I got reinvigorated to look at my blog as a CMS system. While I don’t have a ton of free time to devote to the blog, I did at least look up a few themes and plugins. For the record, Listings from Woo Themes seems like the way to go if you want to create a bunch of different custom post types and especially if you have a lot of people contributing to your blog. It looks beautiful and it seems to make all those customizable fields wicked user-friendly. But …Continue

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

Found this cool little toy, Random Text Generator, which generates anywhere from 1 -5 paragraphs of random text. I originally was posting this as a tool for web-designers, in case you get bored of using the same old “Ipsum Loren”. But it occurred to me that if you’re making a template or coursebook of some kind, it could be useful.
And then I started to wonder if it might be usable in the ESL classroom. Could be a fun way to give kids something that it meaningless, and have them try …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.