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Over the last couple of weeks we've been through the process of creating a stylish blog design in Photoshop, coding it up into a static HTML and CSS concept, and now we'll put the whole thing together as a fully working WordPress theme. Follow this step by step walkthrough of the various WordPress theme files, and see how the HTML is split up and injected with PHP tags to provide the complete blogging functionality.

WordPress offers tons of plugins which confuses the new user. Not just that but there are multiple plugins that serves the same purpose and have the same functions. Which one do you need to get the upper edge, we will cover it in this article. We are only mentioning the plugins that you need to start off your blog, so custom plugins will not be listed in this article, but you may find it being reviewed in our Plugins Category.

WordPress plugins are what make it possible and as long as author willing to support those plugins and continue to develop them as the core evolves - they can greatly enhance your blog functionality.

Facebook is one of those Web phenomena that impress everyone with numbers. To cite some: about 250 million users are on Facebook, and together they spend more than 5 billion minutes on Facebook… every day. These numbers suggest that we should start thinking about how to use Facebook for blogging or vice versa. We did some research to find out how the integration of Facebook with WordPress and vice versa works, or - in other words - how you can present your WordPress blog on Facebook or use the functionality of Facebook on your WordPress-powered blog. Both of these can be achieved with a set of WordPress plug-ins, a couple of which we'll present here in detail.

When developing Wordpress Templates, we sometimes overlook the small easy things we can do to make our theme much better. When you're days into a project, any project, developing developers tunnel vision isn't hard to do. This article serves not as the ultimate go-to guide for Wordpress shortcodes, but instead it serves to remind us of a few small and easy things we can incorporate into our themes within seconds and they function with robust and flexible ease.

This is a clean Wordpress template capable of displaying large amounts of content without suffering aesthetically nor functionally.

The Google URL Shortener API has been released this week so I came up with a short snippet that generates short goo.gl URLs. The script is quite simple, you can paste it in your theme's functions.php file or create a plugin out of it, so without further ado:

Creating a custom WordPress meta box lets you make clean UI elements for you and your clients. The default WordPress custom fields are functional, but IMHO, and if you can pull it off, using a WordPress meta box is the way to go. It will give your project that professional touch.

"WordPress hooks are arguably the basis of WordPress development, forming a large part of the core functionality and used by almost every plugin and theme available to date. The concept of hooks can also be somewhat daunting for users who are starting out with developing for WordPress. Today, we'll jump in and find out a bit more about just what exactly WordPress hooks are and how they can help you on your way to WordPress rock stardom."

Reconfigures the wp_mail() function to use SMTP instead of mail() and creates an options page to manage the settings.

When coding WordPress themes, especially if you do it regularly, its really useful to have a selection of code snippets in your toolbox to just 'copy-n-paste' as and when the functionality needs. Not just your most commonly used code, but also some snippets that can, when required, extend WP even further.

Add shortcode ability to widgets bu placing this in functions.php: add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

function add_slug_class_to_menu_item($output){
$ps = get_option('permalink_structure');
if(!empty($ps)){
$idstr = preg_match_all('/
foreach($matches[1] as $mid){

"Instantly turn your WordPress installation into a private corporate intranet WordPress is a popular platform for creating corporate intranets. The only problem is that it's built primarily for public-facing websites. There are plenty of free plugins available to add privacy and other requirements - but you'll need to cherry-pick the functionality you need, and make sure they all work well together. All-In-One Intranet gives you everything you need in one plugin to lock down your site and start building your intranet."

"Easily send emails from your WordPress blog using your preferred SMTP server SendinBlue's official plugin for WP is a powerful all-in-one email marketing plugin. At a glance: Subscribe forms - Create custom subscribe forms and integrate them easily in your posts, pages or sidebars Contact lists - Manage your contact lists and take advantage of advanced segmentation to improve your campaigns performance Marketing campaigns - Easily create and send beautiful newsletters using drag and drop builder or selecting from our template library Transactional emails - The wp_mail() function use automatically SendinBlue's SMTP for enhanced deliverability and tracking Statistics - Real-time dashboard giving you a global insight over deliverability and performance: opens, clicks, bounce reports, etc."

Plug-in is small snippets of code allowing you to add extra functionality to your site! Like, if you want to get idea of the statistics of your site, WordPress.com stats plug-in can help, which helps you measure your number of page view matrix and it can also help you know where your traffic is coming from.