This is a guest post by Konstantin Kovshenin — a WordPress core contributor, developer and consultant. Editor in chief of Theme.fm — tutorials, tips and tricks on WordPress themes and plugins, setup, security and performance, as well as WordPress consulting. Follow Konstantin on Twitter and don’t hesitate to poke him should you need any help.

Howdy. Seems like only yesterday did our WordPress Weekly Roundup air, yet a whole week has rushed by delivering lots of interesting content and ideas revolving around WordPress and its communities.

Smashing Magazine published a fantastic article on WordPress Essentials: Interacting With The WordPress Database a couple of days ago. It’s all about the $wpdb global in WordPress and how to make it bend at will, providing CRUD (create, read, update, delete) functionality that can be used within themes and more importantly plugins. Daniel Pataki’s lengthy article is a definite must-read-and-bookmark.

After 5 release candidates that we’ve been looking at for the past couple of weeks, bbPress has finally made it to the point where they can say “bbPress 2.0 now available!“, so if you’ve been waiting to update to a newer version, now is the time. BuddyPress have also had their say earlier this week, congratulations to them too – BuddyPress 1.5 now available!, codenamed “Lombardi”, and destined to upgrade “without a hitch”.

A highly inspiring and educational article titled WordPress Multisite Essentials Part 1 – Concept, Success & Failure from James Farmer over at WPMU.org, offers insights into the WordPress Multisite exprience with the example of edublogs. Underlining the importance of commitment and dedication to a Multisite, the article goes on to analyze fictional case studies where Multisite wins and where it does not. While the article has not bit of technical information, it’s a real gem when it comes to setting Multisite startups on the right track to, hopefully, success.

A new WordPress tutorial on wptuts+ on how to Create A Google Static Maps Plugin should be added to your favorite collection of WordPress tutorials. Clear, concise, and quite detailed. Suitable for beginners to walk through and highly recommended for advanced WordPress plugin developers to skim through this 30 minute or so tutorial, taking readers from getting to know the basics of Google Static Maps API, setting up a new plugin in WordPress, creating a shortcode, testing and improving a quite useful plugin.

Categories, tags, and how-to avoid duplicate content on WordPress by Lance Sonka over at WPMU.org dives into SEO, duplicate content penalties and how to better setup WordPress to avoid search engine penalties. Categories, tags and links are looked at with some great examples, and a Matt Cutt’s video explaining how showing recent posts on your homepage can affect your search engine ranking performance. The comments generated by the article are quite interesting as well, so make sure your check them out.

G+ Plugins for WordPress Worth Considering posted by Patrick Smith gives an overview of 6 Google+ WordPress plugins worth looking into, ranging from simple +1 buttons to Google+ stream feeds.

That’s it for this week. Do let us know if we missed something or you want us to look into next week by throwing a tweet or two in our direction or leaving a comment below. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Theme.fm RSS feed.

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Around the WordPress Community this Week

This is a guest post by Konstantin Kovshenin — a WordPress core contributor, developer and consultant. Editor in chief of Theme.fm — tutorials, tips and tricks on WordPress themes and plugins, setup, security and performance, as well as WordPress consulting. Follow Konstantin on Twitter and don’t hesitate to poke him should you need any help.

Ending this second week of September we’ve collected some of this week’s happenings in our weekly roundup.

A little over two weeks ago we the folks over at bbPress brought us one step closer to the release of version 2.0. At the beginning of this week another stepping stone has been announced – bbPress 2.0 RC5. We’ll hopefully get to play with the 2.0 release sometime within two weeks. The development team are pretty confident that RC5 is the last release candidate.

Jean-Baptiste over at CatswhoCode.com presented quite an interesting article on Mastering HTML5 Prefetching using the rel="prefetch" attribute inside <link> tags in the <head> of your page for pages and images that you want the user browser to prefetch; pages that users are likely to request, and since they’ve been prefetched loading times should be near to instantaneous. Prefetching is currently not supported in Safari and IE, but you can make the other 70.9% of Internet users (according to w3school’s Browser Statistics) a little more happy. The article covers HTML5 prefetching (or “prerendring” as Chrome refers to it) in WordPress, offering a ready-to-be-used code snippet that you can paste into your theme’s header file, and a very useful jQuery snippet that automatically appends prefetch code to <head>.

