Facebook introduced more social interactions with their new “Like” or “Recommend” Button. This Facebook button enables the user to interact with a site or page. Additionally share it with his/her friends at their own Facebook profile.

Well, Facebook does made it pretty easy to Implement the “Like” button code on your site. The complexity comes when it is not a single page website. How about a blog Post? This is where you will need this hack to make it work!

Do not use the code provided by Facebook because that will not work on Blog posts. Here is the hacked code designed for WordPress!

Open up your single.php and look for the_content(). Paste the code you see below… either before or after the_content()..

Optional Settings:

If you like to show the faces of your friends, change the part “show_faces=false” to “show_faces=true”

If you like to show the label of the button as “Recommend“, change the part of the code “action=like” to “action=recommend”

I hope this will help you to implement the “Like” button on your WordPress Posts! Have fun and drop me a line at twitter or you can click on the “Like” button on the top of this post

Resources (Plugins for WordPress):

Thanks to my Readers

• Facebook Like plugin including support for Open Graph (XFBML)
• Facebook Like Plugin from Smoking Gunn (Features Live Preview, Thanks Stefan to introduce that).
• Alternatively … Kouguu FB Like WordPress Plugin with Configurable Admin Screen

Those who doesn’t want to do code hacking, this one is for them

• This is how to Implement in Thesis WordPress theme

And.. I’m spent…

Don’t forget to rate the post too!

_

Related Post:

1. Integrate social networking in wordpress using facebook connect api and WordPress plugin tutorial
2. How to style the latest post in WordPress
3. How to add a tweet this button with auto TinyURL or Bit.ly shortening

What is a forum? Early Internet forums could be described as a web version of a newsgroup or electronic mailing list (many of which were commonly called Usenet) ; allowing people to post messages and comment on other messages. Later developments emulated the different newsgroups or individual lists, providing more than one forum, dedicated to a particular topic.

Forums perform a function similar to that of dial-up bulletin board systems and Usenet networks that were common from the late 1970s to the 1990s. Early web-based forums date back as far as 1996. A sense of virtual community often develops around forums that have regular users. Technology, computer games and/or video games, sports, music, fashion, religion, and politics are popular areas for forum themes, but there are forums for a huge number of topics. Internet slang and image macros popular across the Internet are abundant and widely used in Internet forums.

Few of the Most popular PHP driven forums are PHPBB, Invision Board and VBulletin. But today I’m not here to talk about those popular packages; I’m here to list out the possible alternative quality PHP forums available around the globe.

bbPress

bbPress is forum software with a twist from the creators of WordPress.

Have you ever been frustrated with forum or bulletin board software that was slow, bloated and always got your server hacked?

bbPress is focused on web standards, ease of use, ease of integration, and speed. We’re keeping things as small and light as possible while still allowing for great add on features through our extensive plugin system.

What does all that mean? bbPress is lean, mean and ready to take on any job you throw at it.

Download | Extend | Forum | Examples | Documentation

Simple Machines Forum (SMF)

Simple Machines Forum — SMF in short — is a free, professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes.

Its powerful custom made template engine puts you in full control of the lay-out of your message board and with our unique SSI – or Server Side Includes – function you can let your forum and your website interact with each other.

SMF is written in the popular language PHP and uses a MySQL database. It is designed to provide you with all the features you need from a bulletin board while having an absolute minimal impact on the resources of the server. SMF is the next generation of forum software – and best of all it is and will always remain completely free!

Download | Demo | Documents | Customize

Phorum

Started in 1998, Phorum was the original PHP and MySQL based Open Source forum software. Phorum’s developers pride themselves on creating message board software that is designed to meet different needs of different web sites while not sacrificing performance or features.

Download | Demo | Community | Docs

The Ultimate PHP Board (MyUPB)

Your ultimate and free bulletin board resource. MyUPB is a flat file bulletin board powered by TextDB engine so it doesn’t require MySQL Database to run.

Download | Demo | Community | Docs

W-Agora Board

w-agora is Opens In a New Window open source software, you can download, install and even freely modify the code, all free of charge

Versatile: w-agora is one of the most customizable forum packages. Designed to be adapted to various needs, w-agora offers an evolutive solution that will meet various needs

Easy: to install and easy to use: All you need is a simple WEB browser and 5 spare minutes in order to install. The whole interface can be edited with a simple WEB browser

Full featured: w-agora has all the features that you expect from a today’s professional forum software: full WEB based administration, users management, authentication, Online registration, email subscription and much more

Reliable : For more than 5 years, w-agora has been used by a wide and continuously increasing number of sites in France and all over the world.

Download | Docs | Demo

XMB Forum

XMB is a lightweight PHP forum software with all the features you need to support a growing community. With outstanding community support and contribution, you will find XMB to be easy to setup, customize, and enhance.

