I have had some requests asking me to improve the Wordpress Download Monitor documentation, so I decided to write (and maintain) this post explaining the ins-and-outs of configuring and using the plugin. Hopefully it will help you guys use the plugin, and also reveal more of its power and flexibility.
Don’t forget, if you love download monitor please make a small donation and/or rate it on the wordpress plugins directory. I also appreciate your contributions to the development of the plugin, so feel free to email me any code or your suggestions. Your support is very welcome!
Links: Download Monitor Page | Plugin Directory Page
“Learning jQuery 1.3: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques” is a revised and updated version of the excellent (and previously reviewed) Learning jQuery book by Karl Swedberg and Jonathan Chaffer.
Written for web designers and developers, the book contains thorough tutorials on how to get things done in jQuery, for example, manipulating the DOM, using AJAX, events, plugins, and effects.
Download Monitor 3 is upon us. Download Monitor is a plugin for uploading and managing downloads, tracking download hits, and displaying links. So far it has been downloaded over 45,000 times!
New features in version 3 include shortcodes, better template tags, daily stats, download logs and more! Download monitor 3 requires at least Wordpress version 2.5.
Links: Download Monitor Documenation | Plugin Directory Page
‘Shortcodes’ are a feature of wordpress used for executing custom functions by inserting a small snippit of code into a post. For example, my download monitor plugin now uses shortcodes; by entering [download id="1"] into a post, the plugin will output a download link.
The shortcode syntax varies, here are some examples:
[shortcode][shortcode atribute="value"][shortcode]Text[/shortcode]
Shortcodes can be created to perform a handful of useful functions. To use any of the shortcodes in this post I recommend adding the functions to your functions.php theme file (create it if it does not exist!). Ill show shortcodes ranging from showing adsense to speaking pirate! (written for wordpress 2.7)
If you have tried jQuery (which is a brilliant JavaScript framework by the way) there’s no doubt that you’ve heard of jQuery UI which includes all kinds of user interface widgets, user interaction helpers, and animations, to help make interactive web applications.
jQuery UI 1.6: The User Interface Library for jQuery, written by Dan Wellman, is a book that contains an in-depth explanation of jQuery UI, information on how to use it in the real world, and is also quite handy for reference. Perfect for user interface designers and developers who need to learn to utilise jQuery UI quickly.
If you have ever tried to include code in a wordpress post you may have gone through hell trying to get it to output correctly; Wordpress’ built in functions for formatting text (autop and texturize) mangle your code making it non-functional.
I’ve tried many solutions in the past, such as disabling wordpress’ formatting functions, however, this is not ideal -especially if you rely on them to clean up your text and properly encode characters. On top of that its not even valid to include certain things such as CSS in the body of a xHTML document.
The solution? Custom fields. This post will show you how.
I’ve seen the ‘web 2.0′ layout (full width background, centred content) done in some pretty wacky and different ways, the worst being a background image and then fixed height sections laid on top (if the content wraps or the text is resized…bam..broken layout).
Because of this I am going to demonstrate the method I use – content strips. Hopefully this will be useful to CSS beginners who want to code this type of layout.
Theme Slice is an exciting take on the current crop of Slicing services out there; a PSD to Wordpress Theme conversion service; brought to you by Anthony Brewitt and yours truly, Mike Jolley. You send in your mock up design and Theme Slice will send you back a full Wordpress Theme based on your design. Read on to learn more.
Search boxes: integral parts of many websites but often neglected in terms of markup and style. When considering both accessibility and semantics, marking up a a search box can be a little awkward depending on the look you are trying to achieve.
In this post I will suggest some methods of marking up your search boxes, and show a neat way of styling it using css and a few images.
At last! My sidebar login widget has evolved into ‘Sidebar Login’ which has both a widget and a template tag to allow you to have a login form in the sidebar of your wordpress powered blog.
It lets users login, and then redirects them back to the page they logged in from rather than the backend, it also shows error messages. Read more for more information and the download link.
