A few plugins and a hack on one of those plugins that keeps this blog running smoothly and looking so very awesome! Specifically, how to modify the Wordpress Popular Posts plugin to handle custom post types and plugs for the WP DBmanager plugin, the Revision Control plugin and the Redirection plugin.

While looking through ways to spice up my WordPress theme, I found this cool little trick to add icons to links based on what they link to. You’ve likely seem webpages that have little envelope icons next to the “mailto” links or little printer icons next to “print-friendly” links. Or even attachment icons. If you’ve wondered how to do that, and do it automatically, check out Poolie Studios’s solution. You can download and install a bunch of icons and the CSS to make them show up on your blog. Or …Continue

As regular readers might note, a far number of my posts recently have been about tweaking WordPress, even though the focus of this blog is on teaching ESL/EFL. I suppose at this point, I should admit that I am a bit of a WordPress geek and I enjoy tweaking my themes and playing with new WordPress functions, like Post Formats and Custom Post Types. I hope that people looking to customize their blog, who have the same questions and problems I have, will stumble on these posts and find them …Continue

A lot of blogs have toolbars at the bottoms of their posts and pages that let readers share stuff on Twitter or Facebook or whatever. These toolbars are often now built into themes or come from plugins. Personally I use Share This because it’s pretty compact. Most users probably won’t be interested in how to hand-code a sharing toolbar, but if you’re a theme developer, it might be useful. You can design your own buttons and keep it lightweight without javascript or other code,
If you are coding your own “Social …Continue

How to style posts by category so they display differently.

This is one in a series of posts I’ve been doing on how I changed around my WP blog. These are mainly up for my own benefit, so I remember what I did and why and where. But I thought someone somewhere might want to know what I did and how I did it to use on his or her own blog.
While custom post types are extremely useful and WordPress now allows for them, they do need a bit more integration to be perfect. I’ve talked about a few of …Continue

I just posted on Post Formats in WordPress 3.1, why I am so excited about it and what I’ve done to implement it on my site. I also expressed a wish that my tweets would automatically be assigned the post format status. I use the Twitter Tools plugin to turn my tweets into posts and I really hope that Post Formats are integrated into it in the next update.
But after a bit of doing, I’ve hacked it like this:
Add:
set_post_format($post_id , status); to line 517 of twitter-tools.php.
That is working fine for …Continue

Just a shout out to p Type Converter, which made converting my old posts and pages into custom post types very very easy.

How to change the middle category bar in the Wordpress theme Arthemia so it displays pages instead of categories.

Why use taxonomies for custom management systems on Wordpress, how I used taxonomies to organize my lesson plans and make them very searchable, and why tags and categories are good too.

How using custom post types can help teachers to manage and post their lesson plans more effectively. Basically my thoughts on how custom post types can help teachers and Edubloggers use Wordpress as a content management system.

How to add custom post type counts to your dashboard in Wordpress

This article talks about how I displayed custom post types on my Wordpress blog home page and how I made them format differently on the index page so that they stand out.

I’ve been working for a while on reorganizing information here on English Advantage to put the focus on the lesson plans. After looking over a lot of ideas on the web (Thank you WordPress forum people!) and playing around with a test blog, it looks the least disruptive way to mess with things will be to work within this installation bit by bit. I’m counting on my redirection plugin and WordPress’ native redirectioning to limit the number of 404 errors. However there will doubtless be some casualties.
The big thing I’m …Continue

UPDATE: This post has been getting some traffic from people looking for an answer to the redirection plug-in problem so I thought I’d put in the solution. The biggest problem most people have is that the redirection plugin redirects from the homepage/index page to the most recently created page. So if you don’t create a lot of pages, in WordPress you never notice this problem. And if you never go to your homepage, you might never notice it either.
There are two solutions, one temporary and one more permanent:
1) Temporary until …Continue