Selectively Closing Comments On A Post
WordPress has a function to selectively close down comments on a single post, here’s how you do it.
Why Close Comments on Just One Post?
You may have written a particular blog posts which has caused controversy and sparked a particularly heated debated and you don’t like the language being used in your comments section.
You may have a troll on one particular post.
You may be getting an awful lot of spam on one particular comment and want to stop this. This is what happened to me on my post Guest Posting Makes You Attractive To The Opposite Sex Fact, for some unknown reason I was getting a lot of porn spam comments on this one – go figure 
How To Close the Comments
It’s pretty simple really, from your edit post screen scroll down to the following section, and click off “allow comments on this post”. That’s it.
It’s Your Blog
If you don’t like the direction comments are going on a particular posts, it is your prerogative to delete or close down comments.
Remember kids, you are the super user, use your power for good never for evil.
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Hiding WordPress Pages
I recently wrote a blog post on changing the order of your WordPress pages, as an extension to this post I thought I would write a little article on how to hide your blog pages if you don’t want them to appear on your main navigation bar.
Why Hide Pages
There is a good chance that you do not want to have every page you have created shown on your sites navigation section. You may have private pages, that you only want to direct certain people to, or you may have so many pages that your navigation will overwhelm users.
Using the techniques below you can decide which pages your site visitors will see.
Examples of My Hidden Pages
I hide a number of pages on my Nav bar to keep my sites look and feel clean. I do this because when people are visiting your site for the first time I think it can be overwhelming if there is too much information. I also want to funnel people onto certain pages of my site so if I can keep their attention away from certain pages unless I want them to go there that is very useful.
I also have a number of hidden pages which run scripts for example I have conversion tracking pages for affiliate and payment processors. I don’t want these to appear on the navigation bar. I only want them to be used after a Paypal payment or to record an affiliate visit.
Here is one of my hidden pages
I use this as my sneeze page from twitter or other social sites.
How To Hide Your Pages
There are two main ways to hide your pages, editing your theme, or using theme functionality or using a plugin.
Theme Specific
If your theme already has functionality to exclude pages just follow your theme instructions (mine does, so does Headway and Thesis) . But if you are not lucky enough you may need to hack your theme code.
DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible for any crashed sites because you edited your code incorrectly. If you don’t have the techie credentials don’t do this or get some WordPress help from someone who does. Please progress to the plugin section below if you are not a code monkey – thankyou and have a nice day
Inside of your theme files, most likely the header.php file there will be some code which lists your pages, it will probably look like this:
<ul> <?php wp_list_pages(); ?> </ul>
To exclude a page, you need to add some parameters to the wp_list_pages function, and that is an exclude command with the post ID of the page to hide. To find a page’s post ID, go to the page editor and take notice of the URL in your browser bar. Below is an example of my about page, as you can see my post ID is 2.
http://wpdude.com/wp-admin/page.php?action=edit&post=2
Now add this parametre to your wp_list_pages function as shown below:
<?php wp_list_pages('exclude=1,2,3'); ?>
Where 1,2,3 are a comma delimited list of all the pages you want to hide.
Bonus Hide
If you take advantage of the parent/child page functionality of WordPress you can set your list page function to only show top level pages by adding the depth parameter.
<?php wp_list_pages('exclude=1,2,3&depth=1'); ?>
Plugins
If coding your theme is a bit too much, don’t worry there is nearly always a plugin to solve every problem. My favourite is the Exclude Pages plugin. This adds a checkbox to the bottom of each page in the editor which allows you (as the name suggests) to exclude that page. You can download it from the following link:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exclude-pages/
K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Stupid)
Don’t bombard your blog readers with a huge number of pages that they may never need to see, keep your site design neat and tidy. Less is always more in my book
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Skinning Headway; The Future of Theme Design
The new breed of framework themes such as Headway and Thesis are going to change the way new WordPress themes are designed.
In this post I want to tell you why I think this is and how it will effect your theme purchasing or theme development habits in the future.
Most of my experience is with Headway, so I will concentrate on this theme, but I am sure Thesis has the same functionality, please feel free to comment all Thesis fans.
So What’s The Buzz With The Framework Themes?
Framework theme is the name I give to the new breed of themes which allow a designer to skin with their own look and feel whilst using the underlying code to provide the functionality they want without a complete redesign and new theme development.
You cannot fail to have missed the buzz about Headway or Thesis in the Blogosphere and on Twitter, people are all saying which is the best and how fabulous both products are. In truth both are excellent themes, they allow people without any CSS or coding skills to develop a highly personalised blog look and feel.
An example of this can be seen from the following sites, which are all built around the headway theme, but look very different.
They are all the same base theme, but they have been designed to the owmers specification, and they are all very different.
Why I think This Will Chaneg the Future of Theme Design
The functionality I really want to talk about, is the ability for people to Skin the Headway theme and then to pass the skin onto another person using Headway theme and to completely change the look and feel of the base HEadway appearance. In the examples above, these are custom configuration jobs, but their modifications could be put into a skin and easily re-distributed.
How A Skin Works
A skin is a set of custom style sheets, images and function code which can be packaged up and installed very easily into an existing Headway config. These sets of files will be developed by traditional web designers, packaged up and installed into a Headway install, from the skin configuration options in headway select that skin and a whole new custom look and feel will be given to headway.
Where Designers Come In
In the future a designer will create a skin for Headway (or thesis I am sure it’s the same from their camp) rather than developing a theme from the ground up.
