Zinx is my first free theme in 2012, a zebra stripes design wordpress magazine theme with premium features such as animated gallery, post thumbnail, featured video, latest tweets, social bookmark, popular posts and more. View the list of features below.

Type : Semi Magazine (uses excerpt at blog index)
Functionality : Blog

Features

• Fixed width, widget-ready and gravatar-ready
• Tested on Chrome, FireFox, IE6, IE8, Opera, Safari.
• Tested and working properly up to WordPress 3.2.1
• Beautify your blog using Post Thumbnail and Post Image
• 2 thumbnail system to choose from : “WordPress’s Featured Image System” or “Zenverse Post Thumbnail & Post Image System”
• Featured Posts displayed using animated slideshow
• Built-in Social Sharing buttons in blog index and single page (can be disabled in theme options)
• Tabbed Menu with 3 tabs at sidebar
• About Us Menu at sidebar
• Featured Video at sidebar
• Ready for Google Analytics, Adsense and Webmaster Tools
• Twitter Integration, display latest tweets at header
• Feedburner Integration
• Built-in plugins such as page navigation and related posts.
• Uses Sexy Bookmark plugin to share your post
• Auto determine popular posts based on comment count and display at footer
• Four banner ads spots in sidebar
• Commented CSS files for easy editing
• Powerful Theme Options page at Admin Panel
• New Version Notifier feature, you will be notified when there is new version for this theme

Demo

Preview Zinx (210)

Download

Zinx Premium WordPress Magazine Theme 1.0
[ Downloaded 50 times | 177.44 KB ]

License: Free to us, MUST keep footer intact AS IS

Recommendations for User

Manual Excerpt

To make your blog looks better, you need to include a manual excerpt for every post (like my blog). You can add that while editing or adding new post. You can, however, leave your excerpt empty and wordpress will automatically make an excerpt for you, but all HTML tags would be auto removed.

Post Image & Thumbnails

Post Thumbnail is a square image of size 125 x 125 pixels, shown at blog index, related posts and search.
Post Image is an image of size 550 x 190 pixels, shown at single post page, below the post title.
To beautify your blog, try to include post thumbnails for every post (if possible).

Why there are 2 thumbnail system to choose from?

All ZenVerse themes already have their own thumbnail system before WordPress introduces Featured Image system in WordPress 2.9. To continue support all Zenverse theme users who were still using the old thumbnail system, we need to keep the old thumbnail system.
You can choose the priority of the thumbnail system being used, seperately for Post Thumbnail and Post Image, in the theme options page.

Featured Category

In most cases, not all your featured posts are in the same category. You can create a new category (let’s say I called it : Featured) and choose it as the “Featured Category” at the theme option page.
Step-by-step guide to activate Featured Gallery

Social Bookmarking using Sexy Bookmarks Plugin

You need to install Sexy Bookmark plugin in order to show the social bookmark buttons under “Share This Post” menu. Please make sure you set the “Menu Location” to “Manual Mode” in the plugin settings page.

WP-PageNavi Plugin Conflict

Some users reported that WP-PageNavi plugin causes the sidebar and footer to be missing. If you have WP-PageNavi plugin installed, you should deactivate the plugin.

ChangeLog

Version 1.0
- First version

Theme Support / Edit / Add Features

Free theme support service has been stopped. If you need some tweaking or want to add features, please contact me. *Depending on the matter, you might need to buy me a cup of coffee or 3

Like this theme? Donate via Paypal

I spent a lot of time making themes and plugins. If you like this theme and would like to support my works, you can donate via PayPal using the button below.

Thank you.

Let’s look at how YouTube oEmbed works

1. First, send a request to YouTube’s Oembed API page with a video URL (must be urlencoded) as parameter and we also specified that we want it to be returned in json format.

http://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DbDOYN-6gdRE&format=json

2. You will then see a long json-encoded string which contains all information about the video.

3. Next thing you need to do is just simply json-decode the string using your programming language, then you are free to use the information. We will see how to do that in PHP.

