As I am a WordPress user by heart, I have a large list of WordPress related bookmarks. Many of these bookmarks have proven their value over time and I am pretty sure they will be helpful for you too. Welcome to the Ultimate Collection of WordPress Resources.

If I haven’t included a resource I definitely had to include, leave a comment and I will be happy to add it to the article.

General

Here are some general resources on WordPress.

• Host WordPress – What do you need
• Install WordPress
• Upgrade WordPress
• WordPressTV

Beginners

There are always people who would like to get into the game. Here are a couple tutorials that learned me developing WordPress themes.

• So you want to create WordPress themes, huh?
  
• Build a WordPress Theme from Scratch
• WordPress Theme from Scratch (3 parts)

Developing your Theme on your Local Computer

A great way to develop WordPress themes is to have a local server on your computer. A server that runs PHP and MySQL allows you to test WordPress themes without uploading to your online server. It isn’t hard to set up such server:

• Develop WordPress Themes Offline
• Install WordPress Locally
• Sample Post Collection

Codex

The WordPress Codex is the official documentation for WordPress. It has a huge number of content and you can find almost anything about WordPress There. Here are most important resources.

• Theme Development
• Conditional Tags
• Template Tags
• Stepping into Template Tags
• Designing Themes For Public Release
• The Loop
• Template Hierarchy
• Using Custom Fields

Theme Starting Points

When you are just starting out (or if you don’t want to start from scratch) you can use so-called “WordPress Frameworks”. Check of the most popular below:

• Thematic – WordPress Framework
• Hybrid WordPress Theme Framework
• Starkers WordPress Theme
• WhiteBoard – Free WP Theme Framework

WordPress Hacks

Because WordPress is so popular, many people use it. All these people have different requirements and WordPress can’t support them all. So, whoever needs more functionality experimented and hacked away. Here are a few WP hacks you can incorporate into your theme.

• Collection of WordPress Hacks
• WordPress Theme Hacks
• 63 WordPress Hacks
• Mastering Your WordPress Theme Hacks and Techniques

WordPress Tutorials

Hundreds of tutorials have been written about WordPress and theme development. Here is a small  section of the best tutorials out there.

• Social Bookmarking with WordPress
• What Every Blogger need to know about Categories
• Widgetizing Themes
• How to Separate WordPress Comments and Trackbacks
• Different Ways To Display Content in WordPress
• How to Highlight Author Comments in WordPress
• How to Install DomTABs on WordPress
• Create a Custom WordPress Plugin From Scratch
• Build a Featured Posts Section for WordPress
• Unraveling the Secrets of WordPress’ Comments.php File
• How to Blog Design Style Guide

WordPress & SEO

By default, WordPress is a search engine friendly blogging platform. However, you can enhance your themes much further with the following SEO techniques.

• WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk
• Perfect WordPress Title Tags
• WordPress Permalinks Explained
• Duplicated Content

CheatSheets

Cheatsheets can be very handy when you need to reference to a WordPress tag or function. You can print them and put them up your wall for quick referencing!

• WordPress Theme Development Checklist
• WordPress Help-Sheet
• WordPress Advanced Help-Sheet
• WordPress CheatSheet V1
• WP Theme Tags

Promote your WordPress Theme

If you want to release your theme for free to the public, you can add your theme to these sites to get more attention.

• Submit Themes – WeblogToolsCollection
• WordPress – Theme Directory
• WP Themez
• WP Themes Free

WordPress Community

The people around WordPress are great: the community is much alive. Check out these forums to discuss anything WordPress related.

• Official WordPress forums
• WP Tavern forums
• WP forums

WordPress Blogs

Many people write about WordPress to teach other WordPress enthusiasts about their findings and tricks. Here are a few blogs on the subject.

• Lorelle on WordPress
• WP Candy
• ThemeLab
• WpRecipes
• Blog Design Blog
• Darren Hoyt
• WordPress Modder
• Blogging Pro
• WPZoom

Plugins

One great advantage of WordPress is the great plugin support. With thousands of plugins available, there’s almost a fix for anything.