A new WordPress tutorial over at WPBeginner has been published which goes over some of the ins and outs of How to Create Additional Image Sizes in WordPress. The tutorial makes it a point to explain what Hard Crop, Soft Crop and Unlimited Height modes are, explains a bit on how to use custom image sizes inside the WordPress loop, and features the Simple Image Sizes plugin that makes it easy to create custom image sizes, regenerate them and add them to your settings pages.

Speaking of tutorials, Oliver Dale of WPLift provided a great collection of 20 Really Handy Tutorials to help you build WordPress Themes this Tuesday. Menus, Shortcodes, Custom Post Types, Widgets, Child Themes, Buttons, Plugins, and general WordPress theme-building lessons and tutorials. A great place to start if you’ve just begun exploring WordPress development.

How do you make WordPress more mobile friendly? Kevin Muldoon from WPMods explores 3 plugins in his 3 WordPress Plugins That Make Your Website More Mobile Friendly. The plugins revolve around detecting and ultimately substitute your regular WordPress theme for one that is better displayed on mobile devices. We checked out WPtap Mobile Detector, which is a neat plugin and has fingerprints for 9 different mobile devices, but, unfortunately no user-friendly way to allow for the addition of new ones.

Yoast is asking you to point out themes that are incompatible with their WordPress SEO Plugin in their WordPress SEO Theme Compatibility Survey. If you happen to use a theme that breaks the SEO Plugin make sure you let Yoast know.

And finally, another tutorial from wptuts+ on Custom Post Type Pagination Chaining Method. The five-minute tutorial offers a solution to paginating custom post types by using, what is referred to as chaining. In short, a custom post type template makes use of the archive-posttype.php template and it works. Why? Check out the tutorial.

That’s it for this week’s weekly roundup. Make sure to let us know if we missed something major this week and what to lookout for in the coming weeks by leaving a comment below. Stay tuned for more.

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Around the WordPress Community this Week

This is a guest post by Konstantin Kovshenin — a WordPress core contributor, developer and consultant. Editor in chief of Theme.fm — tutorials, tips and tricks on WordPress themes and plugins, setup, security and performance, as well as WordPress consulting. Follow Konstantin on Twitter and don’t hesitate to poke him should you need any help.

Another week has rushed by, lots has happened in the world of WordPress and we shall go over some of this week’s highlights.

Great news for WordPress theme geeks as The Theme Foundry releases its September 2011 Theme Updates Pack, which includes bug fixes, feature additions, improvements, etc. Themes updated include Linen, Paperpunch, Photography, React, Shelf, Titan, Traction and Vigilance. So if you’re using any of those great themes head over to Theme Foundry to get your updates.

WPEngineer posted a short but great post reviewing a WordPress solution that allows you to change your WordPress theme search URL. Frank’s based his trick on hooking to the template_redirect action and using wp_redirect(). People reading and pondering over the solution provided tips and trick of their own, including an .htaccess based solution and a JavaScript onsubmit solution.

Yoast posted an interesting article regarding The Page Title in WordPress Themes. They emphasize the importance of the title in SEO (with an influence value of 94.4 out of 100) and go on to dissect the Twenty Eleven WordPress theme. Joost, the author of the article, finds the fact that the way the title is displayed in Twenty Eleven is hardcoded (NAME OF SITE | DESCRIPTION OF SITE and NAME OF ARTICLE | NAME OF SITE) simply awful and inconvenient, and ponders over several solutions to the problem. Joost has opened a Core trac enhancement ticket 9 days ago which has gathered some attention. If you feel the need to have your say or have a great solution to the problem head over to the #18548 Add a better option for title tags trac ticket.

Remember the Timthumb Vulnerability not long ago? WordPress Tavern have stumbled upon A Timthumb Vulnerability Scanner plugin that checks to see if your WordPress is vulnerable. Comments to the post include a simple shell script to update all timthumb.php files in one go. The script detects vulnerable files (even if the file is not named timthumb.php) and attempts at fixing them all.

And as a continuation of our 5 WordCamp Sessions You Should Have Watched and 5 More WordCamp Sessions You Should Have Watched here are two more videos we think are worth watching:

Thank you for joining us in this week’s overview of WordPress highlights. Have your say using the comments below or Twitter and don’t forget to subscribe to out RSS feed. Stay tuned!

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Around the WordPress Community this Week

WordPress has certainly rocketed in popularity in the last few years. I am constantly being told how great it is and a large percentage of clients seeking to move their businesses onto the web or who want to launch a web based business or blog ask about the benefits of WordPress.

