This is a quick message to let you know I’ve published a detailed tutorial on WordPress Page Attributes. What they are, what they’re for, and how to use them.

Page Attributes in WordPress

Read more here.

Remember These?

Sometimes you need to hide your entire website from public visitors. Maybe it’s because you’re still experimenting and deciding what theme you want to apply, maybe you’re still hard at work creating the initial content for the site, of maybe you’ve been traipsing around in the code and completely horked your site (yes it’s happened to me more than once). Whatever your reason there are times when you want to block your site from the public.

It’s more than likely you’ll want to display a message to your visitors letting them know that you’re working on the site and that it’s only a temporary situation. With a hand coded website, this would involve creating a new temporary file for your main page and then changing the file name of the normal main page to something different. Then, when your changes were finished, you would have to reverse this process.

Luckily, blocking your site content and creating and displaying a “maintenance” message is dead simple with WordPress. It’s just one more reason to use WordPress as your web publishing platform. The secret to accomplishing this effortlessly is a direct result of a few plugin developers and the one plugin I prefer most is named WP Maintenance Mode by Bueltge.

What Does This Plugin Do?

From the plugin page:

Adds a maintenance-page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Users with rights for theme-options get full access to the blog including the frontend.

Your main page before activating the plugin:

Before Activating WP Maintenance Mode

Your main page after activating the plugin (before setting any of the many plugin options):

After Activating WP Maintenance Mode

You might be thinking that the image above is no big deal, and you’re right, it’s not all that lovely to look at is it? It does do the job though, quick and easy. If you want to get fancier with your maintenance message, keep reading. This plugin offers more than just simplicity. It’s also feature packed.

What Can I Display to My Visitors?

You can display text messages or one of several background images. You can also display a countdown timer. Here’s an example after I entered some quick text into the header, heading, and content message areas.

A Written Message

Here’s another example of the above method but this time with a little HTML included to showcase the rest of this person’s sites in their network.

HTML with some links

You could also choose to display one of the several included maintenance message screens. I think they all look really nice and chances are that one of them could fit the mood of your site. Rather than duplicate the images of these different maintenance messages, go ahead and have a look at the available choices here.

How Do I Use It?

This is something important note. Usually after activating a plugin, you’ll see a new item under the Tools or Settings menus, but the Maintenance Mode plugin settings don’t follow that logic. The settings for this plugin are found on the plugins page. That is, wherever you see Maintenance Mode listed along with the other plugins, you’ll see a settings link right next to it. Clicking on the settings link will reveal the options see in the next image.

Maintenance Mode WordPress Plugin Settings

Along with all the styles to choose from above, you can also create your own custom styles. This is a very useful plugin for anyone who needs to quickly hide their site from the public. If you’ve found this tutorial to be useful, please share it with others via your preferred social network.

If you’ve heard the term Shortcode while browsing around the WordPress world, or if you’ve seen the term used within instructions for a WordPress plugin and have been wondering what exactly a shortcode is and what it does, then you’ve found the right tutorial. Shortcodes are an awesome tool for both WordPress developers and WordPress administrators.

What is a Shortcode?

The definition from the WordPress Codex…

Introduced in WordPress 2.5 is the Shortcode API, a simple set of functions for creating macro codes for use in post content.

Huh? Let me put it a bit more simply. A Shortcode is a short code that you can insert into a post or page (and even a Widget) that will display some kind of content. Think of it like an abbreviation for a larger amount of code. All Shortcodes go between brackets, like this:

[shortcode]

Let’s imagine that we have a plugin installed that lets you create different lists of links grouped by topics. Let’s further imagine that you create a topic named Featured WordPress Tutorials and that you have added five links attached to that topic. Let’s also theorize that you wanted to put that list of links into several (but not all) of your WordPress pages or posts. How would you do that without manually creating those links again for each page or post where you wanted them to appear? If this plugin provides you with a Shortcode, it’s simple.

Where Do Shortcodes Come From?

