All you have to do is simply open your functions.php and add the following code:

    // This will occur when the comment is posted
    function plc_comment_post( $incoming_comment ) {
 
    // convert everything in a comment to display literally
    $incoming_comment['comment_content'] = htmlspecialchars($incoming_comment['comment_content']);
 
    // the one exception is single quotes, which cannot be #039; because WordPress marks it as spam
    $incoming_comment['comment_content'] = str_replace( "'", ''', $incoming_comment['comment_content'] );
 
    return( $incoming_comment );
    }
 
    // This will occur before a comment is displayed
    function plc_comment_display( $comment_to_display ) {
 
    // Put the single quotes back in
    $comment_to_display = str_replace( ''', "'", $comment_to_display );
 
    return $comment_to_display;

The original author also offers a plugin that you can download from his site.

Step 1: Signup for Dropbox

the free version is not enough space for you, you’ll can purchase a plan that will accommodate your website backups.

Step 2: Install and activate the WordPress Backup to Dropbox plugin

It’s free and available in the WordPress plugin repository.

Step 3: Authorize the plugin with Dropbox

After installing and activating the plugin, you’ll be prompted to authenticate so that the plugin can gain access to your Dropbox account.

Step 4: Select the day, time and how often you wish your backup to be made.

The plugin’s settings page will show your next scheduled backup and how much space you have available. It also allows you to specify the folder in Dropbox where you want the backup to be placed. You have the option to store the backup locally as well.

One of the most handy features of this plugin is that it allows you to specify how many backups you want to keep, so that you don’t continually go over your limit with Dropbox.

Step 5: Wait for your backups to appear in the specified Dropbox folder.

Once you have the settings configured and have scheduled your backup, wait for a zipped archive of your website’s files and its database to be dropped in your Dropbox. Backups will be prepared automatically for you, so make sure to verify that it’s working correctly before you set it and forget it.

The bottom line is that you know you should be backing up your WordPress site. If Dropbox makes that more convenient for you, then by all means, take advantage of its services. You’ll be glad to find that backup in your Dropbox folder if your hosting fails.

While many sites still opt for a simple line of copyright details and a contact link and with some luck some color, footers have become more and more visually stunning as a way to provide a complete feeling to a design.

Here are 15 web design footers that you can use for inspiration!

1. Tapbots

2. Grzegorz Kozak

3. CSSTricks

4. Singularity Design

5. Amuki

6. The Pixel

7. Ma.tt

8. urbanpie

9.  Pojeta

10. Spoongraphics

11. Maketheneighborsjealous

12. Boagworld

13. Branded07

14. Ligne13

15. bcandullo.com

1 – Nivo Slider

This is a new launched image slider what use jQuery. Is cross browser and have 9 unique transition effects, navigation controls, is simple, clean, valid markup and free.

2 – Lof jSiderNews

Base on the Jquery Framework and the Easing Plugin, The JSiderNews Plugin is a slideshow plugin that displaying images or type of content and support favious navigation options.

3 – Jquery Slide Deck

What is SlideDeck?  SlideDeck is a powerful slider plugin made for web designers.

4 – Boutique Carousel

A ready to use jQuery slider/carousel to present your images in a unique, smooth and customizable way.

5 – Kwicks

The plugin is called Kwicks and you can download it from the Kwicks Home Page but I`m presenting you above another demo from Kriesi, on his wordpress theme, Newscast.

6 – Parallax Slider

Great and very clean slider.

7 – Advanced jQuery background image slideshow

With the use of transparent PNG’s, some HTML, pretty nifty CSS and jQuery, you can make this unique for your website.

8 – Automatic Image Slider w/ CSS & jQuery

Great tutorial  for a nice and clean image slider using HTML/CSS/Javascript

9 – Beautiful Apple-Style Slideshow

A Beautiful Apple-style Slideshow Gallery With CSS & jQuery

10 – S3Slider

This slider I’ve used in some of projects.

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.

<div id="post-&lt;?php the_ID(); ?&gt;" class="post-container">
    <!-- Post Content --></div>

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.

<div id="comment-&lt;?php comment_ID() ?&gt;" class="comment-container">
     <!-- Comment Content --></div>

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.

<!-- It's a comment -->
<!-- Comment content goes here -->
 
<!-- It's a trackback -->

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

1. Create the Circle Shapes
First create a circle path and fill it with orange color. Then Copy (Ctrl+C) it and Paste in Front (Ctrl+F). Scale down about 40% and drag it slight below the center point of the orange circle.

2.Blend Tool
Select the Blend Tool, click on the top edge of the yellow circle and then click again on the top edge of the orange circle. Or you can blend them by selecting both circles, go to Object > Blend > Make (Ctrl+Alt+B).

3. Add Final Light Reflection
Make an oval path and fill it with black & white Gradient and place it on top of the circles. Note if your color setting is CMYK, make sure the black for the gradient is full black(C=100, M=100, Y=100, K=100). With the oval path selected, go to Transparency pallate, select Screen Blend Mode. If your Transparency is not showing, go to Window > Transparency or press Ctrl+Shift+F10.

Advantages
There are serveral advantages to create this glossy button with Illustrator than Photoshop:
- It is vector, which mean it is scalable.
- It is easier and faster to make this with Illustrator (less steps).
- Easier to change colors, just need to fill the circles with different colors.

Today I’ve finish my latest WordPress theme Blackboard. This theme has also been approved by wordpress.org.  This means you can download it from wordpress.org or through the back-end of your wordpress installation.

A preview can be found on this location.

You can download the Blackboard theme from this location.

Enjoy!

If you enjoy this theme or you have a question or comment, please leave a message.