Though how popular is WordPress really and how many people are really using it?

According to WordPress.com at the time of writing this article there were 52,617,600 active WordPress sites, with about half of them being hosted by WordPress.com.

WordPress.com currently sees around 500,000 new posts being uploaded each day in addition to about 400,000 new comments. In terms of monthly web traffic over 284 million readers view over 2.5 billion WordPress.com pages every month, a number that has grown by about 6 times the amount in the last 4 years.

Interesting WordPress Stats/Facts

• 52,000,000+ WordPress Sites (about 50% hosted by WordPress.com)
• 500,000 new posts are made EVERY day!
• 400,000 day total comments are made everyday on WordPress blogs/sites
• Nearly 300 Million people read a wordpress blog every month
• Over 2.5 BILLION wordpress.com pages are viewed every month

WordPress is used all around the globe, with blogs being written in more than 120 different languages. In fact only 66% of WordPress.com blogs are in English! The other most popular languages are Spanish, Portuguese and Indonesian.

In terms of traffic compared to other publishing platforms WordPress has definitely established itself as the leader. According to Google Trends we saw the real breakthrough happen midway through 2006 when WordPress soared past Google’s Blogger and ever since has enjoyed a constantly widening gap and staying way in the lead.

Who uses WordPress.com?

It is really for everyone, from those just looking for a place to rant and rave or share their stories and adventures to small, medium and even gigantic businesses. Some of the big names you probably know who are publishing on WordPress include CNN, UPS, TechCrunch, NBC Sports and the NFL.

WordPress.com or WordPress.org certainly aren’t the only publishing solutions out there or the only choices for launching new blogs and sites, though it is probably an option that you at least want to consider either as a business owner needing a web presence or a designer. What is right for you really depends on your individual needs.

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iNoobs: How Popular is WordPress?

This is a guest post by Konstantin Kovshenin — a WordPress core contributor, developer and consultant. Editor in chief of Theme.fm — tutorials, tips and tricks on WordPress themes and plugins, setup, security and performance, as well as WordPress consulting. Follow Konstantin on Twitter and don’t hesitate to poke him should you need any help.

WordPress themes (both free and paid) nowadays come bundled with a lot of different kind of options — color schemes, custom post types, portfolio pages, contact forms, custom shortcodes and much more. These are the kind of things developers usually offer to their users, but what do they get in return? Well if it’s a paid theme they obviously get some money and if it’s a free one, donations are more common. But there’s one thing you always get in return as a WordPress theme (or plugin) author, and that’s awareness.

Whether it’s yours, or your brand’s, awareness is what gets people to know you in the community, therefore building trust. Trust brings you more visitors to your website or blog, more chances of getting hired for a project and of course a little bit of fame and respect.

Today’s topic is a Dashboard Feed Reader, which is quite a simple widget hanging in your admin dashboard screen, showing the latest stories from your blog. Such widgets often drive more traffic to your website and gets people to read (at least) your headlines directly from their WordPress admin panel. A dashboard reader is a great way to announce new versions of your themes or plugins, as well as promote your new products.

People often think that dashboard readers are distracting or annoying, but the good thing about WordPress is that the Dashboard is actually configurable. In only a couple of clicks, any user can enable or disable any of their dashboard widgets, leaving on screen only the stuff that’s important to them. It’s done via the Screen Options button at the top right of the Dashboard page. So dashboard readers are way more loyal and user friendly than hard-coded links or banners on the front end of your theme or plugin.

Understanding Dashboard Widgets

Dashboard widgets in WordPress are actually meta boxes. They’re used in other places too, like the Edit Post or Page screen. They can be dragged around, shown or hidden from the Screen Options menu, collapsed and expanded by hitting the tiny arrow on the right side of the box titles. But hey, you should probably know that already!

Meta boxes are registered with the add_meta_box function but the ones on the Dashboard screen have a function of their own called wp_add_dashboard_widget which should be used during the wp_dashboard_setup WordPress action. So with that in mind, let’s go ahead and write some code.

Creating a New Dashboard Widget

In this tutorial I’ll be creating a dashboard feed reader for Theme.fm. The reader can then be bundled in a theme or plugin and the implementation doesn’t differ at all. So in your plugin file or the functions.php file of your theme, type in the following snippet.

