Wordpress Tips and Tricks

RocketTheme tips and tricks

GoogleThem — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 05:40:21 +0000

RocketTheme forums: http://www.rockettheme.com/forum/ (PHPBB3)

Re: How Do I Set RokStories to Show in Front Page Only?

Appearance->Widgets and in the “Default Settings” override drag the RokStories widget to the disabled widgets area. Then switch to the “Front Page” override and drag the “rokStories” widget back. This will enable it on the home page but not any of the other pages.

Contact Form 7 field widths narrower

GoogleThem — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 06:19:41 +0000

To narrow or shorten the field widths for Contact Form 7, this is an example of making the name shorter: (you can do this to widen it too)

Your Name (required)

[text* your-name 25/]

The key is the bolded 25/ which sets the field width.

Genesis – Remove 2nd sidebar

GoogleThem — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 05:55:04 +0000

To remove the second sidebar permanently using the Genesis frameworks:

In your child theme’s functions.php file add this to the bottom:

genesis_unregister_layout( ‘content-sidebar-sidebar’ );
genesis_unregister_layout( ‘sidebar-sidebar-content’ );
genesis_unregister_layout( ‘sidebar-content-sidebar’ );

This will remove that extra side on all pages on your entire WordPress website, including the options on the individual pages and posts, making it less confusing for the client.

How to make a widget show up on a single page or post

GoogleThem — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 22:59:51 +0000

Two plugins to do this:

Genesis Simple Sidebars

Widget Context

This frees you from having to display (or not show) widget areas on various pages and posts using code.

How to clean up text with PHP – remove line breaks, paragraphs and tabs and replace with an empty space

GoogleThem — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 22:50:12 +0000

For some text, like Meta description tags and excerpts, you may not want to have paragraph formatting, empty lines, breaks in the text. Especially when you are extracting this text automatically to generate the Meta description.

This is a simple regular expression to remove line breaks, paragraphs and tabs, and replace them with an empty space.

$text = preg_replace(“/\r\n+|\r+|\n+|\t+/i”, ” “, $text);

How to extract H1 tags from a page to pull headings from posts and pages:

preg_match_all('|]+>(.*)]+>|iU', $html, $headings);

Clear all or clear both to have text and left aligned or right aligned images below each paragraph

GoogleThem — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 11:25:55 +0000

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Cannot see updates to WordPress website – sticky cache

GoogleThem — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 19:53:26 +0000

Here’s how to clear your browser cache without going into your menus. This applies to Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome.

Note: CSS changes can cause a really sticky cache when background images are changed, they tend not to update unless you clear your cache.

Top 3 WordPress custom themes development systems or frameworks

GoogleThem — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 04:50:33 +0000

When you customize WordPress pages and themes, it can be hard to remember what you’ve done a year or two later. That’s one reason why it’s good to use a WordPress development system or “Frameworks”. You don’t have to edit PHP, code like changing the functions.php to do things. Often you’ll find what you need in the theme/frameworks configuration screen.

A good WordPress backend has options to change page titles, use custom post types easily so that you can “target” various pages you want to customized without editing PHP.

This makes it so that you can see, your client can see, and you can more easily find your customizations later.

Another huge reason why is so that your WordPress theme updates don’t overwrite your custom WordPress pages so they don’t go away silently or worse yet…break your PHP code.

My top 3 WP frameworks are:

Genesis - good SEO for WordPress with page by page Meta Titles and tags. If you want to remove the WordPress H1 page title from the top of the page click here.

WooThemes - good modern WordPress themes with highly flexible options in the frameworks

RocketTheme - amazing themes and powerful plugins. To use the “Gantry” frameworks, which was created for Joomla, lots of it is done using widgets, however you’ll want a Gantry tutorial on positioning because these widgets are movable on a page using a unique system with sliders and number of widgets in a row. Gantry is using the standard 960px layout, and can be made fluid or liquid as well.

Timthumb exploit in WordPress – how to find if you have it

GoogleThem — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 23:18:22 +0000

Timthumb.php is sometimes named thumb.php or even maybe thumbnail.php, resize.php, crop.php or something else.

The quickest way to find it is to look inside your theme folder. WordPress by itself has a thumbnailer which does not have the vulnerability, so you may not have it. Usually it’s the theme’s author that may decide to use Tim Thumb to resize images.

If you can’t find it and are still concerned, and you use Cpanel file manager search your public_html folder for “thumb”.

If you really want to find and update TimThumb.php even if it’s using another name, SSH in to your server (if you can) and issue this command (from: http://wordpress.shadowlantern.com/2011/08/timthumb-php-is-vulnerable/)

find ~/public_html -type f -wholename “*wp-content*” -name “*.php” -print0 | xargs -0 grep -Hl “TimThumb”

PS. Here’s the updated TimThumb file that is patched:

http://code.google.com/p/timthumb/source/browse/trunk/timthumb.php

WordPress Auth_Key Secure_Auth_Key and Salt generator

GoogleThem — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 08:25:14 +0000

This is an official WordPress secret auth key and secure auth key salt generator. Just click the link and it will make unique keys for your wp-config.php file.

https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/

If you reload the page or click this link again, you’ll get another unique WP salt. This is how to have your own WordPress salt that no one else has (likely).