And example of the old URL that was previously working is: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/captain_nick.xml.

The URL that a Google around found to work now was: http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.xml?include_entities=true&include_rts=true&screen_name=captain_nick

I updated my widget and now it seems to work fine. But I though I’d pass on the widget that I’ve created in case it can save other people some time adding latest Tweets from Twitter into their WordPress theme as a widget.

First you will need to copy the code below and paste it into your functions.php file in the root of your theme.

include TEMPLATEPATH . '/functions/widget-twitter.php'; // include the twitter sidget

/*
Gets last x Twitter stauses for a given user and formats in a UL/LI
*/
function getLastXTwitterStatus($userid,$x){

	$url = "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.xml?include_entities=true&include_rts=true&screen_name=".$userid."&count=".$x;

	$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);
	echo '<ul class="tweets">';
	foreach($xml->status as $status){
		$text = frog_twitterify( $status->text );
		echo '<li>'.utf8_decode($text).'</li>';
	}
	echo '</ul>';
}

/*
Formats a twitter post nicely
*/
function frog_twitterify($ret) {
	$ret = preg_replace("#(^|[n ])([w]+?://[w]+[^ "nrt< ]*)#", "1<a href="2" target="_blank">2</a>", $ret);
	$ret = preg_replace("#(^|[n ])((www|ftp).[^ "tnr< ]*)#", "1<a href="http://2" target="_blank">2</a>", $ret);
	$ret = preg_replace("/@(w+)/", "<a href="http://www.twitter.com/1" target="_blank">@1</a>", $ret);
	$ret = preg_replace("/#(w+)/", "<a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=1" target="_blank">#1</a>", $ret);
	return $ret;
}

Basically the ‘getLastXTwitterStatus()’ function is passed two variables the Twitter user ID and the number of Tweets to show. It then uses the Twitter API to collect those and display them in a UL > LI format.

The ‘frog_twitterify()’ function is used by the ’getLastXTwitterStatus()’ function to format the Tweets in a nice way…make it all pretty.

Make sure the include line at the top is there also and the path is correct for the next step…

Next you will need to create a new file called widget-twitter.php and place it in a folder named ‘functions’ in the root of your theme. Copy the code below and paste it into your new file. This is used to create a widget that you can add to a sidebar.

<?php

/*
Plugin Name: Twitter Widget
Plugin URI: http://nick.boldison.com/wordpress/wordpress-a-twitter-widget-that-works/
Description: A widget to add your last Tweets to your sidebar.
Author: Nick Boldison
Version: 1
Author URI: http://nick.boldison.com
*/

class TwitterWidget extends WP_Widget {
    
	/** constructor */
    function TwitterWidget() {
		$options = array( 'description' => __('A widget to add your last Tweets to your sidebar.') );
		parent::WP_Widget(false, $name = 'Twitter Widget', $options);
    }

    /** @see WP_Widget::widget */
    function widget($args, $instance) {
        extract( $args );
        $title = apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title']);
		$twitter_id = apply_filters('widget_user', $instance['user']);
		$count = apply_filters('widget_count', $instance['count']);
		?>
		<?php echo $before_widget; ?>
		<?php echo $before_title; ?><?php echo $title; ?><?php echo $after_title; ?>
		<?php
		// get last x tweets
		getLastXTwitterStatus($twitter_id,$count);
		?>
		<p>Follow <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/<?php echo $twitter_id;?>" target="_blank">@<?php echo $twitter_id;?></a></p>
		<?php echo $after_widget; ?>
        <?php
    }

    /** @see WP_Widget::update */
    function update($new_instance, $old_instance) {
		$instance = $old_instance;
		$instance['title'] = strip_tags($new_instance['title']);
		$instance['user'] = strip_tags($new_instance['user']);
		$instance['count'] = strip_tags($new_instance['count']);
        return $instance;
    }

    /** @see WP_Widget::form */
    function form($instance) {
        $title = esc_attr($instance['title']);
		$user = esc_attr($instance['user']);
		$count = esc_attr($instance['count']);
        ?>
        <p>
        	<label for="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('title'); ?>"><?php _e('Title:'); ?></label> 
        	<input class="widefat" id="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('title'); ?>" name="<?php echo $this->get_field_name('title'); ?>" type="text" value="<?php echo $title; ?>" />
        </p>
		<p>
        	<label for="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('user'); ?>"><?php _e('Twitter User:'); ?></label> 
        	<input class="widefat" id="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('user'); ?>" name="<?php echo $this->get_field_name('user'); ?>" type="text" value="<?php echo $user; ?>" />
        </p>
		<p>
        	<label for="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('count'); ?>"><?php _e('Count:'); ?></label> 
        	<input class="widefat" id="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('count'); ?>" name="<?php echo $this->get_field_name('count'); ?>" type="text" value="<?php echo $count; ?>" />
        </p>
        <?php
	}
}
// register TwitterWidget widget
add_action('widgets_init', create_function('', 'return register_widget("TwitterWidget");'));
?>

If you go to Appearance -> Widgets now in your admin, the Twitter Widget should be there for you to drag onto a sidebar. If you do so, it will present 3 options: Title, User and Count. Here you should add a title of your choosing, your Twitter username and the number of Tweets to display.