As referenced above, WordPress introduced Shortcodes with the release of WordPress 2.5. This gave theme and plugin developers the ability to create Shortcodes for a multitude of uses…and us daily WordPress users a lot more options. I won’t get into how to create your own Shortcode just yet, so for now, let’s assume that the developer of our example Topics Link List plugin above built in some Shortcodes into his/her plugin for us to use. Let’s assume they provide the Shortcode below…

[topic list]

How and Where Do I Use a Shortcode?

Shortcodes can be used almost anywhere in WordPress. They could be built into your theme code, you could place them in your theme’s functions.php, comments pages, in your archive pages, etc. However, the most common use of Shortcodes are the ones provided by plugins that you place into your pages or posts when you’re creating or editing them.

Back to our example. So I’ve created my topic and some links within our hypothetical plugin settings and now I want them to show in this post. I would simply add the Shortcode below…

[topic list]

…and this abbreviation or short code would actually output my list like below:

Featured WordPress Tutorials

1. Introducing the WP Modder App for iPhone and iPod Touch
2. What is the best WordPress Plugin for Making a Personal Connection with Your Visitors?
3. Speeding up Your WordPress Site by Limiting the Number of Post and Page Revisions
4. How to Avoid Confusing Your New WordPress Authors and Only Give Them What They Need.
5. How to Customize and Remove Items in Your WordPress Dashboard and Post Edit Screens

This is just a quick example and explanation of what Shortcodes are and how they might be used. I hope it gives you a starting point in understanding the real power and benefit of using Shortcodes in WordPress.

Can I Use a Shortcode in a Widget?

You sure can, but you’ll need to activate this feature in your theme first. See my other tutorial here or right on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad by downloading the WP Modder App here.

Stay tuned here and at WP Modder to learn why and how to create your own Shortcodes.

You probably already know that adding images, videos, and relevant links to your blog posts and website articles is something you should be doing. If you didn’t know this or the reasons why, stay tuned here. If you’re already doing this, you may be adding these links, video and images in an inefficient way. In this tutorial, I’m going to highlight one of my favorite plugins for finding images that are legal to use on your site, and it also allows you to easily search several other sources in order to find relevant videos and links for your content including:

• Youtube videos
• Wikipedia
• Google
• Google News
• Google Blog Search
• Google Book Search
• Google Maps

This is a truly powerful and full featured plugin and is named Insights.

Insights Plugin by Vladimir Prevolac

Insights Settings

After activation, this plugin makes additions to two areas of your WordPress backend. The first addition creates a new Insights link under the Settings menu.

Insights Settings Menu

I’m not going to go into detail for the settings above. They’re pretty self-explanatory. However as you can see, the Google Maps module needs to be activated in order to search addresses and insert a Google Map into your content. For this to be enabled, you’ll need to have a Google Maps API key and there’s a handy link to go get one.

If you have no idea what this is or how to go about getting an API, leave a comment on this post and let me know. The process may warrant a tutorial of it’s own.

Insights Meta Box

The second addition will be a new Insights meta box on your post/page editing screens.

Insights Meta Box

This is where the real power and convenience of this plugin will present itself. From this area you can search a variety of sources to find and automatically add content, links, and images to your posts. Notice the radio buttons under the search box (click image to enlarge).

Simply enter your search terms and choose the source you’d like to search and you’ll have the option to insert whatever content you’ve searched right into your post. There are couple specific tips I’d like to share about the different options so I created a video to show how to use the plugin’s options.

In a previous post I showed how you can hide individual pages from your WordPress page navigation menus. I also warned that they can still be indexed by search engines and therefore seen by unintended people through search results.

Why Do Search Engines Still Index My Hidden Pages?

Because we haven’t told them not to…yet. The solution for blocking search engines from indexing individual pages lies in using what are known as robots meta tags. In a nutshell, the robots meta tags deliver instructions to search engines on what to do when they get to the content of an individual web page. The optional tags you can specify are:

"index"
"noindex"
"follow"
"nofollow"

The “index” and “noindex” tell search engines to read the page or not. The “follow” and “nofollow” tell search engines to either follow the links on your pages or not. You can use any combination of these robots meta tags, but only the following combinations make sense logically.

meta name="robots" content="noindex", "follow"
meta name="robots" content="index", "nofollow"
meta name="robots" content="noindex", "nofollow"

How To Specify Robots Meta Tags on Your Pages and Posts

If you were writing individual HTML pages, you would need to insert these robots meta tags in the <HEAD> section of each of your pages. Because WordPress handles the creation of our pages dynamically it would be very difficult to do on our own…

I received this question from one of the members here on AdamWWarner.com.

