How to Show Related Posts in WordPress Without Using Plugin

There are many plugins that allow you to display related posts on your site, but most of them are either too bloated, too complicated or too simple. A better way is to implement the related posts function directly into your theme and reduce the server overhead. In this way, you can also theme it up the way you want it.

This tutorial will teach you how you can show related posts in your site without using any plugin.

Easily Migrate Your SEO Settings With A Single Click

When it comes to the list of "must-have" plugins, SEO plugin will always be in the list. A good SEO plugin can help you to rewrite your site title, description, meta tags and also redirect all your dead permalinks to active one. At its best, It can help you to achieve higher search ranking, without you having to be a SEO expert.

With that said, there are plenty of SEO plugins that you can use. The All in One SEO Pack, Platinum SEO, Headspace2 and WordPress SEO are all great SEO plugins available in the repository. To make things more complicated, premium themes such as Headway themes, Frugal, Thesis, Genesis etc also comes with inbuilt SEO settings that make SEO plugins obsolete.

How to Embed Tweets In Your Posts

Blog posts,Twitter, Facebook and many other social networks often go hand in hand. When you publish a blog post, you will often tweet the link to your Twitter account. Sometime when you send a tweet, you will also embed it in your blog post. The problem is, embedding a tweet in your post is not as easy as it should be. It often involves taking screenshot of the tweet, crop/edit it before you upload it to your post. With the introduction of Blackbird Pie, the whole process just become much easier.

Blackbird Pie is a method created by Twitter Media to easily embed a tweet on your site. Feed it with the tweet's URL and it will generate the necessary code for you to copy/paste to your site.

Fixing the Blackbird Pie Plugin - undefined function mb_strlen

If you are using the Blackbird Pie plugin to embed tweets to your posts, you might see an error message Call to undefined function mb_strlen(). The reason for this error is because the plugin is using the mb_strlen function that is not activated by default.

To fix this, go to the Blackbird Pie plugin folder and open unicode.php in your text-editor. At line 18, replace the line:

[php firstline="17"]return mb_convert_encoding($swap,"UTF-8"); //not really necessary, but why not.[/php]

with

[php firstline="17"]if ( function_exists('mb_convert_encoding') )
return mb_convert_encoding($swap,"UTF-8"); //not really necessary, but why not.
else
return $swap;[/php]

At line 21 and 25, replace the line:

[php]$strlen = mb_strlen($string);[/php]

with

[php]if(function_exists('mb_strlen'))
$strlen = mb_strlen($string);
else
$strlen = strlen($string);[/php]

Save and upload the file to your server. It should work now.

via WordPress Support

Limit The jQuery Lazy Load Plugin to Operate Only In The Content Area

If you have noticed, one of the way that highly-trafficked site save bandwidths is to use a lazy load plugin. What this lazy load plugin does is to load the images only when they become visible on the screen. Any images below the visible screen will not be displayed. This is also known as on-demand loading.

In WordPress, there are several lazy load plugins that you can use. One of my favorite is the jQuery Image Lazy Load plugin, simply because it just works the moment you activate it. No configuration is required.

How to Add Custom Navigation Menus to Your Themes

WordPress 3.0 comes with support for custom navigation menu. The new feature is a good way for you to add navigation menu to your theme with little configuration. Best of all, it allows you to administer the menus from your dashboard. No longer do you need to tamper with the code to add/remove items from the menus.

Now, unless you are using an updated theme, chances are, your old theme does not support this new custom navigation menu feature. Here is how you can modify your current theme to support the menus feature.

Dropbox-CDN Uses Your Dropbox Account As Free CDN

I am sure you have heard of Dropbox - the web storage service that allows you to access your files from almost everywhere. If you are a WordPress user as well as a Dropbox user, you can now host (some of) your theme files in Dropbox and save some bandwidth.

A new plugin known as Dropbox-CDN helps you automate the process. All you need to do is go to your Dropbox's Public folder, create several level of folders with the same folder structures as your WordPress server (for example: /wp-content/themes/your-theme-folder/) and place all your js, css and image files into it. Copy and paste your Dropbox public link to the Dropbox-CDN options page and it will do the rest for you.

Note: This plugin only supports themes who use the filters 'template_directory', 'template_directory_uri', 'stylesheet_directory', and 'stylesheet_directory_uri' to determine the paths to the theme's template and stylesheet files.