It’s quite simple to understand what it does. I’ve got two functions, one for the dashboard setup and another one for the actual content. The content function is used as a callback during the setup of the widget, while the setup function is used in an action as I mentioned earlier. You can furthermore nest this into an admin_init action, since the dashboard is not available elsewhere, but that won’t have any noticeable impact on your site’s performance.

If you browse to your Dashboard at this stage, you’ll see a new widget called Latest from Theme.fm with the contents that we wrote in the second function. Guess what? You’re done! With the widget, that is… That’s all there is to it adding new dashboard widgets, you can move it around, expand or collapse it, and even turn it off and back on from the Screen Options panel.

Now, before you start shipping this piece of code with all your new themes and plugins, let’s fill it in with some actual content. You can go ahead with “lorem ipsum” but I suggest getting the content from your RSS feed, so that’s what we’ll do next.

Gathering Content From Your RSS Feed

WordPress itself comes bundled with SimplePie and FeedCache to work with the internal stuff, which means that we can use the exact same functions for our own functions. SimplePie is quite easy to work with as you’ll see in a second. WordPress allows a neat function called fetch_feed which could be used out of the box, provides feed parsing and caching and all that for free, without any extra coding. Go ahead and try it out in that content area where you were about to stick “lorem ipsum” ;)

This will print all the feed contents (if there was no error retrieving them) in a nicely structured object. Get familiar with the structure, see what content is available and what’s not. There are neat SimplePie functions that we can use against that object to retrieve the data in the format we want, like dates for instance.

To spare you the hassle, here’s what my content function looks like after implementing the feed contents:

So double check the $feed variable in case it returned an error. Set the maximum number of items to yield to 5 and then, with a simple foreach loop, walk through all the items and print them out in a nice looking way — with permalinks, dates and descriptions.

That’s about it, that’s how easy it is to use SimplePie inside WordPress and again, caching is given to you for free, without even having to activate it or whatsoever, so if you refresh the dashboard screen you won’t notice any lags at all! Here’s what your new dashboard screen should look like, now with the new feed reader:

Congratulations, you’ve just built yourself a feed reader, which you can bundle in your themes and plugins, free and paid ones. You just got your users to read your blog directly from their admin panels, unless the deactivate you of course ;)

Conclusion

So in this tutorial you’ve seen how to create your very own dashboard feed reader, getting more readers to your blog and awareness to you or your brand. In only a few lines of code, we’ve registered a new dashboard widget, then used SimplePie to fetch an RSS feed and display the content, with built-in caching.

A word of caution is that if you’re planning to bundle the reader in numerous themes and plugins, think about what will happen if somebody activates one of your theme, together with three of your plugins? You don’t want your users to end up with four dashboard readers, right? There are numerous techniques to avoid this, my favorite one is constants. I basically wrapped up the whole widget code into a class which I initialize during admin_init. I then wrapped the code into a simple if statement, like this:

Including the same constant in every theme and plugin you ship, you’ll make sure that only one instance of the feed reader is created. You might also want to use the class_exists PHP function if you’re planning to use the same class names for your reader in all the themes and plugins.

Well, that’s about it! Hope you enjoyed this tutorial and make sure you use it with caution, plus test before shipping. Thank you so much for reading and hope to see you again soon!

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How to: Create a Dashboard Feed Reader for Your WordPress Theme or Plugin

Do you remember our friends from MOJO themes? Yep, the first digital marketplace to launch a collaboration tool for designers and developers to share work and revenue. Well, this time they launched a super Cyber Bundle!! So we invite you to head on over the official Cyber Bundle page to checkout all 18 of the items included.

Introducing The Cyber Bundle

$579 Worth of Items for ONLY $30!  Yep. It’s the best deal ever! This bundle includes some of the most amazing items within the marketplace. Any buyer can feel confident in purchasing this bundle from each of these talented sellers. But we need to hurry – the bundle started from midnight November 29th and runs until midnight December 9th! Grab it while the stocks last!

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MOJO Cyber Bundle – $579 Worth of Items for ONLY $30!

“We don’t work on assembly line anymore, we work on projects.” – Seth Godin

And I cannot disagree more. I often catch myself telling my friends that I couldn’t pick up their call because I was working on a project. But really, I was not. I was not being a white-collar innovative creative genius who was working on a project but a blue-collar worker who had to drag another design project thought an assembly line:

Get a Brief > Make a Mock > Make Changes > Repeat Previous Steps if Necessary > Start Developing > Test > Done (+ loads of name calling & hair-pulling in between)

Yuck! That looks like an assembly line. I wanted to innovate and create something new, something brilliant and not yet super brilliant but a soft innovation. And that is exactly what I am not doing. So whom do I blame? Let me think…

… The Evil Client sent from Hell! (official website)

When I started out as a designer, I wanted to use my abundance of wisdom in creating something innovative, doing new things and making things work for people. But I ended up with being treated like a Photoshop who’s being told by a non-designer about what to keep and what not.

