensible is that?

What you can do however which is just as easy is to add the slogan as the description of the category. Then you can replace your get_categories() function call with

<a href="<?php echo get_category_link($cat);?>" title="View all <?php single_cat_title('prefix', 'display'); ?> Posts" ><?php echo category_description($cat); ?></a>

4. Styling the Current Category

Markup and styling of category lists is easy now that WordPress automatically inserts a class=”current” on the category used in your post in your archives list when using the template tag wp_list_categories(). It doesn’t get any easier than that – all we need to do is add some CSS to your stylesheet, and this is working.

.current {
color:#cc0000;
font-weight:bold;
}

5. Return the Numbers of Comments, don’t Echo

I hate when functions assume that you want the data returned to you in the form of an echo. The template tag <?php comments_number('0','1 ','%') ?> automatically echos it’s data which means you can’t use it in any math computations or other functions as a variable. This is where we can use this undocumented function:

<?php get_comments_number(); ?>

Now you can do something slightly different with your comments count like use it to generate each post’s popularity score.

6. The Title without any Markup

This happened to me once. I was redesigning a site that used markup within the blog post’s title; “Little Known <strong>Wordpress</strong> Theme Tricks“. Knowing this template tag, my life would have been made much easier.

Instead of this:

<h3><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Permalink to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>

…use this:

<h3><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Permalink to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title_attribute(); ?></a></h3>

This template tag provides a ‘clean’ version of the title by stripping HTML tags and converting certain characters (including quotes) to their character entity equivalent.

7. Different Layout for Page 2+

Here we can have a different template for any page that is not “page 1.” Place this code anywhere within the Loop. (Replace the comments with the code you want displayed on either page 1 or beyond)

<?php if ( !$paged < 2 ) {
  //display code for only page 2 or higher
} else {
  //display page 1 code
} ?>

8. Replace the_excerpt without a Plugin

Instead of using the the_excerpt template tag, the_content_rss. It allows for a little more flexibility, without the need of a plugin (no matter how great it is). This won’t do everything that gszub’s excerpt reloaded plugin does, but it will for someone that just wants a longer or shorter default excerpt.

<?php the_content_rss('', TRUE, '', 55); ?>

9. Built in Email Obfuscator

Hate when spam bots get a hold of your email? Use this template tag to help obfuscate it.

<?php echo antispambot(get_the_author_email()); ?>

10. Dedicated Options Page within the Dashboard

This is not a theme trick, but I found it very interesting none-the-less. This is a hidden admin page that displays the whole wp_options database table. Go to your dashboard and change the URL to match this:

../wp-admin/options.php

For web designers or other businesses alike, setting up a quality portfolio is essential. This tutorial will show you how you can use WordPress’s Link Manager to create and display your portfolio. This will allow you to use WordPress to it’s fullest extent, without the need of extra plugins or any hacked code.

Step 1. Supplying the Data

Lets start off by populating our Links manager with some data. In the screenshot below you can see the fields that I am using:

• Name – Client Name
• Web Address – To link back to. This can either be an internal posting explaining the project in detail or the actual client website (which is what I use).
• Description – For title and alt attributes.
• Categories – Skills that were used in creating the project.
• Advanced: Image Address – Link to the screenshot of your project
• Advanced: Notes – Description of the project

Optional fields include “Target” where you can force your links to open into a new browser window and “Keep this link private.” This is how you can set up a portfolio entry but not have it shown in the display on the site. This could be helpful for when you have a project finished, but you can’t show it until it’s live.

When you are finished adding all your portfolio entries, you can go to Your WP Dashboard > Manage > Links to see the full list.

Step 2. Display Your Portfolio

WordPress has two different ways to display it’s “bookmarks” which we are now using as portfolio entries. They are wp_list_bookmarks and get_bookmarks

We will use the get_bookmarks template tag because it allows us to manipulate how our “bookmarks” look. The only caveat is that this template tag returns an array – which we will need to use some PHP code to parse though it. To see the data that get_bookmarks outputs, I quickly added this little snippet to my code:

$arr_portfolio = get_bookmarks();
print_r ($arr_portfolio);

The output from the print_r on get_bookmarks shows how the array is structured.

