Lots of Wordpress theme designers & developers use Ryan Boren’s Theme Switcher plugin,  a very light-weight plugin which does exactly what its title says. It gives the possibility to preview any uploaded theme.

As you know the default string to preview a theme is index.php?wptheme=theme name . That isn’t very cool is it? TBH its damn ugly and long. Doesn’t testsite.com/theme name/ sound a lot better? I bet it does!

If you take a look at my blog’s free themes seciton you will notice that every live demo url is a static. I have lots of customers to manage, and spending my time on setting up 10 tets blogs would be dumb, so i did this trick and i can show every customer his theme and wait for feedback. Its a lot cleaner than the dynamic url.

Here’s how to rewrite the dynamic url to a static one:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9]+)/?$ index.php?wptheme=$1

Copy this code and paste it into your .htaccess file right in front of # BEGIN WordPress.

Other info:

• This tweak was tested and is fully functional if you do it as instructed.
• It does not affect in any way your permalink structure.

Have fun & enjoy!

CUSTOM WIDGETS V 2.0 IS OUT! (3rd March 2009) Click here for release notes and download.

1. Short Intro

Yeah baby! You guys have been waiting for this pluign for quite a long time( well not that long, considering that only 3 weeks passed from custom widgets v1.0). Since the initial release of Custom Widgets lots and lots of features were requested and bugs were reported.

We(betng4u and me – me with the ideas, him with the coding) tried to handle each an every request, unfortunately there were a few which we couldn’t fulfill(for example: you can’t install Custom Widgets using Pluginstaller, and we didn’t work on making it compatible with Pluginstaller because we considered that the normal installation process is easy as pie).

FOR SCREENSHOTS VISIT THE CUSTOM WIDGETS v1.0 RELEASE POST (click)

2. Official Presentation Video

I know, i know the speech in the video is a bit monoton, but i’m wasted after 6 hours of college and 2 hours of workout.

Click here to watch on Youtube

3. New features

Before starting work on Custom widgets v1.2 i’ve made a log of feature requests that i considered clever and bug reports(scroll down if you want to skip this):

######Custom Widgets v 1.2 - changes to be made######
#####################################################

1) Fix category bug: custom widget added to a category
can't be removed

2*) Pluginstaller isn't installing custom widgets
(http://henning.imaginemore.de/pluginstaller/)
*IDEA REMOVED, with manual instalation it works just fine*

3) Add to widget addition page an authors section for user
to assign a widget to a specified author's posts only.

4) Conditional Tags simplification(use tickboxes):
- http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags

a) "Show Widget Only on Homepage" - is_home()

Tooltip: "The widget is shown only on your blog's homepage
using the is_home() tag"

b) "Show Widget on all posts" - is_single()

Tooltip: "The widget is shown when any post is displayed
using the is_single() tag"

c) "Show Widget only on Sticky posts"  - is_sticky()

Tooltip: "The widget is shown when any stickied page is
displayed using the is_sticky() tag"

d) "Show Widget on Posts/pages Where commenting is open"
- comments_open()

Tooltip: "The widget is shown when any post is displayed
where commenting is possible using the comments_open() tag"

e) "Show widget on all pages" - is_page()

Tooltip: "The widget is shown when any page is displayed
using the is_page() tag"

f) "Show widget on all Categories" - is_category()

Tooltip: "The widget is shown when any category is displayed
using the is_category() tag"

g) "Show widget on all Tag Pages" - is_tag()

Tooltip: "The widget is shown when any Tag page is displayed
using the is_tag() tag"

h) "Show widget on all Archive pages" - is_archive()

Tooltip: "The widget is shown when any type of Archive page
is displayed using the is_archive() tag"

i) "Show widget on Search results" - is_search()

Tooltip: "The widget is shown on all search results using the
is_search() tag"

j) "Show widget on the 404 - Not found Error Page" -is_404()

Tooltip: "The widget is shown on the 404 - Not found error
page using the is_404() tag"

k) "Show Widget for admin previews" - is_preview()

Tooltip: "The widget is shown when a single post being
displayed is viewed in Draft mode using the is_preview() tag

-----------------------------------------------------
Each setting will have a "?" next to them which on hover
will show a balloon with a tip of what the setting does with
the tag name linked to the description at wordpress codex.

5) Compatibility with both php 4 and php 5. - DONE

6) Latest donors implementation. - Coming in v 1.3

######Custom Widgets v 1.2 - major bug reports######
####################################################

A) Works fine on fresh install,at upgrade nothing happens
- ISSUE FIXED

B) Extended features list looks like a zoo, needs
restructuring and more style | - ISSUE FIXED

C) Plugin description is missleading, needs a new one
- ISSUE FIXED (Used Jeff's description)

D) When an advanced feature is selected at a widget
the widget color doesn't turn red | - ISSUE FIXED

E) Make a Wordpress.org compatible readme | - ISSUE FIXED

F) Last minute issues: Users could only see a max number of 10
categories/tags/posts/pages on the options page | - ISSUE FIXED

######Custom Widgets v 1.2 - ETA - Launch######
###############################################

Friday, Oct 31 , 2008 (Halloween), Spooky!
Jeff's feedback arrived on Nov 2, Release on Nov 6 or 8.

4. Download Slayer’s Custom Widgets v 1.2

CUSTOM WIDGETS V 2.0 IS OUT! (3rd March 2009) Click here for release notes and download.

5. Installation Instructions

5.1 upload the slayer_Custom_Widgets directory to wp-content/plugins
5.2 activate the plugin (dashboard -> plugins -> find “Slayer’s Custom Widgets” -> click the activate button
5.3 head over to the usual Widgets section (wp-admin/widgets.php) and add some items to your sidebar
5.4 Now go to Slayer’s Custom Widgets section and select the widget you want to customize.
5.5 Add the desired widgets to the desired pages.
5.6 You’re all done!

If you want to show some love feel free to comment or to blog about the plugin .

If you don’t want to do either of the above you can always suggest new features and report bugs.

Yesterday, on October the 24th Jeff and Keith covered 4 main subjects in this week’s Wordpress Weekly Talkshow:

- The usage of Gravatar, and the importance of NOT changing your gravatar frequently.

- Overview of the new Wordpress 2.7 dashboard, and an admin backend overview.

- Chat about Akismet and how well it fights spam.

- Alex King’s Carrington Theme framework.

- Plugins of the week and Wordpress Job of the week.

Within the Plugins of the week discussion Jeff chose Custom Widgets as this week’s plugin. Besides talking about it they gave me some suggestions regarding the plugin, the most important one being the possibility to assign widgets to specified templates(e.g:single.php):

“I’d like to see the ability to control which widgets appear on which template such as configuring a widget to appear on pages that utilize the single.php template while hiding that same widget from other templates.”

Well Jeff, this is a great idea and you can be sure that it will be implemented in Custom Widgets v 1.2, along with some other handy features.

ZuperZed asked me what’s the difference between Custom Widgets and Widget Logic plugin which can assign widgets to templates(what Jeff suggested), but its damn hard to use.

The user has to define the desired template, and know the Conditional Tags used by Wordpress,

Here are some examples:

is\_home() || is\_category('baked-goods')
or
$x=(1==1)?true:false; return ( !is_home() && $x);

The issue with that is that not even an above-average wordpress user can use the plugin with ease. Slayer’s Custom Widgets Plugin is very simple to use with absolutely no coding knowledge and I still got lots of emails from people asking me how to use it.

This feature WILL be added to Custom Widgets v1.2 which will be out sooner than you expect it

Press play to listen to the discussion about Custom Widgets