Ashfame | Tech Blog |+| Ashfame.com

These days I blog more about WordPress, bbPress & web development stuff

In an effort to document everything I know.

Ashfame | Tech Blog header image

WordPress CMS Series

If you are new here. You may want to sign up for e-mail updates or subscribe to my RSS feeds. Thanks for visiting!

I am starting this series so as to demonstrate the capabilities of using WordPress as CMS coupled up with other scripts (like forum script bbPress). The series will begin with the implementation details of WordPress and bbPress in my recent project Need A Project (a site for students looking to improve their coding skills). Then it will continue with how I used WordPress to design my college website JEC, Kukas.

[Read more →]

Tags:   · · 6 Comments

Nokia N86 Review

n86_8mp

Nokia N868GB | 8MP | ? awesomeness

Today I am going to review my new cell phone Nokia N86. I am so much excited that I actually wanted to do a comprehensive review of the phone but that would have to be cut down on to my opinion of the features of the phone. Before I would start, I would say “awesome” and I am sure you will say the same after reading the complete review.

[Read more →]

Tags:   · No Comments.

How to use the 960 CSS Grid Framework

My first piece of advice before using any kind of framework is that become strong in your basics, learn to do it from scratch, build it from hand and then use frameworks for cutting development times. They are by no means to be use when you are new to the discipline. Today, I am going to discuss about the 960 CSS Grid Framework.

960 Grid Framework is one of the most popular CSS frameworks used nowadays and believe me it is all you need if you want to build fixed page layouts with the complexity of your imagination layout. Today I will tell why I love this framework and use it everywhere.

[Read more →]

Tags:   · · No Comments.

List of topics of a particular bbPress forum

This tutorial will demonstrate the usage of custom queries so as to show topics of a certain bbPress forum along with Topic starter and Last Poster of inside WordPress. Before you can play around with bbPress information, you need to integrate WordPress with bbPress. After integration you can place this code anywhere in your template and it will fetch information from bbPress tables.

[Read more →]

Tags:   · · No Comments.

Show bbPress forum list with posts & topics count in WordPress

This tutorial will demonstrate the usage of custom queries so as to show bbPress forum list inside WordPress. We would like it to display the list of forums along with their topic & post count.

Before you can play around with bbPress information, you need to integrate WordPress with bbPress. After integration you can place this code anywhere in your template and it will fetch information from bbPress tables.

[Read more →]

Tags:   · · 1 Comment

Show bbPress content inside WordPress

One way is to deep integrate both WordPress and bbPress so that one’s function can be called into another as both WordPress & bbPress are loaded every time a page is being generated either by WordPress or bbPress. However I am strictly against it as the overhead is not worth it. Its not at all recommended for busy sites because this will amount to increase in resources consumption and degradation in performance.

A good approach would be to mimic the functionality offered by one into another. First of all I would recommend integrating WordPress with bbPress so that they share the same database and then we can use SQL queries to fetch data from the database. The idea is to get the data by our queries and then we can manipulate as per our needs and mimic the functionality of the needed function.

[Read more →]

Tags:   · · 2 Comments

How to show Random Items out of a list

Picking up the scenario from my project NAP, that I faced was I needed to show some books with their respective links but I have to pick up only 4 out of the 5 books I had and the picking should be random on each page load.

You might say that php random function is the answer to the problem but I have a few things to talk about.

[Read more →]

Tags:   · No Comments.

How to have multiple widgetized different sidebars

Its pretty much simple to widgetize multiple areas in a WordPress theme. Here in this tutorial I will demonstrate how you can have different sidebars for different pages and all of them being widgetized so that adding content to it is a piece of cake.

[Read more →]

Tags:   · No Comments.

Show custom excerpts of the post in WordPress

When WordPress is used as a CMS, then we no longer wants the homepage to be a chronological order of posts. We would want the homepage to be something which serves the purpose of telling everything about itself. Certainly that should have a section where blog updates are being highlighted either with excerpt or with just titles.

Since in our implementation, we only be having a single section where I would want to use the WordPress loop so we can straight go ahead and use it. Had you been using WordPress loop somewhere else on the page then you would have to use a different object for the WP loop.

[Read more →]

Tags:   · 1 Comment

Building a FrontPage using WordPress

This tutorial assumes that you are comfortable enough in designing WordPress themes. I suggest you take the hang of both the methods and decide which one you want to go with. Technically I haven’t come up with any limitation of expanding WordPress capabilities that one may face by using either of the method.

We will require to use page templates in both the methods, so if you don’t know how to create them, here is a good chance to understand how they work and how you can use them. Read this article – WordPress page templates and come back to this tutorial.

[Read more →]

Tags:   · 1 Comment

Page template usage in WordPress

How does a normal WordPress page look like? Header, content, sidebar and footer. What if you want a different layout for a particular page or a set of pages. A different sidebar or multiple sidebar or no sidebar at all? Different styling and arrangement of other things (purely CSS based)? Anything different from the regular layout can be incorporated within WordPress using Page templates.

[Read more →]

Tags:   · 2 Comments