First log into your Hotmail account. Click on the “Settings” link in the top right corner, and then press “More Options” at the bottom of the drop down menu.

This will take you to a page where you can manage your account. One of the first links reads “Send and receive mail from other e-mail accounts”. Click on that to proceed.

You are going to need your email account settings to proceed. These include your username, password, incoming and outgoing mail server names. They will look similar to the following:
Mail Server Username: contact@yourwebsite.com
Incoming Mail Server: mail.yourwebsite.com IMAP: port 143, POP: port 110
Incoming Mail Server: (SSL) box5.servername.com IMAP: port 993, POP: port 995
Outgoing Mail Server: mail.yourwebsite.com (server requires authentication) port 26
Outgoing Mail Server: (SSL) box5.servername.com (server requires authentication) port 465

Connecting To Download New Mail

Look underneath the heading “You can receive mail from these accounts” and click on the link “Add an e-mail account”.

First enter your email address and password. Then press next. Following that you’ll need to enter your username for this account (often the same as your email address) and the incoming server name (often mail.yourdomain.com). Un-tick both check boxes and press next.

Next you can choose whether you want that mail mixed in with your regular inbox mail, or if you want it sent to it’s own folder. After your selection press “Save”.

Congratulations! Your Hotmail account should now be able to download messages from your server. Try sending a test email to ensure it ends up in your Hotmail inbox.

Sending Mail From Your New Account

Next we have to connect everything so that you can send mail using your new email account. Go back to your “Options”–>”More Options”–>”Send and receive mail from other e-mail accounts” page. Beneath the heading “Send and receive mail from other e-mail accounts click on the link “Add another account to send mail from”.

First you must enter your email address and press “Verify”. Hotmail will send an email to that account that you must open before continuing, as it needs to verify that the address belongs to you. After clicking on that link you should be all set to send mail!

If you have any questions or problems with these steps you may contact me for additional help at contact [at] micromediawebsites.com

The Home Page (click to enlarge)
The home page features a large slideshow, video, and four smaller images along the bottom. All of these features can be managed through the custom Theme Options Panel, described below. Additionally, the slideshow can be disabled and replaced with custom page content instead.

There is also a widgetized area beneath the video player where custom content can be placed.

First Inner Page
This theme also comes with a few different page templates to select from. One such page template can display up to eight linked images in the right sidebar, as well as four links in the left sidebar.

All pages come with the ability to upload and display audio files with a nifty flash audio player, and each page can have it’s own custom video and video preview image.

Second Inner Page
Another option for some of the inner pages is to replace the eight sidebar images/links with a larger image and additional text beneath. This modification is done fairly easily through the page editor.

All pages can also display a download link for files such as PDF or Word documents.

Third Inner Page
Authors also have the option to password protect some pages, requiring that users register with their website before viewing the page. On password protected pages only a snippet of the content is displayed, followed by a login box requesting that users login or register before viewing everything. Making a password protected page is as easy as selecting that page template through the editor.

Now For The Fun Stuff…

The Theme Options Panel

Inside of the theme options panel the user has a great deal of control over what content is displayed on their website. The first tab is called “General” and from here the first thing the user can do is pick a different stylesheet, which will change the background color from blue to red, yellow, green, or purple. After that they can upload their own logo which will be automatically be placed in the header of their website. If they are using an email subscription service such as Constant Contact, they can enter the URL to a signup page which is linked to the “Join Our Email List” link on the front end. Leaving this field blank will hide that link.

In the second tab “Header” users can upload their own images to replace those in the slideshow and across the bottom. Additionally they can specify whether or not those images link to another page. Leaving the title blank for the slideshow images will hide that image from view, should the user want fewer than five slides. As I was setting this area up it occurred to me that some users may not want a slideshow on the home page but rather a block of written content. So I included the option for users to disable the slideshow completely if they wish, replacing that area with the home page copy.

