WordPress & jQuery Contact Form without a Plugin

There are lots of WordPress plugins for contact forms, but wouldn’t it be nice to have more control over the markup? In this tutorial, I am going to show how to use a custom page template to create a contact form in WordPress without a plugin.

Some people may want to skip the post and get to the demo and source files:

View Demo Download Source Files

So, why not use a plugin?

Well, I think that a contact form is so simple that a WordPress plugin that doesn’t provide exactly what I want is pretty lame. Plus, I don’t need all those fancy interfaces for building the form; I just need the code.

The Plan

Our plan is to create a custom WordPress Page Template, then create a page that uses that template. Finally, we will add in a little jQuery to improve the form. Let’s write a little pseudo code to help determine how our page template will be structured.

WordPress & jQuery Contact Form without a Plugin | Trevor Davis.

Multilingual wordpress

I setup this English Greek wordpress blog but basically all of the stuff that I did should be the same for any other billingual wordpress.

I am assuming you have setup wordpress either with fantastico (from your cpanel) or by downloading the latest wordpress version and following the installation instructions from wordpress.org.

Now for καταinternationalizing there are quite a few plugins that you can experiment with, if you want. I personally a tried a few but
Polyglot2 was the best choice for me but far from a perfect solution.

To install polyglot

Drop the polyglot.php and polyglot_flags in the plugins directory and then activate it from the admin panel.

Edit the polyglot.php to include the details of you languages and associated flags, which in the case of english and greek languages result in:

$polyglot_settings['knownlangs'] = array('en','el');
$polyglot_settings['flags']['el'] = 'el.png';
$polyglot_settings['trans']['el'] = 'Ελληνικά';

read more at Multilingual wordpress.

Free WordPress Themes

CSS Menu Generator

• Themeforest
• WooThemes
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• Gabfire
• Gorilla Themes
• NattyWP
• Press75
• Revolution
• StudioPress
• WPNow
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• Other

via Free WooThemes – My New Themes.

Adding Extra Sidebar to your WordPress Theme

You like a WordPress theme on the Internet but Oh!… What’s this?? The theme has only one sidebar! You need more than one and are on the verge of switching to some other theme with more sidebars. But wait!! Let me teach you how to add an extra sidebar or sidebars to your favorite theme. People who know PHP will find it easy to follow but even novices can easily do it using the code that I have provided in this tutorial. I am assuming that you already know HTML and a bit of CSS.

To begin the tutorial, extract your theme into a folder and open it to see all the files. If your theme has only one sidebar, then most probably you will NOT find a file called functions.php in your theme folder. In that case you will have to create this file yourself. Just open notepad or any other code editor to start a new file. Put this code into that file :-
<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebars') )
register_sidebars(2);
?>
Save the file as functions.php and put it in your theme folder. This piece of code actually tells WordPress to register two sidebars for you (See register_sidebars(2) in the code). If your theme has more than one sidebar, you will find the functions.php file already present in your theme folder. You just have to edit the number to your requirement and save the file. You can increase this number if you want more sidebars and if your theme’s layout can accommodate it. Now, when you go to your WordPress admin section and browse to the widgets under the menu item called presentation, you will see two sidebars listed there. You can drag your widget items into any of the sidebars.

Now comes the part where we actually build the sidebars. If your theme has only one sidebar, try to locate a file called sidebar.php in your theme folder. In this example, where we are trying to modify the theme for two sidebars, let’s rename sidebar.php to sidebar1.php and make a new blank file called sidebar2.php. Put this code into sidebar2.php and save the file :-
<div>
<ul>
<?php if ( function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') && dynamic_sidebar(2) ) : else : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>
</div>

So, we have the two sidebars ready but they have not been placed in the index.php file yet. Both these sidebars need to be called from the index.php file in order to include them in your theme. Just open the index.php file from your theme folder and locate the code that calls your sidebar file (sidebar.php earlier). It should look something like :-

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebar.php'); ?>

Edit this code and change the words sidebar.php to sidebar1.php.

This takes care of the first sidebar. Now take a look at the index.php file carefully and find a suitable place to insert the second sidebar. This might involve modifying your layout or adding new divs. Once you find a suitable place, place the following code there :-

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebar2.php'); ?>

via How to add sidebar(s) to a WordPress Theme | Blog Oh Blog.