What Do You Want to Know About WordPress?

Nathan Rice on June 30, 2009

Over the next few weeks, I want to take reader-submitted questions about WordPress and answer them here on the blog. Have a question about themes? Plugins? Simple or complicated — it doesn’t matter!

If I pick your question, I’ll answer it (in as much detail as necessary) here on the blog, and link to you as the source of the question.

Hopefully this will be a BIG help to everyone out there, and make for some really good conversation! Leave your questions in the comments.

iThemes, WordPress, and the GPL

Nathan Rice on June 11, 2009

Since starting iThemes back in early 2008, one thing Cory, and I when I joined the team, were justifiably concerned with was protecting our products, and of course our hard work, from being stolen or used without permission. This was our livelihood, so we couldn’t fool around.

Even though we both believed that we would have been within our rights to copyright the entire work, we decided that we would license all WordPress code in our themes (function calls, loops, etc.) as GPL, and protect our images, stylesheets, etc., under a copyright. We felt it was a good compromise. Read More

An Introduction to WordPress Action Hooks

Nathan Rice on June 10, 2009

If you’re going to be doing any level of WordPress development, themes or plugins, you will invariably run into the need to take advantage of the WordPress Action Hook system. But the more I am able to talk to people in the community, the more I realize that people simply don’t understand the concept very well, or at all.

In fact, one of the biggest barriers to using what is referred to as a Theme Framework or creating their own plugins is the fact that they rely heavily on Action Hooks to function properly.

Understanding this concept accelerated my level of development skills immediately after I figured out what hooks were, and how they worked. And today, I want to help you find that path too. Read More

How To Redirect a Page Using Custom Fields in WordPress

Nathan Rice on June 8, 2009

Today, I wanted to share a very quick tip that will allow you to insert an internal or external URL in a custom field for a page, and when a user visits that page, they will be redirected to the URL you put in the custom field.

Why would you need to do this? Well, if you want to add a link to your navigation menu, instead of editing code, you could just create a new page, and have that page redirect your users to the URL you specified. I’ve had clients in that situation before, and this code has come in pretty handy for them. Read More

10 Sites That Produce Quality WordPress Content

Nathan Rice on June 5, 2009

Sometimes, it’s hard to find good sources of quality WordPress content around the net. The problem is, many times good sites go unnoticed because of a lack of good marketing. Sometimes, even, good sites get sold off to bad owners. It happens.

I track a lot of WordPress content daily, so I’m happy to sort through the noise for you. My list is lean and mean, and I don’t mind sharing. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feeds and/or follow them on twitter too.

Here are 10 sites I highly recommend if you are looking to expand your understanding of WordPress, or keep up with what’s going on in the community. Read More