The third tab “Video” offers only a few options. The authors may choose to completely disable the video player on their website, which will hide it from view. Perhaps they don’t want video, or they want to wait awhile before enabling it again. If they do want video then they can specify a default video to be played on those pages that don’t have a custom one, and also the default preview image.

The last two tabs, “Right Sidebar Links” and “Left Sidebar Links” work in exactly the same way. Give each link a title, upload an image, and specify where that link points to. Leaving the title blank will completely hide that link from view.

Another feature of this theme is that the default dashboard widgets have been removed and replaced with the same eight sidebar images/links. This is in case a visitor who logs in somehow manages to find the dashboard. They will be presented with a welcome message and links to a few pages. These dashboard links are also controlled through the “Right Sidebar Links” and are automatically updated to whatever the author prefers.

Page Editor Customization
A final customization I set up is the removal of a lot of unnecessary meta boxes from the page editing screen, to keep things simple and less confusing. Then I added a custom meta box where users can add content for that particular page. The options include specifying a custom video and preview image for that page, replacing the eight sidebar links with a large image and written content beneath, adding an audio file, and adding a download link.

All in all this was a wonderful project that I worked on. I enjoy a challenge and this project certainly presented a fun one for me.

<?php foreach ($this->getStoreCategories() as $_category): ?>
<?php $open = $this->isCategoryActive($_category); ?>
<?php
$cur_category=Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load
($_category->getId());
$layer = Mage::getSingleton('catalog/layer');
$layer->setCurrentCategory($cur_category);
if ($immagine = $this->getCurrentCategory()->getImageUrl()):
?>     

<div style="float: left; margin-right: 30px; text-align: center;
width:140px; border: 1px solid #ddd; padding:10px;">
                <div class="linkimage">
                    <p>
                    <a href="<?php echo $this->
                    getCategoryUrl($_category)?>">
                    <img src=""
                    alt="<?php echo $this->htmlEscape($this->
                    getCurrentCategory()->getName()) ?>" width=
                    "135" height="135" />
                    <?php echo $_category->getName()?>
                    </a>
                    </p>
                </div>
</div>

<?php endif; ?>
<?php endforeach; ?>

Save to catalog/category/list.phtml

Then in the CMS page window:

{{block type="catalog/navigation" name="catalog.category" template="catalog/category/list.phtml"}} 

Display Category List In Sidebar

Link

1. Open layout/catalog.xml. Find the reference name “left” and add the following line:

<reference name="left">
            <block type="catalog/navigation" name="catalog.leftnav" template="catalog/navigation/left_nav.phtml" />
</reference>

2. Create a new file and name it “left_nav.phtml”. Save that file to emplate/catalog/navigation/left_nav.phtml. The paste into that new file:

<h2>Browse</h2>
<div class="block">
<ul id="nav_category" class="nav_category">
	<?php foreach ($this->getStoreCategories() as $_category): ?>
		<?php echo $this->drawItem($_category) ?>
	<?php endforeach ?>
</ul>
</div>
<?php echo $this->getChildHtml('topLeftLinks') ?>

You have to refresh the cache before you’ll be able to see the changes!

Categories On The Home Page (Or Any Page)

http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/14527/P0/

Custom Page Templates

Copy one of the original page files, such as one-column.phtml, and save it as something new. Upload that file to your page templates folder.

Now open app–>code–>core–>Mage–>Page–>etc–>config.xml

Copy and paste one of the sections for a page template and change the names to match:

<about_page module="page" translate="label">
                    <label>About Page</label>
                    <template>page/about.phtml</template>
                    <layout_handle>about_page</layout_handle>
                </about_page>

Pretty much everything we’re going to do below will be placed in the functions.php file.

