How To Get Value Of A Specific Custom Field In WordPress

WordPress allows us to add custom fields to a our posts, which adds extra information, which is known as meta-data. But we can do a lot more there custom fields. For example, I embedded a video in this post with the use of custom fields.

More of newbies gets confused when it comes to use custom fields. But they're not that complicated, at least the basic use of these fields.

Here's how you can get value of a specific custom field in your WordPress posts:

<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'mood', true); ?>

"mood" would be ID value of custom field. That was simple.

And here's how to display custom field only if exists:

<?php
    $url = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'snippet-reference-URL', true);

    if ($url) {
        echo "<p><a href='$url'>Reference URL</a></p>";
    }
?>

Using A Different Post Template For Posts Within A Specific Category

On Thursday I posted an article about using different post template for posts formats, but now it's time for doing the same thing with categories, instead of formats. You can use this trick in your WordPress to create different type of posts, such as portfolio items.

We discussed everything previously, so let's get into this trick:

Using A Different Post Template:

In this tutorial, we'll create a different post template for the cat-1 category. We'll use multiple single.php files to make it more easy and customizable.

Create a single.php file for your category. We're going to name it single-cat-1.php. You can also copy your single.php file to this template and make some changes that you want in the video template.

Upload single-cat-1.php to the root of your current theme. Same place where single.php file is located.

Okay, so now we'll tell WordPress to use single-cat-1.php template for the posts within video category. Add following to your theme's functions.php file:

add_action('template_include', 'load_single_template');
  function load_single_template($template) {
    $new_template = '';

    // single post template
    if( is_single() ) {
      global $post;

      // 'cat-1' is category slugs
      if( has_term('cat-1', 'category', $post) ) {
        // use template file single-template-cat-1.php
        $new_template = locate_template(array('single-cat-1.php' ));
      }

    }
    return ('' != $new_template) ? $new_template : $template;
  }

In above code, replace cat-1 is the slug of your category, and single-cat-1.php is your custom post template file. Save the file. That's it.

How To Log Out From New Facebook Messenger Android App

Facebook has released the latest update of its Messenger app for Android. This release covers some major changes in the app interface and features. You can also text your contracts from this app, which makes it replacement of texting.

But Facebook forgot to add something in this new upload. There's no option to Log Out of your account in this new update. Don't worry there's a solution of every problem.

Most of us used to log out of our Facebook accounts from Account settings menu, which will not work in this case. Here's how to log out from this app:

In Gingerbread: Click on Settings > Applications > Manage applications > Find and click on "Messenger" > Click on Clear Data > That's IT!

In ICS & JellyBean: Click on Settings > Apps > Find and click on "Messenger" > Click on Clear Data > That's IT!

Is Your Website Down For Everyone Or It's Just You?

A couple of days ago my website WWEFansNation.com's server went down, and the following message appeared:

503 Service Unavailable: The server is currently unavailable (because it is overloaded or down for maintenance)

But my website was not down at all. It was just my WiFi operator's fault. It was just down on my WiFi connection, but was up to entire universe.

My fellow blogger, Rajat Garg of TrueBloggerTips, passed me link to isup.me to check whether my website is down for everyone or it's just me.

You can also check if your website is down for everyone or it's you by visiting isup.me.

Using A Different Post Template For Posts Formats In WordPress

Post Formats is a theme feature which was introduced with the WordPress 3.1 release. It gave us a new feature to style posts based on its format. If you ever used WordPress' default themes, then you might know about their different post templates based on the post format. So it's time for you to style your posts based on its format. Here's a demo of this trick from my own WordPress site:

This is a simple post.

This is a video post with a different template.

Add Post Format Support To Your WordPress Theme:

Before starting this tutorial, it's important for you to add support for post formats in your current WordPress theme. If this section is available in your post editor then you can skip this step:

If not, then follow this tutorial.

Using A Different Post Template:

In this tutorial, we'll create a different post template for the Video format. Most of developers uses a single post template file for all different format. But we'll use multiple single.php files to make it more easy and customizable.

Create a single.php file for your post format (we're using Video). We're going to name it single-video.php. You can also copy your single.php file to this template and make some changes that you want in the video template.

Upload single-video.php to the root of your current theme. Same place where single.php file is located.

Okay, so now we'll tell WordPress to use single-video.php template for the posts with video format. Add following to your theme's functions.php file:

add_action('template_include', 'load_single_template');
  function load_single_template($template) {
    $new_template = '';

    // single post template
    if( is_single() ) {
      global $post;

      // template for post with video format
      if ( has_post_format( 'video' )) {
        // use template file single-video.php for video format
        $new_template = locate_template(array('single-video.php' ));
      }

    }
    return ('' != $new_template) ? $new_template : $template;
  }

Save the file. That's it.

Now just publish a post with video format & see the magic. You can do the same with every post format. On a related note, I'll also share the same trick with categories, instead of formats.

Add Post Formats To WordPress Theme

It's school holiday for five days in a row, so as a part of the second day of this holiday, I was doing some random stuff around the internet, such as listing to new songs, reading about upcoming Next-Gen gaming consoles, browsing troll memes, blaming Justin Bieber, and more.

So in this busy day I took some time to edit my WordPress website for new feature. I did some thing new (at least for me) with some post formats, and I'm going to share it here on BWidgets. So as a part of that tutorial, here's the basic thing to learn before I post that article, which is adding post format support to your WordPress theme.