How in the world I ended up there? Is there a way out? You bet!

It starts with thinking differently. I am going to show you how you can use the things you’ve been using all along in a different way to rule world… err.. you know what I mean.

Prototypes aka Mock-Ups

It’s the most obvious tool and yet badly used. It becomes ‘the’ vision of what end product will look like and a well-meaning client ends up throwing ruthless and meaningless comments on it.

Let’s revisit the idea of creating a prototype. It’s supposed to be communication between you and your client so you both know where you are going. It’s one of the ways you communicate your solution to a client in a way he can understand.

So if it was communication, tell me again why did they tell you to add half a pixel.

There is something that you know and I know but they don’t know and you are afraid to tell them.

Tell them that it is a damn rough idea of what it will look like and it’s a basic blue print, a general direction. And the vision will develop all along the way.

Use it to communicate security and progress not to judge the poor pixel.

From personal experience, the best of my designs were built evolved on the fly (over a period of time) with very rough idea in prototypes and later development of individual elements.

Innovate

So much emphasize is put on making it easy and obvious for users. They even have a name for it… something called User Experience. But what they fail to realize is that it is an evolving thing. Users evolve over time, and so does design trends but why not the basics?

Why do we still have menus on top or sidebars? Why a menu at all? Why do we confirm to these untold rules and stop the way for innovation? The web is not expensive at all for innovation and testing.

I will tell you what; you can’t lead industry with your wow designs (even us high school kids can do that and way better than you). You will have to dare to innovate. And innovation doesn’t need a huge change all it needs is a different way of looking at things.

Did you really think of creating navigation or you were wondering about how hover state of that horizontal menu will look like?

Portfolio

On a speaking event, I was talking about these ideas, the general response from audience was that they don’t just get such clients.

You know what that means? You failed to project yourself. Does your portfolio speak of all the pretty sites you made? Damn! That’s where your fault is. You are selling pretty sites and that’s what kind of buyers you are getting.

Sell the process instead. Show them how you work how your vision evolves over time. That’s why blogs are way better than showcase. If they are happy with way you work and communicate – they are going to be perfect clients.

Your portfolio isn’t a bunch of business you have done. It’s a story of evolution of emotion to reality. Does it tell your story properly?

Expertise

You know what Google does when people don’t click your AdWords ads? They fire you! A company fires a client. I hear you say, “Of course they can do that. They are Google.” But they are Google because they set themselves aside as experts.

If you want that kind of authority over what you do with projects you touch, if you want your client to trust you with every bit of it then you have to be an expert.

But you can’t be jack of all trades; you have to be a master to fire your client. You need to be very specific about what you sell.

There was a trend when portfolios said: Hi! I am a designer, Illustrator…

Then they learned this lesson and evolved to: Hi! I design user interface.

And then: Hi! I design user interface for web apps.

But before anyone grabs it be an expert and say: Hi! I design blogs for Thesis & WordPress (that’s what I do)

Or maybe: I design websites for creative people

Sure it limits the niche you get, but that is what an expert does. I am from India and know the mystics at work in here. It’s so damn easy to spot an Indian on freelancing sites:

1. They use “Sir / Madam.”
2. They try to hop in every project they can get their hands on.

Result? India becomes known for cheap labor, and experts? Rare!

So you have two choices: Be an expert or be a labor. In case you choose, I will be sad to see a scientific artist go (That’s what a designer is).

PS: What happens when everyone catches up with your specifications of expertise? Psst… you innovate.

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Design, Designer & Designing – Redefined

We know there are quite a few freelancers and small business owners out there and this one is for you 100%. We selected the most customizable, good looking, sexy, sleek, affordable, and fresh themes on the market.