Using Oembed to Embed Youtube Videos in PHP

<?php
 
$videourl = 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB4nwqNM190';
 
$json = @file_get_contents('http://www.youtube.com/oembed?url='.urlencode($videourl).'&format=json');
$decode = json_decode($json, true);
 
if ($decode == null || !$decode) {
	$error = true;
	//error control here
} else {
	$thumb = $decode['thumbnail_url'];
	$html = $decode['html'];
}
 
?>

It’s pretty straightforward and self-explanatory:

• First, we send a url request to YouTube’s obembed API page using file_get_contents() function.
• Second, we decode the response using json_decode() function which convert json format to array.
• Third, if there is no error in decoding, we then assign $thumb and $html and use it in our website or program.

Extra: If you want to limit the embedded video’s width or height

You can specify the max height or max width by appending the maxwidth or maxheight parameters to the oembed URL. (Please note that this cannot resize a smaller video to bigger size)

For example, from our example above, to specify max width of 300 pixels:

http://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DbDOYN-6gdRE&format=json&maxwidth=300

You should notice the video embedding code (iframe) is now limited to width of 300 pixels.

How do I embed videos from other video sites like Vimeo?

Most of the popular video sites has oEmbed support just like YouTube. For example, by googling “vimeo oembed” we found vimeo oembed documentation.

In vimeo, this is the URL we should send our request to:

http://vimeo.com/api/oembed.json?url=http%3A//vimeo.com/7100569

More details about oEmbed API page for other video sites will be covered in our next blog post (coming soon).

<?php
 
$query = mysql_query("SHOW TABLE STATUS WHERE name='your_table_name_here'");
if (mysql_num_rows($query)) {
	$result = mysql_fetch_assoc($query);
	echo $result['Auto_increment'];
} else {//error
	//error control here
}
 
?>

Just replace “your_table_name_here” with your mySQL table name.

As a Function

Furthermore, making it a PHP function would make the solution looks clean.

<?php
 
function get_next_value($tablename) {
	$query = mysql_query("SHOW TABLE STATUS WHERE name='".mysql_real_escape_string($tablename)."'");
	if (mysql_num_rows($query)) {
		$result = mysql_fetch_assoc($query);
		return $result['Auto_increment'];
	} else {//error
		return false;
	}
}
 
//usage
$nextval = get_next_value('your_table_name_here');
 
?>

Hope this helps.

Also, check out Google’s previous trick: Do a Barrel Roll

OceanWave is my last free theme of 2011, it a wave-design wordpress magazine theme with premium features such as animated gallery, post thumbnail, featured video, latest tweets, social bookmark, popular posts and more. View the list of features below.

Type : Semi Magazine (uses excerpt at blog index)
Functionality : Blog

Features

• Fixed width, widget-ready and gravatar-ready
• Tested on Chrome, FireFox, IE6, IE8, Opera, Safari.
• Tested and working properly up to WordPress 3.2.1
• Beautify your blog using Post Thumbnail and Post Image
• 2 thumbnail system to choose from : “WordPress’s Featured Image System” or “Zenverse Post Thumbnail & Post Image System”
• Featured Posts displayed using animated slideshow
• Built-in Social Sharing buttons in blog index and single page (can be disabled in theme options)
• Tabbed Menu with 3 tabs at sidebar
• About Us Menu at sidebar
• Featured Video at sidebar
• Ready for Google Analytics, Adsense and Webmaster Tools
• Twitter Integration, display latest tweets at header
• Feedburner Integration
• Built-in plugins such as page navigation and related posts.
• Uses Sexy Bookmark plugin to share your post
• Auto determine popular posts based on comment count and display at footer
• Four banner ads spots in sidebar
• Commented CSS files for easy editing
• Powerful Theme Options page at Admin Panel
• New Version Notifier feature, you will be notified when there is new version for this theme

Demo

Preview OceanWave (2189)

Download

Ocean Wave WordPress Theme 1.1.1
[ Downloaded 458 times | 147.82 KB ]

License: Free to use must keep footer intact AS IS

Recommendations for User

Manual Excerpt

To make your blog looks better, you need to include a manual excerpt for every post (like my blog). You can add that while editing or adding new post. You can, however, leave your excerpt empty and wordpress will automatically make an excerpt for you, but all HTML tags would be auto removed.