Though XMB is lightweight out of the box, it offers the key features you need to get your message board up and running

• Forum Organization with Categories, Forums & Sub-Forums
• Easy to use Member Management
• Anti-spam image verification for registration and anonymous posting
• U2U Private Messaging
• Inline Mass Moderation
• Easy-to-use Theming Interface
• Board Rules & FAQ System

Download| Mods | Themes | Docs | Demo

PunBB

PunBB is a fast and lightweight PHP-powered discussion board. It is released under the GNU General Public License. Its primary goals are to be faster, smaller and less graphically intensive as compared to other discussion boards. PunBB has fewer features than many other discussion boards, but is generally faster and outputs smaller, semantically correct XHTML-compliant pages. PunBB is written in PHP and thus requires the PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. PunBB also requires a database in which all forum data is stored. For that purpose PunBB supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite.

Developing software to “please the masses” isn’t difficult. Just cram in every possible feature you can think of and most people will love it. Some people, however, will hate it and look for alternatives. The problem with developing for that other group of people is having to make decisions on whether to implement a feature or not. What is a “must-have” and what is not?

Some features that I have so far chosen not to implement are: private messaging, file attachments, polls, linking to off-site avatars, advanced text formatting controls, subforums etc etc. The jury is still out on some of these features, but don’t expect them to pop up anytime soon. It should however be noted that most, if not all of these features have been realized in the form of third-party mods.

Download | Demo | Docs | Extensions

miniBB

miniBB is a software for building Your own forum, but not from “yet another” series. It’s designed with purpose to make a unique forum, which will be different from others by many aspects. It’s the first forum software of choice, which makes possible to save on hosting expenses, computer resources, forum moderation time, and visibly increase forum traffic speed, still running a fully functional script. The secret is that You choose and decide on every option and function available for Your forum. You is the key to your forum success, and miniBB tries to bring up your hidden abilities in this aspect, providing an ultra-optimized handmade programming code and carefully thought interfaces.

Features | Download | Manual | Demo | Community

freeForum

Not everyone needs a full featured bulletin board such as phpBB. freeForum is a GPL, free, and simple discussion board script which can be fully integrated with your existing page layout. It concentrates on the main features of typical forum scripts, and does it well. Above all, you’ll need less than 3 minutes to get it working!

Freedom

• Post: you are free to post in open categories.
• Categories: unlimited number of categories.
• Layout: layout is fully template and css based, feel free to change it.
• Cost: as in beer, it’s licensed under the GPL.

Simple

• No image, no avatar, no smilies.
• No useless statistics.
• CSS and template based.

Administration

• Backup and restore functions.
• Anti-spam: captcha images, smart forms, IP banning, flood protection.
• Open and closed categories.
• Reserved user names.
• Edit previous posts.

Download| Usage | Community

MyBB

MyBB is a discussion board that has been around for a while; it has evolved from other bulletin boards into the forum package it is today. Therefore, it is a professional and efficient discussion board, developed by an active team of developers. The MyBB history has been recorded and is available for the interested to read. You can also read more about the MyBB team and why they develop MyBB in their spare time. We also like to highlight the most active and contributing fansites of the MyBB community.

Security
MyBB puts your board’s security first. Extensive measures have been put in place to guarantee MyBB’s security on your web server. We’ve performed security audits and rewritten code to make sure that no vulnerabilities are left unpatched in MyBB. In the off chance that a vulnerability is found, you can be confident that we’re already preparing a patch for immediate release.

Speed
So fast you’ll have to chase it. MyBB has been optimized to be speedy on any occasion; be it a large or small forum. Whenever we make a change to the core workings of MyBB, we first ensure that it will not cause a disturbance in the speed of your board. Several features have been rewritten to be optimized for larger boards while still working on smaller boards. Regardless of whether your forum is big or small, you can be guaranteed MyBB will provide you with the speed you need to get your forum running.

AJAX
MyBB makes use of AJAX to enhance its features. MyBB uses AJAX technology throughout to make its features quicker and easier to use. In MyBB 1.2, inline editing was added to allow for faster editing of posts from the thread page and thread titles from the forum page, and keeps you from having to load an entire page to make one small edit. In addition, auto completion was added to private messages to make finding the user you want to write to easier. MyBB 1.4 added still more AJAX-based features, such as an updated quick reply, the ability to mark a forum as read, an updated buddy/ignore list manager, an updated thread rating system, and the ability to select PM recipients from your buddy list. Even the Admin CP utilizes some AJAX, such as in the settings search and the theme manager. In all of its uses, AJAX refines the user interface and makes MyBB even easier to use.