Post Formats is a theme feature introduced with the WordPress 3.1 release. It's piece of meta info that can be used by a theme to customize its post structure. If you ever used Tumblr, then you'll love this feature.

As of now, WordPress supports following post formats:

• aside: Typically styled without a title. Similar to a Facebook note update.

• gallery: An image gallery. This type of post will likely contain an image gallery using shortcode and plugins.

• link: A link to an external webpage.

• image: A single image. Yeah, just a single image.

• quote: A quatation. My favorite quote is: Your arms are just too short to box with the God. - CM Punk to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson

• status: A short status update, similar to a tweet.

• video: A single video or several videos. You can upload or embed a video to the post.

• audio: An audeo file, likely if you run a Podcast.

• chat: A chat transcript.

Add following snippet to your theme's functions.php file to add post format support to your post:

add_theme_support( 'post-formats', array( 'aside', 'chat','gallery','image','link', 'quote', 'status', 'video', 'audio' ) );

You can also add post format support to Page and custom post types:

// add post-formats to post_type 'page'
add_post_type_support( 'page', 'post-formats' );

// add post-formats to post_type 'my_custom_post_type'
add_post_type_support( 'my_custom_post_type', 'post-formats' );

Remove Default Widget Bundle CSS From Blogger

If you're a Blogger template designer, then this article is very very helpful for your future designs. If you're a designer, then you probably know about two default Blogger stylesheets- widget_css_bundle.css and widget_css_2_bundle.css. Becaue they make it more diffecult for you to design your template.

Blogger automatically adds the following code in your Blogger template:

<link type='text/css' rel='stylesheet' href='//www.blogger.com/static/v1/widgets/1937454905-widget_css_bundle.css' />

<link type='text/css' rel='stylesheet' href='//www.blogger.com/static/v1/widgets/4219271310-widget_css_2_bundle.css' />

So it's time for your to remove there stylesheets from your Blogger template. If you don't know above there stylesheets, then don't follow this tutorial. Removing this code maybe can make your template destroyed, if you use official widgets from Blogger.

We are not really removing this code from our template, but this trick will make that code ignored by your browser. This tutorial is just converting that code to HTML comments, thanks to Damzaky for this trick.

• Open Blogger > Template > Edit HTML, proceed, then CTRL+F this code: <b:skin><![CDATA[

• If you have found that code, in below that code you may found your CSS, so just copy all the CSS to a notepad or anywhere because we need this code later in this tutorial.

• Then the remaining code is  <b:skin><![CDATA[    ]]></b:skin>

• Replace above code with following:

&lt;style type=&quot;text/css&quot;&gt;

&lt;!-- /*<b:skin><![CDATA[*/]]></b:skin>

• Then post following code just above the </head> of your template:

<style type='text/css'>

YOUR CSS FROM NOTEPAD

</style>

• In above code, replace the YOUR CSS FROM NOTEPAD from all CSS from your notepad that we copied earlier.

• Save your template.

That's it.

Change WordPress Login Logo Without Plugins

Above is a screen shot of the login page of my WordPress website. As you can see in above image, I'm using my website's logo in the login page instead of WordPress logo. And it looks pretty good.

If you're running a website with public registration or a client website, then you should replace the default logo with your own. There are lots of plugins to change the custom logo in some easy steps. However, we're going to do this without any plugin.

Add this snippet to the functions.php file of your active theme:

<?php
function custom_login_logo() {
    echo '<style type="text/css">
        h1 a { background-image:url('CUSTOM-LOGO-URL.png') !important; }
    </style>';
}
add_action('login_head', 'custom_login_logo');
?>

Replace the CUSTOM-LOGO-URL.png in above code with url of your custom login logo. That's it.

How To Set Minimum Word Count For WordPress Posts

If you're running a WordPress site with some co-authors then it's really important for you to focus on your content's quality. Quality content is the ultimate key to success in blogging. Most of bloggers write like a monkey in the very beginning; I was also in that league when I started this blog.

Since recent Google updates you can no longer post an article with some couple of words and expect the post to rank highly for the keywords in the title. Now you need more content in the entire post with a lot of different keywords.

With WordPress you can create a function to make sure that you have a minimum number of words in your post.

By adding following code to your functions.php file, you can check if the post is under 500 words and if it is you can end the publishing process so the post will not be published:

function minimum_number_words($content)
{
    global $post;
    $content = $post->post_content;
    if (str_word_count($content) < 500 )
    wp_die( __('The current post is below the minimum number of words, it must be over 500 words.') );
}

How To Set Minimum Comment Length In WordPress

Most of us turn on comments in our sites to start a discussion and reach out more people. But some people comment just to get a link back to their own site. Their comments will consist of things like "nice post", "thanks" and all stuff.

If you're running a big website, then moderating these crappy comments will waste a lot of time. So how about setting a minimum character count length on your comments.

Add following snippet to your functions.php file:

add_filter( 'preprocess_comment', 'minimal_comment_length' );

function minimal_comment_length( $commentdata ) {
    $minimalCommentLength = 20;

    if ( strlen( trim( $commentdata['comment_content'] ) ) < $minimalCommentLength )
        {
        wp_die( 'All comments must be at least ' . $minimalCommentLength . ' characters long.' );
        }
    return $commentdata;
}

Save your file. That's it. You can also replace 20 in the above code with your custom value.