I immediately thought to myself: “I need to know how to do that.” So I found out. Looks like Elemental is using some rather like Nathan Rice’s post template plugin which adds a simple dropdown to the post editor offering different post templates.

As themes and plugins start to merge more and more these days, this is yet another example of the merging that’s taking place – to integrate post templates into a theme is really easy:- download and unzip the plugin, open the php file and copy and paste into your functions.php file (at the very bottom, after closing php tag; you’ll want to tidy it up later one you’ve decided you’ll keep it). Next, you need to create the page template – create a duplicate of your single.php file but add the following to the very top of the file:

<?php
/*
Single Post Template: Template Name
Description: This part is optional, but helpful for describing the Post Template
*/
?>

Upload it and check out the post editor. With that, you’re done! You can then get styling to your heart’s content and create a really unique experience for each post you make to your blog.

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Single Post Templates Made Easy

1. Day 1: WordPress as a Tumblelog
2. Day 2: WordPress as a Review Site and Podcasting Site
3. Day 3: WordPress as a Social Network and Twitter clone

You should never say “oh, you can’t do that in WordPress”. Because you probably can. That’s the beauty of the platform – at face value, yes, it is a blogging platform, but be a bit creative and you’ve got yourself a full blown CMS.

WordPress as a review/podcasting site

Above is a picture of Nometet.com, a games reviews site which also has a sporadically posted podcast. Nometet uses a gallery theme to great effect – each post has its own image (set through a custom field) which gets auto resized to create a lovely gallery. But where the ‘review functionality’ really kicks in is with the star ratings for reviews plugin. Each review has a star rating – simple enough, but this star rating, along with other bits of data, is sortable through a rather nice jQuery table:

As for podcasting, look no further than the excellent podPress plugin. It offers you a ton of options for iTunes integration, includes a flash player and various other bits and bobs:

WordPress as a CMS

We’ve been building up to using WordPress as a CMS. With the plugins mentioned above, you can really easily use WordPress for any number of uses. However, using it on a client project as a CMS? Use custom fields to your advantage and you’ll be fine – as I’ve said before, custom fields are what turns WordPress into a CMS – you can use them to store all sorts of information. Here’s an example. I want to display the place where an article was written, and if I haven’t entered that I’ll just display the date. Using custom fields, that’s easy:

<?php
$Place = get_post_custom_values("Place");
if ( is_array($Place) ) { ?>
Plublished in: <?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "Place", true); ?>
<?php }	else { ?>
Published on <?php the_time('n/d/y'); ?>
<?php }	?>

Just create a custom field ‘Place’ and enter the place where the article was written and it’ll appear. If no custom field exists, then the date the post was published on gets displayed instead.

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WordPress as a Review Site and Podcasting Site: Advanced Uses of WordPress

1. Day 1: WordPress as a Tumblelog
2. Day 2: WordPress as a Review Site and Podcasting Site
3. Day 3: WordPress as a Social Network and Twitter clone

As I mentioned the other day,  the multi-user version of WordPress is called WordPressMU. Installing WPMU is something I’ve covered before here on WPShout, so check that out for details how to install it. With WordPress MU installed, there’s an excellent plugin you can add called BuddyPress. Again, I’ve written about how to install BuddyPress and get to grips with it before, so check out those tutuorials.

Whilst we’re not strictly using WordPress here, it’s close enough, and the possibilities for expansion are huge – just take a look at the Telegraph’s blogs – all run on WordPress MU.

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.7.1" /> 

Interestingly, though, they’re only running 2.7.1!

Making a Twitter clone with WordPress

Twitter clones are all the range these days, and, thankfully, there’s a WordPress theme that does the job of Twitter clone. Prologue, or P2, allows you to make your own Twitter clone on any WordPress install – just set up a new install of WordPress, click ‘Add New Themes’, do a search for P2, install it and activate it. And you’re done.

With P2 installed, the subscribe to comments plugin is pretty darn useful and you might want to restrict access to only those who are logged in.

Concluding

Just a (comparatively) quick post today and not a mention of custom fields! It would have been longer, but it occurred to me halfway through writing the post that I’d already written what I wanted to say! Join us tomorrow to find out how to use WordPress as a review site.

