CformsII

CformsIICFormsII is a contact form that has an incredible amount of features and is very customizable. CFromsII offers lots of features. And some of the unique and notable features are “tell a friend” functionality, database tracking of submitted data, backup & restore, submission limitations (for registration etc) and widget support.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Fast Secure Contact Form

Fast Secure Contact Form lets site visitors send a quick E-mail message. It claims to blocks all common spammer tactics. Includes a CAPTCHA and Akismet support. Additionally, the plugin has a multi-form feature, optional extra fields, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent. Very much customizable.

Contact Me

The quickest and easiest way to put a contact form on your WordPress blog. Use the ContactMe button and contact form to turn visitors into customers. Visitors click eye-catching ContactMe button. The button opens a contact form in popup.

Tiny Contact Form

Tiny Contact Form is minimalist form that allows site visitors to contact you by email.

Did I missed any best ones? Please share which ones are your bests.

Step 1:
We will create a PHP file; lets say follower_count.php or whatever you’d like to name it. Then simply put following contents in that page.

<?php
$twitter_username	=	'designgala';	// please replace it with your twitter username
$tw	=	get_option("total_twitter_followers");
if ($tw['lastcheck'] < ( mktime() – 3600 ) ) { 	$xml	=	file_get_contents('http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name='. $twitter_username); 	if (preg_match('/followers_count>(.*)

Explanation:
I used 2 PHP functions file_get_contents() and preg_match() here. file_get_contents fetches twitter xml file and stores in buffere while preg_match searches followers_count for a match in the buffer returned by earlier function.

Step 2:
Now you can include above file using PHP include like below in any template file.

<?php include("follower_count.php"); ?>

Thats it. It will show twitter follower count.

[Photo Credit: JavaJunky via Flickr]

I am making a list of plugins that I use frequently in my most of the projects and recommend buyers to use.

1. Akismet
Do you often hit by spam? No worries Akismet is a saviour. Akismet protects your site against comment spam. Activate this plugin and you won’t need to moderate or captcha your comment submissions. Akismet does 99% of the work for you. In order to make this plugin work, you need Akismet Key which is easily available.

2. All-in-One SEO for Search Engine Optimization

Permalink feature of WordPress makes itself SEO friendly platform. Similarly most WordPress themes are built in SEO friendly manner. But again it is better to use AIOSEO which gives complete control over meta tags and title of the page.

3. Cforms
Almost all project needs contact forms, survey, input from reader; CForms makes life easier to integrate forms.

CformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager support, Database tracking and many more.

4. WP125

If you need to put advertisement widgets in your page then WP125 is an option for you. It supports an image ad of 125×125 px. The interface to manage ads is very clean and easy to understand. Further statistics about ads clicks can also be viewed. Its only drawback is; there’s no support for text ads and ads with other sizes.

5. WP-DBManager
DB is always the most important asset of your website. This little gem is amazing for backing up your website. It actually has quite a few functions that it can perform but perhaps it’s most impressive feature is it’s ability to email the entire WordPress databse to me every day.

6. WP Super Cache
This plugin generates static html files from your WordPress powered website. After a html file is generated then webserver will will serve that static file instead of processing the comparatively more heavier and expensive WordPress scripts. It reduces database connection overhead as well. So if you’re getting heavy traffic to your site; consider using this.

7. YARPP Related Posts – to increase Pageviews and guide readers for possible suggestion
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) automatically scout out other posts on your site that are related to the post being read. YARPP lists related posts at the end of the post being read.

There are many other plugins which are as better than the plugin I listed above.

Basically I used help of CSS ‘display:none’ to achieve it. I created a function ‘hide_wp_tags_from_admin’ and then I added this filter to to admin head using add_action. You must either create a plugin and add it to plugins folder or you can use a quick dirty hack by adding below function to function.php of your active theme.

function hide_wp_tags_from_admin() {
    echo '<!--
#commentsdiv, #tagsdiv-post_tag { display:none; }
-->';
}
add_action('admin_head', 'hide_wp_tags_from_admin');

Very simple; isn’t it? Have your say.

I quickly googled and fixed it by adding following code in function.php

remove_filter('the_content', 'wpautop');

;)

There are 2 ways to disable categories in feeds.

1. If you’re a feedburner user

You’ll have to edit the original feed source in your feedburner account like below;

http://designgala.com/feed?cat=-7&cat=-18

Above URL would exclude posts from categories with ID 7 and 18

2. From standard RSS feed

In order to use this method, you need to add following code in function.php of your active theme.

