One of my favorite parts about using WordPress for my blogs is getting to work with PHP code, which I find to be much easier to write/hack.   For those that are shy around code, it really isn’t that difficult to get ahold of the basics of PHP, so WordPress is the right place for you. 

One great area to start is learning how the WordPress loop works.  This is a basic function of blogging used to display the most recent X number of posts on your blog’s homepage (for traditional blogs).   Rather than go into to much detail here, I’d like to point you towards a new post by Themelab which is designed to be the Utlimate Guide to the WordPress loop. 

This post definitely lives up to its name and goes beyond just showing you how to do something.  It actually explains how and why it works, and includes screenshots with many of the examples.   If you have any interest in learning about the WordPress loop you may want to read through this post and/or bookmark it for future reference. 

Probably the most talked about feature in WordPress 2.5 is the new design for the dashboard that was supposed to be released in WordPress 2.4.  The design has taken a lot of heat since the initial demo was released as many WordPress bloggers don’t seem to like it.   I personally think that it is just drastically different and will just taking some getting used to.  Once people are used to it people will like it.

Once you’ve upgraded, the good news is that you have options.  If you prefer to customize your own colors, Ozh has a nice tutorial up explaining how to make a custom stylesheet in WordPress 2.5.

As previously mentioned, you also have the option of using a plugin such as Fluency Admin to adjust the look of your dashboard (WordPress 2.5+).   I’m sure other plugins will be released as well, giving you a wide variety of looks to choose from.

This guest post was written by Jeffro of Jeffro2pt0. Jeffro is a WordPress enthusiast who writes a lot about WordPress and maintains a WordPress Weekly podcast. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a guest post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

Ever wanted that ability to show your bio information within your WordPress profile at the bottom of every post? For single user blogs, this might not be practical. But for multi-authored blogs, adding the bio info of each author at the bottom of their respective posts is a good way to give props to the author as well as providing information to the readers as to who that person is without having to refer to an about me page. The good news is that, you don’t need to install a plugin to have this functionality.

Inside of a user profile is this nifty little box where you can place information about yourself. As you can see, I have already placed some info into the box for reference later on in the tutorial. We are going to take the information in this box and display it at the bottom of every post that is under my name.

The template tag we are going to focus on is <?php the_author_description(); ?> This tag doesn’t accept any parameters, so don’t bother trying to do anything funky with this tag. Now, head to your templates Style sheet and add this to it:

.postauthor { }

This will give us the opportunity to style the postauthor bit when it’s published in the post. Now that we have the template tag in order, we will need to place it within the loop.

I’m not going to delve into the specifics of the loop, but in general, it deals with the information related to posts. Browse to your themes index.php file and look for something like this:

< ?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?>

That is what it looks like in my theme, it may look different in yours, but this is the function that displays the content of the post. Underneath of this content function is where you would want to place the following code:

< div class="postauthor ">< ?php the_author_description(); ? >< /div>

Please keep in mind that if the code does not work, it is most likely due to the spaces which I had to add in order for the code to properly appear within this post. Simply remove the spaces, and the code should be just fine.

Now that you have the author description function in place, this is what it might look like on your blog:

If you ask me, this looks bland and boring. We need to fix that by editing the div class called Postauthor within the CSS file and give that Div class a nice look. You can style it to match your blog design, but for the sake of this tutorial, I’ll display the CSS code which makes it appear like the TAG div container shown below the Post Author.

.postauthor {
color: #222222;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: normal;
background: #EAEAEA;
border-top: 2px solid #000000;
border-bottom: 1px solid #000000;
width: 640px;
padding: 3px;
margin-bottom:5px;
}

This CSS style code turns that small black text into something like this:

Over the coming weeks and months, I have tons of WordPress plugin reviews scheduled to be posted.   As I complete the reviews, they are being added to my ultimate list of WordPress plugins, which is a collection of WordPress plugins, their descriptions, and the links to these reviews.  My hope is that this page, in time, will prove to be a useful resource for WordPress users.

In the meantime, I ran across a great post by Lifehacker.biz called WordPress plugins and tutorials.   The authors went into an extreme amount of detail with their list of plugins, and there were even a few useful ones there that I didn’t know existed.  I recommend you take a minute or two and skim through their list to make sure you are taking advantage of all of these plugins available.

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.