Web Design Company, Hampshire UK

I have been thinking recently about how to improve the home page of this website. I decided that including my latest tweets would be a nice way of getting into custom wordpress designing. Simple I know but also effective.

The next task was to consider how this could be accomplished and I think that this is where experience really counts. I knew that wordpress allows you easy access to plugins and widgets but these (as far as I know) cannot be added to pages without using php. Something that I have to improve upon before trying this. So I started to look for means of adding tweets to the body of pages without using the widget system.

I stumbled upon this:

http://www.instantshift.com/2009/05/25/10-twitter-hacks-for-your-wordpress-blog/

and this:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/04/15-useful-twitter-plugins-and-hacks-for-wordpress/

I then installed this:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exec-php/

After installing this extension, the user is able to type php more or less anywhere within wordpress but try as I might, I was unable to get any of the hacks to work. Maybe this is because of the theme that I am using or for some other reason… No Idea.

So I kept looking and through this post:

http://leebaillie.com/display-tweets-on-your-wordpress-blog-without-plugins-or-widgets/

I found these:

https://twitter.com/badges

And here is the finished product:

http://www.meonvalleywebdesign.co.uk/

So basicallly I had come full circle. Why reinvent the wheel? I am now able to style the code using css myself so that it blends in with the rest of the site. Installing the Twitter html code took about 5 minutes and has really improved the look and feel of the homepage.

Whilst using DirectoryPress I ran across a small issue which took an annoyingly large amount of time to resolve. Though these holdups are usual when using new products, I thought it best to let you know. I was unable to find the WordPress post ID in order to use the featured items widget on my home page. I ended up with arbitrary records being displayed, one of which was a menu item!

After looking at a lot of code, I stumbled upon the easiest solution. If you navigate here –>Dashboard–>Posts and then hover over each individual post, the browser will display the post ID at the bottom of the screen. Easy!