I’ve had another few days of intensive coding and completed a few plugins that can help with the new theme.

I can’t believe that only last week I was feeling burnt out with coding! All I needed was a little “I wonder if I could …” php demon in my ear and I was off. Everything else has suffered though, I have barely talked to anyone in the past 3 days. I haven’t even answered any text messages! lol. I must be a hermit

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

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Popularity: 1% [?]

Version: 1.98(updated on 21 August 2008)

PLEASE UPDATE IF YOUR VERSION IS BELOW 1.98

Comments are a wonderful thing to receive on your blog, adding the dofollow plugin is one way to reward but why not place a link to their last post under their comment, with CommentLuv, you can do that automatically! This is an excellent way to promote comments from your readers.

example:

The CommentLuv Wordpress Plugin will visit the feed of the comment author and attempt to scrape the last post they made and display it under their comment, this way you can encourage people to join in the discussion of your posts and give something back straight away.

The plugin looks for a feed at the site given in the URL field of the commentform, if you have an auto find feed then it should find it.

The plugin retrieves your last post at the time of the comment being posted and appends the extra text just before the comment gets saved to the database, this way it doesn’t put any extra load on the database or server other than the effort required add another 60 or so characters to the comment content.
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Popularity: 7% [?]

I’m really pleased to announce that the old theme for FiddyP has gone bye bye, it was a great theme and it was really nice to know that no one on the planet had it too. Now, I have spent some time with wp-remix 2 developer edition and I can report that it is good, real good, so good I could nibble its’ ear.

I particularly like how it has so much sexy css built in and you can create new pages and edit the template on the fly and choose which sidebar you want.

There’s some custom code put here and there and that’s whats taken all the time, the rest seems to flow together so easily and I’m really looking forward to adding some great content like the ajax tutorial series and a whole bunch of new nested pags with online tools and scripts.
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Popularity: 1% [?]

I bought a book recently after seeing it mentioned in the WP dashboard news items, it’s called Wordpress Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver and although a lot of the information regarding the functions of wordpress can be found at the codex, the book gives you so much more like the process gone through to design a theme from scratch.

I do quite a lot of sites in wordpress now and find it much easier to provide a client with a website that can be updated so easily, a few plugins here and there and you can provide a website that does all and more that’s needed.

Usually I get a standard theme and cut it up a bit and change the css to give me my site, or create in photoshop and send off for wordpressing but lately due to some more custom design requests I’ve received and the always dependable mistakes that freelancers can make I have wanted to do the whole thing myself from scratch..

I’ve downloaded a tutorial before about WP theme design from small potato before it was taken over and that was pretty darn useful but was made a little while ago so it wasn’t 2.5 specific.

That’s why I like what Tessa has put her book, it takes you step by step through the process of creating a non-blog wordpress blog, from sketch to WP core code. It’s made a big difference to my initial prototyping of concept sites and has really opened my eyes to what you can do with a bit of manipulation of the wordpress template tags. I’m even working on a magazine style front page for here so I can have a featured post for contests that stays up while it’s open for entries as well as excerpts to the regular posts..

You can buy the book printed or get it as pdf for a bit cheaper (I printed mine out from pdf on someone elses printer lol!) at packet publishing

Popularity: 5% [?]

..from the Wordpress Ideas site.. lol

Popularity: 7% [?]

I’ve been away from fiddyp for a while but not away from wordpress as I’ve been working really hard on some WP based sites that have turned out pretty well using WP as a CMS combined with some useful and custom plugins.

It’s pretty amazing what you can do with some customized templates and a bit of hacking the code here and there so I thought I’d list some of the useful tools I work with to make life a little bit easier.

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Cforms II

This is a really easy plugin to use straight out of the box just by entering <!–cforms–> onto a post or page where you want the contact form to appear.

Select which fields you want in the options page and you can’t get a simpler contact form made on Wordpress!

It can be used in a more complex way too, it has options for AJAX, custom fields and even a file upload function. Get into the code some more and there are ways to generate custom contact forms within the wordpress template code so for example, you could generate a “request more information on this product” form on a product listing which has the product code automatically inserted as a hidden field which will be sent along with the contacts details and message.

You can read more about Cforms II and download the latest version at
http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin

It works well and is constantly being updated with new features and options.
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Popularity: 5% [?]

Sorry if you’re having problems with commentluv plugin, I’ve been having real issues with my nameservers and dedicated server. I’ve moved the feed retrieving file to FiddyP.com now and I think that’s the best place for it.

Along the way of all these changes, I’ve learned not to get a dedicated server from streamline.net

I noticed that my disk usage was over 50GB and I only host 4 sites on my server, I sent them an email asking where this extra space usage was coming from and do you know what the expected me to accept as an answer??? - “that’s space taken up by the OS and plesk”

don’t make me bloody larrrrf. OS using up over 50GB? eejits

turns out it was the log files, fancy that, log files taking up 50gb. doh

Popularity: 5% [?]