Book Image

WordPress 2.7 Cookbook

Book Image

WordPress 2.7 Cookbook

Overview of this book

About 120,000 blogs are created every day. Most of them quickly die, but a few stay, grow up, and then become well known and respected places on the Web. If you are seriously interested in being in the top league, you will need to learn all the tricks of the trade. WordPress 2.7 Cookbook focuses on providing solutions to common WordPress problems, to make sure that your blog will be one of the ones that stay. The author's experience with WordPress enables him to share insights on using WordPress effectively, in a clear and friendly way, giving practical hands-on solutions to WordPress problems, questions, and common tasks ñ from themes to widgets and from SEO to security. Are you feeling limited with WordPress, or are you wondering how popular blogs do a certain kind of thing that you can't? With this cookbook, you will learn many WordPress secrets and techniques, with step-by-step, useful recipes dedicated to achieving a particular goal or solve a particular problem. You'll learn the secret of expensive premium themes, how to optimize your blog for SEO and online profits, and how to supercharge WordPress with killer functions used by the most popular blogs over the Internet.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
WordPress 2.7 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
2
Finding and Installing Themes
Index

Creating a nice download message box using a shortcode


Many bloggers like to provide free downloads to their readers. If you want to provide free downloads as well you have the choice between adding a simple text link, and inserting a fancy box to embed your download. Of course, the second solution is, at least visually, the best. But the problem is that anytime you'd like to provide a downloadable file to your readers, you'll have to copy and paste the code within your post.

In this recipe, I'm going to show you how you can easily create a nice Download message box, and insert it even more easily by using a custom WordPress shortcode.

Getting ready

To achieve this hack, you all you need is WordPress 2.5 or a later version, and a functions.php file in your theme directory. If you haven't already read the previous recipe, you should definitely read it before this one.

How to do it...

  1. First, create a nice image that will be the background of your download box and upload in the wp-content/theme...