From that file, we can decipher enough to get the rest of the data echo’d out into an unordered list. The only thing that took a little tweaking was the fact that you have to find your own categories by running SQL on the wp_term_relationships and wp_terms tables in order to derive the category names by their id and the link’s id.

<?php
$arr_portfolio = get_bookmarks();
//print_r ($arr_portfolio);
echo "<ul>";
foreach ($arr_portfolio as $site) {

   echo "<li>";
   echo "<h3>". $site->link_name ."</h3>";
   echo "<a href=\"". $site->link_url ."\" title=\"". $site->link_description ."\">";
   echo "<img src=\"". $site->link_image ."\" /></a>";
   echo "<p>". $site->link_notes ."</p>";

   $cats = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM wp_term_relationships, wp_terms WHERE wp_term_relationships.object_id = $site->link_id AND wp_terms.term_id = wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id");
   echo "<p>Skills Used: ";
   foreach ($cats as $cat) {
   	echo $cat->name .", ";
   }

   echo "</p></li>";
}
echo "</ul>";
?>	

The great thing is that this code doesn’t need to be placed within the_Loop. It will work great within it’s own template or on the sidebar.

View the demo portfolio using this code.

Photo Credit: reportergimmi

A few months ago I wrote an article on how to create a popular posts list, and in the example I used a category called ‘Popular’ to determine what was shown within the list. This approach is great for those that remember to periodically update their list by adding new posts to that category, but I wanted a way for this to be done automatically.

Auto Popular List based on Number of Comments

In this example I check the number of comments, and if they are greater than or equal to 10 (see the 8th line of the code below) then I display the post. This means that this Loop will show any post that has 10 or more comments. The $popular->query('showposts=50'); at the top of the script is so that this Loop will run the ‘number of comments’ check for each of your 50 latest posts.

The trick here will be finding the happy medium between those two variables. If you have the ‘number of comments’ variable set to low, you could get too many posts in your list that meet the criteria. But on the other hand, if you have the ‘showposts’ variable set too low then there may not be enough posts that end up hitting on the ‘number of comments’. A balance needs to be met here. If it was me, I would shoot to have approximately 3 to 5 posts show up in my list. Of course, since this is a dynamically created, the number of posts shown number can change at any given time.

<h3>Popular Articles</h3>
<ul class="postlist">
<?php
$popular = new WP_Query();
$popular->query('showposts=50');
while ($popular->have_posts()) : $popular->the_post();
    $total = get_comments_number();
    if ($total >= 10) { ?>
        <li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a> <span>Score: <?php echo $total; ?></span></li>
    <?php }; ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>

Auto Popular List based on Comments & Del.icio.us Bookmarks

This example is exactly the same except for on the $total line I use my own WP-SocialCount plugin to pull in the amount of Del.ico.us bookmarks that the post has. I feel this gives us a more complete idea of whether or not a post is really “popular” — rather than solely relying on it’s number of comments.

<h3>Popular Articles</h3>
<ul class="postlist">
<?php
$popular = new WP_Query();
$popular->query('showposts=50');
while ($popular->have_posts()) : $popular->the_post();
    $total = (get_comments_number() +  wpsocialcount('delicious', 'count', get_permalink()));
    if ($total >= 10) { ?>
        <li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a> <span>Score: <?php echo $total; ?></span></li>
    <?php }; ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>

Digg too…

If your posts regularly show up on Digg as well, then you can use the same plugin and replace the $total line (line 7) in the above example with this:

$total = (get_comments_number() +  wpsocialcount('delicious', 'count', get_permalink()) +  wpsocialcount('digg', 'diggs', get_permalink()));

Scoring Methods

The default scoring will be all that all ‘hits’ are of equal strength:
Total Score = Comments + Del.icio.us Bookmarks + Diggs

Alternatively, if you feel that a Digg or Bookmark is twice as important as a regular old comment, then you could change the $total line to reflect this.

