Adding Gravatar to your blog, makes your blog’s comments look more attractive. That’s why it have been incorporated in the Wordpress core.

Now comes the idea of adding your gravatar to your post on Wordpress. This can be pretty useful in blogs with multiple authors, so that readers can quickly identify, who wrote this post.

And adding this feature is real easy. Just add this code in your single.php -

<?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_email(), ‘80′ ); ?>

You have to add this, where you want to display the Author’s gravatar. In this code “80″ is the size of the gravatar, you can change it to any value you want.

Pretty simple!! huh

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If you are getting a lot of user registrations and want to flaunt it, then what else can be the best than show your “Latest User Registeres” list in your sidebar.

What you have to do is just paste the following code to your sidebar -

<h2>Latest registered users</h2>
<ul>
<?php
$usernames = $wpdb->get_results(”SELECT user_nicename, user_url FROM $wpdb->users ORDER BY ID DESC LIMIT 5“);

foreach ($usernames as $username) {
echo ‘<li><a href=”‘.$username->user_url.’”>’.$username->user_nicename.”</a></li>”;
}
?>

</ul>

This will display a list of latest 5 registered users in your sidebart along with the url.

You can change the number of users in list by simply changing the number 5 (in red) in above code.

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The Wordpress Team is continuously striving hard to Wordpress as the best Content Management System and enhance the User experience with Wordpress. Now, Wordpress has released its latest version – 2.8

It has added a bunch of features to this latest 2.8 version of Wordpress.

Some of the Key features include :

• Integration of Code Editor in Themes Editor – Now you can edit your Wordpress themes just like Code Editor with all the syntax highlighting and Line Numbers, making theme editing a lot easier.
• Themes installation from Admin Dashboard – Now you can install Wordpress themes right from your Dashboard, no need to upload themes using FTP programs. You can even browse themes from your dashboard and install whichever theme you like by just one click.
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module - This will enable use of  Wordpress’ Pretty URLs on IIS servers.

You check out the complete list of New Features on Wordpress’ site.

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.htaccess, the file which control the Apache webserver, is very useful and allows you to do a lot of things. In this article, let’s see how .htaccess can help you with your WordPress blog, for both security,functionnality and usability.

Warning

When editing or modifying the .htaccess file of your WordPress blog, make sure to always have a backup that you can restore in case of something went wrong.

1 – Redirect WordPress RSS feeds to feedburner with .htaccess

Which blogger doesn’t use feedburner? Sure, feedburner is a very nice service, allowing you to know how many people suscribed to your rss feeds. The only problem is that you must edit your theme files to manually change the rss url. Happilly, there’s a nice hack, using .htaccess, which will make you save a lot of time!
Don’t forget to modify line 6 before applying this code!

# temp redirect wordpress content feeds to feedburner
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator [NC]
RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ http://feeds2.feedburner.com/catswhocode [R=302,NC,L]
</IfModule>

Source: How to redirect WordPress rss feeds to feedburner

2 – Remove /category/ from your WordPress url

By default, WordPress category permalinks are displayed that way:

http://webmasters-blog.com/category/wordpress/

As you can see, the category in the url is pretty useless. Here’s how to remove it:
First backup your .htaccess file. Then, open it and append the following line:

RewriteRule ^category/(.+)$ http://www.yourblog.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Once saved, your categories pages will be displayed like this:

http://webmasters-blog.com/wordpress/

Source: How to remove category from your WordPress url

3 – Using browser cache

A very good way to optimize your blog loading time is to force the use of the browser cache. This code will not improve your blog loading time directly, but it will save some work to the server by sending a 304 not modified status when the requested element haven’t been modified.

FileETag MTime Size
<ifmodule mod_expires.c>
<filesmatch “\.(jpg|gif|png|css|js)$”>
ExpiresActive on
ExpiresDefault “access plus 1 year”
</filesmatch>
</ifmodule>

Source: Comment accelerer le temps de chargement de votre blog

4 – Compress static data

Do you know that it is possible to send compressed data to the visitors, which will be decompressed by the client? This code will definitely save you (and your visitor) bandwidth and reduce your pages weight.