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WordPress as a Social Network and Twitter clone: Advanced Uses of WordPress

1. Day 1: WordPress as a Tumblelog
2. Day 2: WordPress as a Review Site and Podcasting Site
3. Day 3: WordPress as a Social Network and Twitter clone

You should never say “oh, you can’t do that in WordPress”. Because you probably can. That’s the beauty of the platform – at face value, yes, it is a blogging platform, but be a bit creative and you’ve got yourself a full blown CMS.

WordPress as an advanced blogging platform

The image above is a screen of BinaryMoon.co.uk, Ben Gillbanks’ blog. It’s powered by WordPress and look at it! Popular posts on a scrolling, jQuerified block, recent posts from various categories down the sidebar, with one post only having an excerpt. It’s a brilliant example of how you can use WordPress as an advanced blogging platform; a good knowledge of the template hierarchy, the basics of WordPress development and some design skills and you’re effectively there. Sites such as Ben’s prove just how versatile WordPress is as a blogging platform. Speaking of which…

WordPress as a Tumblelog

Microblogging is yet another thing that WordPress is brilliantly suited to. To prove the point, I’ve just very quickly created a Biblioteca child theme which acts as a Tumblelog: using custom fields and custom write panels I’ve been able to set up a homepage where the latest posts get displayed, in Tumblelog form. However, there’s a bonus – again, using  just custom fields, you can post links! It’s all very clever – the image above is the actual theme – I just took Biblioteca, created a child theme of it, got rid of the sidebar and made it single column and I was left with a decent Tumble-like design. Taking it further though, the first post – WPShout – is actually a link to WPShout. How? Using Biblioteca’s custom write meta box thingys (I still don’t know the technical term!) I can create a new post which contains the link and then under ‘title’ type in the link URL:

And to integrate that onto the homepage, I can use the following:

<?php
$Post = get_post_custom_values("Title");
if ( is_array($Post) ) { ?>
<h2 class="posttitle"><?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "Title", true); ?></h2>
<?php }	else { ?>
<h2 class="posttitle"><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title();?></a></h2>
<?php }	?>

The clever bit here is that for normal blog posts, just leave the field blank and the title gets displayed. It’s really easy to create something like this so go on! Do it!

Concluding

Throughout this week I’m going to bang on about custom fields, which I make no apology for; they’re a brilliant way of storing extra information about posts and you can’t ignore them! Join us on Wednesday to find out how to use WordPress as a social network with Twitter-like functionality.

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WordPress as a Tumblelog, CMS: Advanced Uses of WordPress

This is the third of WPShout’s themed weeks, this time with the foucs being on advanced uses of WordPress. Whilst WordPress is traditionally a blogging platform, that is certainly not the only use for it. Throughout this week we’re going to be looking at [ad], with the table of contents as follows:

1. Day 1: WordPress as a Tumblelog
2. Day 2: WordPress as a Review Site and Podcasting Site
3. Day 3: WordPress as a Social Network and Twitter clone

(if the links don’t work, that means coming soon!)

The introductory bit

WordPress is a great blogging platform. A simple, easy to use backend and scope for development with plugins and themes. WordPress is also a brilliant CMS. More and more, WordPress is being used for all kinds of different sites; the power of WordPress themes and frameworks, such as Biblioteca, make WordPress a really powerful CMS. You’ve just got the think outside the box. You want to make a site with a large featured post, explaining about a product, with links to buy the product and recent blog posts on the sidebar? Easy. In WordPress you could use widgets, create a category for the featured product and display the post with the info on it. You could use custom fields, harcode it with a custom page template… the options are endless. That’s the point I’m going to attempt to convey this week; you want to do literally anything? WordPress can do it for you.

Advanced Uses of WordPress’ Reading List

There are a couple of posts here on WPShout that you should read before delving into the series to give you a solid understanding of all the jargon I’m using and all the options available to you:

• "A Beginner Guide To WordPress Theme Development"
• 10 Awesome Things to do with WordPress’ Custom Fields
• Creating the perfect widget ready WordPress theme
• WordPress’ Template File Hierarchy Explained

With those posts read and understood, you’ll be in pretty good shape for the rest of the week’s post. Make sure you subscribe by RSS to catch the full week’s postings.