Replace The Wordpress Dashboard Icon With Your Own

Quick and easy. Replace that little “W” icon in the wordpress dashboard with your own (30 x 30 pixels)

add_action('admin_head', 'my_custom_logo');
function my_custom_logo() {
echo '<style type="text/css">
#header-logo { background-image: url('.get_bloginfo
('template_directory').'/images/custom-logo.gif) !important; }</style>';
}

Place Your Own Logo On The Login Page

function my_custom_login_logo() {
echo '<style type="text/css">
h1 a { background-image:url('.get_bloginfo('template_directory').'
/images/custom-login-logo.gif) !important; }</style>'; }
add_action('login_head', 'my_custom_login_logo');

Remove Some Of The Default Dashboard Widgets

Sometimes some of those little buggers can be confusing to clients and it’s just easier to remove them

function example_remove_dashboard_widgets() {
// Globalize the metaboxes array, this holds all the widgets for wp-admin
global $wp_meta_boxes;

// Remove the incomming links widget
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_incoming_links']);	

// Remove right now
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_right_now']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_primary']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_secondary']);
}
// Hoook into the 'wp_dashboard_setup' action to register our function
add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'example_remove_dashboard_widgets' );

Add Your Own Custom Dashboard Widget

Perhaps you’d like to add a widget to the dashboard with a welcome message to your client, or pulling in a custom RSS feed.

function example_dashboard_widget_function() {
	// Display whatever it is you want to show
	echo "Hello World, I'm a great Dashboard Widget";
} 

// Create the function use in the action hook
function example_add_dashboard_widgets() {
	wp_add_dashboard_widget('example_dashboard_widget', 'Example Dashboard Widget', 'example_dashboard_widget_function');
}
// Hoook into the 'wp_dashboard_setup' action to register our other functions
add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'example_add_dashboard_widgets' );

Customize The Dashboard Footer

function remove_footer_admin () {
echo "Custom Footer Text";
}

add_filter('admin_footer_text', 'remove_footer_admin');

Theme Options Panel

To create a custom theme options panel for the Wordpress dashboard, download these files and upload them to the theme directory. Take caution with the functions.php file that you don’t overwrite what is there currently.

Resources

Wordpress Dashboard Hacks
Using htaccess To Speed Up Wordpres

The Normal Loop

<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<?php endwhile; endif: ?>

Get Posts Published Between Two Dates

<?php
  function filter_where($where = '') {
        $where .= " AND post_date >= '2009-03-17' AND
        post_date <= '2009-05-03'";
    return $where;
  }
add_filter('posts_where', 'filter_where');
query_posts($query_string);
while (have_posts()) :
      the_post();
      the_content();
endwhile;
?>

Paged Posts By Category

<?php $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ?
get_query_var('paged') : 1;
query_posts("category_name=articles&showposts=7&paged=$paged"); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<?php if (have_posts()) :
$my_query = new WP_Query('cat=-21&showposts=3'.'&paged='.$paged);
while ( $my_query->have_posts() ) : $my_query->the_post();
?>

Simple Query By Category

<?php query_posts('cat=1&showposts=7'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> 

You can also use this query to exclude a category from the loop by adding a minus sign before the category ID

<?php query_posts('cat=-7&showposts=7'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Custom Paged Query By Category & Exluding A Category

<?php
$temp = $wp_query;
$wp_query= null;
$wp_query = new WP_Query();
$wp_query->query('showposts=10&category_name=articles
&post__not_in(142)'.'&paged='.$paged);
?>
<?php while ($wp_query->have_posts()) : $wp_query->the_post(); ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php $wp_query = null; $wp_query = $temp;?>

Two Loops On Same Page – Don’t Repeat

The First Loop:

<?php
query_posts('showposts=8');
$ids = array();
while (have_posts()) : the_post();
$ids[] = get_the_ID();
the_title();
the_content();
endwhile;
?>

The second loop

<?php
query_posts(array('post__not_in' => $ids));
while (have_posts()) : the_post();
the_title();
the_content();
endwhile;
?>

Step One

Log into your Magento system, and then look to the top menu bar. Hover your mouse over the button “Catalog” and press “Manage Products”.

This will pull up a list of all products that you currently have listed in your system if you have any. To add a new product look to the right of the screen and press the orange “Add Product” button.

You will be prompted first to select the attribute type and product set. Typically you can leave them as they are and press “Continue” unless you’re offering downloadable products or other items that require these fields.