Hi Adam,
I was looking around on your site and didn’t find this information, but that could just be me. The question is – Whenever Jamie posts something on her blog, I get notified the next day – the post arrives. Same thing happens for your blog. (wpmodder) I get notices of your posts.

So, WP guru, what’s the key?

Thanks!!
Milt
http://manykites.org

Thanks for the great question Milt! This is a popular feature on many websites and is known as an RSS to email subscription service. There are many ways and many services you could use to accomplish the same goal of sending people updates to their email every time you add new content, but in this tutorial I’m going to show you what I consider to be the easiest method. Best of all it’s completely free. The service is named Feedburner. The first thing you need is a Google account. If you don’t have one, you should…they offer all kinds of free services that I’ll be covering in future tutorials.

Once you’re logged into your Google account, click on Settings–>Google Account settings.

Google Account Settings

Once in your Google Account settings, look for Feedburner listed under the My Products heading. If it’s not there, you’ll need to add that to your Google Account product listing. You should be able to find it by clicking the More link to see a full listing of available Google product services.

Click on Feedburner

Once you click on the Feedburner link, you’ll see a window similar to the one below that gives you the option to “burn a feed”. In other words, you’re going to tell Feedburner where to find your RSS feed address. Now, if your site is built in WordPress (and most likely it is if you’re reading this), you should know that be default WordPress provides several different RSS feeds “out of the box”. This makes it easy for services like Feedburner to find your feeds. Simply enter your website address and Feedburner will find one, two, or more of your feeds and ask you which one you’d like to use.

Enter WordPress Website Address

Choose the feed you would like Feedburner to use and hit Next.

Your Available RSS Feeds

You have the option here to define a different feed address. Feel free to make it something easy to remember.

Choose Your Desired Feed Address

Once you’re done here, you’ll be presented with a few more options. They’re self-explanatory so I’ll skip the details. After you’re all done, you’ll see a screen like the one below with a series of tabs. Click on the Publicize tab.

Feedburner Feed Settings

You’ll then see an option for Email Subscriptions. Click that.

Click on Email Subscriptions

Click the Activate button.

Activate the Email Subscriptions Service

You’ll now be presented with the code that contains the Email Subscription Form. We’re going to put that form inside a Text Widget in the WordPress backend Widgets area.

Copy the Subscription Form Code

If you don’t want a form, you can also choose to copy a simple text link to the Email Subscription Form.

Optional Text Link to Email Subscribe

Go to the Widgets area of your WordPress backend and paste this code into a Text Widget. You’ll also want to give it snappy title to prompt people to “take action”.

Paste the Code in a Text Widget and Save

On the front end of your site, now you’ll see the Email Subscription Form.

Why not sign up for my updates?

When you create a new page in WordPress it automatically shows up in your main navigation menu. Although this is intended default behavior, sometimes you don’t want that to happen. As an example, I regularly create “test” pages for my clients in order to give them a visual interpretation of some functionality or process I’m trying to explain. I absolutely don’t want these test pages in my menu, not only because it would look terrible but also because I don’t want the general public to see these client-specific pages.

Have you ever had the need to create a WordPress page and have it NOT show up in your page navigation menu? At first glance, this seems like a really simple thing to do, and with the menu creation options in WordPress 3.0 it is…well, kind of. I’m going to save the menu creation for another tutorial but I wanted to show you a very quick and easy way to exclude any page you want from your page navigation menus. It’s simple and I use it every day. It’s a plugin named…Exclude Pages from Navigation made available by Simon Wheatley.

Exclude Pages Plugin

This plugin does just what it says in the description…

This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus).