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This theme is a complete WordPress Theme, designed from the ground up to function as a comprehensive WordPress theme that can be used for just about any site that needs a beautiful layout

Pandora | $30 | Details | Demo

Pandora is a WordPress Template, designed to promote anything from a corporate business to a portfolio site. More than 10 professionally-designed and easy customisable themes comes as standard: Aqua, Crimson, Eco, Egypt, Modern, Mystery, Nebula, Ocean, Olive, Parquet, Podium and Startup

Octofirst | $30 | Details | Demo

Octofirst is a best selling corporate theme with many updates: new option in admin panel to sort the homepage slides, fixed styling for strong tag, alignleft, alignright and aligncenter classes

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Add New Post ‹ Inspired Magazine — WordPress

This theme is best suitable for the freelancers, business portfolios and suitable for many more other categories

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Amazing business theme with 3 color schemes, a jQuery powered AJAZ contact form, dropdown pages & auto image resizing

BVD | $35 | Details | Demo

Finally it is here! The WP version of the very popular BVD – Beautiful Website Design – template. Perfect for business websites!

Web Explorer | $30 | Details | Demo

Web Explorer is a simple and elegant premium business WordPress theme. It’s great for any business and personal sitesBizFolio

BizFolio | $25 | Details | Demo

BizFolio is a professional business theme with creative portfolio layout and included blog layout

NewSense | $30 | Details | Demo

NewSense is a aimple and clean business WordPress theme. It’s great for any business and is designed in corporative and modern style. The home page is designed to emphasize your product

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10 Outstanding Corporate WordPress Themes for Freelancers and Small Business Owners

Selling downloads that are instantly delivered to the customer after they purchase is an easy way to earn some passive income. There’s no inventory to manage, no shipping calculations, and instant, automatic delivery means more happy customers and less support headaches.

This tutorial will show you how to add a shopping cart that gives the ability to sell and automatically deliver download products from your WordPress blog in just a few minutes.

The shopping cart plugin we’ll use is DPD-Cart Plugin released by the awesome crew at Digital Product Delivery. So you first need to make an account here (there’s a 30 days no hassle free trial) and this plugin will communicate with the DPD Storefront system via an API to automatically pull in your cart settings and allowing you to easily insert add-to-cart buttons for products to your WordPress posts and pages. All of this will be powered by a slick javascript cart that loads right in your blog.

Step 0: Add Product

You’ll need to have the products you want to sell already set up in the DPD awesome dashboard before you begin this process (you could start with a .pdf or .psd)

Step 1: Plugin Installation

1. Download the DPD-Cart WordPress Plugin
2. Unzip the plugin and place the entire dpd-wpcart folder in to your WordPress plugin folder at /wp-content/plugins/dpd-wpcart/



3. Log in to your WordPress admin and enable the DPD-Cart plugin from the Installed Plugins menu.
4. Once activated, the DPD-Cart Configuration page will be added to your WordPress Plugins menu.

Step 2: Configuration

To configure the plugin you’ll need your DPD account’s API credentials. To get them, log in or create a DPD account and go to the Profile > Profile Options page from the Dashboard.

Do you know how hard it is to take a screenshot with a mouse cursor in it?

At the bottom of the profile options page you’ll find the API Access information. These two fields, the username and API Key, are what you will need to insert on the DPD-Cart Configuration page.

Copy-paste time!

Once you have obtained your API Access information, complete the following steps:

1. Go to the DPD-Cart Configuration page in your WordPress Admin
2. Enter your DPD username and API key in the fields provided and click the Update Options page to pull your available storefronts from DPD.
   Once you have authenticated your blog against the DPD API two new options will appear- Storefront Selection and Button Style Selection.



3. Select which DPD Storefront you would like to associate with this WordPress blog.
   DPD is a multi-cart system meaning that you can operate multiple shopping carts, each with their own settings, from one account. We call these individual carts “Storefronts” and that’s what you’ll be selecting here. If you have not created any additional storefronts in your account, the default storefront will be selected automatically.
4. Select your Button Style and click Update Options.
   The DPD-Cart plugin comes with a range of button styles already loaded. However, many people like to create custom buttons to match their blogs and its easy to add custom button styles. More information on adding custom buttons is at the end of this tutorial.

DPD-Cart setup is now complete! Lets start putting add-to-cart and checkout buttons on the blog!

Step 3: Activate the DPD-Cart Sidebar Widget

It’s a good practice to have a way for the buyer to checkout on every page of an e-commerce site. To help you accomplish this without editing theme templates the DPD-Cart plugin provides a widget that displays a “View Cart” button for your sidebar.

