Today we have an interesting WordPress theme, originally designed by growldesign. This theme only has one column, with category and page navigation in the header and footer. On the homepage template, there is room for your latest blog post and an area for your latest 3 portfolio entries below. More information on how to use this will be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the theme features. It will require a few code hacks to get it working perfectly on your new portfolio site…

Bottom Half of Homepage

This area of the homepage is reserved for your 3 latest “portfolio” entries, or posts in a certain category. To set the category you’ll need to retrieve the category ID. You can do this in WordPress 2.5+ by hovering over the link and viewing the address bar. Hack WordPress does a good job explaining this.

Change the “1″ in this example, to whatever category ID you have chosen to post your portfolio entries in.

Using Custom Fields for Portfolio Images

You can use the custom field key portfolio_image with the value as the image name to display portfolio images on the homepage.

The image will have to be stored in the wp-content/themes/mintswirl/portfolio/ directory for it to work, unless you change this directory in the home.php file.

Conclusion

Sorry if this theme is a little too confusing with all the code edits that may be necessary for you to get this theme up and running. If all else fails, you can simply delete the home.php file, and just have a normal blog layout.

If anything is unclear, feel free to leave a comment and I’d be happy to clarify it.

There are certain WordPress plugins you hear about all the time. You see them repeated across multiple blogs as the “best” WordPress plugins like a broken record. Who ever looks back and tries to find underrated WordPress plugins though? These are plugins that don’t get much publicity, but are very useful in one way or another.

• Search Regex – I know this plugin has come in handy for me several times. What this plugin will do is search and replace data stored in your site. For example, if you wanted to change the directory path to images (from /wp-content/uploads/ to just /uploads/) throughout all your posts, all you would have to do is type it in once. Be careful with this powerful plugin though. Make sure to back your database before using it.
• WP DB Backup – This brings us to our next underrated plugin – a database backup plugin. This can automate the process of backing up your database by sending you an e-mail attachment at a defined interval. It was briefly gone over in a previous article of mine: The Importance of Backing Up Your WordPress Site.
• No Self Pings – This is more of a personal preference than anything. I personally don’t like how WordPress “self pings” when you link to another page of your blog. If you’re like me, you can install this plugin and not have to worry about moderating your own pingbacks.

And those are my three. Thanks to the WordPress Expert and Kyle of Hack WordPress for this post idea.

Only a few weekend resources this week – both related to customizing the WordPress administration panel.

Four Alternative WordPress 2.5 Admin Themes – While I use the default WordPress admin panel, these alternative themes may be useful to those who want a branded look for their WordPress-powered sites.

For the Love of 2.3 – James Dimick, author of the Easy Admin Color Schemes Plugin, has released a new color scheme for the 2.5 admin panel resembling the old 2.3 admin panel.

That’s all, thanks for reading! If you know of a quality WordPress resource published recently, feel free to let me know in the comments.

Today we have an interesting WordPress theme, originally designed by growldesign. This theme only has one column, with category and page navigation in the header and footer. On the homepage template, there is room for your latest blog post and an area for your latest 3 portfolio entries below. More information on how to use this will be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the theme features. It will require a few code hacks to get it working perfectly on your new portfolio site…

Bottom Half of Homepage

This area of the homepage is reserved for your 3 latest “portfolio” entries, or posts in a certain category. To set the category you’ll need to retrieve the category ID. You can do this in WordPress 2.5+ by hovering over the link and viewing the address bar. Hack WordPress does a good job explaining this.

Change the “1″ in this example, to whatever category ID you have chosen to post your portfolio entries in.

Using Custom Fields for Portfolio Images

You can use the custom field key portfolio_image with the value as the image name to display portfolio images on the homepage.

The image will have to be stored in the wp-content/themes/mintswirl/portfolio/ directory for it to work, unless you change this directory in the home.php file.

Conclusion

Sorry if this theme is a little too confusing with all the code edits that may be necessary for you to get this theme up and running. If all else fails, you can simply delete the home.php file, and just have a normal blog layout.

If anything is unclear, feel free to leave a comment and I’d be happy to clarify it.

There are certain WordPress plugins you hear about all the time. You see them repeated across multiple blogs as the “best” WordPress plugins like a broken record. Who ever looks back and tries to find underrated WordPress plugins though? These are plugins that don’t get much publicity, but are very useful in one way or another.

• Search Regex – I know this plugin has come in handy for me several times. What this plugin will do is search and replace data stored in your site. For example, if you wanted to change the directory path to images (from /wp-content/uploads/ to just /uploads/) throughout all your posts, all you would have to do is type it in once. Be careful with this powerful plugin though. Make sure to back your database before using it.
• WP DB Backup – This brings us to our next underrated plugin – a database backup plugin. This can automate the process of backing up your database by sending you an e-mail attachment at a defined interval. It was briefly gone over in a previous article of mine: The Importance of Backing Up Your WordPress Site.
• No Self Pings – This is more of a personal preference than anything. I personally don’t like how WordPress “self pings” when you link to another page of your blog. If you’re like me, you can install this plugin and not have to worry about moderating your own pingbacks.

And those are my three. Thanks to the WordPress Expert and Kyle of Hack WordPress for this post idea.