Blog engine or CMS, call it whatever you want but WordPress is a great tool for web designers. It just get a little hard to use sometimes when you want to do some more advanced things in your theme and you are not a coder. Here are 8 snippets of code that have helped me in recent projects.

The eight snippets they share show how to include:

• Include post thumbnail in RSS feed
• Next & Previous Post Titles With Thumbnails
• Search Specific Category in WordPress
• List top 10 authors of the blog with their last post
• Automatically insert content in your RSS feed
• Display a Comment's Number in a List
• Display your most commented posts in your blog sidebar
• Excluding Posts from Your WordPress Feed

Each item links back to the full recipe it came from.

Releasing a WordPress theme on a marketplace, such as ThemeForest, where the audience is so large and diverse, has some challenges. You cannot test a solution directly with the client. You need to plan in advance for all edge cases, and ensure that your theme is as customizable as possible. If you're inexperienced, chances are that some things will unfortunately slip through the cracks. Luckily for you, we have drawn on our hard-earned wisdom to help you avoid repeating the same mistakes we made.

Among the things they suggest checking are things like:

• Don't Display Comments on Protected Posts
• Introduce Right-To-Left Support
• Make Paginated Entries Work
• Do not Forget wp_footer() and wp_head()
• Support Custom Menus
• Make User-Visible Strings Translatable

Each item on the list comes complete with a description and code (when it's needed).

Anyone who has worked with both knows that anything you can do in WordPress, you can do in Drupal, and vice versa. It just takes some elbow grease. [Drupal] is a great thing to learn because of its broad market, but WordPress developers might find some difficulty getting acclimated'"Drupal has a much higher learning curve.

They mention some of the differences between the installation of the two (creating settings files, making additional directories) and a table showing the correlating theme files between the two.

The WordPress community is abuzz with news that the WP Foundation has essentially gone to war with the makers of the Thesis WP theme. The substance of the argument, as I understand it, is that the makers of WordPress claim that themes, since they rely on WP's GPL'ed code to run, must be covered by the GPL as well because they are derivative works. Thesis, on the other hand, is distributed under a commercial license, therefore violating this tenet.

Marco talks about all of the legal implications of the issue and some of the stances each side has taken - WordPress saying that since the code has a foundation on it, it must be covered and the themers saying that's ridiculous. As Marco points out, however, is that the opinions of non-legal professionals doesn't really matter. What matters is what would hold up if this issue were ever pressed into a legal arena. He even includes some suggestions he wishes the WPF would take to heart including to just back off.

I've grown to have an affinity for Drupal's hook_form_alter function. Truly, modifying a form doesn't have to be as complicated as it may seem. One of the most generic Drupal forms (in my opinion) is the pesky comment form. Out of the box, it comes complete with name, email, homepage, subject, and comment fields.

A few snippets of code included in the post show you how to customize the form by removing some fields, changing labels on others and update the value of one of the buttons - all with a simple implementation of a hook theme.

Coding a WordPress theme or plugin can seem to be an easy task at first, but if you want to produce work that is more professional, you have to worry about things such as internationalization and security. In this article, I'm going to show you the best practices I have learned in 3 years of developing with WordPress.

There's six main tips he share including "Think International", "Speed up development using community tools and templates" and "Make use of hooks, actions and filters". Each tip also comes with a few links to some resources where you can find out more details on the technology involved.

This is a brief explanation on how to add theme support to your Zend Framework application and how to ensure those themes are self-contained, easy to distribute and install. Themes are very powerful and extremely easy to develop. They allow you to quickly switch between layouts and change the look and feel of your application. You can use themes to show, for example, a mobile friendly version of your site.

It's a three step process to get them up and running - modify your site's directory structure, update the Bootstrap class to append in the new "templates" directory and copy over all of your view scripts to the new directory.

Althought English is the most represented language over the Internet, it is a good thing to think about people who speak other languages and offer them trabslated WordPress theme. In this step-by-step tutorial, you'll learn how to take a WordPress theme and make it translatable for any language.

You'll need to add in a few functions to handle the loading of various language templates and use them, along with language-specific .PO files, to make switching languages as simple as changing the value of a constant in a define.

Magento is the next generation of eCommerce! It is incredibly well architectured, fully flexible, scalable, and fun to work with. If you've ever thought about creating an online shop, Magento is your choice! Today we are going to install it locally with XAMPP Lite and review the essentials.

The tutorial also helps you to install the XAMPP package - a Windows all-inclusive web platform that includes Apache, MySQL, PHP and phpMyAdmin. Once its started, you can create the database Magento needs and import its data. Log into the admin, change a few settings and you're all set.

• Multiple Wordpress Installations Using a Single Database
• Wordpress Theme Hacks
• Turning a Web Template Into a Wordpress Theme
• Rounded Corner Tab Menus
• Customizing Widgets Using CSS
• Wordpress Categories in a Horizontal Drop-down Menu
• Enabling HTTPS for Wordpress.com Blogs Screencast

Check out the full post for even more WordPress goodness.