New Product Basic Details

You will be taken to a screen where you’ll fill in some basic information about the product that you’re listing. Enter the product name, description, and short description. Give it a sku number and weight. If you have manufacturers and colors set up in your system then you may select one of those here.

Sometimes you might want to have a page or filter on your website for users to view “New Products”. To set an item as a new product you would do that here in the fields “Set Product As New From Date” and “Set Products As New To Date“. Let the system know when the product will start to be considered new and select the date that the product will end being new.

Make sure the status is “Enabled” if you want it visible online right away. The URL key is where you would enter the custom url that you’d want used for this product. For example, if your product is called “The Office DVD” then you could enter in this field “the-office-dvd”. When viewing this product’s page on your website the url would appear as http://yourwebsite.com/the-office-dvd/. Great for search engine optimization.

Finally select where this product will be visible- in the catalog, in the search, or both.

More Settings

There is a lot of information that you still need to fill in, and you’ll notice a series of tabs to the left of the screen. You’ll need to visit almost all of these. As you go along it’s a good idea to press the “Save And Continue Edit” button to the top right to ensure that you don’t lose any information. It isn’t necessary but a good idea.

Prices

Next you have to give your product a price, found in the “Prices” tab. There is the default “Price”, followed by a “Special Price” field. The special price is a sale price that you might want to list your product as temporarily. If you choose to put your product on sale you’ll want to fill in the “Special Price From Date” and “Special Price To Date” fields to tell your system how long that item will be listed for a discount. The “Cost” field is for you to fill in how much that item costs you, not the customer, and will not show on the frontend of your website. Select a tax class and whether or not that item is available for purchase with Google Checkout. Save and continue edit.

Meta Tags For SEO

Next press the “Meta Information” tab. Here you will give this product page its own unique title, description, and keywords for the search engines to read and consider. The title will be visible at the very very top of the browser window but the description and keywords will not. The description should be one to two sentences long, and the keywords should be separated with commas.

Adding An Image

From the “Images” tab is where you’ll add your product images. First select the “Browse Files” button. This will open a window from where you will browse through your computer for the image file that you wish to use. Once you select your picture press “Open” and then “Upload Files”. The image will upload but at first all you’ll see is an empty box- just swish your mouse over that empty box to see the image. To the right are three radio buttons- Base Image, Small Image, and Thumbnail. If you are only using one image for this product then select all three. But you can upload different images to be used for each option.

Inventory

Next let’s select the Inventory tab on the left. This one is important. First fill in the quantity that you have available. If you leave it at zero then your system will mark that product as “out of stock”. Then at the bottom list the item as “In Stock”. When you sell out of an item Magento will automatically mark your product as unavailable for purchase.

The Category

You also need to file this product under one or more categories by selecting the Categories tab.

Finishing Up

Finally you have “Related Products”, “Up Sells” and “Cross Sells”. Your website can be set up in such a way that when users are viewing a product page, related products can be suggested to them. Additionally when they are visiting their cart and viewing what they plan to purchase you can offer them additional product ideas called “Cross Sells”. All three are set up the same way.

First select the “Related Products” tab on the left. You should be presented with a list of products that you have listed previously. If this is your first product that you are adding to your store then you will need to come back to this step at a later date. If you do have products added to your store but you don’t see them listed on this screen then press the “Refresh Filter” button on the top right. Once the products are displayed simply check the boxes of the products that you wish to relate to the one that you’re currently adding- two to four is best.

Rinse and repeat for Cross Sells and Upsells.

Finally when everything is filled in press the “Save” button at the top right to finish up!

HTML is an acronym for “hypertext markup language”.  It is used to structure the website, much like a house is structured by a frame.  CSS is an acronym for “cascading stylesheets” and it is used to style the look of your website.  Much like paint, curtains, and flooring style the look of a house.

What you will need: in order to write code you will need a good text editor. I recommend Notepad++. Download that to your computer and open it.

