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You always wanted to upgrade wordpress plugin automatically. Wordpress 2.5 has brought along its share of goodies which let you upgrade plugins in one click. Now updating plugins need not be an arduous task as before and new wordpress bloggers will find this particularly easy.

Earlier upgrading plugins was tedious. Once you realized a new version was available, it required deactivating the plugin, downloading, unzipping and reading the upgrade instructions (in case some new tricky modification required), then uploading the plugins php files to the wordpress plugin directory and reactivating the plugin and hopefully all will work out well.
Fast and Quick Wordpress Plugin Upgrades

Wordpress 2.5 introduced the much requested feature for easy one click plugin upgrades. I received a notice that my Google XML Sitemaps Plugin needed an update. This time it had an “Upgrade Automatically” link beside it

I simply clicked the “Upgrade Automatically” link and in a few seconds it was all done…Wordpress Plugin Update Read the rest of this entry »

In the last tutorial, you learnt how to widgetize your wordpress theme to support wordpress widgets. Now this tutorial explains how to create multiple dynamic sidebars to add various combinations of widgets to customize your wordpress theme even more. I suggest you read how to Widget-Enable Wordpress Themes in 3 Easy Steps before reading further as examples will be quoted in the same context.

Edit Functions.php for Multiple Dynamic Sidebars

The functions.php code which helped to widgetize your wordpress theme and support a single dynamic sidebar, now needs to be edited (using any text editor like Notepad) to support multiple sidebars. You remember we had modified the default function.php from

<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar();
?>

to the new code below to support our customized template with h4 subtitles and non-default unordered lists in the sidebar. REMEMBER you need to edit functions.php to match your wordpress theme or it will not work.

<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'before_widget' => '',
'after_widget' => '',
'before_title' => '<h4>',
'after_title' => '</h4>',
));
?>

To support multiple sidebars, I simply need to specify that multiple sidebars be used and name them as I like. In our case I use Sidebar1, Sidebar2 etc and as many as you like. The code now looks like this -

<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array('name'=>'sidebar1',
'before_widget' => '',
'after_widget' => '',
'before_title' => '<h4>',
'after_title' => '</h4>',
));
register_sidebar(array('name'=>'sidebar2',
'before_widget' => '',
'after_widget' => '',
'before_title' => '<h4>',
'after_title' => '</h4>',
));
?>

I personally have extended this capacity to 6 dynamic sidebars on this blog. Here is how it looks like on top of admin panel.

Read the rest of this entry »