In this weeks tutorial we'll be creating a WordPress widget to display the current weather for a specified location. To do this we'll be using the great Weather Underground API. You can sign up for a free developer account here, or sign up for a professional account to get increase request rates. Signing Up ... Once you've signed up and registered for your API key, you should see something like the following. To actually query the API we just need the API key. The Wunderground API does not use OAuth to authenticate...
The default WordPress theme (TwentyTwelve) comes with a pretty standard previous/next post function for the theme. I don't particularly like the links as they feel a little forgotten about and they could easily be so much more. This snippet will show you how to create a custom navigation function and we'll be using Font Awesome to add some icons. Adding Font Awesome ... Font Awesome is quite literally awesome. It's a collection of over 360 icons presented as a font. This means you can easily add it to any...
How do you encourage users to stay on your site and how do you let them know about the rest of the great content you have on your site? If a user has read or is reading and article on your site, they may like to know about similar content. You could have a series of thumbnails or related articles, but why not give a specific post a little more priority? In this tutorial we'll be using jQuery to detect when the user has scrolled to or near the bottom of the article. Once they are near it, we'll display a small overlay...
The footer is often overlooked when it comes to designing a site, but it's a great way to find contact details or other important pieces of information. People have been trained to look there since the days of letter writing. Even today if you look at any correspondence, utility bill or company letterhead you'll find important information. On websites it's an can be an important navigation tool, it can give you quick access to commonly needed pages that are not core to a site. In this quick tutorial we'll...
Almost every site you see these days has an image slider on the front page. They come in all sizes and depending on who you ask, they have limited benefit to a sites traffic or navigation compared to the amount of space they take up. But they look pretty and when used correctly can be fairly effective. This tutorial aims to create a simple WordPress page template with a slider that allows you to include a few posts that have been added to a slider category. To make it more interesting, we're going to make it book-markable,...
There are a few behaviors I normally change when I'm writing a WordPress theme. Some of them are pretty basic, but they can really enhance the theme my making it go that extra mile. Customize The Login Page ... Even though you can't include a custom login page in your theme, it's actually quiet easy to customize the existing one. If it's just changing the logo or giving it a completely different layout, the place to start is the login_enqueue_scripts action. Here you can decide to output a simple piece of...
Everyone knows the most popular WordPress plug-ins, but there are plenty of others out there that don't get the same level of press and are just as useful. Outside of the obvious ones, here's my alternate list of plug-ins that you should be using. Some of these do appear in the popular lists, but in general they're not near the first few pages. Advanced Excerpt ... This is quite an old plug-in, but it still works perfectly. It allows you easily customize the excerpt for posts. You can set the maximum number...
For the last few years I've run my own Subversion (SVN) server on either a spare box and more recently with a paid for server. This was mainly because my work was private and I was familiar with SVN, and I found that the TortoiseSVN client was excellent and easy to use. My needs have changed and evolved over the years, particularly in the last few months since I started these tutorials. So I have decided to start moving new projects and some of my tutorials to GitHub. I've been watching GitHub progress over the...