Category Listings WordPress Plugin

The Category Listings plugin has been developed for a WordPress site that needed to display the titles and excerpts of the most recent posts for the post that is currently being viewed. The idea being that it promotes other related posts to the readers.

Download Category Listings Plugin

The plugin outputs the most recent posts from the category of the post that is currently being displayed. It is possible to configure the number of posts to be output, the HTML before and after the whole of the output, the HTML before and after the post title and the HTML before and after the post excerpt.

To get the Category Listings to display, you will need to either:

1. Place the shortcode ‘category-listing’ where you want the output to appear in your post. Usually, this would be at the end of a post.
2. Place the following code in your theme <?php echo output_category_listing(); ?>. We have placed it only where we are displaying a single post and positioned it between the end of any post paging and before the comment form.

The category listings have the following configurations that are set in the Settings->Category Listings admin page:

1. Number of posts output – The number of posts that will be shown.
2. HTML before all output – HTML that will be output before the generated output.
3. HTML after all output – HTML that will be output before the generated output.
4. HTML before post title – HTML that will be output before the post title.
5. HTML after post title - HTML that will be output after the post title.
6. HTML before excerpt - HTML that will be output before the post excerpt.
7. HTML after excerpt - HTML that will be output before the post excerpt.

We have a wish list of how we would like to develop this plugin if we need to:

• Make it work with the <!–more–> tag instead of having to use excerpts.
• Widgetize it so it can be placed in a sidebar or footer. Although for this, we plan to only show the

For an example of how it looks, you should see the most recent posts published in the Plugins category between the end of this post and the start of the comments. Why not check out the other plugins we have?

What do you think could be done to improve this plugin or make it more useful?

Minimal Single Column WordPress Theme

The Minimal Single Column WordPress Theme is a very simple theme that should be easy to extend with your own styling should you want to. It has 3 widget areas in the footer for extra links and navigation and a navigation area in the header.

Download Minimal Single Column WordPress Theme

Demo

Other features include:

• Post thumbnails
• Custom backgrounds

Let me know what you think in the comments

Do you think I could make any simple improvements to it?

Blogroll to Page WordPress Plugin

You can use the Blogroll to Page WordPress Plugin to output your blogroll links to any page or post on your blog by using its ‘blogroll-to-page’ custom short code. The output options can be configured using parameters explained in the WordPress Codex and set in the options page which is found under the ‘Links’ menu.

Download Blogroll to Page WordPress Plugin

Use the following shortcode to output the blogroll links : blogroll-to-page

You can see an example of the output at our WordPress Resources page.

If you find any problems, let me know and I’ll try to fix them up.

Business Brochure WordPress Theme

The Business Brochure is a very clean and simply designed WordPress Theme for businesses who want to get a great looking web site up and running very quickly.

It is easy to get your business profile looking good online and branding is easy with the easy option to add your own website header image without having to change any of the website coding!

Read more …

Minimal 2 Column WordPress Theme

The Minimal 2 Column WordPress Theme is an extension of Bare Minimum with some extra CSS layout for a header, sidebar, content and footer. It also has a widgetized sidebar.

The theme is very simple, and should be easy to change or use as a template for something a bit more complex.

Download Minimal 2 Column WordPress Theme

Demo

If you download it to give it a try, I would be keen to know what you think in the comments.

I would really appreciate any feedback. Feel free to ask any questions below.

Amazon Affiliate Linker WordPress Plugin

The Amazon Affiliate Linker Plugin allows easy linking to Amazon.com products by only using the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number). It also allows you to embed your Amazon Associate link so that you can pick up affiliate commissions on your links.

Download Amazon Affiliate Linker Plugin

Once downloaded and activated, the plugin needs to be configured by going to Settings -> Amazon Affiliate Linker menu item. In this page you can set your Amazon Affiliate ID and whether you want the link to be no-followed or to onen in a new window.

To embed an Amazon link with the plugin, the text for the link needs to be embedded in the following tags:

This will link to Amazon.com with a product ASIN of 12345678. At present, the asin tag needs to be lower case.

For example, if I wanted to link to ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, I would get the ASIN for it’s from Amazon.com URL:

I would then embed the ASIN into into a post like this:

Which would produce a link like this:

[asin=0470246677]Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income[/asin]

The attributes for the link are configured in the plugin administration and has my Amazon Affiliate ID embedded into it.

I have tested the link generation and there seem to be no problems with clicks being registered in the Amazon Associates stats report and I have tested the generated links in the Amazon Associate Link Checker.

Download Amazon Affiliate Linker Plugin

How To Set Up A .htaccess 301 Redirect In WordPress

For a number of reasons, you may find that you need to send traffic from one page on your blog to another. An effective way of doing this is to use a htaccess 301 redirect.

