WordPress is a very powerful CMS (Content Management System). It has tons of capability and can be extremely powerful. There’s only one thing in the way from all of this power and you as the blog owner – your theme. See, no matter how many awesome features such as threaded comments or breadcrumb navigation or even an “edit” link beside each post are added, you’re limited by your theme that you are using. If you theme isn’t “smart” enough to use these features, well, quite frankly, you can’t use them.

This is a post for all the WordPress theme developers out there. Here are only a few of the many great snippets of code that will take your current theme creation and make it that much better. Please, use them.

1- How to Disable Commenting on Posts Older Than 1 Month
A great way to reduce the amount of spam you receive is to disable the ability to comment on posts that are more than 1 month old. Just paste the following in your functions.php file. Note: To change the amount of time from 1 month, just replace 30 (days) with any number of days you want.

post_date_gmt ) > ( 30 * 24 * 60 * 60 ) ) {
		$posts[0]->comment_status = 'closed';
		$posts[0]->ping_status    = 'closed';
	}
	return $posts;
}
add_filter( 'the_posts', 'close_comments' );
?>

2 – How to Add an Automatically Changing Copyright Year in Your Footer
This is a common sight on most sites, something like a “Copyright 2007 – 2009″ or something similar in the footer. Thing is, it’s been more than a month since the new year and yet I’m still seeing “2008″ as the current year on some sites. This is how you can make WordPress change the date for you. Put in this snippet of code wherever you want the dynamic date to be displayed.

Copyright © 200x- Example.com.

3 – How to Display a List of Allowed HTML Tags for Use in Comments
Ever been to a blog where you’ve seen a list of all of the allowed HTML tags right above the comment form? Ever wonder how to do that in WordPress? Well, wonder no more.

You may use: .

4 – How to Add an “Edit” Link Next to Each Post
Ever see an error in one of your posts and sigh at the fact that you have to now go an navigate through the WordPress Dashboard just to get to the post to edit it? Not anymore. Just add this next in single.php, index.php, or wherever a post appears. Note – Only admins can see the edit link.

5 – How to Remove Curly Quotes From Your Posts
Ever copy and paste some php code you found on a website and find out that all of the quotation and apostrophe marks were causing errors? This is because of the way WordPress styles these punctuation marks to make them more aesthetically pleasing. Who needs that, right? Just paste this code into your functions.php file and you’re good to go.

6 – How to Remove Curly Quotes From Your Comments
Same thing as above, only this time, the code removes the curly quotes from your comments instead of posts.

7 – How to Disable Search Engine Indexing on a Certain Category
This code snippet is more for SEO purposes, possibly to avoid duplicate content or something similar. Make sure search engines don’t index any posts in a certain category by applying this to your head tags in header.php. Note – Change the category number of 4 to the category you want to prevent search engines from seeing.

';
}

8 – How to Display the Total Number of Posts on Your Blog
A useful code snippet that displays how many posts you’ve made.

get_var("SELECT count(*) FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_type = 'post'");
if (0 < $numposts)      $numposts = number_format($numposts); echo $numposts.' posts.'; ?>

9 – How to Add a Simple “Tweet This” Link to Each Post
Twitter is getting more and more popular each day. To make this benefit you, why not add a nice little “Tweet This” button to each blog post? Put this somewhere in The Loop in single.php.

<a title="Send this page to Twitter!" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=I just read &lt;?php the_permalink(); ?&gt;" target="_blank">Tweet This!</a>

10 – How to Display Your Scheduled Posts
Scheduling your posts in WordPress is a great feature. Create a sense of suspense for your readers by allowing them to see the title’s of upcoming posts. Paste this anywhere in your theme files.

have_posts()) {
    while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>

11 – How to Exclude Certain Categories From Being Shown
If, for whatever reason, you don’t want certain categories to be displayed, paste this code into The Loop. Note – Replace “3″ with the number corresponding to the category you want to block.

12 – How to Allow Styling of Individual Posts
This is a pain when themes don’t have this built in. If the user of your theme wants to style a single post differently than all of the others, the only way for you to make this easy for them is by giving each post a unique identifier. To do this, simple make use of “the_ID” in The Loop.

13 – How to Add a Unique Identifier to Each Comment

This basically follows the same idea as above, only now it’s applied to comments.

14 – How to Separate Trackbacks / Pingbacks and Actual Comments

The comment area of your posts should be a place where your readers can talk and discuss things with you and eachother. It’s annoying if this discussion is interrupted by a few trackback announcements. Tidy up the comment area by putting the comments in one pile and the trackbacks in another.

Custom Navigation Menus feature in WordPress 3.0 will make WordPress even more user friendly for beginners. This function let you organize your menu, create drop down menus, add new items to menu, and much more. The drag-and-drop function of this feature is what makes it extremely easy to use. This feature will not be available in older themes unless the theme author(s) update their themes. In this article, we will show you how you can enable and install custom navigation menus in your themes.

