Because this website focuses on WordPress, I tend to spend a lot of time highlighting various WordPress themes and plugins.   One trend I’ve noticed is that a lot of theme developers will often waste a lot of valuable screen real estate by keeping their themes width under 800px.  Is this really necessary anymore?   Do people still use the 800 x 600 resolution? 

Limiting yourself to a 800px or less wastes a lot of valuable real estate that in my opinion could be used to widen your sidebar, give you more room in your menu (which helps keep things above the fold), or allow you to better blend advertisements into your blog posts.   When I set up a new site for someone and start theme shopping, I don’t even consider using these themes as it would take to long to adjust to a comfortable width. 

So that is my pet peeve with theme authors.  Its not the 80’s or 90’s anymore, so make your themes modern if you want people to use them.  

What is something you watch out for when selecting a theme to use?

Have you ever noticed those blogs that seem to automatically generate content? Typically they are done in good taste, maybe linking to a small portion of one of your posts and providing a link to the source. There are a few ways to go about this, but one popular method for WordPress blogs is the WP-o-Matic WordPress plugin.

This WordPress plugin allows you to add/import your feeds and sort them into campaigns and categories for easy management. You can then automatically generate posts from the feeds of your choice. Additional features include the ability to relink specific words as well as rewriting words within posts.

WP-o-Matic is actually a pretty well done plugin, but has the potential for abuse in the wrong hands. I recommend people that download this plugin use it responsibly and always only post excerpts of others works and provide a link to the source.

Edit: There is now a premium WordPress plugin available called AutoBlogged that is a more advanced version of this plugin.   It has a small fee, but will quickly pay for itself!

This post is being written as part of Tutorial Group Writing project happening at The Writer’s Manifesto blog.

I talked previously about how there are a lot of basic things WordPress theme authors can do to make a theme more functional and appealing to WordPress users, such as separating blog comments from trackbacks.  Another thing that theme authors often forget to do is add “edit” buttons to posts, pages, and comments.   Having access to these buttons can save blog authors a lot of time when trying to manage their blogs.  As a result, I decided to write up a quick tutorial that explains the really simple process of adding edit buttons to your WordPress theme. 

If you’d like to add an “Edit” button on your individual posts or pages, here is the code you will want to place somewhere in your post and/or page template (usually called single.php and page.php) where you want it to display:

<?php edit_post_link(__("**Edit**"), ''); ?>

If you’d like to add an “Edit” button to your individual comments, here is the code you need to place somewhere in your comments loop (usually called comments.php) where you want it to display:

<?php edit_comment_link(__("**Edit**"), ''); ?>

A couple of quick notes about adding edit buttons to your theme:

• These edit links will only appear if you are logged in with the appropriate priviledges (administrator, editor, etc.).  Your traffic will not see them.
• You can wrap them in a div or whatever you would like to and then set its position in your stylesheet to appear where you want it to. 

This post is being written as part of the Geeks Are Sexy How-To Contest. 

Have you noticed while visiting some of your favorite blogs that many author comments are styled differently to help the authors comments to stand out?   This is something that isn’t overly difficult to implement on your WordPress blog, so I decided to write a quick how-to post explaining how you can easily adjust your WordPress theme to display different styles for each author.

First, you’ll need to make some adjustments to the comments.php code.   Look for something similar to the following code:

<li class="<?php echo $oddcomment; ?>" id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">

Replace the above code with the following code:

<li class="<?php if ($comment->comment_author_email == "admin@yourdomain.com") echo 'author'; else echo $oddcomment; ?> item" id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">

You’ll want to modify admin@yourdomain.com to reflect the primary blog author’s e-mail address.  This will tell WordPress to check each comment to see if you are the author.   Now go to your CSS Stylesheet (style.css) and add the commands you would like to use for your author comments.   You’ll want to use .author to style your author comments.  I recommend pulling your standard comment code, then adjusting the colors to look different on your comments.  You can also add a logo through your stylesheet.

How do I do this if my blog uses multiple authors?   If your blog features several different authors, you’ll want to make a slightly different adjustment to the above code so that it looks like this:

<li class="<?php if ($comment->comment_author_email == "author@yourdomain.com") echo 'author'; else if ($comment->comment_author_email == "author2@yourdomain.com") echo 'author2'; else if ($comment->comment_author_email == "author3@yourdomain.com") echo 'author3'; else echo $oddcomment; ?> item" id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">

In the above example, we are assigning the primary author as .author and adding their e-mail address where it says author@yourdomain.com.   When the comment includes that e-mail, it will use the .author style from the stylesheet.  The second author will use .author2 for their stylesheet and replace author2@yourdomain.com with the 2nd author’s e-mail, etc.   Any comments that don’t include one of the above e-mails will use the standard styles.

Once you’ve got your code adjusted and added the author(s) commands to your stylesheet you will be ready to start commenting!