As theme designers, we can add more than 1 native menus to the theme to any position that we want. For example, we can create 3 native menus in our theme, for example: “Top Pages Menu”, “Top Categories Menu”, “Footer Link Menu”. We should name the menus according to their location in the theme so that user knows which menu they are working on.

Now you might think, what if the user did not want to use Native Menu, instead they want the traditional way to display all pages in their menu? A good way is to let user choose whether to use Native Menu or the default (traditional) one. In another word: we need Backward Compatibility. We will look into that in Step 3 below.

Some WP functions that we need

- wp_nav_menu() – to display native menu
- has_nav_menu( name ) – to check whether a menu called “name” is activated
- register_nav_menus() – to register nav menus

Step 1: Registering the Native Menu

Open up your theme’s functions.php, append this to the file:

add_action('init', 'register_nav_menus_on_init');
 
function register_nav_menus_on_init() {
	register_nav_menus(array(
		'top-pages-menu' => 'Top Pages Menu',
		'top-cat-menu' => 'Top Categories Menu',
		'footer-link-menu' => 'Footer Link Menu',
	));
}

In the codes above, we registered 3 native menus, each named with their location in the theme.

Step 2: Place the Native Menus into your theme

Now, add this code to where you want the native menus to appear.

In our example, we need to add 2 menus to header.php:

 
<div class="pages-nav">
	<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'top-pages-menu' ) ); ?>
</div>
 
....
 
<div class="cats-nav">
	<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'top-cats-menu' ) ); ?>
</div>

- Take note how we pass the registered name to the wp_nav_menu() function.
- wp_nav_menu() will generate the <ul> and <li> automatically for your menu, provided that user has activated the menu.

In our example, we need to add 1 menu to footer.php:

<div class="footer-nav">
	<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'footer-links-menu' ) ); ?>
</div>

- Take note how we pass the registered name to the wp_nav_menu() function.
- wp_nav_menu() will generate the <ul> and <li> automatically for your menu, provided that user has activated the menu.

Step 3: Backward Compatibility

Most likely you will need to display a default menu if the user has not activated (or decided not to use) native menu for that location.

Now we need to modify our header.php to achieve that:

 
<div class="pages-nav">
	<?php
	if (has_nav_menu('top-pages-menu')) {
		wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'top-pages-menu' ) );
	} else {
		wp_list_pages();
	}
	?>
</div>
 
....
 
<div class="cats-nav">
	<?php
	if (has_nav_menu('top-cats-menu')) {
		wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'top-cats-menu' ) );
	} else {
		wp_list_categories();
	}
	?>
</div>

Do the same to footer.php.

Step 4: Try out your native menu

Go to Admin Panel > Appearance > Menus.

If you registered the native menus correctly, you will see them appearing in the “Theme Locations” box.

Now, to test your native menu, create a new native menu by clicking on the “+” button of the right box.

Add categories, pages or links to the menu by using the 3 boxes under “Theme Locations” and save it.

Lastly, add your new menu to your desired Theme Location and save it.

Now view your theme.

Please Share or Like this post if it helps :)

Thesis

Thesis theme is a very versatile theme, or a theme framework, and is used by many professional web developers, as well as Matt Cutts himself, the head of the Google Webspam Team. It’s very easy to customize, and can easily help you show off your best content. This theme is not free.

Socrates

This theme was developed for the internet marketer in mind. It’s easy as pie to set up for Adsense and Clickbank, as well as many other affiliate marketing ideas. There are several different formats to use for your page, including a sales page and a squeeze page. It has 220+ Niche Header Designs as well as a very active support forum. This theme is not free.

Heatmap

It’s named Heatmap after Google’s famous study of where people look when they visit a typical website. You can easily place your advertisements and affiliate offers at the area where people tend to look at the most. This will definitely helps increasing your conversion rate. The theme also comes with numerous choices of advertisement layouts and skins for the user to pick. This is not a free theme.