Post Image & Thumbnails

Post Thumbnail is a square image of size 125 x 125 pixels, shown at blog index, related posts and search.
Post Image is an image of size 550 x 190 pixels, shown at single post page, below the post title.
To beautify your blog, try to include post thumbnails for every post (if possible).

Why there are 2 thumbnail system to choose from?

All ZenVerse themes already have their own thumbnail system before WordPress introduces Featured Image system in WordPress 2.9. To continue support all Zenverse theme users who were still using the old thumbnail system, we need to keep the old thumbnail system.
You can choose the priority of the thumbnail system being used, seperately for Post Thumbnail and Post Image, in the theme options page.

Featured Category

In most cases, not all your featured posts are in the same category. You can create a new category (let’s say I called it : Featured) and choose it as the “Featured Category” at the theme option page.
Step-by-step guide to activate Featured Gallery

Social Bookmarking using Sexy Bookmarks Plugin

You need to install Sexy Bookmark plugin in order to show the social bookmark buttons under “Share This Post” menu. Please make sure you set the “Menu Location” to “Manual Mode” in the plugin settings page.

WP-PageNavi Plugin Conflict

Some users reported that WP-PageNavi plugin causes the sidebar and footer to be missing. If you have WP-PageNavi plugin installed, you should deactivate the plugin.

ChangeLog

Version 1.1.1
- Fixed a bug – wrong rss feed link at sidebar
- Changed files: header.php, functions.php, sidebar.php and style.css (updated version number only)

Version 1.1
- Fixed a bug where comment feature is not working when related post is enabled.
- Changed files: functions.php and style.css (updated version number only)

Version 1.0
- First version

Theme Support / Edit / Add Features

Free theme support service has been stopped. If you need some tweaking or want to add features, please contact me. *Depending on the matter, you might need to buy me a cup of coffee or 3

Like this theme? Donate via Paypal

I spent a lot of time making themes and plugins. If you like this theme and would like to support my works, you can donate via PayPal using the button below.

Thank you.

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.

PHP Smart Date Function

/*
Simple PHP Smart Date Function
by Zen (http://zenverse.net)
*/
function smartdate($timestamp) {
	$diff = time() - $timestamp;
 
	if ($diff <= 0) {
		return 'Now';
	}
	else if ($diff < 60) {
		return grammar_date(floor($diff), ' second(s) ago');
	}
	else if ($diff < 60*60) {
		return grammar_date(floor($diff/60), ' minute(s) ago');
	}
	else if ($diff < 60*60*24) {
		return grammar_date(floor($diff/(60*60)), ' hour(s) ago');
	}
	else if ($diff < 60*60*24*30) {
		return grammar_date(floor($diff/(60*60*24)), ' day(s) ago');
	}
	else if ($diff < 60*60*24*30*12) {
		return grammar_date(floor($diff/(60*60*24*30)), ' month(s) ago');
	}
	else {
		return grammar_date(floor($diff/(60*60*24*30*12)), ' year(s) ago');
	}
}
 
 
function grammar_date($val, $sentence) {
	if ($val > 1) {
		return $val.str_replace('(s)', 's', $sentence);
	} else {
		return $val.str_replace('(s)', '', $sentence);
	}
}

Basically I defined 2 functions above:
smartdate – calculates the difference between given timestamp and current time, then returns the correct sentence
grammar_date – modifies the returned sentence to plural form or singular form

Usage

The usage is simple and straightforward.