Inline Moderation
MyBB’s inline moderation makes management easier. Inline moderation can be found throughout MyBB’s forum and thread pages to make mass moderation a breeze. Inline moderation allows you to perform the same moderation task on multiple threads or posts, or just one. You can even create your own moderation tools using MyBB’s custom mod tools. Inline moderation is just the beginning of the extensive moderation systems you’ll find in MyBB.

Permissions
Extensive permissions allow for complete control. MyBB features a vast set of tools for thorough control of your users’ access to various parts of the board. Every user group has a large set of permissions for various features in the board, as well as varying permissions to each forum. With MyBB, you can control every level of user with ease, and can easily block access to any part of your board to some groups, while leaving it available for others.

Download | Wiki | Mods | Community

ImperialBB

ImperialBB is a free PHP/MySQL driven forum software package which is fully featured and highly customizable. It is compatible with all webserver / operating system setups providing PHP 4.x or higher is installed. It also benefits from a unique one click upgrader and mod installer to cut down the time you have to spend installing mods on your system and ensures that you keep it up to date.

Our forum software package allows you to quickly and easily create categories, forums and sub-forums, manage users / ranks / usergroups / smilies on your community through the powerful administration panel.

Download | Mods | Styles | Community | Blog

Electron AEF

The full name of AEF is Advanced Electron Forum. This bulletin board software is free software. It is written in PHP and MySQL. AEF has a very simple and easy to use Administration Panel and installing this software is a piece of cake! You can install new themes, customize themes the way you want. The User Control Panel has a simple yet beautiful interface where users can set their preferences for the board.

This Bulletin board or forum software has all the general features that a forum software should have. It also includes features such as :

• UTF-8 Supported
• Search Engine Optimization Tools
• IP Ban
• W3C Validated
• News System with articles
• ShoutBox
• Threaded Mode for topics
• JS DOCK for easy navigation(A first from AEF)
• WYSIWYG Editors
• Customizable Themes
• Multiple Languages supported
• Time Zone Adjustment
• Automatic Updates
• Export Files and Database
• Suggest Framework for usernames while writing PM’s
• Domdrag for reordering Categories, Forums, emoticons (A new feature included for the first time ever in a forum software.)

Download| Docs | Themes | Community

GBX

Gravity Board X is free forum software written in PHP and MySQL. GBX features a unique front page layout, and version 2.0 will push the envelope with features such as a CSS-based layout, WYSIWYG message editor and AJAX framework.

Download | Docs | Demo

fuzzyLime Forum

Want a forum on your site, but don’t want to have to spend ages setting it up – and want it to look different from all those other ones?

fuzzylime (forum) is for you. We’ve ignored the traditional look of a forum and gone for something altogether more modern. It looks – and works – like your favorite e-mail program. New messages even appear while you’re surfing!

It uses all sorts of clever technology to do this – but don’t worry, we’ve made sure that if your visitors can’t use this for some reason, they can still see everything on your site through a traditional forum-style layout.

For the more technically minded, the script is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database to store posts, user info etc. It also relies heavily on JavaScript, particularly Ajax, to update pages automatically and provide some of the cool effects like the option of dragging boxes around the page.

But as long as your server as PHP and MySQL installed (and most of them do), you should be able to get things up and running within minutes. Then, it’s easy to customize your forum with your own logo (if you wish) as well as choosing from a whole range of color schemes that are built-in to make sure your forum suits the look of the rest of your site.

Download | Screenshots | Forums

These are few of the alternatives to popular forum software like PHPBB or Invision Board. There are many out there but some of these are pretty much faster than the popular ones used by everyone. Do you know of any other useful PHP Forums that you’ve used. Feel free to comment about it. Share your thoughts if you had any problems or drawbacks of these products. You can find me on twitter @ruhanirabin if you want to let me know of any other scripts too.

Related Post:

1. Elegant Useful and Free PHP Graph/Chart Libraries
2. Free but Useful PHP Form Processor Scripts
3. Best Windows Freeware – Databases

Forms are one of the most common features for almost any website. It provides a secure communication or feedback from the end user to the sites owner. Having said that, forms often allows security breaches to a website so it is advisable to use secured forms processing systems. I hope that this post will help you out searching for PHP based form processors.

PHP Contact Form

• Spam protection: users are required to enter security code (captcha).
• The script checks that all form fields are filled and that e-mail address has correct form.

Information and Download

Secure PHP Mail Form

Free PHP Mail Form is a single-page multi-use PHP mail (e-mail) website form that allows your users to send you feedback directly from your website, without the need to customize heavily detailed scripts and panic over security.