Notepad Chaos (Free)

This colorful floral theme is definitely one of the most interesting WordPress themes on the web. Having all your blog posts displayed in a notepad-like page, your website would like a e-diary, which makes it suitable for personal blog. Besides, there are other interesting areas in the theme such as the post-it-note design sidebar and handwritten fonts used in the special hyperlinks. This theme would make your blog stand out of the crowd.

TV.Elements

This is definitely a great WordPress theme for video bloggers. The theme features a main video display at the top of the page, with scrollable arrows. Below the main display is the featured video carousel with nice bordered thumbnails. You are allowed to insert up to 12 featured categories of your choice. This is not a free theme.

Although nofollow links don’t take your link juice away from your site, it does reduces the link juice passed to your dofollow links. So, it is best to remove all unwanted links, including nofollow links.

Mass delete all existing comment author URLs for WordPress Site

While we might have some WordPress plugins that can do this for you. I prefer doing it manually via phpMyAdmin. Go to your phpMyAdmin or any SQL administration tool that allow you to run queries to your database.

1. Select your WordPress installation’s database
2. Go to “SQL” tab.
3. Enter any of the following queries.
4. If your table prefix is not “wp_”, change it accordingly.

To delete ALL comment urls

Here we just set the URL value to empty. So no worries about losing your comment.

UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_author_url = '';

To delete ALL comment urls EXCEPT a certain link

I used this query to avoid deleting URL of those comments made by me myself.

UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_author_url = '' WHERE NOT comment_author_url = 'http://zenverse.net/';

Now I am feeling good having less outgoing links. Hope this helps :)

How Does It Work?

The whole process inclues these 4 steps:

• Step 1. Create a basic PSD template with the help of the Layout Editor;
• Step 2. Design the template you prepared in Divine Elemente;
• Step 3. Convert your PSD into a WordPress theme;
• Step 4. Upload the theme and activate it on your website.

These 4 steps normally take less than 20 minutes of your time and depend only on your skills or on the template you have.

Examples Of the Themes Divine Elemente Created

Here’s a few freebies given by Divine Elemente for our readers.

1. “Diablo 3″ PSD Template

Download Diablo 3 PSD template

2. “Mass Effect 3″ PSD Template

Download Mass Effect 3 PSD template

What is the Price?

The regular price is $199, but there’s a 10% discount offer with coupon code: WP4GU, so you can have the Developers license key just for $179.

How to get it for free?

I have 3 Developers license keys to giveaway. If you want to try your luck and get one for free, just follow @zenverse on Twitter and tweet one of the following:

Retweet and get a chance to win a psd to #wordpress software from @divineteam via @zenverse

New giveaway from @divineteam via @zenverse. Just retweet this and get chance to win a #PSD to WordPress software.

Get a chance to win a free license key for a #wordpress tool from @divineteam via @zenverse – just retweet this!

3 winners will be selected randomly on April 22, 2012 and will be awarded a Developer license key each.

What you should do: Always put your video URL in a new line

The example below works, and a video player be displayed when you view the post.

Your content here. Your content here. Your content here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTDNLUzjkpg
Your content here. Your content here.

Preview of the code above:

Your content here. Your content here. Your content here.

Your content here. Your content here.

Try putting the link in the same line with other text, it will NOT work:

Your content here. Your content here. Your content here.
Guys, check out this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTDNLUzjkpg
Your content here. Your content here. Your content here.

Hope this helps.

The All in One SEO Pack

You’re probably well aware of the value of good SEO, but you can make it even easier with this free plugin. In fact, it’s become one of the most popular plugins of all – so you can feel sure it’s a wise choice for your blog. The All in One SEO Pack allows you to tweak every SEO element – from page titles to metatags – and all quickly and easily from the standard post writing page or settings area. You can specify your blog’s home page title and metatags too, which is great for making sure Google indexes you properly. Overall, this plugin is pretty essential for any blogger looking to make a splash in organic results. How will it help you gain more visitors? Well, if you do the right keyword research, you’ll find more people showing up naturally from organic searches. It’s simple and effective (if a little long term). Simply search for ‘All in One SEO’ from the ‘Add New’ plugin section of your blog to find it.