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/xml application/xhtml+xml text/javascript text/css application/x-javascript
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

5 – Redirect Day and name permalinks to /%postname%/

The first thing to do is to login to your WordPress admin, go to Settings → Permalinks and select custom. Fill out the field with /%postname%/.
Your permalinks will now look like the ones on this blog:

http://www.yourblog.com/name-of-the-post

Now we got to redirect all backlinks using the old permalinks structure to the new permalink structure. To do so, you’ll have to edit the .htaccess file, located in WordPress root directory.
Paste the following line in your .htaccess:

RedirectMatch 301 /([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$4

Allright! You just changed your permalinks structure without loosing any backlinks!
Source: Redirect day and name permalinks to postname

6 – How to: Deny comment posting to no referrer requests

Are you sick and tired about the daily amount of spam comments received? Sure, there’s akismet, but here’s a little .htaccess trick to prevent spammers posting on your blog. The fact is that most spammers uses bots comming from nowhere. This code will look for the referrer (the page from where the commentator come from) and will deny commenting if the commentator try to access the wp-comments-post.php file without directly comming from your blog.
Just change the line 4 and specify your blog url there.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*yourblog.com.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/$ [R=301,L]

Source: How to deny comment posting to no referrer requests

7 – Redirect visitors to a maintenance page

When you’re upgrading your blog, or making theme/design changes, it isn’t a good idea to let people see your blog being tweaked, sometimes with design or code problems, or even worst, security gaps.
The solution is to design a nice “maintenance page” and temporarily redirect your visitors to that page until you finished the maintenance.
Replace maintenance.html (line 2) by the page you’d like to redirect your visitors, and the IP adress on line 3 by your own ip.
Note that a 302 redirection is used, to avoid search engines indexing the maintenance page instead of your real homepage!

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.html$
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^123\.123\.123\.123
RewriteRule $ /maintenance.html [R=302,L]

Source: Comment faire une page d’accueil pour les internautes

8 – Protect your WordPress blog from hotlinking

Hotlinking is the use of an image from one site into a web page belonging to another site. Many bloggers are hotlinked, and have their bandwidth used on another websites. This very helpful code will protect your WordPress blog from hotlinking.

RewriteEngine On
#Replace ?mysite\.com/ with your blog url
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
#Replace /images/nohotlink.jpg with your “don’t hotlink” image url
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]

Source: How to protect your WordPress blog from hotlinking

9 – Allow only your IP adress on the wp-admin directory

Excepted the case of a collaborative blog, only you should be allowed to visit the wp-admin directory. If you have a static IP, this code will do the job.
All you have to do is to enter your static IP adress on line 8. Note that you can add more IPs if needed, by creating a new line with: allow from xx.xx.xxx.xx inside.

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “Example Access Control”
AuthType Basic
<LIMIT GET>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from xx.xx.xx.xx
</LIMIT>

Source: Protecting the WordPress wp-admin folder

10 – Banning a WordPress Spammer With .htaccess

You know it, spam is very annoying. In the case of a particular person/bot spamming you, you can easily avoid it by blacklisting the IP.
Simply replace the IP adress on line 3 by the spammer’s IP. You can add more spammers by creating a new line with deny from xxx.xx.xxx.xxx inside.

<Limit GET POST>
order allow,deny
deny from 200.49.176.139
allow from all
</Limit>

Source: The easiest way to ban a WordPress spammer

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It may happen sometime that you may lost the password for admin account for Wordpress blog. Retrieving it can be a real pain. If you haven’t updated your email in any direct wordpress installation from your webhost, then retrieving your old password can become almost impossible.

But if you have admin access to phpMyAdmin for your blog, then you can change password for your wordpress blog by executing a simple SQL query.

For this you need to login to your phpMyAdmin panel, which you can easily do through your hots’s cpanel. Now, select the database for Wordpress blog you want to change password. First of all create a backup of your database, before executing any SQL query. After that click on the “SQL” button, to open the SQL query window, as shown below.

Then, paste the following code into the textarea in the newly opened window. Don’t forget to modify the password(in red) before executing it.

UPDATE ‘wp_users’ SET ‘user_pass’ = MD5(’PASSWORD‘) WHERE ‘user_login’ =’admin’ LIMIT 1;

Thats it you have successfully changed the password for your wordpress admin account, now login with your new Wordpress password.

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If you have been blogging since some months/years and your blog has been getting good number of comments, you may have notice that some posts are getting more comments that other posts. This means that some posts are more popular than other posts.

