Do you feel bored with your contact form? Seems like every contact forms have similar appearance. Although there are a lot of Wordpress plugin for you to create your contact form, but most of them do not provide “themes” for you.

So, you may use this plugin, WP-Niceforms to customize your contact form. It is a script that will replace commonly used form elements with custom design appearance.

Looks nice? To use this script, simply add class=”niceform” for the form that you want to beautify.

Plugin Download | Plugin Website | Demo

Wordpress introduce post revision feature since version 2.6. It helps us to keep revisions of our posts and we can restore to previous revisions anytime.

Although this is a great feature, but what happen if you accumulate too many revisions? Probably your server will takes longer time to query and processes database requests. That means, your blog will load slower and your visitors may wait longer before the content comes out.

So, we may want to delete unwanted post revisions. This can be done by logging to phpMyAdmin and execute the SQL command, or use a plugin.

SQL command to delete post revisions

Here, i would assume you know how to login to your phpMyAdmin and know how to execute SQL command. So, simply run this SQL command and all stored post revisions will be deleted.

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = “revision”;

Use Delete Revision Wordpress plugin

This is an easier method. Just download the Delete Revision plugin and go to your Settings->Delete-Revision to delete them.

Press the Check Redundant Revision button and the plugin will automatically search for post revisions.

Remember, both the SQL command and delete-revision plugin will delete all your post revisions, and you are not allow to choose which revesion to be deleted. So, please make sure you won’t regret after delete them!

Tips: You can turn off post revision feature by go to your wp-config.php and add define(’WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false); before the closing ?> tag.

Do you like Mac OSX Leopard design? You can skin your Wordpress Admin Panel into Leopard style by using Leopard Admin plugin.

The screenshot above show your admin panel after activate the Leopard Admin. Simply download, install and activate the plugin to have your Leopard admin panel. No extra modification needed.

This plugin works well on both Wordpress 2.5 and 2.6. I tried the plugin on Wordpress 2.7 but it looks weird. Hope the author will release a new version when Wordpress 2.7 final version release.

Sometimes, we may want to exclude some categories from display in our main page or sidebar. There are a lot of methods to exclude these categories. Here i would like to share 3 types of different method to do so.

Use Wordpress Category Visibility Plugin

This plugin will let you to exclude any tag and category at different pages. For example, you can exclude selected category in the front page, search results, archives, and feeds. Simply activate the plugin and go to your Manage->Category Visibility to manage them. (There are some users who claim this plugin may has conflict with other Wordpress plugins.)

wp_list_categories() template tags

You may use this template tags to list out all categories at your website’s navigation bar or your sidebar. The template tags tutorial website actually teach us how to include or exclude categories by adding parameters when we call this template tags.

Hack the default widgets.php

I read this tutorial from Simple Solution For smart People website. You need to make a backup of wp-includes/widgets.php file before proceed.

1. After you backup the file. Open it using any text-editor and try to look for function wp_widget_categories. I am using Wordpress 2.6.x and it is around line 703. This is the only function that you need to modify.
2. Find the following line:

   $d = $options[$number]['dropdown'] ? '1' : '0';

   Add $exclude = ‘17′; below this line. You may replace 17 with the Category ID that you want to exclude. You may exclude more than one category by adding a “,” between the number.

3. Next, look for

   $cat_args = array('orderby' => 'name', 'show_count' => $c, 'hierarchical' => $h);

   And replace it with

   $cat_args = array('orderby' => 'name', 'show_count' => $c, 'hierarchical' => $h, 'exclude' => $exclude);

Done. You can change the “17″ to any category ID that you want to exclude anytime. I had pasted my codes at the end of this tutorial, in case you don’t understand my tutorial.

function wp_widget_categories($args, $widget_args = 1) {
    extract($args, EXTR_SKIP);
    if ( is_numeric($widget_args) )
        $widget_args = array( 'number' => $widget_args );
    $widget_args = wp_parse_args( $widget_args, array( 'number' => -1 ) );
    extract($widget_args, EXTR_SKIP);

    $options = get_option('widget_categories');
    if ( !isset($options[$number]) )
        return;

    $c = $options[$number]['count'] ? '1' : '0';
    $h = $options[$number]['hierarchical'] ? '1' : '0';
    $d = $options[$number]['dropdown'] ? '1' : '0';
    $exclude = '17';

    $title = empty($options[$number]['title']) ? __('Categories') : apply_filters('widget_title', $options[$number]['title']);

    echo $before_widget;
    echo $before_title . $title . $after_title;

    $cat_args = array('orderby' => 'name', 'show_count' => $c, 'hierarchical' => $h, 'exclude' => $exclude);

    if ( $d ) {
        $cat_args['show_option_none'] = __('Select Category');
        wp_dropdown_categories($cat_args);
?>

Hope you enjoying reading my tutorial. Please choose any method that suit you.

People always talking about how to increase their RSS subscriber. Daniel wrote a great article about 50 Simple Ways to Gain RSS Subscribers, which cover all basic things that everyone need to do to get more subscribers.

Besides these 50 tips, i found 2 plugins which will help us in getting more subscribers also. They are Comment Relish and FD Feedburner Plugin.

Comment Relish is a Wordpress plugin that will send an email message to readers who comment on your blog who have never commented before. You can customize the email message and also add a link to your Feedburner acccount. By doing so, the commentators maybe will subscribe to your blog through the link.

FD Feedburner Plugin will redirects the main feed and optionally the comments feed to Feedburner.com. By doing so, your Feedburner Feedcount will increase even readers subscribe to your category feed or comments feed. This plugin is easy to setup. Simply activate it and give it your Feedburner feed URL.

Although these tips and plugin will help you to increase your subscribers, but the most important is you provide original and good content.

So, do you like my post? If yes, why not subscribe to my RSS feed?