• Akismet
• All in One SEO Pack
• WordPress.com Stats
• WP Super Cache
• WP-DB-Backup
• Contact Form 7

More plugins? Check out these links:

• WordPress – Plugin Directory
• 10 Un-Usual WordPress Plugins that Improved my Blog
• Ultimate Collection fo WordPress Plugins

WordPress Inspiration

It’s important to get inspiration from time to time, it can give you many idea’s for your themes. Here are some WordPress related showcase sites.

• WordPress Showcase
• We Love WP
• Loop Press
• WP Inspire
• WP Candy – Sites

That’s why I decided to make a WordPress Theme Development Checklist. Oh, and if I forgot about some things, be sure to let me know!

General

• Stylesheet should start with these codes or your theme will not be recognized as WordPress theme.
  /*      Theme Name:  The Name of your theme
  *        Theme URI: The URL where people can get more information
  *        Description: Description
  *        Version: 1.0
  *        Author: Your Name
  *        Author URI: Designers’ URL
  *        Tags: red, black, widget-ready (etc) */
• Download the Sample Post Collection to have a filled WordPress installation to start with.
• Theme preview image
  • 240 x 180 pixels
  • Name: screenshot.jpg, screenshot.png or screenshot.gif
• Widget ready themes
• Add rules to your Comments form
• Backwards Compatibility (WordPress version 2.5+ is alright I guess)
• CSS sprites for optimizing images
• WordPress PSD framework

Stylesheets

Make sure you have these stylesheets included with your theme:

• General.css
• Print.css
• Reset.css
• Browser specific stylesheet – ie.css
• Compressed Stylesheet?
  

Browser Compatibility

Test your theme in a number of browsers to make sure everyone sees the same theme. Use browsershots.org to get screenshots from your site in the most browsers. The most important browsers are:

• Firefox 2.0/3.0
• Internet Explorer 6
• Internet Explorer 7
• Google Chrome
• Safari
• Opera

Blog Elements

Every theme should have some elements every blog should have:

• Title/Logo
• Navigation of Pages
• Navigation of Categories
• RSS links
• Search Form
• Archives links
• Dates/Timestamps
• Comments
• Copyright message
• Past/Next links
• Advertisiments

Styled Everything?

You never know how bloggers will use your theme and therefore you have to style all HTML elements. Here are some elements you might not have thought of:

• blocknotes
• tables
• captions
• unordered lists
• ordered lists
• img

Pages

The basic pages you need to produce for a good template hierarchy:

• Index.php
  • Header.php
  • Footer.php
  • Sidebar.php
• Single.php
• Archive.php
• Page.php
• Home.php
• Author.php
• Date.php
• Tag.php
• Category.php
• 404.php

Valid HTML/CSS

You can not validate your PHP files, so you have to go to your favorite browser and click the right mouse button > view source. You copy/past everything into the HTML validator.

• Style.css (CSS validator)
• Single.php (HTML validator)
  • Normal
  • With Comment/Without Comments
  • Login Required/Non-required
  • Password protected pages
• All other pages (categories/tags/authors/ etc)

Suggestions?

Remember, this checklist is not finished. Because I learn about WordPress theme development all the time, more things will be added as soon as I think of them. My question for you is:

Do you have suggestions that make this WordPress theme development checklist better?

PDF Version

Soon, I will also come up with a PDF version of this checklist so that you can print it and put it next to your computer when you are developing WordPress Themes.

Keep Updated!

Do you want to get noticed when the CheatSheet PDF version gets released? Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed, or you can get the latest news delivered right into your mailbox.

Today we will talk about what features an error page should have and how we can implant the custom error page into our site or blog.

The Features of a Good 404 Error Page

The points that I will refer to have been working for me for a couple years.