It will be a good idea to display your “Most Popular” posts in the sidebar. This will make your visitors stay longer on your blog and more chances of them subscribing your RSS feed.

Now the “Most Popular” posts can be sorted out based on number of comments or number of views.

Plugins using most views as a criteria are -

• Popular Posts
• WP-PostViews Plus widget
• Recently Popular
• WordPress.com Popular Posts
• Yet Another Most Popular Posts
• KF most read

There is one most popular plugin for this purpose Alex King’s “Popularity Contest”. It uses various factors as criteria to sort out “Most Popular” posts list.

There are other plugins that use number of comments as a criteria for “Most Popular” posts. Here are some  -

• Most Popular Posts
• WP Comment Remix
• wPopularity – Wordpres Plug-In

If you don’t want install any plugin for “Most Popular” posts, then you can use following to display it. Just copy-paste the following code on your sidebar.php file. To change the number of displayed posts, simply change the 5 , highlighted in red to any number you want. Also if you want to change its title, just change ‘Popular Posts’, highlighted in green to anything of your choice.

<h2>Popular Posts</h2>
<ul>
<?php $result = $wpdb->get_results(”SELECT comment_count,ID,post_title FROM $wpdb->posts ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0 , 5“);
foreach ($result as $post) {
setup_postdata($post);
$postid = $post->ID;
$title = $post->post_title;
$commentcount = $post->comment_count;
if ($commentcount != 0) { ?>
<li><a href=”<?php echo get_permalink($postid); ?>” title=”<?php echo $title ?>”>

<?php echo $title ?></a> {<?php echo $commentcount ?>}</li>
<?php } } ?>
</ul>

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• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
• WordPress Related Posts
• Wordpress Related Posts Plugin
• Related Posts by Category
• Contextual Related Posts

The list is quiet long. The most popular among these is Yet Another Related Posts Plugin aka “YARPP”. But here on my blog I use a Plugin “Simple Tagging” which can be used both for managing tags and displaying “Related Posts” based on tags. But if you don’t want to install another plugin on your server, then here is the code for you. Just place the following code anywhere you want to show “Related Posts” within loop. The code will display “Related Posts” based on the current post tag(s).

<?php //for use in the loop, list 5 post titles related to first tag on current post $tags = wp_get_post_tags($post->ID); if ($tags) { echo ‘Related Posts’; $first_tag = $tags[0]->term_id; $args=array( ‘tag__in’ => array($first_tag), ‘post__not_in’ => array($post->ID), ’showposts’=>5, ‘caller_get_posts’=>1 ); $my_query = new WP_Query($args); if( $my_query->have_posts() ) { while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?> <p><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></p> <?php endwhile; } } ?>

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Displaying recent comments on your blog, lets your visitors know about the recent comments on your blog and also encourages them to make comments.

Though “Recent Comments” does not come as a default widget with Wordpress, there are many plugins available for this functions. But if you don’t want to install anymore plugins, then here is the simple code snippet for you.

<?php
global $wpdb;
$sql = “SELECT DISTINCT ID, post_title, post_password, comment_ID, comment_post_ID, comment_author, comment_date_gmt, comment_approved, comment_type,comment_author_url, SUBSTRING(comment_content,1,30) AS com_excerpt FROM $wpdb->comments LEFT OUTER JOIN $wpdb->posts ON ($wpdb->comments.comment_post_ID = $wpdb->posts.ID) WHERE comment_approved = ‘1′ AND comment_type = ” AND post_password = ” ORDER BY comment_date_gmt DESC LIMIT 10“;

$comments = $wpdb->get_results($sql);
$output = $pre_HTML;
$output .= “\n<ul>”;
foreach ($comments as $comment) {
$output .= “\n<li>”.strip_tags($comment->comment_author) .”:” . “<a href=\”" . get_permalink($comment->ID).”#comment-” . $comment->comment_ID . “\” title=\”on “.$comment->post_title . “\”>” . strip_tags($comment->com_excerpt).”</a></li>”;
}
$output .= “\n</ul>”;
$output .= $post_HTML;
echo $output;
?>

Just place this code, wherever you want to show recent comments, may be your sidebar.