Features:

• Meta header and JavaScript injection protection
• Tags stripped and whitespace trimmed
• Validity and length checking on name and e-mail fields
• IP and browser details included in e-mail
• Valid data displayed when other errors occur
• Spam word check
• Common spam bot blocking
• New in v2: Bayesian style spam filtering

Usage Instructions and Download

Form Tools

Form Tools is written for web developers who work on online registration sites, or sites that require any form of information gathering from their online visitors. Put simply, it is a form processor, storage and data access script written in PHP and MySQL, designed to work with any existing web form. With a few minor changes to your form, you can stop using old-fashioned form-mail scripts and instead store form submissions in a database, instantly providing your clients with a user-friendly interface to manage their form submissions, include options such as mass data export via excel, printer-friendly pages, data sorting, form submission editing and optional email notifications.

Demo | Download | Documentation | Translations

phpFormGenerator Beta

phpFormGenerator is a an easy, online tool for creating reliable, efficient, and aesthetically pleasing web forms in a snap. No programming of any sort is required: phpFormGenerator generates the HTML code, the form processor code (PHP), and the field validation code automatically via an easy, point-and-click interface.

phpFormGenerator provides several delivery formats. You can choose to have your form results delivered via email, sent to a MySQL database, and written to a data file (which you can then open in Excel and other programs)

features in phpFormGenerator 3.0:

• Simple, intuitive, point-and-click interface
• Forms can have multiple pages
• Add and remove fields dynamically – without switching pages
• Customize look and feel of your form
• Add pre-populated fields: country, state (U.S.)
• Add non-invasive tooltips to help your users
• Add and remove fields dynamically – on the same page
• New fields with live validation: date (with pop-up calendar), email
• Add pre-populated fields: country, state (U.S.)

Start building

Tectite FormMail

FormMail provides the logic required to accept form submissions on your website and email the results to you (and do other things too!).

Features:

• send you their results by email (supports any number of email recipients)
• store their results in a CSV (comma separated values) database on your server
• create a log file entry of activity on your server
• use obfuscated email addresses to prevent SpamBots from harvesting your email addresses
• accept no spam; FormMail blocks spam through automatic attack detection tests as well as optional image verification (CAPTCHA) features. Tectite’s form processor is a complete anti-spam solution.
• encrypt their results before they are emailed to you (ideal for securely collecting credit card data)
• redirect to a specific URL on success (e.g. allow a user to download software after filling in a form)
• redirect to a specific URL on failure (customized error page)
• alert you of failures
• work as simple email gateways – just create a form with one non-special field (usually a textarea field) and formmail.php will format the email appropriately
• use GET or POST methods for form submission
• send HTML emails formatted with your form results
• upload files
• perform advanced field validations
• perform advanced error handling
• send an autoresponse to the person submitting your form
• support for other human languages (internationalization)
• GeoIP support

Download | Documentation | Instructions | FAQ | How to Guides

Ajax Form Builder

It is a PHP & Mysql Based WYSWYG Form Builder powered by Jquery . It makes you create a ready-to-go Online Contact Us From, Online Quiz/Survey, Customer Satisfaction Survey, Job Application, Bug Tracker … in minutes, just move/click your mouse to build incredible online forms without any knowledge of programming.

Download | Instructions

MailCode

Mailcode is a simple feedback form system, designed with the novice web designer in mind. It utilizes CAPTCHA technology to prevent spam submission, validates email address structure, and validates form fields to ensure all requested information is provided.

Mailcode is expandable, allowing you to include your own form fields without editing the complicated source code. Simply add your fields to the basic HTML form and the mail handler will interpret them. Edit the HTML form to match your website layout.

To start using the system, simply upload and configure the script, and add one line of code to your webpage.

Information and Download

Silentum FormSend

Silentum FormSend is a basic PHP mailing script which is great to use as either a “Contact Us” page, or as a feedback system for your site. Unlike a lot of other forms, this one is sent through a single PHP file. It uses a simple form to send user comments to a specified email address, and can be easily set up in a matter of minutes. It logs the IP addresses the messages are sent from to prevent abuse, and has settings as to which of the four fields to require and which to leave optional.

Information and Download

FormHandler

FormHandler is a PHP written “module” which allows you to create dynamic forms in an easy way. So easy that you can build a fully working form, including field validations, within 10 lines!

With FormHandler you can:

• Very easy to generate a form
• Easy to save/edit data from a database
• Easy to validate the values
• You can use templates!
• The form is generated by the XHTML 1.0 standard
• Possibility to change to style of the form
• Possibility to add CSS / Javascript to the fields
• The size FormHandler is only +/- 256 kb (server side)! (without the FCKeditor files)
• There can be generated special fields (like datefields)
• It’s very easy to upload files
• Possibility to generate an online text editor!
• It’s completely FREE!