Lets first take a look at the basics of HTML

All HTML code is surrounded by angle brackets < and >. Anything inside of these brackets are commands given to the browser. Anything outside of these brackets are words that will be displayed on the screen. For example:

<b>The fox jumps over the fence</b>

The letter b is surrounded by an opening and closing bracket. This tells the browser that the following text will be bold. The words outside of the brackets are what actually appear on the screen, and the type will appear in bold as we commanded. Finally when we are finished with the bold text we must tell it to end. We do that by repeating our opening <b> and inserting a forward slash just before to let the browser know that we are now done with that command. </b>.

I read this as “open” and “close”. So for me, I would read the following statement <b>The fox jumps…</b> as “Open bold. The fox jumps over… Close bold.”

You will always close an open tag, with only a couple of exceptions that we will get to later.

Basic Markup

Let’s take a look at the most basic structure of a website:

<html>
<head>
<title>My Website Title</title>
</head>
<body>
Hello World!
</body>
</html>

Now lets read this line by line and explain what it means:
<html> — This lets the browser know that the file is written in HTML
<head> — This is a section of the file that is used for many things, mostly for linking to external CSS files and Javascript files. We’ll go into that later.
<title> — This is the title of your website, which is displayed across the very top of the browser window. The title is always inside of the <head>.
</head> — We must end the head when we are finished with it, before the start of the body
<body> — After the head we begin the body. This is the actual part of the file that is your website.
</body> — We end the body when we’re finished with it
</html> — We end the HTML at the very very end.

I’d like to point something important out at this point. Note that all tags are closed in the reverse order that they were opened. First we opened the head, then we opened the title. Then we closed the title before we closed the head. If it helps, picture this code as a series of boxes inside of other boxes. We must first close the inner box before we can close the containing box.

Now go ahead and open your text editor and type out the example code above. Once that’s done save the file as “index.html”. You must remember to add the .html part to the end. After it’s saved double click on that file in your computer to open it in your browser window. You should see a white screen with the words “Hello World!” and the title “My Website Title” across the top of the screen. Congratulations! You’ve just made your first web page!

All in One SEO Pack

This plugin will add a custom panel to each page and post write screen, enabling you to give every single one its own unique title, description, and keywords for the search engines.

Google XML Sitemaps

Auto-generates an XML sitemap of your blog every time a post is created or updated, and it sends that sitemap off to most of the major search engines such as ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

My Page Order

Very handy and super easy to use. Lets you rearrange the order of your pages as they appear in your menu by simply dragging and dropping them from a page in your admin panel.

Exclude Pages

Adds a small checkbox to the page-editing screen giving you the option to include this page in user menus. By default it is checked and the page will appear as a link. However by simply unchecking that box your page will now be hidden from view.

cforms II

An extremely powerful plugin that generates an AJAX driven contact form for your blog.

Flutter

A plugin that helps turn a regular Wordpress driven site into a powerful content management system. With it you can generate your own custom write panels and lay out your page content in almost any fashion you want.

Members Only

Password protect your entire blog and redirect visitors to a selected splash page unless they are logged in. Very handy if your site is under developement.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

This plugin notifies you when a new version of Wordpress has been released, and upon your permission with quickly and easily upgrade your site.

WP-PageNavi

Creates a “pagination” for your blog pages so that rather than selecting “previous posts” and “newer posts” your users will be provided with links to additional pages such as [Page 1 of 9] [1] [2] [3] etc.

Viva Content Trimmer

Rather than use the_exerpt on your index and archives pages to limit your post display, this plugin will allow you to limit how much of your article will show quickly and easily.

Simple Post Thumbnails

Adds an image upload box to the post writing page for quickly adding a thumbnail.

