Some Wordpress tips and tricks

Posted on 23 Nov 2013

wordpress php

Wordpress is a universally recognized and robust blogging platform written in the PHP language. Below are a bunch of Wordpress tricks that I’ve learned during my deployments, and I’d like to share with you.

1. Change breadcrumbs to start from “Home” instead of Site-Title: When I set up this site, the breadcrumbs in the post used to read like this:

Prahlad Yeri » wordpress » WordPress installation quick-start guide

However, I wanted it to look like this:

Home » wordpress » WordPress installation quick-start guide

In order to do that, you need to look into your theme-functions.php file and see where wordpress is echoing your breadcrumbs. In the mantra theme, I found this in the function mantra_breadcrumbs(). So accordingly, I changed get_bloginfo(‘name’) and hard-coded it to ‘Home’:

//changed by prahlad
//echo '<a href="'.get_bloginfo('url').'">'.get_bloginfo('name').' &raquo; </a>'; 
echo '<a href="'.get_bloginfo('url').'">'.'Home'.' &raquo; </a>';

You have to do this at multiple places in the mantra_breadcrumbs() (or your theme’s equivalent function) wherever get_bloginfo(‘name’) is used and replace it with ‘Home’.

2. How to crop off the big page-title that appears on top of pages: This is a nice little css trick. Just open your theme’s style.css and switch off the display for “entry-title” class elements within the “page” class elements. This will hide the page titles only on page-titles (and not posts!):

/*start: prahlad - used to hide post-titles on all pages (not posts)*/
.page .entry-title {
 display: none;
}
/*end: prahlad*/

If you notice that some whitespace is still left on top of the page, you can try some of these modifiers:

.site-header {
 padding-bottom: 0;
}

.site-content {
 margin-top: 0;
}

#content {
 margin-top: -20px;
}

3. How to add a contact-form to your post or page: In order to do that you need a Contact-Form plugin. The most popular and well-maintained plugin at that is “Contact-Forms 7”:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/contact-form-7/

This is a pretty decent form plugin that, from a single line of short-code (in your page or post), creates a basic all-purpose contact-form such as this:

Page created with Contact Forms 7

Page created with Contact Forms 7

When you install this plugin, you will see an additional “Contact” tab in your dashboard. When you click that, you will see a default form with a short-code like this:

[contact-form-7 id="116" title="Contact form 1"]

You can copy-paste this short-code anywhere in the editor for your page or post. For this site’s contact page, it looked something like this:

[contact-form-7 id="116" title="Contact form 1"]

By default, the information in the text-fields are mailed to the admin user’s email-address when a user submits this form. You can change all this by editing the default form that you find in the “Contact” tab of your dashboard. You can add/remove the text-fields, add validation and much more.

Another plugin that works in combination with this is the flamingo plugin. It is useful in case you want to store the contact information in the wordpress database in addition to getting it mailed to your email address.

4: Change the footer notices (such as “Powered by Wordpress”, etc..): Just open your footer.php from editor and try to find a snippet such as this:

<footer id="colophon" role="contentinfo">
 <div class="site-info">
 <?php do_action( 'twentytwelve_credits' ); ?>

Change it accordingly to suit your needs.

References: