There’s a great plugin that now makes this possible and easy!

This plugin will get the user’s Twitter avatar by matching their twitter email address. If the user doesn’t use Twitter, it will first try to load their gravatar. If this fails, they will have the default gravatar used.

You can customize the gravatar by setting a 2 pixel boarder in whatever color you’d like and setting the default size to either 24px, 48px, or 72px. 

Download the plugin here and then activate it. 

Within your comments.php file, you’ll want to add the following code:

<?php twittar(size, placeholderimg, border, class, usegravatar, rating); ?>

Complete the settings: 

Size – insert the number you’d like without the ‘px’ for the avatar.

Placeholderimg –  image URL that you’d like to use as the default if the user doesn’t have a Twitter account or a gravatar they want to use. Enter inside quotes (””).

Border – if you want to use a border, you can use a 2px border in whatever color you’d like. Just place the hexadecimal code of the color within the quotation marks.

Class – Used for styling the avatar. For example: “myimg.” In the CSS, you would include .myimg { }. Put inside “”.

Usegravatar – Type 1 if you want to use gravatars, and 0 if you don’t.

Go into your WordPress dashboard and click on Appearance -> Widgets.

There you will find the various widgets you can add to your sidebar. Look for the "Text" widget and drag/drop it in the Sidebar where you’d like for your Tweets to show up.

Copy and paste the following code into this new widget:

<?php

$username = "TwitterUsername"; // Your twitter username.

$prefix = ""; // Prefix – some text you want displayed before your latest tweet.

$suffix = ""; // Suffix – some text you want display after your latest tweet.

$feed = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:" . $username . "&rpp=1";

 

function parse_feed($feed) {

$stepOne = explode("<content type="html">", $feed);

$stepTwo = explode("</content>", $stepOne[1]);

$tweet = $stepTwo[0];

$tweet = str_replace("&lt;", "<", $tweet);

$tweet = str_replace("&gt;", ">", $tweet);

return $tweet;

}

 $twitterFeed = file_get_contents($feed);

echo stripslashes($prefix) . parse_feed($twitterFeed) . stripslashes($suffix);

?>

The first thing is to make sure that your 404 page has a live, easy-to-fine link back to your home page. Don’t take the chance of your visitor leaving you site because they didn’t rely on the back arrow.

The second thing is to make your 404 page creative and unique. Let them know that sometimes there will be a missing page and sometimes they may land on an 404, but that you cared enough to take the time to spruce it up for their enjoyment!

Some very creative 404 pages:

When creating your unique 404 page, remember to include things like a memorable image, list of your recent posts or archive, a search bar, options on other pages to go back to.

Now to create your custom and unique  404 Page for your WordPress site

If you look through your theme files, you’ll find one that is named 404.php.  If you don’t have one, you can always create a new page as in this tutorial.  You can be as creative in your design and add any HTML that you’d like. 

Make sure to remember to include the following codes so that your header, sidebar and footer is consistent through your site and even on your 404 page.

<?php get_header(); ?>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Now wrap around the styling HTML around it. If you want you can even copy your page.php content in 404.php and just remove the content area and add your customized tags.

Here are some of the tags that you can use:

Display Archive by Months:

                 <?php wp_get_archives(‘type=monthly’); ?>

This code will display archive by months, but it will list all months. So it might become a mess if you have a blog that is three years old. To learn how to limit the count of months displayed check out the tutorial.

Display list of Categories

                <?php wp_list_cats(); ?>

This code will list all categories on your blog. Ofcoures you can style them however using list tags or others.

Display Most used Tags

                 <?php wp_tag_cloud(‘smallest=8&largest=12&unit=pt&number=30&format=list&order=RAND’); ?>

This will show the most used tags like how we have on our 404 page.

Display Recent Posts

                <?php get_archives(‘postbypost’, ’17′, ‘custom’, ‘<li>’, ‘</li>’); ?>

There are more codes that you can use, you will just have to search the documentation and find it. If you have a specific question feel free to ask us at anytime.

At the same time, we are all looking to cut costs without cutting corners, right? Instead of using services such as aWeber, Constant Contact, Mail Chimp and others that have a monthly (can be hefty!) fees, there’s a way for you to now do this on  your WordPress site for free!

Although the paid services do offer more bells and whistles, this is a very affordable option and can very well fit your needs!

#1 – Create a new category

You’ll need to create a new post category in your WordPress dashboard by Posts -> Categories. Name the new post category whatever you’d like. For this tutorial, we’ll name it "Email Newsletter".

Next you’ll want to ensure that you note the category ID of the new category that you just created. Every time that I have [Replace with your Category Id], you will need to do just that! Replace it with the category ID of this new category.

To find out what your new category ID is, just go to Posts -> Categories. Hover your mouse over the new category and when in the status bar you’ll see the ID.

For this tutorial, the cat ID is 10. Remember to replace the following [Replace with your Category Id] with your new category ID.

#2 – Excluding the new category 

If you use a list of your categories in your sidebar (or any where else), you’ll want this new category not to show up and be visible. We need to set it so that this new category is excluded for the category listings. Find the .php files where the category list appears. This is usually the sidebar.php file. You’re looking for a code that’s similar to: 

<?php wp_list_categories(‘&title_li=<h2>Categories</h2>’); ?>

Once you find it, you need to replace it with: 

<?php wp_list_categories(‘exclude=[Replace with your Category Id]&title_li=<h2>Categories</h2>’); ?>

Remember to insert your new category ID where I have [Replace with your Category Id]. This will hide this category from your visitors.