*note: if running WP version 2.9 or higher the system provides support for this feature. http://justintadlock.com/archives/2009/11/16/everything-you-need-to-know-about-wordpress-2-9s-post-image-feature

Events Calendar

Selectively Hide Admin Buttons And More

Alternating Comment Colors

Adding a zebra stripe effect to even and odd numbered comments can make them easier to read. Add the following code to your comments.php template file, under where it says <?php if ( $comments ) : ?>

<ul>
<?php $i = 0; ?>
<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>
<?php $i++; ?>
<li id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>"<?php if($i&1)
{ echo 'class="odd"';} else {echo 'class="even"';} ?></ul>

The CSS:

.odd {
background-color: #fcf9fc; }
.even {
background-color: #616161; }

List of conditional tags

is_home() For use on the main blog page, usually your home page.

is_page() For WordPress pages.
is_page('2') Where 2 is the page ID.
is_page('about') Where about is the page slug

is_single() To be used on single blog post pages.
is_single('About Me') Where About Me is the page title
is_single('1') Where 1 is the post ID.
is_single('hello-world') Where hello-world is the post slug
is_single('Hello World!') Where Hello World! is the post title

is_category() - When a category page is listed
in_category('1') - When a post is in category ID 1.
is_tag() - On a tag archive page, similar to is_category().
is_archive() Any archive page including monthly, categories, tags.
is_search() For search results pages.
is_404() When a page is not found

List of post metadata tags

<?php the_permalink() ?> - This will echo the permalink of the post
    <?php the_title(); ?> - This echos the post title
    <?php the_time(’F jS, Y’) ?> - The date, April 4th, 2008.
    <?php the_author() ?> - This will display the author’s name
    <?php the_tags(’Tags: ‘, ‘, ‘, ‘’); ?> - Display the tags,
         separated by commas, followed by a line break
    <?php the_category(’, ‘) ?> - This will display the categories
    <?php edit_post_link(’Edit’, ”, ‘ | ‘); ?>
    <?php comments_popup_link(’No Comments »’,
            ‘1 Comment »’, ‘% Comments »’); ?> 

The “list pages” template tag

<?php wp_list_pages( $args ); ?> 

List pages comes with several arguments to further customize the appearance of the listed pages. For example, here is the way to show specific pages by ID with the heading “Pages”.

<ul>
  <?php wp_list_pages('include=7,13,26,35&title_li=<h2>'
        . __('Pages') . '</h2>' ); ?>
  </ul>

Some common arguments include:

<?php $args = array(
    'depth'        => 0,
    'show_date'    => ,
    'date_format'  => get_option('date_format'),
    'child_of'     => 0,
    'exclude'      => ,
    'title_li'     => __('Pages'),
    'echo'         => 1,
    'authors'      => ,
    'sort_column'  => 'menu_order, post_title',
    'link_before'  => ,
    'link_after'   => ,
    'exclude_tree' =>  ); ?> 

Retrieve a specific post/page

Retrieving a specific post

<?php
// retrieve one post with an ID of 5
query_posts('p=5');
?>

Retrieving a specific page

<?php
query_posts('page_id=7'); //retrieves page 7 only
query_posts('pagename=about'); //retrieves the about page only
?>

Organized archives page

Query all posts and structure them by category, and by monthly archive.

<?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<ul><?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&optioncount=1') ?></ul>
<ul><?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly&show_post_count=1') ?></ul>
<?php endwhile; ?>

Custom Fields

Here is an example of a custom field option I set up for a client. He had an area in each post to display a video, and in most circumstances he wanted a default video displayed. But occasionally he wanted to be able to override that video and display something else, or show nothing at all. I created a custom field called “video”, in which he could place the embed code of a video (or anything really), and that would show in place of the default. Or he could enter the word “none” into the video custom field to show nothing.

Below is the code. Basically it says “if there is a custom field named video, if it has a value and if that value is not equal to ‘none’, then display the code. Else if video has a value and that value equals ‘none’ then display nothing. Else just show the default.”

<?php $video = get_post_meta($post->ID, video, true);
if($video && $video !== none){ ?>
<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, video, true); ?>

<?php }elseif($video === none ) { ?>
Do nothing here

<?php }else{ ?>
Default video code here, or whatever you want shown by default
<? } ?>