1. Descriptive title – The user should know they are on a 404 page, so don’t forget to tell them they are.
2. Sitemap – If you have a sitemap, be sure to include a link to your sitemap on your error page. People might browse through the sitemap to find the page they were looking for.
3. Mistyped URL – On an error page you could include the mistyped URL. This makes it easy for the visitor to scan the URL for typos or mistakes.
4. Search box – A search box in the 404 page is a must. The possiblity exists that the information is still on the site and with a simple search, the user might find the information they need.
5. Common links – Adding a couple links to some common pages (like the about/contact/articles pages) will increase the number of people that stay and want to read something on your site.
6. Popular articles – Displaying a number of popular articles is good to push your best content forward. Visitors might get interested by these titles and click an article.
7. Archives – It is also possible to add the list of archives to your error page. They might find the article they are looking for. If not, they might browse the archives to look for this article and then might stumble on some other interesting article.

Implant the 404 Error Page in Your Site

Now you know what features your error page has, it is time to implant it on your site or blog. I will discuss two ways to get your error page up and running. One way is an error page in WordPress and the other is via .htaccess.

404 Error Page in WordPress

WordPress has a build-in error message in their themes. This isn’t the best solution as it only give the user this explanation: Error 404 – Not Found .

Editing the error text

One thing you can do is editing that text in your WordPress theme. You should locate index.php and find the error message. You can add more and better text to your likings.

Creating an error page

You could also create a custom error page. This solution is in my opinion the best for WordPress. You should make a file called 404.php, add the custom text and messages, add it in your theme directory and your error page is ready to go.

404 Error Page via htaccess

If you don’t use a blogging tool like WordPress you need a proper looking 404 error page too.

The first step we will take is opening (or creating if you don’t already have one) the .htaccess file. We need to add a couple extra lines to this file to tell our server to redirect the visitor to a custom 404 page once they have need it.

You should add these codes to the .htaccess file:

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ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

This tells the server your 404 document is located somewhere other than default. You now have the power to change the error page to your likings.

Other Error Pages

You could also use this trick to build custom error messages for other apache errors. Take a look here for the status codes Apache uses.

It bothered me that bad that I decided to search for an alternative. The alternative was called XAMPP and it has the possibility to run your development space offline, on your own computer. You would have your own “webserver” that runs MySQL and PHP, which means you can install WordPress too. That sounded awesome for me!

Installing your offline “webserver”

The program XAMPP was the perfect solution to all my developing adventures. That’s why I would recommend this program for anyone interested in developing WordPress themes. Let’s install XAMPP.

You should download the latest version from the original site. I run a Windows computer, so I’ve downloaded the Windows version. I guess it doesn’t differ much between other operating systems.

The installation progress shouldn’t be to hard, it is just a normal setup.

Starting your offline “webserver”

Once you’ve installed this program, you have to start the program. You can do that by running the XAMPP.exe file.

To make your webserver run, you have to start the Apache and the MySql modules. PHP has no apart module because it is included in the Apache module. We need to run these particular services to make WordPress work.

Navigating to Localhost

When you have started these modules, you have started your offline webserver. This means you can navigate to the contents of your webserver from this point. The URL you have to visit is http://localhost/.

You should get redirected to the XAMPP web-based control panel. In this control panel you can find links to Status, PHPMyAdmin, phpinfo() and other services. A services that is of interest of us is PHPMyAdmin.

PHPMyAdmin and MySQL

We need to create a new database to install WordPress to PHPMyAdmin offers that service. Fortunately, all you need to do is “create a new database” and you are done. In the online versions you need to make users and passwords, but on your localhost, things can stay simple.

If you, for example, have made a database called ‘blog’ you need to remember the following information when installing WordPress:

Database: blog
User: blog
Password: (no password)
Server: localhost

Installing WordPress

Finally, we are ready to install WordPress as we have set up our database and offline connection. First things first, download the most recent version from WordPress.org. From now on, things are the same as your online version.

You have to extract the WordPress files to these folder: /XAMPP/htdocs. Remember to use the database information I have given you before.

Once WordPress is Installed

After you have installed you are ready to go. You can now develop WordPress themes with the ease of a webserver but it doesn’t cost you much time to constantly upload more recent versions of certain files to see changes.