Pages which are children of excluded pages also do not show up in menu listings. (An alert in the editing screen, underneath the “include” checkbox allows you to track down which ancestor page is affecting child pages in this way.)

Let’s have a look. Go to your WordPress Dashboard and install, then activate this plugin. After activation you might expect to see some new options on the left side of your Dashboard, but this plugin is a bit different. This plugin’s settings are where they should be, only on the Pages screen while in Edit Mode. Go ahead and either click Add New under the pages menu or go to any page and go to Edit Mode. Now have a look at the right side of the page. Somewhere there you’ll see a new item named Exclude Pages. It looks like this:

Exclude Pages Setting

If you want to hide or exclude this page from your navigation page menus, simply uncheck this box and either save or update your page. That’s it!

Here’s my page navigation before using the plugin. The page I want to hide is named Page that Should be Hidden:

I want to remove this page

After I’ve unchecked the Include this page in lists of pages option, my page navigation menu now looks like this:

No more page listed:)

Care to watch a quick video?

If you liked this tutorial, please help me spread the word and share on your preferred social network below. Thanks for your help!

I recently received a support request from a client who was having trouble with sizing images when inserting them into her posts…

Hi Adam,

I have been receiving images from my customers and uploading them into my posts for awhile now with no problems, but lately I’ve run into an issue I hope you can help solve. Usually after uploading an image I get to choose from the size of the image to insert into my pages or posts. The sizes to choose from are Thumbnail, Medium, Large, and Original. I have a couple questions regarding some inconsistencies I’m seeing.

Why do I get all of these size choices with some images and other times I only get Thumbnail, Medium, and Original (no Large)?

Why do the available sizes of these images change? Sometimes the medium size will be 300 x 300 and other times it will be smaller (like 250 x 250) The same thing happens with the Large size too, but the above things only happen sometimes? I would like to make an image fill the entire width of my posts just like the text does, but depending on the image, sometimes my only choice is either too large or too small for this area.

Thanks for your continued support, we appreciate all your help!

Alexa

While offering Alexa the solution and explanation of why this happens and how to correct it, it occurred to me that even with the many years experience I have of working with WordPress, I very seldom took advantage of a built-in image and media setting that can really help to create consistency when using images in your posts and pages, not to mention making things easier for you.

The first thing you’ll need to know is how wide your content area is. In other words, what is the maximum width that you can have for each image. The width you have to work with is directly related to the theme you have installed and activated on your site. There are a couple ways to find out the width of the content area of your specific theme, but for the purpose of this tutorial, I’ll be using the WordPress default theme named Twenty Ten. I know that the content area has a maximum width of 640px, and that’s how wide I want my uploaded images to be.

Post Content Width

I’ve had the opportunity to use many different WordPress slideshow plugins through the years and each of them seem to have certain features that they manage and execute very well. That said, each plugin is different and targeted toward a specific task and none of them ever satisfied me completely, but I’ve found one that comes closer than any of the others.

I want to call out right now that this is a paid plugin and that I am only sharing this information because I have purchased it myself and believe in it’s value. Therefore any links in this article that lead to the slideshow plugin are affiliate links which means if any of you end up purchasing this plugin, I can buy my dogs a few more treats:)

Promise: I will never recommend a premium plugin or theme unless I have personally used it and think it’s useful.

This plugin is aptly named Slideshow Plugin. It’s almost too direct of a name in the WordPress plugin world if you ask me, but the author seems to be pretty ingrained in the online marketing community, so I’ll assume she knows her stuff and how she wants her plugin to be found. I’ve made a short video of how to create a simple slideshow and insert it into a WordPress page using a shortcode that the plugin provides. I purposefully did not administer the plugin before making this video in order to show you just how user friendly and straightforward it was to setup a nice looking slideshow in a matter of minutes.

Click Image to Watch Video

There are several more configuration possibilities with this plugin, including adding an audio file to play during individual slideshows you create. Overall I’ve been very happy with the features of this plugin and in my opinion, it was well worth the cost of the developer license that enables me to use it on any client site that needs a slideshow feature. Read more about the WordPress Slideshow Plugin here.