Save and it should now pull Tweets into your sidebar.

The final step is to style the widget up using CSS in your styles.css file. AS it’s potentially different for each theme, you can do this as you wish. Otherwise it’ll pull in your default widget UL > LI styles.

Hope that helps anyway!

The post WordPress: A Twitter widget that works appeared first on nick boldison.

Using the get_bloginfo(‘description’); function will pull that out, but it turns any HTML tags into HTML entities. A quick fix for that problem is to run it through a PHP function as well when you call it and the HTML tags will be used.

Here is how to do that:

<?php echo html_entity_decode(get_bloginfo('description')); ?>

The post WordPress – How to get the blog description in HTML format appeared first on nick boldison.

// search only posts
global $wp_query;
$args = array_merge( $wp_query->query, array( 'post_type' => 'post' ) );
query_posts( $args ); 

Further to that you can add any arguments from the standard WP_Query function to there to make the search more custom

The post WordPress : How to have query search posts only appeared first on nick boldison.

The post WordPress : TinyMCE text editor shortcuts appeared first on nick boldison.

Read more about it here: http://www.niklasroy.com/project/88/my-little-piece-of-privacy

The post Robotic curtain appeared first on nick boldison.

In the example below, I have used this method and formatted the tweets into a list. It can then be styled how you like from there.

The Javascript

function twitterCallback2(twitters) {
  var statusHTML = [];
  for (var i=0; i<twitters.length; i++){
    var username = twitters[i].user.screen_name;
    var status = twitters[i].text.replace(/((https?|s?ftp|ssh)://[^"s<>]*[^.,;'">:s<>)]!])/g, function(url) {
      return '<a href="'+url+'">'+url+'</a>';
    }).replace(/B@([_a-z0-9]+)/ig, function(reply) {
      return  reply.charAt(0)+'<a href="http://twitter.com/'+reply.substring(1)+'">'+reply.substring(1)+'</a>';
    });
    statusHTML.push('<li><span>'+status+'</span> <a style="font-size:85%" href="http://twitter.com/'+username+'/statuses/'+twitters[i].id_str+'">' + relative_time(twitters[i].created_at)+'</a></li>');
  }
  jQuery('.twitter_update_list').html(statusHTML.join(''));
}

function relative_time(time_value) {
  var values = time_value.split(" ");
  time_value = values[1] + " " + values[2] + ", " + values[5] + " " + values[3];
  var parsed_date = Date.parse(time_value);
  var relative_to = (arguments.length > 1) ? arguments[1] : new Date();
  var delta = parseInt((relative_to.getTime() - parsed_date) / 1000);
  delta = delta + (relative_to.getTimezoneOffset() * 60);

  if (delta < 60) {
    return 'less than a minute ago';
  } else if(delta < 120) {
    return 'about a minute ago';
  } else if(delta < (60*60)) {
    return (parseInt(delta / 60)).toString() + ' minutes ago';
  } else if(delta < (120*60)) {
    return 'about an hour ago';
  } else if(delta < (24*60*60)) {
    return 'about ' + (parseInt(delta / 3600)).toString() + ' hours ago';
  } else if(delta < (48*60*60)) {
    return '1 day ago';
  } else {
    return (parseInt(delta / 86400)).toString() + ' days ago';
  }
}

The twitterCallback2() function formats the Tweets nicely for you and uses the relative_time() function to get the time it was created and display that.

The HTML

Below is the HTML you should use to display the Tweets. If you want more than 1, simply change the value of ‘count’ so it is greater.

<ul class="twitter_update_list">
	<li>Tweets will replace this...</li>
</ul>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/captain_nick.json?callback=twitterCallback2&amp;count=2"></script>
<p>Follow <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/captain_nick" target="_blank">@captain_nick</a></p>

The post Get your latest Tweet using the JSON timeline appeared first on nick boldison.

New home page

Create a page using a text editor and name it something like main.php. This will be the new home page.
Below is the general code you would add when creating a home page that isn’t a list of blog posts. essentially, it’s just a replica of the code used when creating a custom page template.

