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10 New WordPress Plugins

Offline Mode

This plugin enable admin to put up a splash page to show that the site is down for maintenance. Come with a timer to tell how long the site is down. User can customize their own splash screen or get a list of splash screen from author’s site.

Resize at Upload

By using this plugin you can resize all your images when you upload them to your WordPress installation. It lets you specify the maximum width according to which it resizes your images keeping the aspect ratio proportional.

Albumize

This plugin lets you display the images uploaded through the WordPress gallery option in different albums. By organizing your galleries as multiple child pages of one parent page, you can use this plugin to see a preview thumbnail and description of each gallery.
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10 WordPress Hacks to Make your Life even Easier

The last post that I had made on 10 WordPress Hacks to Make your Life Easy got a good number of comments and views. Based on the success, I have decided to make another WordPress Hacks post to make your life EVEN easier. Here is the list of 10 new hacks ready to be bookmarked :-

How to make a Sticky Post

A sticky post is one that will always be on top of all your recent posts and stay there until you change it. You can use a sticky post as a notification, reminder or something that you want to emphasize to your readers. Here is how you can make a sticky post :-

First, decide on a category name that will hold all your sticky posts. For example, you can create a new category and name it “Stickies” and later use this name to call the posts from this category. Now, if you have ever opened the index.php file in any blog styled WordPress theme (Just install the basic Whiteboard theme for this tutorial), you will notice that it has a loop which is used to call your posts.
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10 WordPress Hacks to Make your Life Easy

Displaying Gravatars in comments

To refresh your memory, Gravatars are little user images from Gravatar.com that are displayed against your comments in the theme (if the theme is built to support Gravatars). A lot of WordPress themes are built without the support of Gravatars. So, here is some help for you to add Gravatars in your theme. Open up your comments.php file from the theme folder. Find this piece of code :-

<?php comment_text() ?>

Replace the above code with the following code :-

<div class="gravs">
<?php if (get_bloginfo('version')>=2.5)
echo get_avatar( $comment->comment_author_email, $size = '50', $comment->comment_author_link);?>
<?php comment_text() ?>
</div>
<br clear="all" />

The above code will display the Gravatars. Now let us add some CSS to the style.css file for your theme.

.gravs {margin-top:20px;}
.avatar {float:left; margin-right:5px; margin-bottom:5px; padding:3px; border:1px solid #999999;}

When you check your theme again, you will see the Gravatar images against your comments.
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Retrieving Posts from a Particular Category

Many people have asked me how to show posts on their homepage only from a particular category or categories. So here is a simple and quick solution for doing this.

Getting Posts from a Single Category

Go and open your index.php file from your theme folder. Now search for this string :-
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
Now just below this line, add the following piece of code:-
<?php

?>
The above code will display posts only from the category called “General” on your home page. You can change this to any of your category names. Read more

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