Now you can just save your files and you see your changes right away. This greatly improves your productivity when developing WordPress themes. It defenitely did for me.

1. WP Candy – WPCandy is a WordPress blog releasing plugins, themes, resources and tutorials on WordPress. Some of the WordPress resources I used to start developing themes like the WordPress Help Sheet and the Advanced Help Sheet. WPCandy also has a WordPress gallery, a community news page and many more. Enjoy.

2. BlogParfume – Blog Parfume will give you information about the latest WordPress developments and the best articles, tutorials, themes and plugins that has been written about WordPress. Take a look and I am sure you find something interesting.

3. WP Engineer – Great blog I stumbled upon a couple weeks back. It gives you smart tips and tricks about WordPress. WP Engineer also cover themes and WordPress related news.

4. Blog Design Blog – A blog focused on the design of your own WordPress blog. BlogDesignBlog offers you free themes and many smart tips and tricks to help you create a better WordPress theme.

5. ThemeLab – This blog is all about styling WordPress themes, just like any of the others I mentioned. Great thing is that all explanations and tutorials are very detailed and easy to understand. You should check out their free themes too!

6. WpRecipes – WpRecipes gives you “daily recipes to cook with WordPress”. They answer questions from visitors and they come up with some very smart tips and tricks for WordPress.

7. WordPress Hacks – This site is extremely updated and very complete. You can find many things about WordPress: themes, tips, plugins, tutorials and even a WordPress Ebook!

8. WPDesigner – Yes, I hear you sigh. Well, the new owner didn’t offer anything at all, BUT the content and WordPress themes Small Potato has been delivering are still valid. The blog is still a large source of information to anybody interested in WordPress.

Looking for more interesting blogs & content?

There are tons of sites and blogs out there I enjoy and read on a daily basis. You can make sure you stay updated for the next part in this series by subscribing to the RSS feed or receive news via email.

Other blogs have been writing articles like these too, but I will add a couple that aren’t the usual plugins that you have already implanted.

1. Advanced Excerpt – Because I needed to customize the default excerpt function of WordPress I decided to give this plugin a go. I can now do everything I want with my excerpts like the number of words, the html characters that are allowed, the ending character and more.

2. DoFollow – There has been numerous discussion going on about the Dofollow. Is it a good step to take with your blog? I think it is, it haven’t increased my spam posts, but it have increased the ‘look-like-real-comments-but-are-spam’ comments. You will get more discussion, and a little more moderation.

3. FD Feedburner Plugin – If you are using Feedburner as your RSS service, you should have this plugin installed. This make sure all the subscribers subscribed to www.yourblog.com/feed/ are redirected to feeds.feedburner.com/yourblog.

4. Feed Pauser – Feed Pauser was exactly what I was looking for. After almost every post I found some small typos in my article but the article was yet send to the RSS feed, I couldn’t change the typos there. With Feed Pauser you can choose to let WordPress send your post to the RSS feed after a number of minutes so you make sure everything is fine.

5. FV Code Highlighter – If you want to highlight code tags like HTML, CSS, PHP or JavaScript on your WordPress blog you could use the other plugins out there. This plugin however is developed to give the blogger full control over their codes. You can style everything in this code highlighter!

6. RSS Footer – My fellow Dutchman Joost de Valk know what bloggers need. This RSS footer plugin let you do exactly what its name tell us: add a line of text, a copyright notice or even advertisements after or before each post that is published in your RSS feed.

7. Samsarin PHP Widget – If you want to use widgets for your sidebar, there might be time you need to use PHP to get the functionality you like to have. This “PHP widget” is a an awesome solution as you can choose as many widgets as you like.

8. Search Excerpt – The default search function sucks, we used to sort by date and not by relevance. Fortunately there has been some talking about this and this plugin has been developed to help us.

9. WP Existing Tags – This small plugin adds an existing tags-section to your new post page. This makes it easy to choose a tag for your post and makes sure you don’t make two tags almost identical to each other.

10. WordPress Download Monitor – If you offer downloads for your visitors it might be nice to know how many times files are downloaded. This awesome plugin does a good job.