The AddThis WordPress plugin

Social media is all the rage, you’ll doubtless need to be told, so you’re probably already giving your users a push to share your content. But with the AddThis WordPress plugin, it’s even easier. This simple plugin adds a small links section to the end of each of your posts, from which your readers or visitors can share the article or post via various networks. These include the obvious choices like Facebook and Twitter, but your readers can also post to social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit. In any case, your blog’s name will be spread and you should end up with more visitors in the long run. Just try to avoid looking spammy – that can get you blacklisted and you may end up achieving the exact opposite of what you want. If you notice your site being spammed to social bookmarking sites, you can block users by IP or simply remove the plugin.

Wordbooker

So you’ve spent three hours writing a post you’re proud of, what’s next? Usually, it’s trawling through the social networks and letting your followers and fans know that there’s new stuff to read. This can be time-consuming. But with the Wordbooker plugin, you can set your posts to automatically be posted to Facebook. And it’s not limited to just your personal wall or Timeline, you can also post to pages – so it’s ideal for businesses too. There are lots of handy options that help you tweak the output of the plugin to suit the style in which you share your content, so you can rest assured that your posts are being shared in the right way. A quick search for ‘Wordbooker’ from the plugins menu will help you get this installed ASAP.

So there you have it – three nifty plugins that can make a real difference to your visitor numbers. Oh, and they’re free, which is always nice. Remember that no amount of plugins will give you a huge increase in numbers, these will only help along the way. The key is to post quality content that people really want to read. There’s a reason they say ‘content is king’ – and your blog is an excellent outlet for compelling content that will keep coming back time and again.

There are a number of ways to achieve what we want, but the best and cleanest method is to exclude using WordPress Action Hook: pre_get_posts. Using this action hook, we can easily exclude any categories in all wordpress generated pages.

Exclude Certain Categories from RSS Feed

First thing you need to do is find the category IDs that you want to hide. WPrecipes explains this pretty well.

Let’s say you want to exclude category 3, 4 and 5. Open your theme’s functions.php, paste these codes:

function mytheme_exclude_cats($query) {
    if ($query->is_feed) {
        $query->set('cat','-3,-4,-5');//seperate by comma
    }
return $query;
}
 
add_action('pre_get_posts','mytheme_exclude_cats');

• pre_get_posts is an action hook that is triggered everytime before wordpress actually retrieve post from database. Therefore, we can tell wordpress to exclude certain categories.
• $query is a wordpress query object that carries information about current query: how many post to show, what categories to show to exclude, at which page does this query runs, etc.
  If you are familiar with writing custom query using WP_Query(), $query is actually the parameters of WP_Query.
• $query->is_feed carries boolean value of TRUE only when you are in Feed Page.

You can run var_dump($query) inside the function to learn more about what the object holds.

Exclude Certain Categories from Homepage

Just simply change “is_feed” to “is_home”:

function mytheme_exclude_cats($query) {
    if ($query->is_home) {
        $query->set('cat','-3,-4,-5');//seperate by comma
    }
return $query;
}
 
add_action('pre_get_posts','mytheme_exclude_cats');

Exclude from other places

Just simply change “is_feed” to the following:

is_feed – in RSS feed page
is_home – in blog homepage
is_category – in category page
is_tag – in tag page
is_search – in search page
is_comment_feed – in comment RSS feed page
is_author – in author archive page

Exclude Specific Categories from more than 1 pages

For example, to exclude category 3, 4 and 5 in both RSS Feed and Search page, it will be just as easy as:

function mytheme_exclude_cats($query) {
    if ($query->is_search || $query->is_feed) {
        $query->set('cat','-3,-4,-5');//seperate by comma
    }
return $query;
}
 
add_action('pre_get_posts','mytheme_exclude_cats');

Hope this helps.

Loading WordPress Engine

First thing to do is to load the WordPress core engine file, wp-load.php. Depends on where you want to put your custom page, you just need to use require_once(‘wp-load.php’), of course point it to correct folder if your custom page is in different folder.