We see this feature as one of the most demanded feature in the future of WordPress themes. Below is a simple screenshot that shows you what you can do with this menu option.

You can create multiple menus, add existing categories or pages to the menu, and you can add custom links to menu as well. You can organize the menus and create drop-down menus with a simple drag-and-drop feature.

How to enable Custom Navigation Menus in WordPress 3.0
Like the custom background, header image, and post thumbnails, the custom navigation menus also needs to be enabled through your theme’s functions.php file.

Simply add the code below to your theme’s functions.php file:

add_theme_support( 'menus' );

If this code is not added in your functions.php file, the user will not see this as an option in the Admin panel.

How to Add Custom Navigation Menus in WordPress 3.0 Themes

Once you have enabled the feature, now you can add it in your theme. These menus are not limited for header.php file only. You can add them anywhere you like to fit your design’s need by pasting the code below:

 'menu_order', 'container_class' => 'menu-header' ) ); ?>

For custom themes: If you are using more than one menu, then you need to specify either the menu ID, menu slug, or menu name. The parameters are: $id, $slug, $menu respectively.

Additional Resource: WordPress Codex

WordPress 3.0 is released with lots of breathtaking improvements and exciting new features which will surely bring this platform one step ahead. So, what actually we can expect to bundle up with this release? Here is a walk through!

1. WordPress.org and WordPress MU Wedding
Yeah WordPress MU and WordPress.org are all set to tie up with each other. Almost over a year of hard work the floks at Automattic are all set to merge their standalone blogging platform WordPress.org with multi user platform WordPress MU. This feature will come handy specially for large blog networks.

It is an add-on for the existing users which means it won’t hurt them if they don’t want to use it. The upgrade process will be smooth and won’t cause any difficulties to existing users. Most importantly it will be a win win situation for WordPress MU users as they can now easily use WordPress.org plugins out of the box needless to modify.

2. Choose Username and Password while Installing
Earlier when you do new installation WordPress automatically choose ‘admin‘ as default username and generate a random password, however in 3.0 it allows you to choose custom username and password while installing WordPress.

3. New Default Theme
It’s time to bid adieu to Kubrik theme which comes up default with WordPress. WordPress 3 has been packaged with a new theme called “Twenty Ten”. This new theme is really outstanding and minimalist at the same time. Twenty Ten has some outstanding features such as Custom Background, Custom Header, Simple and Clean Look, Multi Widget Areas Supported, Two-Columns and Drop Down Menu.

4. Custom Background
Wordpress 3.0 now adds support for custom background for themes. To enable custom background functionality to your theme you just have to add following code in your theme’s functions.php file:

add_custom_background();

And it will enable “Background” option in WordPress admin “Appearance” tab.

5. Custom Post Types
This is another feature which will boost up WordPress as a CMS. This feature is due since WordPress 2.9 it allows you create different post types such as Portfolio, Products, Reviews etc. all you have to do is to just add following code in your functions.php file:

function post_type_portfolio() {
    register_post_type( 'Portfolio',
                array( 'label' => __('Portfolio'), 'public' => true, 'show_ui' => true ) );
    register_taxonomy_for_object_type('post_tag', 'Portfolio');
}

6. Navigation Menu
This feature is inspired by WooTheme’s WooNav which allows you to create different menu items containing Categories, Pages, External or Internal Link. It also support a widget so that you can place these menus in your sidebar as widget.

7. Author Templates
Earlier we had category specific templates which we use to develop category based templates using category-slug.php now WordPress 3 brings the same functionality for author based templates now you can create author based template files such as ‘author-chef.php‘.

Other Features Worth Mentioning
1. Now every WordPress installation will have a Welcome Guide for which helps newbies to understand WordPress better.
2. Plugins will now developed by community rather than sole developer, so you can now expect updated plugins every time.
3. In WordPress 3 plugins can not be edited until they are active so you must first deactivate them to be able to edit.

Major new features in this release include a sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies. (Twenty Ten theme shows all of that off.)

Developers and network admins will appreciate the long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality which makes it possible to run one blog or ten million from the same installation.

As a user, you will love the new lighter interface, the contextual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, bulk updates so you can upgrade 15 plugins at once with a single click

There’s good reason why WordPress is the most popular blogging platform. It’s easy to use and has tons of great features. But what’s really made this open source software excel is its passionate community. Yes, WordPress has lots of features built in, but it doesn’t have everything. The WordPress community fills this need. It’s full of talented developers that are constantly creating plugins to extend the features and make it even better.

There are many WordPress plugins out there, but in this article we’re focusing on the most essential. Below is a list of 10 plugins that every WordPress website could use.