Download | Manual

PHP FormMail Generator

PHP FormMail Generator – A tool to create ready-to-use web forms in a minutes. It’s Easy + Quick + Free

Features:

• Unlimited standard form fields, credit card and file upload fields
• User input validation (checking required fields, credit card number and expiry date, file upload, etc..)
• Send customized email to you, support attachments
• Send personalized auto response email or copy to user
• Save submitted form data as Excel file
• Customized thank you message or redirect page
• Anti email spider (Email address harvesting)
• Anti-Spam using security image (CAPTCHA) and email header injection removal
• Log all email traffics (to see if there are any spam activities)
• Admin Panel to see and download your form data

Start Generating

CJ Web2Mail

The CJ Web2Mail is a very simple web page form to your email inbox script. The script has been improved considerably from the previous version.

V3.0 includes multipart email sending which basically means that the script sends both HTML and text emails to you (and for the auto responder). This way the receiver of the email can leave it up to their mail client to choose which one to display: Outlook Express for example, uses HTML (but you can have this turned off, therefore sending both makes sure you get it). The script comes with full data validation and a thank you page which can be customized fully.

Download | Demo | Information

FormContact

The FormContact 1.1 system will allow you to handle most Form-To-Email functions required by a website. It can be set up to take all the submitted form data and convert it to a readable email format. It can be customized to send users to a “thank you” page once the form data has been filled out, and certain form fields can be marked as being required in order for the form to be completed.

It also has the added ability for sending an automated response to the person who fills out the form. Different responses can be used for different forms, and can even be personalized to the user, based on form fields they enter.

Information and Download

TheWebHelp PHP Contact Form

If you use a normal contact form then spammers will find a way to automatically send junk messages through that form, so you need a way to verify that the sender is an actual person and not an automated script.

A good solution for this is to use an random code that is generated by a script the code will be displayed as an image so only a person could read the image and type the number. This practice is called Captcha image validation. The image also has a noise added to avoid any existent automated scripts that could read the text from the image.

The contact form also makes sure the user filled all the form fields correctly, when all fields are completed and the text entered inside email box is an email address.

Usage Instructions and Download

KillBot Form

This script is intended to eliminate various types of web based robots from repeatedly filling out forms by requiring the visitor to enter some simple data (called a Turing or CAPTCHA test). Many times you may have a form (feedback, poll, guestbook, etc.) on your web site and a malicious user targets a script to automatically fill out your form until it either cripples your server, skews statistics, or floods your inbox. By requiring the visitor to read the text in an image (over 900,000,000 possible combinations) and enter that with the other data in your form, you can prevent automated scripts from repeatedly filling out your form.

Please test out the sample form below for yourself and see! If you find the image too difficult to read, simply click on the image to reload the page for a new one. KillBot can be set to be case-sensitive or case-insensitive, or it can be set to display only uppercase or only lowercase.

Download and Instructions

SiteMail 2.0

Sitemail 2.0 Simple PHP based web contact form. Includes a theme for use as a stand-alone script or can be included into your own pages. Also uses error checking for blank fields or an incorrectly formatted email address.

Download

Simple PHP Form Mailer

Simple PHP Form Mailer attempts to be easy to administer, and secure, while at the same time being some what Formmailer compatible enough to not upset existing users. Thus, the outside has a Formmailer-ish flavor, but the inside is completely different.

Download and Information

There are many more form processors for PHP available for free but these are the one easy to use and implement and some of them provides robust features. Do you have a PHP form processor script that you’ve used and useful? Feel free to post it in the comments. You can find me on twitter @ruhanirabin if you want to let me know of any other scripts too. Don’t forget to share your comments.

Related Post:

1. Alternative Free but Useful PHP Forums and Discussion Boards
2. 10 Useful free CSS tools and services
3. Elegant Useful and Free PHP Graph/Chart Libraries

For various kind of reports/applications graph and charts can play a very important role. Here are some of the free and open source chart libraries that you can use into your own PHP web projects. Use these to enhance the user experience and build a rich client presentation.

OpenFlash Chart 2

Home | Download | Demos

Charts with PHP and Google Charts API

Usage and Download

XML/SWF Charts

Information | Gallery | Download | Tutorial

Max’s Chart CSS and PHP Driven

Information | Download

pChart PHP Class with Cache

Information | Screen shots | Download | Addons | Demo

phpGraphLIB

Information | Documentation | Download | Examples

QGoogleVisualizationAPI (Render charts with Google Visualization API)

Information and Download | Sample

FusionCharts Free

FusionCharts Free is a completely free and open-source Flash charting component. It empowers you to create animated and interactive Flash charts for your web applications, desktop applications and presentations

Some of the highlights are:

• 22 popular charts like Column, Line, Pie, Bar, Area, Stacked, Candlestick and Funnel Chart, that look the same across all browsers
• Animated and interactive charts that make your applications look “wow”
• Works with PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, ColdFusion, Python, RoR, simple HTML pages or even PowerPoint Presentations
• All the charts can pull data from any database and are AJAX enabled

If the chart types and features in FusionCharts Free satiate you, then you end up spending zilch for your charting requirements.
Information and Download | Sample Gallery

So here we are, get these elegant and useful chart libraries and add more rich chart on your PHP web application easily.