One big difference between a blog and a website is the way visitors can interact with the blog author. Bloggers allow all their visitors to leave a comment anytime. If they asked a question, simple say they enjoyed the article or when you don’t agree with the author’s opinion. That’s the power of the blog.

I have to admit, getting comments is one of the greatest things you can get when you are blogger. You get the confirmation your visitors are actually there and they aren’t just a number on your statistics software.

But allowing comments isn’t everything you can do to get user interactivity on your blog, many more options exist. In this article we will go through the solutions I think works best to improve user interactivity.

1. Contact Form

You should always try to make things as easy as possible for your readers on your blog. People are lazy and busy and if they can’t find something right way, they will simply leave.

The same thing with the contact form: if they can’t find that page in one click, they are usually gone. If you make it easy to find your contact information and web-form, you will receive more thank-, opinion- and comment-emails. That’s always great.

In some cases you could even add multiply contact forms to your blog to improve the number of emails you get.

My plugin recommendation is Cforms II: the best contact form plugin available for WordPress.

2. Polls

Adding a poll is a very good feature to add when you want to improve user interactivity. Many people read your article and move on, because they don’t have the time to add a opinion through the comments.

With a poll however the user only has to click once to leave an opinion and they will do that easier. You can also use the poll to gather valuable information about your visitors!

A good solution to add a poll to your WordPress blog is the WP-Polls plugin.

3. Shoutbox

If you have a free spot in your sidebar and you want your visitors to contact you even easier then hitting the “contact” button, consider using a shoutbox on your blog.

In a shoutbox a user can “shout” what they would like to tell you or the other visitors. Your visitor usually only has to add their name, email and their message, so when placed on a easy to find spot, it’ll really stimulate user interactivity.

You can find a live example of a shoutbox on Jeffro2pt0. To add a shoutbox to your WordPress blog, the following plugins AJAX Shoutbox and WP-Wall are recommended.

4. Community Forums

If you want to have a conversation or extensive discussion, the comments under your article aren’t the right place. That’s where your forum software comes in: you can separate the discussion from the other comments.

Forums were developed to let people talk to each other and therefore ideal for these kind of conversations. It can also become a place where visitors come to discuss and talk about niche-related news.

Remember: to make a forum successful on your blog you need to have a large visitors base.

This article will tell you exactly how to integrate forums with your WordPress blog.

5. Community News

Community news is a feature that is popping up at some more places lately: it allows visitors to promote their own articles in the sidebar of your blog.

If you don’t have the time to fill your readers’ hunger for more articles, let them provide interesting articles for their fellow readers by adding the news items to your sidebar.

Frank Verhoeven has just released the Community News plugin that
allows your visitors to add their news to the sidebar or page.

6. Voting

Usually, people have their opinion ready about an article, plugin, theme or website. Why not use this fact and let people rate that stuff with a voting system?

This way you make it very easy (same principle as with polls) for people to give their opinion about something, just with one simple click.

To add a voting system to your WordPress blog, you could use the GD Star Rating plugin.

Do you have other tricks?

There are loads more ideas and tricks in the world that could improve the user interactivity of your blog, so if you would like to share some that could help me or the readers, please do so in the comments!

That’s why I looked for a Community News plugin, a plugin that allows users to add articles they thought were relevant to the blog, and allow me to moderate them.

I couldn’t find this kind of plugin anywhere, so I looked at my buddy Frank Verhoeven with some sweet puppy eyes. He agreed and developed a wonderful plugin that allowed me to do everything I wanted and this plugin goes beyond!

FV Community News plugin for WordPress was born!

Features

The current feature-list is awesome and there’s more to come:

• Widget Ready (Different form/results widget)
• Moderation panel (with email option) – Make sure you approve the right articles
• Customizable templates
• Captcha Spam protection (on/off)
• Settings

FV Community News – Settings Page

Add More Interaction To Your Blog!

If you want to get more people to be active on your blog or you simply want more related articles (= more content) for your visitors, be sure to download this plugin.