I am working on a website redesign project for a company that has a need to display several thousand products on their site. One of the main goals with this redesign was easier navigation for the end user. This post will focus on only one aspect of this new navigation. The display of categories.

The desire was to display these product posts and their categories like an online catalog without the need for e-commerce capability. This meant that the categories needed a more visual display instead of a standard list, and this needed to be included on category archive pages. To achieve this, I turned to the Thematic theme framework, category page templates, and most important for my visual layout, the Category-Icons plugin by Sub.

Creating Category Page Templates

The first thing I did was create category page templates. There were two reasons for this:

1. This site has 85 seperate categories and several category archive pages needed different descriptions at the top of the page.
2. Each category archive page needed a different loop to pull in different categories of my choosing.

It couldn’t be easier to create category page templates really. Two simple steps:

1. Copy the category.php file from the main Thematic folder, put it in your Child Theme folder, and rename it using the ID of the category you want to use it for. Learn more here http://codex.wordpress.org/Category_Templates
2. That’s it, you’ve just created a category template page. Now you can edit this page to include content specific to that category.

Here’s a quick example. I have a category named Bath. This category has an ID of 62. I copied the category.php file into my Child Theme folder and named it category-62.php. Now everytime the Bath category archive page loads, it uses the category-62.php file instead of the category.php file.

Adding Custom Content to Category Page Templates

Now I needed to change the content for the Bath category page, so I dove into the template and placed some descriptive content at the top:

You've spent hours pouring over magazines to find the perfect design for your new
spa-like bathroom retreat. You've chosen the perfect tile, the whirlpool tub,
beautiful faucets and luxurious shower sprays.

Notice the ascii code in there? I had to use that for the apostrophe’s in order for the page to render correctly. But I digress…

Now for the really cool part. Changing the category loop to pull in the categories of my choosing and to display the icons I assigned to these categories using the Category-Icons plugin. (I’ll go into more detail about this plugin in a future post).

<!--?php //Bath Cats //Create a variable with category IDs. These can easily be changed anytime. $ftchildcats="69,71,77,75,67,116,72"; ?-->

<!--?php <br ?-->//Creating my own ul class for styling these category listings
echo "</pre>
<ul class="ft-category">
<ul class="ft-category">";</ul>
</ul>
&nbsp;
<ul class="ft-category">
<ul class="ft-category">//Checking to see if the Category-Icons plugin function exists</ul>
</ul>
<ul class="ft-category">
<ul class="ft-category">if (function_exists('put_cat_icons'))</ul>
</ul>
&nbsp;
<ul class="ft-category">
<ul class="ft-category">//If it does exist, display the Category-Icons along with the category titles</ul>
</ul>
&nbsp;
<ul class="ft-category">
<ul class="ft-category">put_cat_icons( wp_list_categories('title_li=&include=' . $ftchildcats . '&echo=0'));</ul>
</ul>
&nbsp;
<ul class="ft-category">
<ul class="ft-category">//If the Category-Icons plugin is broken, or doesn't exist, just show the full category list</ul>
</ul>
&nbsp;
<ul class="ft-category">
<ul class="ft-category">else</ul>
</ul>
&nbsp;
<ul class="ft-category">
<ul class="ft-category">wp_list_categories('title_li');</ul>
</ul>
&nbsp;
<ul class="ft-category">echo "</ul>
<pre>
;
?>

The output looks like this:

Of course this is only one of the methods you can use with the Category-Icons plugin. You can learn more here.

If you’re using this plugin, please post a link so we can all have a peek.

I had a bit of a time finding the answer to this one, but I solved it by searching high and low and thought I’d share:) A client I’m working with has a few different series of products and along with the standard categorical framework, they needed an easy way for their customers to “jump to information” on different series of products. They also wanted this series list in a dropdown menu displayed on most pages. So, here’s what I did…

I am using posts to display individual product information, but I needed to use individual pages to display the information about a particular product series. Using pages posed a bit of a quandary though when I started thinking about how to display them in a dropdown list. Why? Have a look in your WordPress Dashboard–>Appearance–>Widgets area. Look at the Categories widget. See that option in there to “show as dropdown”?