Do you know another elegant chart library? Post a comment with it, I will append that in this list afterwards. Share your own thoughts at the comments or you can find me at twitter @ruhanirabin, say hi or share your opinion.

Related Post:

1. Best of the JavaScript Libraries and Frameworks
2. Free but Useful PHP Form Processor Scripts
3. Alternative Free but Useful PHP Forums and Discussion Boards

Those who are still figuring out PHP 5 object oriented structures and implementation, this ebook/presentation might be a good start for them.

What’s it is about OOP anyway?
In traditional sense most PHP developers write when their first coming into the language is called “procedural”. In this kind of code, one thing happens after another and the most exciting thing that could happen is the inclusion of another file. Functions are scattered everywhere and not organized, a library of them sometimes used to help sort out things a bit faster. There are well known limitations to this kind of programming. Procedural code tends to gets messy pretty quickly when working with large scale site. Usage of included files helps, but it doesn’t really give you a proper solution to the problem.

Object-oriented programming came to rescue you from all these problems. What is the “object” part means. Objects are variable types in PHP that can do all sorts of things. They can be created, destroyed, passed around from place to place all while maintaining all of their properties and methods inside. Well it might make sense to you. For a Kick start you might wanna visit PHP.Net/oop. But those already had a grasp of it enjoy the presentation below

Related Post:

1. How to style the latest post in WordPress
2. Joomla Day Malaysia 2008 highlights
3. PHP5 Frameworks including PHP-AJAX Link Roll

You will often find blogs that shows the latest post in a different color or applied different CSS tags. Basically you need to Inject some code inside wordpress post listing generation loop. The Loop is used by WordPress to display each of your posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each of the posts to be displayed on the current page and formats them according to how they match specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code placed in the Loop will be repeated on each post. So we need to find the latest post and define a specific attribute to that post such as a different CSS class.

First of all open the index.php from the theme you are using. Search for the code

Now after that code to the next line add this code:

As you can see from the code above it defines $postclass as a variable and look for the latest post and assign that variable to a new name. But this is not all, you need to output that variable where your post has the CSS style assigned to it. See the example below:

Now you need to style your CSS file according to the class name you’ve assigned for the latest post

Related Post:

1. How to display the latest post from each category using WordPress query_posts
2. How to – Add Facebook LIKE button to WordPress Posts
3. How to use different header for categories and pages in WordPress

By default Wordpress presents all the posts in the blog sorted descending to post time at the home page. Well in some circumstances you might not want to have that layout on your home page. Lets say you have five categories and you want to pull the latest post from each of the categories and display it on your home page. Now that wont work out with the default Wordpress home page layout. Here is a simple tip to work around that situation. Wordpress has a function to filter out the posts depending on certain criteria, the function is known as query_post. The template function query_post has several parameters that enables you to filter the posts for the Wordpress post output Loop. Below is an example of pulling the latest post from a category and display it at the blog home page. The query_post function can be modified by many parameters. Here I’m displaying only few parameters in action.

Example: Display the latest post from a category at homepage or display each latest post from multiple categories. This file is the index.php of your theme file.

Example: Exclude some categories from the loop

Example: Retrieve a single specific post

Example: Get a sticky post

These are just simple examples, you can do a lot more if you take a look at the Wordpress Codex for query_posts.

Related Post:

1. How to style the latest post in WordPress
2. How to use different header for categories and pages in WordPress
3. WP-Optimize Database Cleanup and Optimization Plugin for Wordpress

Facebook connect is a Facebook API to integrate Facebook related social networking option to your website. It provides a secure layer of authentication mechanism to integrate partial Facebook features, user details for you. Today I’m going to show you a way to integrate Facebook authentication for your Wordpress blog. This article assumes that you are already running Wordpress 2.7 or above. It’s possible to make a Facebook connect plugin from the very scratch but here I’m covering the easy way to implement it. Alternatively because of some problems with this plugin, I’ve written another post for much more easier way to integrate facebook (Using Official Plugin). Now here are the steps to make you accomplish on this matter.

#1 – Make the Facebook Application

Do you have a Facebook Profile? If you don’t have a Facebook profile, create one first then move to Facebook developers page to create your website application. A Facebook application is required provide a secure layer of authentication and manage Facebook members for your website. Here is how you should do it.

• Visit Facebook Developers page
• Click on Start Now Button
• You need to Login to Facebook Developers Application and you need to add it to your applications, once you do that you can head over here and use the “Set up New Application” button.
• Insert your application name and create the application, here is the typical application settings
  
• Once you are done you need to keep the settings page open for reference to the API Key.