When I released the custom menu plugin, I made the mistake of notifying a website that it’s URL was http://www.clubwordpress.com/club-wordpress-custom-menu/, so when I checked my analytics report, I noticed that a load of traffic was being sent there and getting my 404 page.

Getting the link changed could have been tricky, so instead I needed to set up a redirect in my .htaccess file to send traffic from:

http://www.clubwordpress.com/club-wordpress-custom-menu/

to:

http://www.clubwordpress.com/wordpress-custom-menu-plugin/

Here is how to do it:

1. Make a backup of my original .htaccess file

This is very important. It is extremely easy to make a mistake or typo in the .htaccess file which can take down your whole website. If this happens, all you need to do is swap your original .htaccess file into your blog and sort out where you went wrong.

2. Open the .htaccess file for editing

You will now need to get your .htaccess file from your webserver using FTP and open it for editing.

If you can’t see your .htaccess file, then your FTP client may not be configured to show hidden files. To find out how to set this type “[FTP client name] show hidden files” into Google and you should find out how to do it. e.g. Filezilla show hidden file names.

If you are using permalinks on your blog, then your .htaccess file may look something like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

This is all stuff for re-writing your URLs and shouldn’t be messed with. Any edits that you make should be outside of the #BEGIN and #END WordPress lines.

3. Add the redirect line to the .htaccess file

Now add the redirect. You need to specify the relative URL you are redirecting from and the full URL you are redirecting to. Getting these wrong can take your blog down. I know because I have allready tried it.

So, the redirect should look something like this:

redirect 301 /old-url/ http://www.myblog.com/new-url/

We are using the 301 to notify search engines that the page has moved permanently. If it was a temporary redirect we would use 302 instead.

4. Upload the new .htaccess file

Once you have added the redirect, you can now upload your file to your blog. If your .htaccess if readonly, you will nead to make it readable before uploading.

You can now test the redirect. If your site goes down, then you have probably made a typing error, so put the original backup of the .htaccess back while you find what you did wrong. You did make a backup didn’t you?

Once you have found the error, upload again and hopefully you should be good to go.

Bare Minimum WordPress Theme

This theme uses the bare minimum files that are needed for a WordPress theme – `index.php` and `styles.css`.

Download Bare Minimum WordPress Theme

I wanted to build a new theme for ClubWordpress from the ground up. This is the first stage of the theme and I thought it would be of interest to some people to release it as a theme in its own right.

You probably wouldn’t actually use this theme on a live site, but it would be worth taking a look at if you wanted to see the bare bones of how a WordPress theme works without any extra markup and other fancy bits and pieces getting in the way.

All the functionality is in the `index.php` file. The header, posts, sidebar (search, categories, pages, archives, etc) and footer are all included here.

There is no css markup in the template to complicate things further, but the styles.css file has to be included as it is needed for the theme to function in WordPress. It only includes the information for the theme that appears in the Theme Selection part of WordPress admin.

Download Bare Minimum WordPress Theme

If you download it and give it a try, please let me know what you think of it in the comments

I will post some further iterations of this theme over the coming weeks, so check out my RSS Feed to keep updated.

WordPress Custom Menu Plugin

This is a very simple plugin that I wrote to manage navigation menus from the admin panel in WordPress instead of having to code the template each time a menu or a menu item was added, removed or changed.

Download WordPress Custom Menu Plugin

Menu items are added in the Tools->Custom Menu section of WordPress Admin as displayed below:

Menu items can be added, edited and deleted here. Use the Visible property to set whether an item is displayed.

To display the Custom Menu in a WordPress theme, add the following code to your template file where you want the menu to be displayed:

<?php custommenu_output(); ?>

For the menu items displayed in the image above, the following HTML will be output in the theme:

<ul>
<li><a href=’/’ title=’Home’>Home</a></li>
<li><a href=’/articles/’ title=’Articles’>Articles</a></li>
<li><a href=’http://wordpress.org/’ title=’Wordpress’>Wordpress</a></li>
<li><a href=’/sitemap/’ title=’Sitemap’>Sitemap</a></li>
<li><a href=’/contact/’ title=’Contact’>Contact</a></li>
<li><a href=’/about/’ title=’About’>About</a></li>
</ul>

The menu is output as an unordered HTML list.

Download WordPress Custom Menu Plugin

All you need to do then is make sure the HTML is styled properly to display the menu correctly. I may do a tutorial on how to do this if there is enough interest, so check out my RSS Feed to keep updated

Please let me know what you think of the plugin and what improvements could be made to it.