$total = (get_comments_number() + 2*(wpsocialcount('delicious', 'count', get_permalink()) + wpsocialcount('digg', 'diggs', get_permalink()))); ]]> http://www.cagintranet.com/archive/generating-an-automatic-popular-post-list-via-delicious-or-digg-in-wordpress/feed/ 2 http://www.cagintranet.com/archive/the-definitive-guide-on-wordpress-syntax-highligher-plugins/ http://www.cagintranet.com/archive/the-definitive-guide-on-wordpress-syntax-highligher-plugins/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 01:22:13 +0000 Chris Cagle http://www.cagintranet.com/?p=129 These are reviews based on my own evaluations of the plugins. I downloaded, installed and tested each one within a default Kubrick theme installation on WordPress 2.6. I tried to make this a complete list via the Extend Plugin Directory. I used a snippet of code from the recent post Creating a Simple Online Application [...]]]> These are reviews based on my own evaluations of the plugins. I downloaded, installed and tested each one within a default Kubrick theme installation on WordPress 2.6.

• I tried to make this a complete list via the Extend Plugin Directory.
• I used a snippet of code from the recent post Creating a Simple Online Application using the Flickr API.
• The screenshots are taken from a Firefox 3 browser. I did not test these plugins on any other browsers (IE or Safari).
• I removed all inherent <code> and <pre> CSS styling from the Kubrick theme for this test except for (in order to try to make all the font sizes the same):

  code, pre {font-size:12px !important;}

8. Code Colorer

Download | Author: Dmytro Shteflyuk
Coloring: #8 of 8
Ease of Install/Use: #8 of 8
Line Numbers: Optional
PRE or CODE: CODE or [cc][/cc]
Other Options: Optional links to code keyword linking, Optional CSS changes though a plugin page
Code Format: It can only handle full code.

Review: Maybe the optional CSS would make a difference here, but the coloring is just horrible, and I can’t figure out why the source code is not being highlighted. The setup instructions require you to rename a CSS file (why?) — I did that and I still can’t get this to highlight correctly.

7. Highlight Source Pro

Download | Author: Christian Knoflach
Coloring: #7 of 8
Ease of Install/Use: #5 of 8
Line Numbers: Optional
PRE or CODE: PRE
Other Options: Headlines within the code
Code Format: It can handle either already-escaped or full code.

Review: The syntax highlighting is very similar to the other plugins that also use GeSHi, but the gray on dark gray background doesn’t look right to me. I am sure you can change it by playing with CSS, but it just doesn’t look very appealing right out of the box.

6. Snippet Highlight

Download | Author: Roland Rust
Coloring: #5 of 8
Ease of Install/Use: #3 of 8
Line Numbers: Yes
PRE or CODE: PRE
Code Format: It can only handle already-escaped code.

Review: Very straightforward. It’s only downfall is the ugly olive green line numbering and the fact that it forces you to manually escape your code.

5. WP-Syntax

Download | Author: Ryan McGeary
Coloring: #4 of 8
Ease of Install/Use: #2 of 8 (tied)
Line Numbers: Optional
PRE or CODE: PRE
Code Format: It can handle only full code.

Review: WP-Syntax has good coloring and I do like how the line number coloring is distinctly different from the rest of the code. Other than that, it is pretty much a no-frills highlighter (which isn’t a bad thing).

4. WP-Codebox

Download | Author: Eric Wang

Coloring: #3 of 8
Ease of Install/Use: #2 of 8 (tied)
Line Numbers: Optional
PRE or CODE: PRE
Other Options: Optional collapsible code area, Optional text download of code
Code Format: It can only handle full code.

Review: This example looks to be exactly like WP-Syntax except that this one give you the option to download the code. Although a “copy to clipboard” option would have been better, I feel this is still a step up from WP-Syntax.

3. Google Syntax Highlighter for WordPress

Download | Author: Peter Ryan
Coloring: #4 of 8
Ease of Install/Use: #7 of 8
Line Numbers: Optional
PRE or CODE: PRE
Other Options: Many
Code Format: It can only handle already-escaped code.