All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack optimizes your WordPress blog for search engines. Some key features include:

• Advanced Canonical URLs
• Fine tune Page Navigational Links
• Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
• ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
• Nonce Security
• Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After an html file is generated, your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps generates a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

WP-DB-Backup

WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.

WP-PageNavi

WP-PageNavi adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress site.

WordPress Automatic upgrade

WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the WordPress installation to the latest one provided by WordPress.org using the 5 steps provided in the WordPress upgrade instructions. It automatically does the backups and provides links for downloading.

cforms II

cforms is a powerful and feature rich form plugin for WordPress, offering convenient deployment of multiple Ajax driven contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page.

Broken Link Checker

This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found. Some key features include:

• Monitors links in your posts, pages, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
• Detects links that don’t work and missing images.
• Notifies you on the Dashboard if any are found.
• Also detects redirected links.
• Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
• Link checking intervals can be configured.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

This plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed and optionally, your main comments feed as well.

source: webdesignledger.com

One major upgrade which is expected to come in 3.0 is the merge of WordPress and WordPress MU. Which means you will be able to install multiple sites on your normal wordpress installation as part of expansion. Currently if you want to expand your reach by adding multiple sites on your normal wordpress installation, you will have to install a new copy of wordpress each time. But after the release of WordPress 3.0, that expansion will be much easier.

Menu Settings on WordPress 3.0

New featured and nice one is Menu Setting, this menu is based on WooNav WooThemes Framework menu. This menu system will have a drag and drop

functionality that will combine Pages, Categories, and Links. It will also allow the ability of re-ordering, along with sub-menus, and hiding specific Pages or Categories from the menu altogether.

Custom Image Background on WordPress 3.0

In WordPress 3.0, it will have, additional to the Custom Header Image support, also a Custom Background Support. A first snapshot is in the current trunk. To use the functionality, the theme needs in functions.php this line: add_custom_background();

After that, there is in your backend under Appearance the menu Custom Background available. After uploading an image, you have the option to activate “Tile the background” and delete the background image.

New default theme

The WordPress 3.0 release will be packed with a brand new default theme called 2010. This theme will include Custom header, Custom Background, Clean Design, Multiple Widget Areas, Cascading Menus and a lot more. Overall, it will be a good base to build on for custom themes.

Choose your own Username/Password

This is a feature that I have always wanted from WordPress. From version 3.0, whenever you install WordPress, you will be able to choose your own username and password. You will no longer have to accept “admin” for the username and a randomly generated password.

Custom Post Types

Until now, you could only add posts or pages to your WordPress blog. This feature will give you power to create content of any type that you want. For example, you can have Portfolio listings, Products, Catalogs, Library etc. This feature is not going to replace categories or Tags. You will still be able to use categories. Custom Post Types will allow a different way of sorting/displaying your content.

By default, the sidebar is located on the right side of the page rather than the left. The following tutorial explains how to easily move the sidebar from right to left.

Login to your WordPress admin panel

From the navigation menu, select Design and then select Theme Editor from the sub menu.

Within the Theme Editor, select stylesheet from the theme files listed vertically to the right. The Style.css file should now be presented in the editor window and is ready for editing.

From the editor window, find the following code:

.narrowcolumn {
float: left;
padding: 0 0 20px 45px;
margin: 0px 0 0;
width: 450px;
}

Replace this piece of code with the following code:

.narrowcolumn {
float: right;
padding: 0 45px 20px 0px;
margin: 0px 0 0;
width: 450px;
}

Next find the following piece code:

#sidebar
{
padding: 20px 0 10px 0;
margin-left: 545px;
width: 190px;
}

Replace with the following:

#sidebar
{
padding: 20px 0 10px 0;
margin-left: 20px;
width: 190px;
}

Click the Update File button on the lower right hand side of the Theme Editor screen.

You see the background image doesn’t change. From this point you can design the rest of the theme or download the background and flip it with for example Photoshop. You can find the background image (kubrickbg.jpg)in the theme directory: /wp-content/themes/default/images

In your theme, open the comments.php and look for the following code:

This simple line of code has a lot of options available. If you want to learn more about them, just have a look at the WordPress Codex pages. For now, we’ll just concentrate on the size of the avatar.

The way to change the default size is simply by adding some text inside the function, like this:

It’s that simple!

A few of the new features are outlined in the video below.

The hot new features includes:

• Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.

• Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
• Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.

• Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

More information can be found in the WordPress 2.9 Codex.

1. Designing a WordPress Theme From Scratch
2. How To Create WordPress Themes From Scratch Part 1
3. How To Create A WordPress Theme From Scratch (Complete Video Series)
4. How to Create a WordPress Theme from Scratch – net.tuts
5. Designing for WordPress: Complete Series & Downloads
6. Creating a WordPress theme with Dreamweaver – Part 1: Learning the basics