<?php
/**
 * Template Name: Home
 *
 * @package WordPress
 * @subpackage Theme Name
 */

get_header(); ?>

<?php if ( have_posts() ) while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
		
		<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>

                <?php if(has_post_thumbnail()){ ?>
			<?php the_post_thumbnail('home'); ?>
		<?php } ?>
        
		<div id="content">
		
			<?php the_content(); ?>
		
		</div>
		
<?php endwhile; // end of the loop. ?>
		
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Make sure that the ‘Template Name: Home’ is at the top of the file as WordPress will read this when checking for page templates. Once done, upload it to the theme folder on you site and in the admin, create a page called something like ‘Home’. In the right column, you should see a box named ‘Page Attributes’. Select the’Home’ template and save the page.

Blog home page

We don’t need to create a custom php file for the blog page as we will just be using the standard index.php as that’s what it’s there for! All we need to do is create a page in the WordPress admin and name it something like ‘Blog’. Just whatever you want the slug to be really for the blog list page. Don’t select a template for this page, just leave it as default.

Setting it all up…

All that needs to be done now is to set up the theme so that the home page and blog page do what you want them to. Go to Settings -> Reading in your WordPress admin.
For the option ‘Front end display’, check ‘A static page (select below)’ . Now for the ‘Front page’ dropdown, select ‘Home’ or whetever you named the home page and ‘Blog’ for the ‘Posts page’ dropdown.

Now if you go to the home page of your theme, it should display the home page we just created. Obviously you can add anything to that main.php to make it as creative as you like. Just add the blog link in to get to that and it will be found at the URL you set it to when adding the ‘Blog’ page in the admin.

Here is an exmaple of a site I did this with recently that has a cusotm home page and the blog page linked at the top: http://dinosaurpr.co.uk/

The post WordPress : The proper way to create a home page template that isn’t the standard list of blog articles appeared first on nick boldison.

1. The Widget

Firstly, you need to create the function for the actual widget. The function here uses a Twitter Widget to display the latest tweets from your account. You can change certain variables in here as you wish, such as the background colour and the text colour.

<?php

function twitter_widget()
{
    $settings = get_option("widget_twitter");

    $twitter_id = $settings['twitter_id'];
    $twitter_width = $settings['twitter_width'];
    $twitter_height = $settings['twitter_height'];

    echo "<div class="widget">
    <h1 class="side_nav_title">Follow us on Twitter</h1>
	<script src="http://widgets.twimg.com/j/2/widget.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript">
	new TWTR.Widget({
	version: 2,
	type: 'profile',
	rpp: 3,
	interval: 6000,
	width: ".$twitter_width.",
	height: ".$twitter_height.",
	theme: {
	shell: {
	background: '#F3F3F3',
	color: '#232323'
	},
	tweets: {
	background: '#F3F3F3',
	color: '#232323',
	links: '#f9a424'
	}
	},
	features: {
	scrollbar: false,
	loop: false,
	live: false,
	hashtags: true,
	timestamp: true,
	avatars: false,
	behavior: 'all'
	}
	}).render().setUser('".$twitter_id."').start();
	</script>
	</div>";
}

?>

2. The Twitter Widget admin

Next, we create the admin for the widget; this is what appears once we drag the widget into a sidebar and WordPress gives us a list of options for it.
Here we are creating options for the Twitter username, width and height of the box. You could also add in the colours for the background and text if you wish, just add in extra ones like in the example below.

<?php

function twitter_widget_admin() {

	$settings = get_option("widget_twitter");
	
	// update options
	if (isset($_POST['update_twitter'])) {
	
		$settings['twitter_id'] = strip_tags(stripslashes($_POST['twitter_id']));
		$settings['twitter_width'] = strip_tags(stripslashes($_POST['twitter_width']));
		$settings['twitter_height'] = strip_tags(stripslashes($_POST['twitter_height']));
		
		update_option("widget_twitter",$settings);
	}

	echo '<p>
	<label for="twitter_id">Twitter Name:
	<input id="twitter_id" name="twitter_id" type="text" class="widefat" value="'.$settings['twitter_id'].'" /></label></p>';
	echo '<p>
	<label for="twitter_width">Width:
	<input id="twitter_width" name="twitter_width" type="text" class="widefat" value="'.$settings['twitter_width'].'" /></label></p>';
	echo '<p>
	<label for="twitter_height">Height:
	<input id="twitter_height" name="twitter_height" type="text" class="widefat" value="'.$settings['twitter_height'].'" /></label></p>';
	echo '<input type="hidden" id="update_twitter" name="update_twitter" value="1" />';

}

?>

3. Registering the Widget

Now all that is left to do is to register the widget this is done with the following 2 lines of code.