Review: This plugin is a little confusing at first with all it’s available options, but I think once you find a combination that is a right fit for your uses, it will be just as easy as any other plugin out there.

2. WP-Chili

Download | Author: Andrea Ercolino
Coloring: #1 of 8
Ease of Install/Use: #6 of 8
Line Numbers: Not Available
PRE or CODE: Requires both to work properly
Code Format: It can only handle already-escaped code.

Review: This example may look very plain because it requires you to provide your own CSS for the <code> and <pre> for styling. This makes it very customizable to the do-it-yourselfer, but maybe not so appealing for those looking for something to work and look great easily right out of the box. Chili does however have the best code highlighting hands-down. Since it doesn’t use GeSHi like many of the other plugins, it’s coloring is distinctly unique.

Disclaimer: This is the plugin I settled on, and I am happy with my choice thus far. Since I need to escape my code before using it, I use Elliot Swan’s great little app Postable.

1. Syntax Highlighter Plus

Download | Author: Fred Wu (along with ma.tt, Viper007Bond and mdawaffe)
Coloring: #2 of 8
Ease of Install/Use: #1 of 8 (tied)
Line Numbers: Yes
PRE or CODE: Neither. It uses [sourcecode][/sourcecode]
Other Options: Print, Copy to clipboard, View as plain text
Code Format: It can handle either already-escaped or full code.

Review: Syntax Highlighter Plus looks fantastic right out of the box. There were no setup steps required, and the extra features such as copy to clipboard really make this plugin stand out. The alternating line colors are a big plus — and unique to this list. The code highlighting, which uses Alex Gorbatchev’s Google Syntax Highlighter, looks the same as most of the plugins here.

This plugin is an obvious upgrade from the original great SyntaxHighlighter. It allows for un-escaped code and removes the leading zeros from the line numbers (eg 1. instead of 01.)

Bonus: WP-Chili CSS

Since I decided to use WP-Chili as my syntax highlighter of choice, I figured I would also share with you the CSS I perfected to make it look the way I do… Just in case anyone wanted to know.

.post pre {
	margin:0 0 20px 0;
	}
.post code {
	border:1px solid #ececec;
	display:block;
	padding:10px;
	font-family: Consolas, Monaco, "Courier New", Courier, monospace;
	font-size: 12px;
	background:#f9f9f9;
	color:#000;
	overflow: auto;
	overflow-y: hidden;
	white-space:nowrap;
	*padding:10px 10px 20px 10px; /* IE Hack-Fix */
	}

Photo Credit: tshein

I have done many projects over the last year or so that use WordPress as the back end but not for the typical blog setup. Most websites setup like this (an example is my setup here) will feature the same design and layout thought the whole site, but the homepage will be a static page with a blog component that is seemingly just another part of the site.

WordPress gives us the ability to use it as a CMS to make a traditional website with a blog, all easily editable, and extremely easy to manage.

In this tutorial I will show you how to configure a WordPress installation for just such a setup. None of this is particularly groundbreaking, but I thought a step-by-step tutorial on how to do it could possibly help someone out. I also offer some plugins that help streamline the WP admin interface for yourself or maybe your web-unsavvy client.

1. The Install

There is nothing new here – you still do the famous 5 minute install. The only thing I do slightly different is to put all the WordPress files into their own directory on the hosting server. After I do that, I then move the .htaccess and the modified index.php files from the WordPress directory into the root of your hosting server.

This step is not necessary, but being the neat-freak that I am, I have made this a standard on all my WordPress installs.

2. Creating the Theme Templates

Many times the traditional website has a homepage with a slightly different layout as the rest of the site. The rest of the static portion (pages) of site will most likely use the single.php and page.php template files, but to make the homepage unique, we need to create a new homepage.php template. The only thing other than your creativity required here is a php comment at the top of it like this:

<?php
/*
Template Name: CMS Homepage
*/
?>

That was the homepage. But now what about the blog section of the site?

For this, we use the standard index.php template file. This file should look like any other index.php template file out there.