How do I know this is happening? I asked. I put a query out on twitter and several design companies came back and confirmed my suspicion that this was their way forward. One designer was quite sad about this as it took a lot of the challenging (read fun for a geek) work away from the whole theme development process.
I think the role of a web designer will be to think about design rather than underlying code and functiuonality.
Do I think this is a good thing? Yes I do, there are going to be some pretty fantastic looking sites coming out if all of the time is spent on the presentation of a site rather than the gadgets which power a site.
I Still don’t get Why It Is So Radical
Most of the hard work is already done by Headway. All a designer needs to do is create their look and feel, do the designing, logo creation, wizzy look and feel effects, style the widgets and gee-gaws. Thrust them into a headway theme skin and send it off to their client.
Development time is hugely reduced, quality is the same, theme designers can earn the same cash for less time investment, or they can reduce their costs to make custom themes much more accessible to bloggers.
Premium skins rather than themes
It is my opinion that people will be asking for custom or premium skins in the future rather than a whole new premium or custom themes.
As a client you will go to your designer and say “My framework of preference is Headway, I have spent time learning how to use the back-end functionality of my theme but I want a custom look, create me a skin please”
As a designer you will spend you time building premium skins and selling them to existing Headway customers, or developing your own premium skin shop where you develop mulitple skins and sell them many times using the same model as premium themes.
What Is This Skin Market Worth
I have been thinking about this a lot, if you have already forked out $87 dollars for your basic Headway theme, you are not going to want to spend premium theme money on a skin. I can see skins being sold for $20 – $30 as a premium skin or $400-$500 dollars for a custom skin. Much less than a premium or complete custom designed theme.
This reduction in cost will come from efficiencies in development time.
How Must Will it Cost A Designer To Get Into This Market?
For a web designer to get into this market they will need to buy a Headway developers license. At $164 the barrier for entry into this new market is very low, your first skinning gig will probably pay for your investment. Add onto this, the fact that dev. license holders can provide their clients with a copy of the Headway free of charge means their is no initial theme investement for their clients.
Here is what the Headway team say about their dev license:
If you are a developer or need/want to install Headway on multiple websites, the Headway Developer Option is for you. The Headway Developer Option allows you to install Headway on any number of websites that you or your company operates or developed. You are also allowed to remove the footer attribution/credit with the developer option (woot!).
UPDATE: I missed something in the small print you need to buy an add-on license for each client site you develop at the cost of $40 per site, here is the small print, thanks to James NomadRip for the heads up
Install on unlimited websites that you or your company owns. If you develop client sites on Headway you must pay [or have your client pay you] an additional $40 per add-on license.
Will There Be A Skin MarketPlace?
I was pondering on whether there would be a central place to sell skins using the same business model as ThemeForest.net , a market place for premium themes.
I have been in twitter/email communication with Grant Griffiths one of the people behind Headway. I was keen to see if there would be and official Headway sanctioned skin marketplace.
His answer was that a couple of domains have been purchased for a Headway Skin marketplace. He is hoping to build a community of web designers who would market their skin designs from there.
I can only see this as a bright future for people wanting to develop skins for Headway.
All Aboard
The skinning express is about to leave, get your development license now, get your skills up to speed and be part of this new theme design revolution.
I don’t plan to do any more bespoke development, all future sites for me and my clients will be skinned via Headway.
Get A Copy Of Headway Developers License
Need Help With Headway?
If you need help building your Headway implementation, I would be happy to give you a quote, please visit my service page and let me know your requirements.
Here are some of the custom Headway themes I have created:
Random Posts
Proving Your Credentials Through Your Blog
Your cannot move on the Internet at the minute without the word authority or trust popping up. Using blog posts to prove your credentials or authority in a particular niche is a great way to build your business.
What’s The Problem?
If you work over the net delivering goods or services, there is a chance that your clients will never meet you except via emails or possibly telephone calls. You need to have some social proof that you can do what you say you can do.
Your clients will be handing over their cash to a total stranger in exchange for your goods or services. They need proof you are qualified to deliver on your sales copy’s promise.
This is where blogging comes in, if you can write an in-depth blog post about a topic in your niche that solves peoples problems there is a good chance that you can do it for real for them too as part of your service offering.
Writing Blog Post To Prove You Have the Stuff
To prove your credentials through your blog you need to write a lot of blog posts on your subject which can solve peoples problems. This is important, it’s not about writing blog posts which market your service, it’s about writing blog posts that help people solve a problem for free in the hope that you can prove you have the stuff to help them in the future.
Use Tools to Market Your Posts
Once you have written your post, if you market that article correctly, you can get other people to sing your praises . This (often informal) testimonial again proves you have the stuff. This can be in the form of a link to your blog post, re-publishing your content, voting on social media such as Digg or re-tweeting your blog post on Twitter.
My particular preference is to market my blog posts on twitter, the type of testimonial I am looking for is a re-tweet. This is an informal testimonial but it gets my name in front of an audience who may not know about my Wordpress expertise.
Check out my post on how I market my blog posts on twitter.
The Search Engines Want To Link To Authorities
The job of the search engines is to provide the most authoritative result to any particular search query. Writing an excellent blog post which generates links and traffic is a good way to get Google and Co to see you as an authority.
Blog posts are particularly well suited to rank on search engines because of the density of keywords that can be placed in a post and the ease of tweaking SEO configurations on WordPress means it is relatively easy to make your blog posts rank well.
Getting on the first page of Google is yet more excellent social proof that you know your subject inside out.
Wrap Up
Write in-depth about your professional niche to prove your credentials and show you are an authority in your subject. If done well this is excellent social proof to potential clients that you know your stuff.
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