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Advanced Uses of WordPress

Advanced Uses of WordPress’ Reading List

• "A Beginner Guide To WordPress Theme Development"
• 10 Awesome Things to do with WordPress’ Custom Fields
• Creating the perfect widget ready WordPress theme
• WordPress’ Template File Hierarchy Explained

The introductory bit

WordPress is a great blogging platform. A simple, easy to use backend and scope for development with plugins and themes. WordPress is also a brilliant CMS. More and more, WordPress is being used for all kinds of different sites; the power of WordPress themes and frameworks, such as Biblioteca, make WordPress a really powerful CMS. You’ve just got the think outside the box. You want to make a site with a large featured post, explaining about a product, with links to buy the product and recent blog posts on the sidebar? Easy. In WordPress you could use widgets, create a category for the featured product and display the post with the info on it. You could use custom fields, harcode it with a custom page template… the options are endless. That’s the point I’m going to attempt to convey this week; you want to do literally anything? WordPress can do it for you.

So that’s all coming up next week. In the meantime, some slightly not so good news – for the past three months or so there have been three posts a week. As those of you who[f] will know, I’m working on something secret (for the moment at least) which is taking up a fair bit of time. For that reason, for the next month (and starting this time next week) or so there are only going to be two posts a week. I’ll enlighten everyone on this secret thing soon and you’ll also soon have a chance to voice opinions on the site. In the meantime, if you’re missing out on a tri-weekly bout of WordPress goodness, hop out of that RSS reader to WPShout and have a flick through the category archives. There’s something for all abilities there!

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Advanced Uses of WordPress – Coming Next Week

Shortcodes. What are they?

In a nutshell, shortcodes are shortcuts of writing phrases or words. Here’s an example. On WPShout whenever I write WPShout it always links to the homepage. That’s because I’ve set up a shortcode so all I have to do is type WPShout and WordPress outputs <a href="http://wpshout.com">WPShout</a>.

Another example – if I type WordPress themes WordPress outputs <a href="http://wpshout.com/category/themes/">WordPress Themes</a>. This allows me to quickly cross promote other sections of the site and link to other pages with minimal effort on my part. I do use them quite a lot – why not [f] or subscribe by RSS? All I’m typing is [f] and subscribe by RSS.

So how do I use them?

Now that you’re convinced shortcodes are the best thing since sliced bread, you’ll obviously want to know how to use these shortcodes. It’s really easy. First, you’ll need the functions.php file open. We’ll come back to that in a sec – first lets look at the WPShout example I showed earlier. In my functions.php file I’ve got the following:

function wpshout() {
    return '<a href="http://wpshout.com">WPShout</a>';
}
add_shortcode('wp', 'wpshout');

Which as we’ve seen outputs a link to WPShout.com. The important thing to learn from the example is the formatting: start off with a function, then return what we want to be displayed and then add the shortcode. The first needs to be what you want to shorten to and the second the same as the function. Another example – I want WordPress to output ‘cheese’ when I type Creating an Advanced Theme Options Page in WordPress. Using the same formatting as the last example, you’d have:

function cheese() {
    return 'cheese';
}
add_shortcode('c', 'cheese');

So when should I use them?

All the time actually. They save an awful lot of time for useful little things. Enjoy!

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Write Faster With WordPress’ Shortcodes

1. W3 Total Cache

Used here on WPShout:

Trusted by many popular blogs like: mashable.com, pearsonified.com, webdesignerdepot.com, freelanceswitch.com, briansolis.com, css3.info, tutsplus.com, yoast.com, noupe.com and others — W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

It’s a great caching platform that creates static versions of your pages. And a heck of a lot more!

W3 Total Cache

2. WP Super Cache

The caching plugin that everyone uses (at least until W3 Total Cache came along!). I’m no expert, but W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache are pretty similar – they’re both caching plugins. However, to me at least, it looks as though Total Cache is a tad more superior with a couple of additional features. That said, they’re both excellent plugins and the only way to pick between them is to try them both out! So do that!

A classic method of preparing an under powered site for a Digg front page appearance or a Slashdotting has been to manually save copies of dynamically generated pages, and place them in directories that match the permalinks structure. This method of performance enhancement does help servers handle a higher load without crashing, but is only effective when an oncoming rush of traffic can be anticipated. WP-Cache alone, while helpful, is not adequate in many cases, so WP Super Cache was created to effectively mimic the manual page caching method, but to handle it in an automated fashion.