/**
* disable RSS feed
*/
function exclude_categories_in_feed($query) {
	if ($query->is_feed) {
        $query->set('cat','-7,-18');
return $query;
}
 
add_filter('pre_get_posts','exclude_categories_in_feed');

I hope this was short but cool wordpress hack to exclude categories from RSS feed.

Step 1:

Create a new function in function.php located in your active theme folder like below:

/**
* disable RSS feed
*/
function wp_disable_feed() {
   wp_die( __('Sorry, no feeds available, return to <a href="'. get_bloginfo('url') .'">homepage</a>') );
}
 
add_action('do_feed', 'wp_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'wp_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'wp_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'wp_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'wp_disable_feed', 1);

I told you. Its very easy to disable feeds.

Step 1:

Include jQuery Library in head section of your html file.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

Step 2:

Come up with your own html elements in body section. I chose div ‘layer1′ to be the main container where collapsible/expandable content would reside.

Next, class ‘heading’ is given to header while div ‘content’ holds the show hide layer for that heading

Like this:

<div class="layer1">
<p class="heading">Header-1 </p>
<div class="content">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit</div>
<p class="heading">Header-2</p>
<div class="content">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit</div>
<p class="heading">Header-3</p>
<div class="content">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit</div>
</div>

Step 3:

CSS: Now it totally depends on you to write css for your heading, div. Here’s my version of CSS for this example.

.layer1 {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
width: 500px;
}
 
.heading {
margin: 1px;
color: #fff;
padding: 3px 10px;
cursor: pointer;
position: relative;
background-color:#c30;
}
.content {
padding: 5px 10px;
background-color:#fafafa;
}
p { padding: 5px 0; }

Step 4:

Again lets go to head section to add few more javascript codes.

<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery(document).ready(function() {
  jQuery(".content").hide();
  //toggle the componenet with class msg_body
  jQuery(".heading").click(function()
  {
    jQuery(this).next(".content").slideToggle(500);
  });
});
</script>

Thats it!! Expandible-Collapsible panel is ready. You may like to view a DEMO.

1. Viper’s Video Quicktags

This plugin adds on new buttons to the rich text editor on WordPress. In order to embed a video, you just need to paste the video URL into the prompt box. With this plugin you can also fully configure the width, height, colors and alignment on the page.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vipers-video-quicktags/

2. FLV Embed

This plugin supports video sitemap generation, includes options such as auto start and menu control bar. It also supports text only output for RSS that prompt readers to visit the original post for Flash content.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/flv-embed/

3. Interactive Video Plugin

Apart from video embed this plugin also includes the ability to upload/ record/import videos directly to your post, edit and remix content with an online video editor. You can even enable video responses, manage and track your video content.

Includes custom sizing of the video player, advanced sharing options and allow readers and subscribers to add video and audio comments.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/kaltura-interactive-video/

4. Flash Video Player

This plugin allows the addition of videos into WordPress by using a menu with post-level overrides for customization of size, background color etc. Give up your style wishes once, and you never ever have to manually style a video again.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/flash-video-player/

5. Video Embedder

To embed a video using this plugin, all you need is the ID of the video. With this plugin you can manage the settings for all of your embedded movies from the WordPress settings for Video Embedder, the properties for all the movies will be updated instantly as soon as you save the settings.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/video-embedder/

Missed Any? Let us know.

Here are collection of my favorite WordPress SQL hacks.

1. Batch Delete Post Revisions:

Post revisions are very useful but they also increase the size of your MySQL database. You can manually delete revisions, but that’s very long and boring work.

SQL:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

2. Erase all Spam Comments:

Even though I have differnt plugins like AKismet, reCaptcha; I’ve always had very hard times dealing with spam. This solution made me very happy when I first used.

SQL:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = '0';

3. Manually Reset Your admin Password:

SQL:

UPDATE `wp_users` SET `user_pass` = MD5('mypassword') WHERE `wp_users`.`user_login` =`admin` LIMIT 1;

4. Change Your WordPress Address:

I often use this hack very often. There are many cases when project development is done in demo site address. When we need to make it live; there’s already lots of data (testing + live) and its necessary to run following SQL to get things going.

4.a. changes WordPress URL:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = REPLACE(option_value, 'http://www.oldsite.com', 'http://www.newsite.com') WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl';

4.b. Replace the relative URL (guid) of each post:

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = REPLACE(guid, 'http://www.oldsite.com','http://www.newsite.com');

4.c. Search and replace in the wp_posts table to make sure that no absolute URL is still here:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, 'http://www.oldsite.com', 'http://www.newsite.com');

We’re done changing WordPress Address. I am sure you do have your own collection of fav SQL hacks.