WordPress 3.5 is Here – Time to Upgrade and Enjoy Some Pretty Fancy Changes!

WordPress 3.5 has just dropped on the masses. It’s time to play the upgrade game! Hopefully you’ve taken the time to maybe install it locally, or run it on a test site (I keep one handy in a subdomain) with your themes and plugins – just to make sure you don’t run into any problems. This is a pretty nice release, you can check out the release notes on the WP blog of course, but what has changed?

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Building a ‘Responsive’ Adsense Widget for the Twenty Twelve Theme

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NOTE: My adsense account has been deactivated. And the fine folks at Google simply don’t bother explaining why they deactivate accounts – they just do it. If I ever find out why I will forward that info on. For now, I would recommend you do not use the guide I have below – in case that is the problem.

Over the past two days, I’ve put up a couple articles relating to widgetizing the twenty twelve header and guidance for adding multiple items up there while accounting for 2012′s responsive nature. I wanted to finish up today by showing my solution for running Google Adsense ads to the header while still maintaining the responsive nature of the theme as best we can, let’s dig in!

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Adding a Login Function to Our Twenty Twelve Header Widget Area – And Responsiveness Considerations

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Yesterday, we started the basics for adding a widget area to the soon to be new default WordPress Twenty Twelve theme. I personally wanted to have advertising up there, plus login and registration options. I use custom login and registration pages on VoodooPress, so the standard links don’t work – I need to provide working links. I’m going to show my code for adding that login feature, of course. But I also want to show you this for a bigger reason – 2012 has a responsive setup and if you alter the theme, you need to consider that with your changes. Let’s take a look at what I have now!

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Add a Header Widget Area to the WordPress Twenty Twelve Theme

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WordPress 3.5 is going to drop very soon. And with it comes the new Twenty Twelve theme as default. We’ve already started tweaking it on VoodooPress. So next up on our agenda was finding a little spot to put advertising. A widget area up top seemed like just the solution, so here is how we got that done!

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Win a Free Membership to Elegant Themes From VoodooPress!

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Well Hallowe’en has come and gone, now we’re all left facing a terrible candy hangover. How can you fight the morning after shame that only 30 Snickers can bring? You could change your looks by celebrating Novembeard (also known as Movember and Noshavember). But why scare away your loved ones with a patchy week old beard? You could just give that WordPress site of yours a fantastic facelift with one of these amazing looking WordPress Themes. VoodooPress has teamed up with Elegant Themes to offer a few completely free memberships for you, our lovely readers (even with a patchy beard). Read on for the details!

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Combat WordPress Comment Spam – The Basics

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I’m often quite amazed when I see so many posts on the WordPress.org forums asking how to combat spam. When I ask what steps have been taken so far, the reply is often “OMGWTFBBQLOLLERCOPTER I am being inundated with hundreds of spam comments I haven’t done anything make it stop WordPress!!!!” And I get it, spam is pretty annoying! Also, sometimes it’s easy to forget that some people are brand new to running a site on the internet and don’t even know what questions to ask to get the result they need. So here is a real simple bit of information to get you started down the spam fighting road.

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Hmmm… Where to Advertise on 2012 Theme?

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I’m trying to work through how I want to position advertising on the 2012 theme. I just don’t like it in the sidebar much. I’m considering getting rid of the current login/out/register float I have up top. I think a bar along the top of the screen, inside the wrapper, not stuck to the top might work. Like right above the nav menu… maybe style it up like my widget areas, float login stuff left and the ad to the right. What do you think? Not the advertising in general, but if you were trying to position ‘something’ on this theme that you wanted to be visible/useful, where would you put it? Do you think any areas lend themselves better to user interaction than others?

What’s Going on at WPCandy?

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Hmmm… strange things afoot! I was running ads from PressedAds on my sites, and they started choking my site, taking forever to load and then not loading at all. So I headed to that website to see what was up, and it won’t load at all. Strange.. that ad network is run by WPCandy, so I headed over there to look for any news, and it is now redirecting to a default blank 2011 based website with no content. Wonder what is happening over there? I like that site for interesting WP reading.

Ben over at WPin.me dug a little deeper, it seems a hack might be behind the mess. You can read what he found here.

Oh Noes! You Suck Feedburner – Time to Jump Ship

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Sigh. You know, sometimes when things get pretty busy, I forget to look at my websites. I might jump into the admin and sort through comments or make a post. Maybe even hop on my admin system to deal with upgrades. But sometimes I don’t look at my sites for a while on the frontend. Well, I just did, and it was ugly!

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Kohrus Nero – A Social Post Rating Plugin – The Voodoo Review

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VoodooPress was recently approached by the folks at Kohrus with a new plugin they launched, Kohrus Nero. This is a plugin that allows for readers to vote for your posts. That’s a fairly common thing and many plugins allow for post voting. But this plugin has an interesting twist. It integrates with Twitter and posts and tracks tweets through that mechanism. The intention here seems to be gathering a little grass roots momentum – if you can get folks to spread the word about what you are offering, it is far more likely that you can gather some steam and attract new people to your site. Well, let’s set this plugin up and dig in to see what it offers!

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