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One of the improvements in WordPress 2.9 is native support for thumbnail images on posts. The API is pretty good – although it assumes that you want to return the whole IMG tag. In my case I wanted to return the URL of the image (So I could wrap the actual thumbnail in a lightbox-style [...]

I recently re-worked a site for a client. He was moving over from Joomla to WordPress, so I started from scratch with his theme design. They liked the new theme I came up with – however I’d put the menu and other navigation (Links to recent articles, etc) in a right hand sidebar, and they [...]

Google has announced the launch of “Place Pages”. Essentially a local hub showing you relevant information from maps, search, business listings and so on. It’s a fairly basic implementation right now (My local page doesn’t return any info just yet – not even businesses that I know are listed with Google) – but you can [...]

I’ve been working with a few clients to move their email marketing to a new home after most of them outgrew the limits of what they could reliably send through their existing infrastructure / hosts. Now – marketing isn’t really my strong point, and I’m definitely no designer – however I recommended and helped move [...]

I’ve recently been doing some work for a family member on a WordPress blog they run, and the need came up to build a mini-app. Now historically, I’m a Joomla kind of guy, and it’s fairly clear that for a Joomla site you would build a component to implement your app. However, in WordPress it’s [...]

I wrote a previous post about how you could hack the excellent Twitter Tools plugin from Alex King to add Google Analytics tracking variables to the URLs posted to twitter when you posted a new blog post. I submitted the patch upstream, and Alex kindly pointed out that rather than bodging around in his code [...]

Taxonomy Support I wrote recently about building a brand directory using a fantastic feature of WordPress called “Taxonomies”. Now that that feature is live I’ve realised that a number of my favourite WordPress plugins simply don’t support taxonomies. Among the casualities were Google XML Sitemaps, and the otherwise excellent Headspace2. Now, the beauty of open [...]

Background WordPress lets you categorise your posts according to “tag”, and “category”. Which is fine. However, for some time now WordPress has supported a concept called “Custom Taxonomies”. Which is a long winded way of saying “We’ll let you choose how your organise and present your posts – however you want”. This isn’t something I’ve [...]

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but I’ve recently had to build a new WordPress site from scratch, and I’ve also had a couple of friends ask my advice on how to get their own sites up and running – so I was spurred into action. This list is my ten [...]

About six weeks ago, Google made an interesting announcement. They basically said that they will Look for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can easily add to your own web pages This is an interesting announcement for a bunch of reasons (which I’ll get to soon – I promise!). Now, I like Google, they [...]