#2 – Implementing the fbConnect Plugin

Sociable.es which is a part of SixJumps Social media marketing has created a wonderful OOP programmed Facebook Connect plugin which allows you to integrate Facebook connect in a minute inside your Wordpress blog including Friend Invites, Last visited Facebook users Widget, Members of the blog and a profile page. This plugin also enables you to automatically create Facebook users on your blog database (Facebook uses don’t have to register to your blog) and able to syndicate the comments on the users Facebook mini-feed.

• Get the Facebook Connect plugin
• Extract, Upload and Install it on your Wordpress plugins
• Open and Edit your themes header.php file and add this code inside. The Second line is important!

  1 2	<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">

• Once you are done, save and update the header.php file
• Now go to Wordpress Admin > Settings > Facebook Connect

  Set the options, insert your API Key and Secret Key from the Facebook Application Page, see below

   

  Enable Comment Auto-Approval and Allow send user comments to Facebook. Click on Update Options Button when you are done

• Once updated, follow down to the Comment Templates section of the page and click on “Create Template” button to create basic feed template for the users Facebook mini-feed.

  

• Well you are almost done, just go to Wordpress Admin > Appearance > Widgets to add the Facebook Connect Widget to your sidebar. Save your sidebar settings and you are done. Note that you can customize some of the options of the sidebar widget from by clicking on “Edit” options on the sidebar management admin panel.

  

• You can go to your blog now and have a look at the sidebar.

#3 – See it in Action

Now you’ve added the plugin to your system and integrated the functions to your blog. So it’s time for you to check it out. Try to login using your sidebar and you should be presented with a Facebook login popup dialog.

Once you enter the credentials, you should be logged in to your blog as a Facebook user and will be able to see your Facebook avatar at the sidebar panel.

These are only the basic setup of the plugin. If you like you can take it further, see the rest of this article get the idea of doing it.

#4 – Implement the Facebook Connect options in your Comment posting form (NOT necessary for the newer version of the plugin)

Now we are going to do some changes in the comments.php file which comes with your theme package. Here is a example of implementing the Facebook Login Button just before the Author Name field. Open your comments.php file in your favorite text editor. If you don’t have one you can read this and choose one for yourself and yes they are free. In your text editor search for the line “wp-comments-post.php” then follow the code changes below..

Here is how it looks like.

And once you login using your Facebook account the comment posting form will turn into this.

#5 – Known Issues

• This plugin seems not be working with WP-Super Cache plugin, which cache static HTML files of the dynamic Wordpress website.

Well, this is all for now. Please do post your comments about your implementations and possible problems that you’ve hit along the way.

Related Post:

1. Easier way to add facebook connect to your blog using WP-FacebookConnect plugin
2. RuhaniRabin.com now uses Facebook Connect social network api
3. Easy steps to Facebook Connect Comment Box [How to]

Don’t you come across situations like you need to implement multiple header types for different categories? I’m sure you do. Here is a simple yet effective solution to work out the issue to implement multiple header types for different categories. For more conditional tags you can look up to Wordpress codex.

First of all create the header files for each categories. Also have one header file as the default one. These files will be included from the main header.php file. Consider the code below for the your Wordpress theme header.php file.

Example of using Category Names and Slugs

Alternatively you might want different headers for different pages, so I’ve included that example too.

Reminder: You need to use these codes inside your themes header.php file to load specific header elements based on condition.

Related Post:

1. How to display the latest post from each category using WordPress query_posts
2. How to style the latest post in WordPress
3. How to Change Wordpress Permalinks without affecting Google

I’ve attended the Joomla Day Malaysia 2008! I was waiting for the event for a while. Joomla has been in the scene of web based content management system (CMS) for a while. But It actually evolved, improved and transformed along the Journey. It’s core concept was originally from MAMBO Content Management System. Joomla is considered as user friendly system to make your own interactive community website in less time and with less coding.

In the Joomla Day event there was a big number of crowd but there were a lot of people who are in real life is just a business man, teacher or just a plain housewife. So there was a need to give them the concept of what is a CMS actually. The event started at 9am at citytel hotel. After the Welcome note from Azrul, The basic introduction of the Joomla CMS was Presented by Toby Patterson who is one of the very well written component developers of Joomla Community. Toby described what is actually Joomla project and some other history and roadmap of Joomla project, also he mentioned the reasons to choose Joomla.

