How To Build A Poker Web Site

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of requests from individuals regarding how to display a “Keep Reading” or “Continue Reading” option on their WordPress blog when the home page displays all the latest posts. Now there are a variety of different ways of accomplishing this task and each are valid in their own way. Depending on what kind of person you are will determine which way you’ll want to go.

1. Manual Excerpts – There is a section when creating a post in which you can craft manual excerpts. This is what will appear on your home page when you post your content. If you are writing all the content for your blog yourself this is most likely the easiest option to run with.

2. The MORE button – There is a button that says “more” when you are creating a new post. When you click it, it will display some code that looks like this <)!--more--> minus the ) which I threw in there to display it on the page. Everything before the more tag will appear on your home page while the rest is only displayed after someone clicks on your “continue reading” button.

3. Plugins – I’ve run across a few plugins that will supposedly accomplish this task for you, HOWEVER, I stopped using them due to reasons that I can’t even remember.

4. Themeing – This is the route that I typically take and will work with MOST themes. Themes such as Atahulapa more than likely have the option to turn this function on somewhere deep within all their options. Under “Appearance” click on “Editor.” Now look for the line of code that reads < ?php the_content('Continue Reading »'); ?> and replace it with < ?php the_excerpt(); ?> as well as < a href="< ?php the_permalink(); ?>“>CONTINUE READING< /a> and you’re good to go. Feel free to replace continue reading with whatever text you want.

Typically I would suggest working with something like the plugin SmartYoutube, where you simply type in the url of the video and you’re good to go. But from a branding perspective you may not want your video showing a Youtube logo across the bottom. You want your logo, or no logo at all on the video. Maybe you even want to control the color of the player, the buttons on the player, etc… Well there is a solution for this.

Enter FLOWPLAYER. Flowplayer is a jquery application created to present SWF videos online in a variety of different options. You can create playlists, autoload videos, insert still screen shots on top of videos, or even allow individuals to embed your video on their website. Throughout their website you’ll find various demos and coding examples on how to accomplish this.

Embedding / Sharing plugin – http://flowplayer.org/demos/plugins/javascript/embed.html

Playlists – http://flowplayer.org/demos/plugins/javascript/playlist/horizontal.html

Various Other Demos / Functions – http://flowplayer.org/demos/index.html

Of course there are several Flowplayer modules available for download over at WordPress.org, but it may be better to simply install the files onto the website yourself and run the scripts your way as the plugins may only allow for certain effects to occur, thus leaving much to be desired.

You technically shouldn’t have to do much more than add a few lines of code to your header.php file in your theme (between the and area) that shows where you’ve placed your Flowplayer files. Once you have all that up and running you just need to switch over to the HTML version of your editor when creating a post or page (or maybe install PHPExec to run the code in PHP so WordPress doesn’t start removing lines of code you need for the application to run) and you’ll be adding videos fairly quickly.

The code itself is a series of javascript that you pretty much just need to copy and paste. You can control the look and feel of the video using external javascript files, which will then allow you to introduce branding to your player when someone embeds it on their website.

I’d advise uploading your SWF files through FTP as opposed to the Media Library as you’re less likely to suffer a time-out or have WordPress tell you the file is too large, but using FTP isn’t as scary as it sounds.

In terms of branding the videos you will have to pay Flowplayer for a license to embed your own logo on the videos. If you’re trying to make your videos go viral the fee is well worth it.

Oh and by the way, I’m currently not an affiliate with Flowplayer, I just like what they can do.

PLEASE NOTE THIS WALKTHROUGH WAS CREATED FOR WORDPRESS 2.9 AND MAY NOT FUNCTION CORRECTLY WITH THE NEW WORDPRESS CUSTOM MENUS

Creating your own WordPress theme ranges from fairly easy to fairly complex depending on how many options you want to give yourself within the Dashboard area. If you’re not too worried about the admin area now how the widget areas function, setting up a 3 column theme can be finished in an afternoon.

If you’ve ever worked with server side include files you’re already a step ahead of the game. WordPress themes require the following files at a minimum for your theme to work:
-footer.php
-functions.php
-header.php
-index.php
-page.php
-sidebar.php

Now if you want additional stylings you’ll need additional files such as comments.php, archives.php, etc…..

The best way to get started creating your own WP theme is by looking at one that has already been created. The more basic the theme the easier it’ll be for you to cut and paste from. No need to go crazy with tons of php functions if your php experience is lacking.

Start with the index.php file. Inside the index.php file you’ll see first a call out to < ?php get_header(); ? > which tells the system to go grab the header.php file when the page is rendered. For someone who uses .shtml or SSI they’ll recognize this as a similar function which retrieves a certain element (say header.html) and places it inside the page.

After the header the page now needs to grab the sidebar. The code will look something like ?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/sidebar1.php’); ?

From there you break down exactly where you want the content to go along with title, styling, etc. If you have a pre-built template going in Notepad, Dreamweaver, etc you want to replace certain sections of text such as TITLE with the correct php callout to render the title, the text area, etc. Again just copy and paste the sections you want (if you don’t want comments leave them out, don’t want the date leave it out, etc) into your page and you’re good to go.

Finally you’ll want to render the footer with a ?php get_footer(); ? command.

Now you need to create your header, footer, and page.php files. The page.php file directly affects any PAGE pages you create inside of WordPress. You can basically create multiple layouts for your Theme (say a salespage for one, a 3 column for another, maybe a wider video page) by only inserting the minimum required php into the header.php file and leaving the majority of the page coding inside the page.php and index.php files.

The functions.php file itself controls widgets as well as hooks to your dashboard. I’ve left it blank before and have seen zero issues with sidebars, and seem to be able to stack more sidebars by leaving it blank than by trying to include information within it.

As with most web design tasks most of the code has already been written for you, and you simply need to copy and paste it in applying your own classes and ID’s to style each individual element.