3. Creating the Pages

Next up is the page creation. Head on over to Write > Pages within your WordPress administration panel and create two new pages. Title one of the new pages FRONTPAGE and the other POSTSPAGE.

Depending on whether your homepage.php template warrants it or not, you may or may not need to add text to the page. Many times, these FRONTPAGE and POSTPAGE pages are just dummy placeholders and require no text or descriptive title.

When creating the FRONTPAGE page, scroll down to the bottom and open the widget for “Page Template.” Within there, you should see the new template we just created called CMS Homepage. Choose CMS Homepage and save.

4. Setting the Options

The final step is to change the “Front page displays” option within your Settings > Reading administration page. Choose the respective pages from the drop-down list that match what you are trying to accomplish.

Voila! You now have a static website setup with a blog. Like I said before, this isn’t ground breaking, but it could be useful for those that are just starting out setting up WordPress.

Plugins that Help Transform WordPress into a Basic CMS for your Clients

Once the setup is complete, these plugins can help streamline the interface even more. Let me know if there are any more out there that may help that I am missing.

• Simple CMS – The Simple CMS WordPress plugin converts the WordPress blog tool into a basic CMS (Content Management System). Simple CMS removes all of the complicated blogging functionality which is not needed for a basic static website. This allows for easier use of the admin panel by non web designers.

• Dashboard Editor – the Dashboard is great souce of information sometimes, but for some clients we design for, it may not be the best use of space. Use this plugin to change that.

• IWG Hide Dashboard – If you don’t want to use the Dashboard at all, this plugin gives you the possibility to hide the Dashboard for selected users. It requires the installation of the popular Role Manager Plugin.

• WordPress Admin Themes – Starting with WordPress 2.5, you had the ability to install a theme for your admin backend. Some popular options are Fluency and Leopard

• FreshPost – A plugin that pushes WordPress towards a practical content management solution. It allows you to create multiple custom write panels, add custom fields and much more.

• Article Templates – If your posts are kind of unique in layout, and are a hassle to retype each time, consider this plugin. I use it, and I don’t know how I ever ran PghDesigners.com without it.

A couple months ago I wrote up a tutorial on how to use WordPress as a Membership Directory. The problem was that the tutorial was using WordPress 2.3 and a week later version 2.5 came out. After letting WordPress, to advance to version 2.5.1, I decided to upgrade the PghDesigners.com website.

To be honest, I was really dreading doing this upgrade.

To my pleasure, after speaking with the very helpful Mike Houghton of Refresh Tallahassee (a WP Membership Site), I found that he had little-to-no problems with following my tutorial on a WordPress 2.5.1 setup. This was great news for me, but he built it from the beginning on the new version of WP – and I would be upgrading. I knew things shouldn’t be that much different, but I just didn’t know what to expect.

Upgrading the Plugins

So after doing all the typical database backups, I started the process. I first uploaded all the new versions of the plugins that I had been using:

• Askimet – For spam filtering
• Article Templates – To pre-configure my “New Member” post templates
• GeneralStats – To show the number of members
• Improved Include Page – To insert the ads
• IWG Hide Dashboard – Removed
• Mail From – Changing a WP option
• Role Manager – To specify which a Subscriber or a Designer could do within the dashboard
• WP-DBManager – To make database backups
• WP User Manager – The heart of the site

Upgrading the WordPress Core Files

Then after uploading the new WordPress files, I upgraded the database, and then started testing things. Everything looked good expect for the fact that anyone not with the Administrator Role couldn’t sign in. Minor inconvenience, huh?

The Problem & The Fix

After a lot of testing back and forth, I found that it was the Hide Dashboard and Role Manager plugins causing the problem. When these plugins were activated, users couldn’t log in. When they were deactivated, things were back to normal.

The work around that I found was that after ditching the Hide Dashboard plugin all together, I could activate Role Manager only when I needed to make changes to the Roles. Much of this plugin’s data is still in use even after you disable the plugin – so it worked out great. I was able to take advantage of this plugin’s features, even if I had it disabled (which I needed to do – my members needed to be able to sign in).