Just to prove it works, check out EpicAlex.com – it’s using a standard layout of featured post and then recent posts below. With Super Cache turned on, it’s loading just over a second!

WP Super Cache

3. Caching with .htaccess!

As I wrote a while ago, it’s really easy to cache your files with the .htaccess file – the following code can just be plopped into your .htaccess file:

# BEGIN Expire headers
  ExpiresActive On
  ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 604800 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 600 seconds"
  ExpiresByType application/xhtml+xml "access plus 600 seconds"
# END Expire headers

Source.

4. Reduce database queries

This is a killer one. Reducing the number of database queries your theme is making can be the difference between your site staying up and going down! You can easily check how many queries your theme is using with the following:

<?php if (is_user_logged_in()) { ?>
    <?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries in <?php timer_stop(1); ?> seconds.
<?php } ?>

Counters are great for reducing your queries – look at Binary Moon’s sidebar to see an example of how counters can be used to pull a load of data in a single loop.

It’s all very easy seeing how many database queries you’re making, but reducing them? That’s the interesting bit. The culprit can often be plugins – the YARPP plugin makes a heck of a lot of queries (often 10+!) and whilst it’s incredibly customisable, it could well be slowing down your site a heck of a lot. Just bear that in mind.

The next thing on the list is custom fields. WPShout is using custom fields on the homepage in order to grab a featured image. Getting rid of those images took the count down three queries so that’s something to bear in mind when creating a magazine theme.

Custom loops are a massive culprit too with even the simple downloads section on WPShout using five queries! With something like that with relatively static content, it can be an idea to comment out the query and replace with the static code generated (ie copying and pasting from the source code).

5. Utilise your .htaccess file

We’ve already touched on .htaccess in this article, but there is a heck of a lot more you can do with it – check out “10 Ways to Use .htaccess to Speed Up WordPress” for more tips – you can easily cache, gzip, stop hotlinking, the lot!

6. Take the load off your server

An interesting one this that I’ve been experimenting a bit with recently. The idea? Use a service such as Amazon S3 to host your images, CSS and JS, making your site load quicker and taking some of the load off your server. As this screencast shows, there are immediately benefits:

In practice, using Amazon S3 day to day is a little more challenging. However, with a plugin such as “Amazon S3 for WordPress” it’s fairly easy to use S3 to host all of your media files.

7. Clean up that database!

As I explain in this post, it’s very easy to optimise your database – login to cPanel and then load up phpMyAdmin. Next, select the database WordPress is installed on and then ‘Check all’ checkboxes. Then on the dropdown at the bottom of the page click ‘Optimize table’ and you’re done!

8. Get a decent host!

This one’s uber important. Without a good host, a spike of traffic will see your site plummet out of the interweb. A decent host should be an integral part of your blog’s strategy. Yes, they will cost more, but you’ll not regret it when your site gets popular on Twitter and the site remains up. WPShout is with WPWebHost and I’m pleased to say the past couple of months they’ve been brilliant after some initial problems. They’re definitely a host to check out with some generous plans. For measuring the uptime of your site, look no further than the wonderful AreMySites to notify you of when your site goes down.

9. Your thoughts

I haven’t done this for a while, so here goes. Why not suggest your way of optimising your theme. Leave a comment below (RSS readers jump to the comment form here)!

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9 Ways to Create a Crash Proof WordPress Site

So what can I use bloginfo for?

All sorts of different things. Here’s the complete list, courtesy of the codex. It doesn’t make too much sense on it’s own if you don’t already know what you’re doing, so I’ve added in a little explanation below each.

admin_email = admin@example

Email of the administrator.

atom_url = http://example/home/feed/atom

Atom feed URL

charset = UTF-8

The character ecoding system (not particularily interesting – used in the ).

comments_atom_url = http://example/home/comments/feed/atom

Atom feed for all comments on the blog.

comments_rss2_url = http://example/home/comments/feed

RSS feed for all comments on the blog.

description = Just another WordPress blog

The description (or tagline) of your blog, as set under ‘Settings’ in the backend.

url = http://example/home

Homepage of the blog.

html_type = text/html

Type of HTML used (again, not too interesting ).

language = en-GB

Language used on the blog.