<?php

register_sidebar_widget('Twitter Widget', 'twitter_widget');
register_widget_control('Twitter Widget', 'twitter_widget_admin');

?>

4. Using the Widget

Now to use this widget and add it to one of your sidebar menus go to Appearance -> Widgets in your WordPress admin and it will be available to add to your sidebars with the title ‘Twitter Widget’. Once you drag it to your sidebar, it will give the options which you can manage. Simply add your Twitter username, the width it should be and the height the box should be. Now the widget should appear on the front end of your site in the sidebar you put it in.

5. Full code

Below is the full code for creating the Twitter Widget. Simply add it to your functions.php file in your theme folder.

<?php

function twitter_widget()
{
    $settings = get_option("widget_twitter");

    $twitter_id = $settings['twitter_id'];
    $twitter_width = $settings['twitter_width'];
    $twitter_height = $settings['twitter_height'];

    echo "<div class="widget">
    <h1 class="side_nav_title">Follow us on Twitter</h1>
	<script src="http://widgets.twimg.com/j/2/widget.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript">
	new TWTR.Widget({
	version: 2,
	type: 'profile',
	rpp: 3,
	interval: 6000,
	width: ".$twitter_width.",
	height: ".$twitter_height.",
	theme: {
	shell: {
	background: '#F3F3F3',
	color: '#232323'
	},
	tweets: {
	background: '#F3F3F3',
	color: '#232323',
	links: '#f9a424'
	}
	},
	features: {
	scrollbar: false,
	loop: false,
	live: false,
	hashtags: true,
	timestamp: true,
	avatars: false,
	behavior: 'all'
	}
	}).render().setUser('".$twitter_id."').start();
	</script>
	</div>";
}

function twitter_widget_admin() {

	$settings = get_option("widget_twitter");
	
	// update options
	if (isset($_POST['update_twitter'])) {
	
		$settings['twitter_id'] = strip_tags(stripslashes($_POST['twitter_id']));
		$settings['twitter_width'] = strip_tags(stripslashes($_POST['twitter_width']));
		$settings['twitter_height'] = strip_tags(stripslashes($_POST['twitter_height']));
		
		update_option("widget_twitter",$settings);
	}

	echo '<p>
	<label for="twitter_id">Twitter Name:
	<input id="twitter_id" name="twitter_id" type="text" class="widefat" value="'.$settings['twitter_id'].'" /></label></p>';
	echo '<p>
	<label for="twitter_width">Width:
	<input id="twitter_width" name="twitter_width" type="text" class="widefat" value="'.$settings['twitter_width'].'" /></label></p>';
	echo '<p>
	<label for="twitter_height">Height:
	<input id="twitter_height" name="twitter_height" type="text" class="widefat" value="'.$settings['twitter_height'].'" /></label></p>';
	echo '<input type="hidden" id="update_twitter" name="update_twitter" value="1" />';

}

register_sidebar_widget('Twitter Widget', 'twitter_widget');
register_widget_control('Twitter Widget', 'twitter_widget_admin');

?>

Depending upon your styling and the CSS you use on your site, it should create a widget in your sidebar like this.

The post WordPress : Creating a Twitter Widget appeared first on nick boldison.

Additionally if the redirect is a 301, you can add a status to the wp_redirect() function in the following way.

The default value if left empty is 302.

The post WordPress : Redirecting to a random page appeared first on nick boldison.

Get slug of top parent

Firstly, you need to add the function below called getTopParentPostName(). This function gets the slug of the top parent of the subpage we are on. We need this so that we can then get the ID of the

Get top parent’s ID

Next we need to use the function get_ID_by_slug() to get the ID of the top parent we just found. This is so we can use the list in the array of arguments in the wp_list_pages() function in WordPress.

Displaying the child pages

Finally we use create the array of arguments we want so we can compile the menu of subpages. This is done using the wp_list_pages() function and passing an array of arguments to it.

The arguments I have used do the following things:

‘echo’ => 1 – this allows the function to echo the menu out once we call it.
‘title_li’ => ” - this just removes the title of the menu…I don’t usually fel the need to display this, that’s all.
‘child_of’ => get_ID_by_slug(getTopParentPostName($post->ID)) – this uses the post ID of the page we are on to then get the top parent slug, then the ID of that top parent. This ID is then used to get all the children of that ID for displaying in the menu.
‘sort_column’ => ‘menu_order, post_title’ - this is just a way to order the items in the menu. It does it by the order you gave them when adding them and then by title alphabetically.

Full Whammy…

So the full code you will need to add to pull out the child pages from a post ID is:

The post WordPress : Creating a menu of subpages from post ID of a child page appeared first on nick boldison.