Now have a look at the Pages widget. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

…right! WTF? No option to display pages as a dropdown list? Why? Who knows, but I needed to solve it so I set forth on my search. The first thing I did was look for a Template Tag similar to wp_dropdown_categories and I found one for pages named wp_dropdown_pages. Now, I needed to use this tag AND be able to specify the individual pages to be included AND the order of these pages. Before we get to that code, the first thing I needed to do was to figure out the easiest way to get it displayed in a widget. As you might know, WordPress doesn’t allow for inserting PHP code into your widgets by default, so finding a plugin for that was the first task. Luckily, I came across Otto’s PHP Code Widget plugin pretty quickly and since Otto’s pretty ingrained in the WordPress world, it seemed very likely that this plugin would be “future-proof”. OK, so now I can put PHP code inside a widget.

I then wrote some pretty simple code using the wp_dropdown_pages Template Tag (or function) to pull a list of pages into my PHP Code Widget. It looked like this: (with proper beginning and ending PHP tags not seen in this example) wp_dropdown_pages(‘include=1409,1411,1413&sort_column=ID’). I saved my widget, refreshed my main page, and presto, a pages dropdown list. But wait!!! When selecting any page from the list, none of them were being loaded by the browser. HUH?

So, off again I went to search the Template Tag section of the Codex. I found this on the wp_dropdown_pages detail page:

See the section entitled 5.1? With Submit Button? But I don’t want a submit button, I want a “jump” menu. Take me to the page when selected. It works in the categories widget by default and there’s not even an example of how to achieve this with dropdown pages. Say it ain’t so WordPress gods, say it ain’t so!

After much time searching the Codex, forums, and blog posts, and bothering online friends who have better things to do, I finally found the answer. Guess where. The Codex! I missed it initially, but the answer is there, only it’s on the wp_dropdown_categories Codex page and not the wp_dropdown_pages Codex page.

See examples 4.2 and 4.3. Those were my answers. Actually 4.3 was my answer. I took that bit of code, replaced all references to categories and replaced with pages, and Bam! A dropdown list of pages that works like a charm! Here’s the end result:

Here’s what my PHP Code Widget looked like with the code inside: (notice I commented out the H2 title tags also)

I hope that helps and if you use this trick, please post a link in the comments.

We all know that you can add a sticky post to the index page right? Have you ever wanted to do the same with a category archive page? One way is to create your own category page template and code in a custom loop, but that’s not really “user-friendly” for most WordPress users. As good news usually goes with WordPress, a plugin exists to help you more easily accomplish this “Category Sticky Post” feature on your site. It’s named AStickyPostsOrderER and it was created by AndreSC. I love the name!

I’ve created a video that gives you a quick overview and also an idea of the possibilities available with this plugin. Incidentally, I’ve created several videos so far and this is the first to show my ugly mug…so be prepared. Ha!

Oh wait, one more thing before the video…don’t forget to enter the WordPress Book Giveaway, it really couldn’t be easier to enter. You’ve got nothing to lose and only WordPress knowledge to gain.

I’ve recently became aware of the “Secondary HTML Content” plugin for WordPress, and after having a quick look at the description, I still wasn’t quite sure what exactly it was supposed to do. I’m more of a visual learner and I had a hunch that it’s intended usage may not be clear for others either, so I installed the plugin and made a video showing some basics.


The plugin descriptions starts out like this:

Add a second block of HTML content to WordPress pages. A perfect solution for layouts with two distinct content areas or “blocks”, such as a sidebar or two column view. When editing a page, a second WordPress WYSIWYG content editor will appear beneath the standard page editing block.

The description goes on to explain that whatever you enter into this second HTML content area, can be output to your page in a couple of ways. You can add the “Secondary HTML Content” widget to your sidebar or you can use a function inside your template. This video only covers the widget usage.

Thanks for taking the time to watch this video. Please feel free to leave comments below with further questions.