Testing out my theme-switching Wordpress plugin

I’m working on a Wordpress plugin that allows you to switch themes on a per-post or per-page basis. That’s why this page looks different, I’m trying the plugin out here before releasing it.

The idea is that you upload a new theme into the usual Wordpress theme directory. You can use this theme for a single Post, a single Page or more of either. You specify which Posts/Pages are to use a theme other than the WP default by using a Custom Field. All you have to do is enter the theme’s name in the Custom Field value and the theme of that name will be used for the Post/Page it’s entered on.

I’m fairly sure there will be something like this out there already but when I tried to find a theme switcher all I could find was plugins that switched the whole theme.

Go back to the home page.

Manifest: One column wordpress theme

Manifest is a one-column wordpress theme – it’s simple, uncluttered, easy on the eye and allows a blog’s content to take centre stage.

I’m thinking of switching this blog to use it – only problem with that is that Vince will be all, “that’s pony” and “looks like My First Blog”.

News aggregator Wordpress theme

http://ericulous.com/2007/06/11/popurls-clone-using-wordpress/

This theme lets you easily create news aggregator sites like Alltop and Popurls and it shows off the power of Wordpress – it’s not just a blogging platform these days.

Create a Custom WordPress Plugin From Scratch

From nettus.com

Wordpress presentation layer is a mess

As much as I love Wordpress, and that’s a lot, I can’t bring myself to accept the state of the presentation layer.

Have a look at a Wordpress template’s index.php – it’s usually a big plate of code soup. It’s a mess, it’s difficult to read and a pain to debug. It gets particularly bad when you start to modify a standard template to introduce some site-specific behaviour – you invariably start adding if statements and case statements that bloat the PHP and lead to an even messier soup of HTML and PHP.

Why doesn’t Wordpress come with a templating engine by default?

There’s plenty about. I think there’s also a few WP plugins for the Smarty template engine doing the rounds already.

Adding something like Smarty into Wordpress would:

• Let template designers concentrate on what they do best: design beautiful templates. They wouldn’t need to know anything about the WP PHP code other than to look at the template tags they need to include.
• Make templates version independent. At the moment many templates break when a new version of WP comes out because the WP API has changed, been deprecated, had a bug fix, whatever. Templates would do away with that – assuming the tags never changes and it’s unlikely they would need to.
• De-soupify the HTML.
• Give WP a proper presentation layer!

7 easy steps to a more secure Wordpress blog

There are many things you can do to secure your wordpress blog – a lot of them are pretty technical are require programming and/or sysadmin knowledge. Here’s a list of easy things that YOU can do to secure your wordpress blog:

1. Remove unused themes (by removing the whole directory)
2. Disable and remove unused plugins.
3. Keep your wordpress version up to date.
4. Keep your used plugins up to date.
5. Add an empty index.html file into the themes and plugins directories. This stop people from browsing to see what themes/plugins you have installed.
6. Install the XSS-Me and SQLInject-Me Firefox plugins and run them against your site.
7. Remove the XMLRPC.PHP file from the root directory of your blog if you are not using XML RPC.

Securing Wordpress

Danial Cuthbert has written and excellent paper about securing Wordpress using mod_security for Apache.

Read it on BlogSecurity.

Frigging awesome Wordpress themes

A really nice magazine-style layout: http://themasterplan.in/themes/the-morning-after/

A newspaper layout: http://www.revolutiontheme.com/

For a while I’ve been meaning to change by other blog from a more traditional blog-like layout to a more static traditional website type layout. I think either of those themes above should do the trick. The second theme costs but looks to be well worth the $60 – and besides, having a paid-for theme makes it much less likely that they will be a million other blogs with the same theme as you!

Writing code in Wordpress posts

Wordpress offers a <code> tag that you can wrap around any code segments in your post.


int steveMethod( int one, int two )
{
return a * b;
}

The snippet of Java above was surround with the <code> tag. Using the tag should allow you to make code snippets stand out from the rest of the text in the post.

The code tag does not tell Wordpress to format the text in any way – Wordpress will not strip or modify any HTML tags in a code segment so you will need to escape them yourself. I bet there’s a plugin somewhere to do that for you.

testing insertion of an old post

I am deliberately setting the post timestamp of this post to several months ago to see if this will appear on the front page and in the RSS feed.