To enable the Cart Widget go to your Widgets page under the WordPress Appearance menu and drag the widget to where you would like it to be in your sidebar. This will output a “View Cart / Checkout” button on the frontend of your WordPress blog like so:

It's a cute little sidebar cart widget

Step 4: Create Product Pages / Posts

The DPD-Cart plugin adds an editor button to the post and page edit windows to quickly insert a product’s “Add-to-Cart” button code.

1. Create a new Post or Page on your WordPress blog where you would like the product to be displayed.
2. After you have typed your product’s sales copy go to the HTML editor tab, move the mouse cursor to where you want the Add-to-Cart button to appear, and click the DPD-Cart editor button.
3. In the popup that opens, select the product you want to insert from your list of available storefront products and click “Insert Product”

Easy as 1-2-3.

A dpd-atc quicktag will be added to your blog post. When your post is published this quicktag will be automatically converted to an “add-to-cart” button using the button set you have selected:

Look! Now your post has an add-to-cart button!

You’re ready to start selling!

Optional Customization Options:

The DPD-Cart plugin provides a couple different methods to customize the appearance of cart items on your blog.

Adding Custom Button Sets:

Adding custom button sets to match your blog is easy- all you need to do is create a new folder in the buttons/ folder located in the dpd-wpcart/ plugins directory and name it what you would like your button set to be called in the wordpress admin. Then add two PNG images:

atc.png for the add-to-cart button displayed in posts and pages.
viewcart.png for the View Cart / Checkout button displayed in the sidebar widget.

Name your folder what you'd like your button set to be called.

The buttons must be PNG format and named atc.png and viewcart.png to be properly parsed by the plugin and added to the DPD-Cart Configuration page.

Then go to DPD-Cart Configuration in your WordPress admin, select the new button set, and click the Update Settings button. The new buttons will display on all your posts and pages automatically and you don’t need to go back and edit previously made posts.

Customizing the Sidebar Widget:

Lets say we wanted to add some credit card logos to be displayed above our View Cart / Checkout button. The Cart Widget loads its layout from the following template file in the plugin directory:

dpd-wpcart/templates/cart-widget.php

You can edit this file to add content above and below the View Cart / Checkout button code inside the View Cart widget. The DPD code is wrapped in comments and includes an image link and javascript reference required to make the cart load within your wordpress blog. You should not edit the code between the html comments- changing this code could break the cart function and prevent people who want to give you their money from doing so.

To add custom text- or in the case of our example, images- you would simply insert your content above or below the DPD button code block and save the template in the same location.

Insert you code above or below the DPD code block to customize the widget

Then on your blog your sidebar widget would be updated to look like this:

Look! Now people know how to give you money!

The DPD-Cart Plugin is a quick and easy way to automatically sell downloads like website templates, graphics files, ebooks, and more from your WordPress blog. We hope this tutorial has shown you how easy it is to start selling downloads and make money from your blog!

If you have further questions or suggestions, please shoot!

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HOW TO: Start Selling Downloads from your WordPress Blog in 5 Minutes

Man, WordPress is so cool in so many ways! Need a website for your school project? There’s a theme for that! Need a small landing page for a new product you market? There’s a theme for that also! Need a fully customizable E-commerce website? There are quite a few interesting themes for that and we’re here to introduce them:

WPA Storefront | $30 | Details | Demo

This theme solves that problem by using the existing WP-E-Commerce plugin code combined with some new custom coding to display your products and product groups like never before!

WP Shop Reloaded | $35 | Details | Demo

After popular demand wpShop got a new look and some exciting new features!

Simple Cart | Free | Details | Demo

SimpleCart(js) is a simple, attractive, and flexible WordPress theme that taps into the power of both Thematic and WP E-commerce

eGoods | $30 | Details | Demo

eGoods is a 3 in 1 pack: a parent theme with 3 localized child themes

Vanilla Cart | Free | Details | Demo

Clean, minimal, highly customizable, vanilla-style WordPress Shopping Cart Theme, made specifically for the free WP e-Commerce plugin

Artshop | $30 | Details | Demo

Two Localized Themes in one! Two Parent themes with a child theme each

ShopperPress | $49 | Details | Demo

Start selling online with your very own online store. It’s fun and easy to use and includes lots of great features to help you get started

This is a post from Inspired Magazine. If you like it, you may want to subscribe to our RSS full feed to be updated on every article we're publishing. Also, it's highly recommended to follow us on Twitter!

7 Fresh & Effective Shopping Themes for WordPress