This code will list the 10 most recent comments. If you want to list more or less comments, simply change the “10″ in the $sql variable highlighted in red.

Thats it you are done.

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Wordpress theme’s trends changes every few months. So you get to see new styles for Wordpress every 6-8 months. These days there is a trend of displaying your categories and subcategories or pages and subpages in a drop-down horizontal menu in header.

Though many wordpress themes come with built-in simple horizontal menu, i.e. there is no drop-down facility, you can easily put advanced categories/pages menu in your header.

Just follow these simple steps, and you will have a horizontal drop-down menu in your blog’s header.

STEP I.
In the first step we’ll get WordPress to display the categories/pages list. For this just paste the following code in the header.php file of your theme.

<ul id=”nav2″ class=”clearfloat”>
<li><a href=”<?php echo get_option(’home’); ?>/” class=”on”>Home</a></li>

<?php wp_list_categories(’orderby=name&exlude=181&title_li=’);
$this_category = get_category($cat);
if (get_category_children($this_category->cat_ID) != “”) {
echo “<ul>”;
wp_list_categories(’orderby=id&show_count=0&title_li=&use_desc_for_title=1&child_of=’.$this_category->cat_ID);
echo “</ul>”;
}
?>
</ul>

STEP II.
Now we should style our menu as per our needs, for this we need to add this to our stylesheet. Just paste this in your style.css file. We are not using any javascript for now, as we can get an advanced horizontal drop-down menu, without using javascript, But to ensure it’s compatibility with IE6 we’ll need to add the javascript, which I had described later.

#nav2{
background-color: #202020;
display: block;
font-size:1.1em;
height:50px;
width:100%;
}

#nav2, #nav2 ul {
line-height: 1;
list-style: none;
}

#nav2 a ,#nav2 a:hover{
border:none;
display: block;
text-decoration: none;
}

#nav2 li {
float: left;
list-style:none;
}

#nav2 a,#nav2 a:visited {
color:#109dd0;
display:block;
font-weight:bold;
padding:6px 12px;
}

#nav2 a:hover, #nav2 a:active {
color:#fff;
text-decoration:none
}

#nav2 li ul {
border-bottom: 1px solid #a9a9a9;
height: auto;
left: -999em;
position: absolute;
width: 900px;
z-index:999;
}

#nav2 li li {
width: auto;
}

#nav2 li li a,#nav2 li li a:visited {
color:#109dd0;
font-weight:normal;
font-size:0.9em;
}

#nav2 li li a:hover,#nav2 li li a:active {
color:#fff;
}

#nav2 li:hover ul, #nav2 li li:hover ul, #nav2 li li li:hover ul, #nav2 li.sfhover ul, #nav2 li li.sfhover ul, #nav2 li li li.sfhover ul {
left: 30px;
}

Once added the above code to your stylesheet, you are done with horizontal drop-down menu for all browserss except IE6. To ensure its compatibility with IE6 just place this javascript snippet as an external file or in the header.phpfile.

<!–//–><![CDATA[//><!--

sfHover = function() {
var sfEls = document.getElementById("nav2").getElementsByTagName("LI");
for (var i=0; i<sfEls.length; i++) {
sfEls[i].onmouseover=function() {
this.className+=” sfhover”;
}
sfEls[i].onmouseout=function() {
this.className=this.className.replace(new RegExp(” sfhover\\b”), “”);
}
}
}
if (window.attachEvent) window.attachEvent(”onload”, sfHover);

//–><!]]>

Once done, your Wordpress blog now have an advanced horizontal drop-down menu compatible with all browsers.

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Favicon is really important as it adds identity to your url. Your site can be easily identified from the list of favourites, because of its favicon.

Also it helps to identify your sites easily if multiple tabs are opened in any web-browser.

Here are the steps to add favicon to your wordpress blog -

• You will first need a favicon, which can be created from any image here  – www.html-kit.com/favicon
• When you have created your favicon, upload it to your server or any other image uploading service.
• Once you have uploaded it, get its url.
• Goto your WordPress Dasboard > Appearance > Editor > Header.
• Search for following code if any -
  

  <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico”>

• If its not there, add it replacing “favicon.ico” with the url of your favicon image.
• Now update it….thats it you have successfully added favicon to your site.

Feel free to leave a comment if you are having difficulty in implementing these steps.

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