In my own words Joomla is a platform that you can start building your web site with more features and in really less time. The point is NOT to spend time to develop the code for the web site but to start building the site   because the platform is already provided. It comes with many types of components, features, API’s to keep your focus on start designing the web site. Joomla provided extensive number of user friendly features in Joomla Administration Interface and it is as simple as click, type and save. A simple user who can write an e-mail can start using Joomla system to develop their own website in no time. Joomla code structure has changed a lot from version 1.0 to version 1.5, Joomla 1.0 was classic PHP function based procedural codes which are not easy to maintain. Now Joomla 1.5 onwards the code core has been re-written into MVC (Model View Controller) architecture using PHP Object Oriented codes and optimized MySQL queries. So it’s more fast, optimistic and robust. Because of the new code models, it’s now more easy to develop custom components, plugins, modules, API-bridge between several kind of technologies and systems. Every day new components, plugins, modules is being developed to extend the functionality of the core product into a whole new level.

What was covered in this Joomla Day event

• A Brief description of Joomla Project and roadmap
• How to install and start building   a website as fast as 5 minutes. Now Joomla installer is simplified into more visual presentation.
• What are the hosting requirements
• Managing the content using the Administration Interface
• How to make your Joomla website to a search engine friendly (SEF) website and necessary tools to do it (SEO Tools)
• How do you optimize your performance for your Joomla website
• How do you secure your Joomla Website and server
• Some case studies and showcase of successful Joomla implementation professionally in various industry.
• How to install, extend, expand add more features in your Joomla site using components, modules, plugins and themes.
• Introduction to Joomla Component, Modules, plugins and Templates repository and few popular modules, components and plugins.
• Advanced level of Development using Joomla framework and a bit of introduction of component and module development
• Introduction to Joomla API
• Common Issues of Joomla Development
• How to build templates for Joomla and how the template structures is being organized.
• Explanation of CSS system of Joomla

Framework

Joomla is not a bare bone framework such as Zend Framework or Symfony. Joomla has Joomla framework but there are many layers already developed on top of it to make it as a product. From that point forward you can start customizing, add 3rd party templates, plugins, components, modules to the site to fit your needs without minimal coding. For frameworks such as Zend and Symfony you need to build up functional 2nd and 3rd layer before you can actually start focus on making your site.

A simple Diagram of Joomla CMS architecture.

How do you sale a Product like Joomla when its Free?

Joomla framework and standard CMS is free of course but it doesn’t always fits with in the criteria of the customers needs. Joomla you don’t have to sale. The sale will actually comes from all the feature customization, components, custom modules, custom plugins,   and custom design templates. It could be done by per feature and/or by man days required to develop the customizations and templates.

Joomla Optimization & SEO Considerations:

• Enable built in caching system in Joomla
• Disable and Uninstall any unused module, components, mambots and plugins
• Optimize usage of your site load, don’t use too many JavaScript.
• Enable PHP 5 FastCGI from your CPANEL or ask your hosting provider to enable it for you.
• Make use of MEMCache
• Check for heavy queries that requires more resources
• Disable Internal statistics of Joomla and start using Google analytics
• Use & configure .htaccess re write to make your urls search engine friendly
• Use SEO Components to make your site readable, use proven components such as sh404SEF which is quite good enough to optimize your site for SEO. You can download this slide about Joomla SEO and SEF.

Joomla Security Considerations:

• Keep daily backups
• Stay update to security releases and patches
• Create new admin and remove the default admin. Use at least 8-10   mix characters for password.
• Use .htaccess to protect sensitive directories for specific admin IP’s
• Delete the Install Folder Entirely
• Block all not used ports in the server
• Use a professional level firewall for your server

Site Development Considerations:

• Always use your extensions, plugins, mambots, templates from JED (Joomla Extensions Directory)
• Check your CSS and Template compatibility with IE 6, IE 7, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Safari and Opera and take necessary steps to make sure your site look and feel are same on all these browsers
• Do site debugging, site load test etc using Firefox FireBug Extension
• Test and Re-Test all of your custom 3rd party components, modules and plugins. Check your template codes for malicious injection codes.
• Check for conflicts in between components and dependency.

Joomla Resources:

• Community Forum
• Developers Arena
• Extension Directory
• Documentation and Joomla Framework API
• Malaysian Joomla Community
• Malaysian Joomla Tutorials
• Slashes & Dots Sdn Bhd
• Ninjoomla
• Mike Simbunch
• Packt Publishing, Inc
• Chicago Joomla! User Group / Coffee Group USA
• CY Lee MOSETS.com
• Toby Patterson
• sayaFuqaha
• Aidi-Ahmi
• DMOZ Joomla resource directory
• Joomla Day Malaysia 2008 Event Slides Downloads
• Joomla Day SEO Feature Presentation Slide Download

Related Post:

1. Petrol Price Increase up to 40% at Malaysia June 2008
2. Pikom PC Fair Kuala lumpur August 2008 Highlights
3. PIKOM PC Fair 2008 April Malaysia