Have you ever found that the WordPress theme you are using offers a ton of Widgets to use? This can create a real pain in the tail end when you are trying to add or remove widgets from select sidebar widget areas. Consider the following: As you can see, there are a number of Widget Areas here, and on many displays, several of these can appear below the fold. Add a few widgets to each section and it really gets crazy… and very hard to manage. Now, with a little help from jQuery, we can change this to be an easier to use interface. See the same page, but with the new jQuery: Now, you have a...

When working with themes, sometimes you want users that are less than an Administrator to be able to update theme options. By default, if the user can not “manage_options” (which all Admins can), the user will not be able to update the options. Instead they are greeted with a “Cheatin’ Uh?” page. To avoid the error, you need to grant the user the correct permissions to do this. Side Note: WordPress developers… can we change this error page please? When you hand a site to a client powered by WordPress and they get a page error that says they are Cheating, its not the...

Introducing The RW Meta Box Class plugin for WordPress This plugin uses the Meta Box class as created by Rilwis and adds the capabilities to WordPress as a plugin. UPDATE: The author of this script has released this as an updated WordPress plugin. I highly recommend you use this version of the plugin: Meta Box on WordPress.org What is the Meta Box Class? Rilwis created a great bit of code that allows developers to quickly and easily add custom meta boxes for all post types (pages, posts, custom). The way Rilwis set this up, you simply copy his code to your theme’s functions.php file and then set...

I build a lot of websites on WordPress. And when building a new website for a client, this is typically done on a development server instead of on the live website server. This way the website can be perfected before the public sees it, and once it is ready, the website is then moved to the new server. There are a number of websites out there telling you how to move a WordPress website from one host to another. Following a few basic steps, you can easily move the entire website with no problem. (I will review these steps in another posting soon.) However, it seemed that from time to time when I would...

So this past weekend I went to my first WordCamp, which was held in Raleigh, NC. Overall, it seemed to be a good experience and I would rank the event itself as a success. For myself, I met a number of other WordPress users and developers, and picked up a few tips from the different sessions I attended. However, I may have oversold the event to myself going in. You see, I wanted to attend this event with the hopes that I would find some earth shattering nugget of information that would propel me to a higher level of WordPress development and understanding. So going in with that anticipation, I must say...