<?php
 
//example 1
echo smartdate($yourtimestamp);
 
//example 2
echo 'Posted on '.smartdate($yourtimestamp); 
 
?>

By default, this function returns the floor() value, i.e: instead of returning “1.7 years ago”, it returns “1 year ago”. Anyway, the function can be easily modified to suit your specific needs.

Give users the choice to view the full date

1 disadvantage of smart date is of course, it reduces the level of detail and granularity of the date information. For example, dates of 13 months ago or 19 months ago will both be displayed as “1 year ago”.

The most common way to let user view the full date is to add a “title” attribute with full date as the attribute value. Now, when user mouseover your smart date, they can see the full date popping up as tooltip. Facebook uses this approach.

<?php
 
//from example 2 above
echo 'Posted on <span title="' . $originalfulldate . '">' . smartdate($yourtimestamp) . '</span>'; 
 
?>

Hope this helps.

Preview

Download

The zip file contains 1 PSD and 1 PNG file.

Cat-Ears - Free Social Bookmark Buttons & Logo [PSD + PNG]
[ Downloaded 92 times | 517.37 KB ]

Comments are appreciated. Enjoy the pack and share it to your friends

License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

NOTE:
This is not XAMPP / apache issue
This is not browser-specific issue

In fact, this is a simple problem with simple solution. However, this problem occurs when I am getting frustrated with the Facebook integration problem (after 12 hours of debugging). Therefore, I missed some simple but important steps to solve this problem. Here I list them down below:

1. Ping Localhost

For Mac OS users, open up your Terminal. For windows users, open up your command prompt.

• Type the “ping localhost” and press enter.
• You should get error messages like “unknown host” since you are having this problem.

• Next, type “ping 127.0.0.1″ and press enter.
• If you saw something like this, the ping is successful:
  ^?View Code CMD

  PING 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.118 ms 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.171 ms 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.167 ms

• If you get “unknown host error”, please check whether you have started your local server service.

2. Clear your browser cache

Modern browsers cache a lot of stuff, including DNS cache. They may have cached the erroneous DNS setting in etc/hosts, so you might want to clear your browsers cache and try loading localhost again. Clearing cache alone would already be sufficient, you can skip clearing cookies, saved session, etc.

If it still doesn’t work, try #3 below.

3. Did you just flushed the DNS cache?

I ran this command in terminal (Mac) to flush my cache before I get into this mess: “dscacheutil -flushcache”
For some reason, after I flushed the cache, the DNS setting is not being rebuilt – I cannot ping localhost but I can ping 127.0.0.1

After restarting my laptop (to rebuild the DNS settings & cache) and clearing all browser cache once again, I finally get my localhost displayed again.

Now I hope this helps some of you.

Here are the complete codes for all sizes of Facebook share button for those who are interested:

Box Count

Share  *count will only visible when there is at least 1 share

Codes:

<a name="fb_share" type="box_count" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php">Share</a>
<script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" type="text/javascript"></script>

Button Count

Share *count will only visible when there is at least 1 share

Codes:

<a name="fb_share" type="button_count" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php">Share</a>
<script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" type="text/javascript"></script>

Button only

Share

Codes:

<a name="fb_share" type="button" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php">Share</a>
<script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" type="text/javascript"></script>

Small Icon only

Share

Codes:

<a name="fb_share" type="icon" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php">Share</a>
<script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" type="text/javascript"></script>

Custom URL?

All codes above “shares” the current page. If you want to share another page or a specific page, you need to add a “share_url” attribute to the <a> tag. You need this too when you have multiple share buttons in a single page.

Example below shares our main website http://zenverse.net instead of this page.

Share

Here’s how:

<a name="fb_share" type="button_count" share_url="http://zenverse.net" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php">Share</a>
<script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" type="text/javascript"></script>

Multiple Share Buttons

If you have multiple share buttons in a single page, you just need to include the <script> element once.

Hope this helps.