#3 – Exclude any posts written to the new Email Newsletter Category

Your posts are always visible to your readers from different areas including RSS, homepage, archives, etc. We can use a great plugin, Advanced Category Excluder (ACE),  that will allow us to exclude these posts so that they are not visible on your site. 

Once you have installed the plugin, you’ll want to go into the settings and check your new Newsletter category in every box with the exception of Single Posts.

If you want your WordPress theme to go to the next post and previous post, you may, you’ll want to go into your single.php file and replace the code with: 

<div class="navigation"><div class="alignleft"><?php previous_post_link(‘&laquo; %link’, ‘%title’, FALSE, ’10′) ?></div><div class="alignright"><?php next_post_link(‘&raquo; %link’, ‘%title’, FALSE, ’10′) ?></div></div>

#4 – Creating your feed with FeedBurner

Your newly hidden newsletter category will have its own feed. Once you have the URL for your new category, you’ll need to create the new feed using FeedBurner. No worries if you don’t have a FeedBurner account, you can create one easily. Once you have your account, enter your new feed URL in a field similar to:

Enter your URL and click Next. You should be seeing a screen similar to:

Here you’ll want to include your specific. Then click Next. Your feed has been set up! 

#5 – Setting up your Email Newsletter

Now tha tyou have your Feed taken care of, you need to click on the Publicize tab and the Email Subscription Tab so that you can activate the feed.

Now that it’s activated, you’ll have a code that you’ll need to copy/paste into your theme file so that a form will be displayed for your visitors to include their email address and subscribe to your service. 

If you are a bit talented, you can even customize the look of your form and place it any where on your website. Usually, it’s added to the sidebar where it’s easy to find.

#6 – Full text feeds

You’ll need to change a setting so that your readers can see the full text.  To do this – Settings -> Reading in your dashboard and click on Full Text instead of Summary.

#7 – Sending your first newsletter

Finally you can now start putting your newsletter together and get ready to send it out! All you need to do is write your newsletter content, add it as a new post to your new Newlsetter category and you’re set! Your WordPress blog will automatically send the content to your FeedBurner account and let it know that there’s a new post. Then, an email will be sent to all of your subscribers at the specified time that you selected. Since it’s not sent immediately, you have the opporutnity to go in and make edits if need be. 

To set when the article will be emailed out to your subscribers, go to your FeedBurner admin area -> Publicize Tab -> Email Subscription -> Delivery Options

Just copy the code below and paste into your theme where ever you want the RSS feed to show. If you’d like to have it on its own dedicated page, read my recent post on how to create a custom page here.

<?php include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.’/feed.php’);

$rss = fetch_feed(‘http://feeds.feedburner.com/wpbeginner’);

$maxitems = $rss->get_item_quantity(5);

$rss_items = $rss->get_items(0, $maxitems);

?>

<ul>

<?php if ($maxitems == 0) echo ‘<li>No items.</li>’;

else

// Loop through each feed item and display each item as a hyperlink.

foreach ( $rss_items as $item ) : ?>

<li>

<a href=’<?php echo $item->get_permalink(); ?>’

title=’<?php echo ‘Posted ‘.$item->get_date(‘j F Y | g:i a’); ?>’>

<?php echo $item->get_title(); ?></a>

</li>

<?php endforeach; ?>

</ul>

First you’ll need to create a new page. I covered this yesterday and you can read that post here if you aren’t sure about creating a new page.  (Only create the new page, don’t set it as your landing page, unless that’s what you’d like to do!)

Once you have the new page created, paste the following code into the file:

<?php

query_posts(array(‘orderby’ => ‘rand’, ‘showposts’ => 1));

if (have_posts()) :

while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

 

<h1><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>

 

<?php the_content(); ?>

 

<?php endwhile;

endif; ?>

 

This is just a  basic WordPress loop that will run a query displaying random posts. If you want to show more then 1 random post on this page, change the number in ’showposts’ => 1 to the number of posts you’d like displayed on the page!

The first thing that you’ll need to do is to create the custom page. This isn’t as difficult as it sounds! Just create a copy of your page.php. Another option is to create a brand new page by creating a new .php file. To go this route, you’ll need to add the following code to the top of the file:

<?php /* Template Name */ ?>

      Example:  6 minutes ago, 3 hours ago, etc.

You can do this by adding the following to your functions.php file:

function twitter_time() {

echo "This Was Posted ".human_time_diff(get_the_time(‘U’), current_time(‘timestamp’))." ago";

}

Then go into the other files that may also display the time posted, such as single.php or index.php, etc. and add:

 <?php twitter_time(); ?>

Enjoy!

The primary reasoning for WordPress’ built in memory limit was to save your websites’ memory being consumed by poorly written plugins.

WordPress’ standard memory limit is set to 32MB but by going into your wp-config.php file and adding the following line of code, you should have no more problems:

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’96M’);

Of course, another way to just avoid this is issue is to upgrade your WordPress from 3.0 to the latest version! Starting with WordPress 3.2, the memory limit is configurable again and won’t be an issue.

WordPress, by default, has the auto save set to 60 seconds, meaning that it will automatically save your new work every 60 minutes. Perhaps you’d like to have it reset to every 30 seconds?

You can do this by accessing your wp-config.php file and finding this line:

define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 60);

If you’d like to have your system auto save sooner then the default 60 seconds, change the ’60′ in the line of code to your desired number of seconds.

On the other hand, if the auto saves are causing your computer to slow down, you may want to increase the frequency of the auto saves. 

Just remember, whether you increase or decrease the timing, always enter the number of seconds desired!