In this example, i put my custom page in my WordPress root folder. Enter this in your custom page:

<?php
 
require_once('wp-load.php');
 
//if you put in "your-wordpress-root/wp-content/" folder , prepend with "../" to go "1 folder up"
//require_once('../wp-load.php');
 
?>

Congratulations, you just created a standalone WordPress custom PHP page. Isn’t that easy?

Making the page Admin-Only

Very often you need limit access to your page to your blog admins only. You can check if the user is an admin after the require_once() statement:

<?php
 
require_once('wp-load.php');
 
if ( !is_user_logged_in() && !current_user_can('manage_options')) {
die('Please login as admin to use this page.');
}
 
//your page content here

As we said previously, after we loaded wp-load.php, we then have access to all WordPress functions, that is why we can use is_user_logged_in() and current_user_can() to check the user.

“manage_options” is the capability we used to check if the user is admin because all admins can “manage_options”. For more capabilities other than just “manage_options”, please refer to the WordPress Codex on Roles & Capabilities.

Hope this helps :)

MySQL query that pulls all categories from database

<?php
 
$result = mysql_query("SELECT ".$table_prefix."terms.term_id, ".$table_prefix."terms.name,".$table_prefix."term_taxonomy.taxonomy FROM ".$table_prefix."terms INNER JOIN ".$table_prefix."term_taxonomy ON ".$table_prefix."terms.term_id = ".$table_prefix."term_taxonomy.term_id WHERE ".$table_prefix."term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category'");
 
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
// uncomment the line below to view the content of $row
// var_dump($row);
 
// category ID = $row['term_id']
// category name = $row['name']
 
echo $row['name'].' - ID '.$row['term_id'].'<br />';
}
 
?>

$table_prefix is a variable declared in wp-config.php, it carries value “wp_” by default unless you changed the setting. It is your SQL tables’ prefix.

WordPress stores all category, tags, etc in wp_term_taxonomy table so we can load all categories name and ID from there.

What about Pages?

<?php
 
$result = mysql_query("SELECT post_title, ID FROM ".$table_prefix."posts WHERE post_type = 'page' AND post_status = 'publish';");
 
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
// uncomment the line below to view the content of $row
// var_dump($row);
 
// page ID = $row['ID']
// page name = $row['post_title']
 
echo $row['post_title'].' - ID '.$row['ID'].'<br />';
}
 
?>

WordPress stores all pages in wp_posts table, but with post_type set as “page”.

Hope this helps.

In this guide, we are going to create a simple plugin that scan through the post content for “{donationcode}” and replace it with our paypal donation codes. Jump to complete code

1. Creating a new plugin php file

We created a file called simple_replacer.php and put it into wp-content/plugins/simple_replacer/ folder.

2. The plugin header

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Simple Replacer
Plugin URI: link to your page to download the plugin or usage guide
Description: Replaces {donationcode} with paypal donation codes
Author: Zen
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://zenverse.net/
*/
 
?>

3. Adding a function that does the replacing work

Type these codes into the file after the header part (after */)

function the_replacer($content) {
 
$post = str_replace( '{donationcode}' , 'YOUR_DONATION_HTML_CODES' , $content);
 
return $content;
}

NOTE:
Without returning the variable $content, you will ruin the whole post content (return empty content), so make sure you include the “return” line.

4. Adding filter, let wordpress know what we want to do

Add this, 1 line before the php closing tag (?>)

add_filter('the_content', 'the_replacer');
 
//if you want to run the function on excerpts too, uncomment the line below
//add_filter('the_excerpt', 'the_replacer');

NOTE:
The function name “the_replacer” must match the php function that you created in step 3.

The Complete Code

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Simple Replacer
Plugin URI: link to your page to download the plugin or usage guide
Description: Replaces {donationcode} with paypal donation codes
Author: Zen
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://zenverse.net/
*/
 
function the_replacer($content) {
 
$post = str_replace( '{donationcode}' , 'YOUR_DONATION_HTML_CODES' , $content);
 
return $content;
}
 
 
add_filter('the_content', 'the_replacer');
 
//if you want to run the function on excerpts too, uncomment the line below
//add_filter('the_excerpt', 'the_replacer');
 
?>

That’s it.