Read more information on Frank’s FV Community News and be sure to keep track of Frank’s blog for more interesting plugins. Did you know he developed the great Code Highlight plugin I am using on DivitoDesign?

The power of magazines or magazine looking blogs are the loads of information that can be displayed. If you want to run a successful magazine, you need to focus on writing content and not on manually add the entries to your theme. An important factor for a magazine is there how you automatize the process of displaying content.

We will use the WordPress template tag query_posts();. Remember this tag only works in the WP loop. You can find a version of the WP loop I use below:

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<?php query_posts(); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
<div class="entry"><?php the_excerpt(); ?></div>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>

Parameters for query_posts()

We are going to give the query_posts() tag some parameters on how to operate. Some of those parameters are given below:

• cat > the category you would like to choose
• showposts > the number of entries you would like to show
• offset > number of the entry you don’t want to display
• orderby > order the entries by author, category or anything else
• tag > select entries by tag
• More parameters can be found at WordPress

Display Featured Post

In a magazine theme you might want your visitors to focus on the featured entry. You need to add your specific entry to a category named featured.

If you want to show one featured entry in the loop, change:

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<?php query_posts(); ?>

to:

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<?php query_posts("cat=featured&showposts=1"); ?>

Latest Post

If you want to select the latest entry, this parameter will get you there:

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<?php query_posts("showposts=1"); ?>

The other posts

If we have selected the latest entry from the database, you might want to show the other (older) items as well expect the ‘latest’ item you have already shown. Here’s the query:

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<?php query_posts("showposts=5&offset=1"); ?>

Exclude Category(s) or tag(s)

If you want to display all entries, expect the ones from a certain category or tag you need to get to the ID of the category or tag first (wp-admin>manage>tags/categories):

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<?php query_posts("cat=-1"); ?>
<?php query_posts("category__not_in=2,3,4"); ?>
<?php query_posts("tag=-2"); ?>

Show posts by Author

It is easy to make a page that shows all the posts a specific author wrote for your blog:

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<?php query_posts("author=2"); ?> // Author's ID (wp-admin>users)
<?php query_posts("author_name=stefan"); ?>

Examples

These examples are just a couple things I have learned lately and it’s not everything that’s out there. You should remember there is alot more you can do with WordPress Template tags, as well as with the query_posts() attribute.

For more examples visit the query_posts codex page.

I asked Google, but there wasn’t a clear article that helped me along the way and I guess more people are struggling with this situation. After some research I finally found the solution on OrangeScale.

Widgets Core

To let WordPress Widgets preform on your blog, you should have the functions.php file ready with the right codes. This widget codes in the functions.php file usually looks like this:

PHP

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<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar();
?>

To give your WordPress installation more sidebars, we have to extend these codes. We have to add more ‘options’ and we do that by adding more codes to the function and by given those seperated functions names like Sidebar 1 and Sidebar 2.

PHP

Sidebar 1

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<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array('name'=>'Sidebar 1',
'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</li>',
'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));

Sidebar 2

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<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array('name'=>'Sidebar 2',
'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</li>',
'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));

Name your Sidebar

To get more sidebars you need to name them and in our case, we will call them Sidebar 1, Sidebar 2 etc. as many as you would like. Here is how you do that:

PHP

You are able to change the values of before_widget, after_widget, before_title and after_title to whatever you like. These are just the example of what I use myself.

How to insert Multiple Widgets to your Theme

Open up the file you would like to have your widgets shown. When you already have one sidebar in place you will find the following codes:

PHP

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<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
<?php endif;?>

Now, find all the places you would like to add widgets. Insert Sidebar 1 where sidebar 1 should be located, and so on. Here we go:

PHP

Sidebar 1

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<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('Sidebar 1') ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Sidebar 2

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<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('Sidebar 2') ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Ready

After you’ve saved your file you will have two dynamic sidebars you are able to edit via WordPress Widgets. Of course, al lot more sidebars can be created and all the creativity that follows next, that’s up to you. Do you want to style your widgets now?