Making a list of blog authors : get_users_of_blog and get_userdata
Following on from a previous post on how to make author profile pages for WordPress, Jabril and a couple of others asked how to make a page listing all the authors of a blog, with bio information and a photo. Here's how to do that. Some things before we start: You'll need to adapt this for your own theme (probably): e.g. you might need to add get_sidebar() in the appropriate place, or... Read more
30 Free Social Media Icon Sets
Your blog's not the only place you blog, right? If you need to link your Twitter feed and your Flickr photostream and your Facebook page and your StumbleUpon bookmarks, then you need some cute icons to link from your blog's sidebar. Here are some free ones (check the terms of use because they're not all free for commercial sites and some require backlinks). Square The most popular shape, and... Read more
Help! My new blog is blank!
photo credit: 416styleThis is basic, but more than one person has had a little panic at me this week. Symptoms include: No categories show up. Where the posts should be is blank, or It says "Not Found Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here." or similiar where my blog should be. Other things like recent posts and comments are blank. The newness of the blog is the... Read more
WordPress 2.8.2 released
Hot on the heels of 2.8.1, WordPress version 2.8.2 was released this morning to fix an XSS vulnerability which could have been exploited to direct authors away from their admin sections to another site. If it's not there already, over the next few hours a link to upgrade should appear on your WordPress dashboard: not everyone sees it at once, but when you do, please click it. If you're... Read more
Help! My plugin doesn't work
One of the more frustrating things about blogging with WordPress is finding a plugin you think will do just what you need... only to find that it doesn't work. When things don't behave like you expect them to, it can be hard to know just where to start trouble-shooting. So here are some suggestions: Is the plugin uploaded to the right place? If you uploaded via FTP (rather than installing... Read more
More fun with author photos
Just because I've been playing with this, and someone else will surely find it useful... I like the Author Image plugin because it allows users to add their image directly to their profile in WP admin, rather than sending them off to Gravatar to sign up there. However, the plugin's a bit limited as to what you can output: it generates a whole img src with an attached CSS class, so if you want... Read more
How to change the WordPress author slug
photo credit: steepwaysWhile we're on the topic of WP authors, while I was making my author profile yesterday, I wanted to change the "slug" - the bit in the URL that labels the particular author. By default, the URL of author pages ishttp://domain.com/author/slug For most users, this "slug" is set to the user name: while you can't change a user name, you might very well want to change the... Read more
How to make a WordPress profile page
If you're running a multi-author blog, you've probably thought about including biographical and contact details for each author either on the posts that they write, or on a separate profile page. Though WP admin's users section gives you plenty of options for inputting information, from a potted life-story to your AIM handle, most themes don't take advantage of this. So today, we're going to look... Read more
Turning off WordPress syntax highlighting
When I first saw that syntax highlighting would be available with WordPress 2.8, I thought it was a great idea. If you're using the WordPress built-in editor to amend themes or plugins on your live installation, you need to get it right first time, so having the source code display in different colours should help avoid mistakes, right? Except it turns out - frankly - to be a complete pain.... Read more
WordPress 2.8 bugs? Try this
photo credit: Hamed SaberIn the last few days, I've heard from a few people who've upgraded to WordPress 2.8 that they're missing some or all of the visual editor from the Add New Post page: even if the "Visual" tab is selected (not the "HTML" one), buttons are missing. People have also reported the dashboard page not loading properly. The issues seem to be reported more widely in Firefox... Read more