name = Testpilot

Name or title of your blog, as set under ‘Settings’ in the backend.

pingback_url = http://example/home/wp/xmlrpc.php

URL to which pingbacks should be sent.

rdf_url = http://example/home/feed/rdf

a general method for conceptual description or modeling of information that is implemented in web resources; using a variety of syntax formats.

via Wikipedia

rss2_url = http://example/home/feed

RSS feed for the blog.

rss_url = http://example/home/feed/rss

URL of the RSS feed.

siteurl = http://example/home

URL of the site.

stylesheet_directory = http://example/home/wp/wp-content/themes/largo

Directory where the style.css file is located.

stylesheet_url = http://example/home/wp/wp-content/themes/largo/style.css

URL of the stylesheet.

template_directory = http://example/home/wp/wp-content/themes/largo

Directory of your theme.

template_url = http://example/home/wp/wp-content/themes/largo

URL of the theme.

text_direction = ltr

Direction in which the text reads (ie left to right).

version = 2.8.5

Version of WordPress the blog is running.

wpurl = http://example/home/wp

URL of the WordPress installation (sometimes different to where the homepage is).

When should bloginfo be used?

Good question. It should be used for ’stuff’ that is unique to your installation of WordPress (for example the title or homepage). Let’s say we want to send a link to the homepage. On your installation it’s at /word/, but on mine it’s at /press/! You want to share the theme you’re using with me, so obviously I’m going to have to change all the links to the homepage, right? Not true. Using the siteurl parameter, the homepage URL can be dynamically generated. So instead of links reading:

<a href="/word/">Homepage</a>

They should be:

<a href="<?php bloginfo('siteurl'); ?>Homepage</a>

That format applies to all uses of bloginfo :

 <?php bloginfo('parameter_here'); ?>

Further examples

Stylesheet URL. On my installation it’s /press/wp-content/themes/Biblioteca/style.css but on yours it’s /word/wordpress-installed-in-a-different-directory-to-the-homepage/wp-content/themes/Biblioteca/style.css. Bloginfo to the rescue again – instead of:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/press/wp-content/themes/Biblioteca/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen,projection" />

You can dynamically generate the stylesheet URL:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen,projection" />

The final example I’ll do today is the title. On my blog it’s Press! but on yours it’s Word! Using the name parameter we can dynamically generate the title:

<h2><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></h2>

And with that, we’re done. Enjoy your new-found knowledge!

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Using Bloginfo Effectively in WordPress

Aim

• To display a quote from a random article in the sidebar of our blog.

Hypothesis

• Use of custom fields to pull data from posts. Preferably custom write panels to spice it up a bit.
• Loop (preferably without replacing the loop already in use) to pull a random post and display custom field.

Method

First thing we’ve got to do is create the custom field with the quote from the article. Here there are two options. First is to just use the custom field and copy and paste the quote into it. Second option is to make things look a little nicer and use some custom write panels. This isn’t nearly as hard as it sounds and to prove the point, I’ve made a screencast which is exactly five minutes long in which I add custom write panels to the default theme. Check it out -

As I’ve just proved, it’s easy to add these custom write panels and what I didn’t quite finish saying was that were you to save any content into your quote field, it’d then get saved as the custom field quote. We’re now ready to move onto part two.

Next we need some way of pulling this custom field and displaying it in the sidebar. The obvious answer is to use the loop and that’s true, although by doing that you replace the loop already in use which I don’t really want to do – if anyone has a better way of doing this please do leave a comment (code should be wrapped in <pre><code>pre and code</code></pre> tags). Pressing on with this method though, first we need a custom loop:

<?php
$quotes = new WP_Query();
$quotes->query('showposts=1&meta_key=Quote&orderby=rand');
while ($quotes->have_posts()) : $quotes->the_post(); ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>

Here we’re being very clever – we’re pulling a random single post with the custom field ‘Quote’. Of course, next we need to pull the custom field so the full loop looks like this:

<?php
$quotes = new WP_Query();
$quotes->query('showposts=1&meta_key=Quote&orderby=rand');
while ($quotes->have_posts()) : $quotes->the_post(); ?>
<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "Quote", true); ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>

Conclusion

With that, we’re done. Like the way I’ve laid this out? Please do leave a comment.

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How To: Display Quotes From A Random Post in WordPress