Free WordPress Themes

A Flickr Badge using WordPress Shortcodes

Flickr provides a neat little snippet of javaScript to supply various image galleries direct to your site – a so-named Flickr badge. Here’s a good way using WordPress shortcodes to grab a gallery…

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PHP Calendar Functions

It’s really easy to get really mixed up when trying to program with date functions – lots to keep track of, calendars, timezones, daylight saving, weird months that have different numbers of days in them…

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Expressivo (Center) Free WordPress Theme

Expressivo (Center) is a free WordPress theme – based on Expressivo – a three-column layout, but with the blog post content centered. It’s got the same feature list – a jQuery dropdown pages menu, Cufon embedded fonts for post titles, a custom header image and threaded and paged comments.

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Mistral Free WordPress Theme

Mistral is a free WordPress theme – a two-column layout, with a righthand sidebar. Plus a static pages menu, Cufon embedded fonts for widget headings, a replaceable logo area and paged- and threaded- comments.

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WP-Cron – automating and scheduling

You need a cron job in your WordPress blog – something run to a schedule, hourly, daily… Instead of fixing up a crontab and using wget or lynx, you can use WordPress’s internal version of the cron job.

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Using JSON with WordPress

With the popularity of jQuery, AJAX, and client-side programming operations in general, there’s more use made of JSON as a format for getting data backwards and forwards.

For example, the Twitter API offers data as JSON – and more manageably than accessing their RSS XML feeds for user timelines.

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Separate Pingbacks from User Comments

People have predicted their death for a long time, but pingbacks/trackbacks (and displaying them) are still firmly with us – there is a certain vanity involved…

They do give an indication of related content, other sites in your niche (and just how many automated spam sites there are out there ) etc. At the same time, they break up the flow of user comments and even with threaded comments can make it difficult for visitors to follow the discussion.

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Expressivo Free WordPress Theme

Expressivo is a free WordPress theme, three-column with two righthand sidebars – going to a single sidebar on single posts and pages. With Cufon embedded fonts for post titles, threaded and paged comments – you can also replace the header completely with your own image.

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A jQuery Slideshow for WordPress 2.9

You want a jQuery slideshow for your WordPress blog? – on the front page, or maybe in the sidebar? No real problem, all the javascript is taken of with the help of a jQuery plugin, all we have to do is figure out how to get the post data.

And to keep things really simple, this is going to use the thumbnail functions in WP 2.9 – no need to mess around with custom fields any more.

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WordPress Comments Plugins

We spend enough time on the blog content and then tend to forget about the comments part. Comments are the way to get people involved – build up a blog’s readership etc etc. A few, sensible, comments trickling in will freshen up a page’s content and make it not seem completely dead in the water to passing search engine crawlers…

And the good news, there’s plenty of comment-related plugins available to get the job done.

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