Once again the fourth of July is upon us, and for those of us in the United States, this marks a paid vacation day the day we celebrate our independence and freedom!

Though I plan to take the day off, I did want to offer a quick note I ran across about WordPress.  I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention a post by Planet Ozh about what WordPress plugin authors need to know about WordPress 2.6.  The post covers changes to both the wp-content directory and the wp-config.php files and will likely force many plugin authors to update their plugins for WordPress 2.6. If you are the author of a WordPress plugin, you should probably check this out.

I hope everyone has a happy and safe holiday!

I think it is safe to say that most (if not all) of our readers are big fans of WordPress.  The flexbility of WordPress is just incredible and still manages to impress me at times. What I didn’t realize is that many major corporations are starting to use WordPress to manage their blogs.

A recent post over at BloggingPro caught my attention because they cite a number of examples of WordPress being used by many online corporations, including:

• CNN
• Yahoo
• Sony
• The New York Times
• People
• eBay
• b5Media

That is quite the impressive list in my opinion and I think it goes to show just how easily WordPress can be integrated into all sorts of existing websites.  WordPress.org is definitely the most popular blogging software these days, but I think it is also competing well against CMS software like Joomla, Drupal, etc.

For those of you that have tried other software like Joomla or Drupal, how does WordPress stack up?

This guest post was written by John of WordPress Expert, where he writes about WordPress tips, services, themes, plugins, and more. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

By default, WordPress (2.5 and later) comes with two RSS feed sections on the Dashboard. You can customize these by clicking the “Edit” link and typing in your own RSS feed URL.

But what if you want to add more than 2 feeds to your dashboard?

Just use the free RSS Mix service: enter in the multiple feed URLs that you would like to syndicate in one of your WordPress Dashboard boxes, and then click “Create” to join those feeds into one new feed that you can enter into your Dashboard.

One disadvantage to this tactic is that you have to create a new feed every time you want to edit the list. But still, this could be helpful for WordPress bloggers who would find other sources of information (besides those related to WordPress) more relevant for their blog’s “administration homepage.”

The six month of 2008 is now complete and this blog is celebrating the completion of its ninth month of existence. Hack WordPress has continued to show excellent growth each month, so I like to wrap up each month with our popular posts for that month and also to thank everyone for supporting us through reading, comments, guest posts, and any inbound links you’ve sent mentioning the stuff you find here. It really is appreciated!

Here are some of last month’s most popular posts:

• Turn Your WordPress Blog Into an E-Commerce Site
• What Do You Think of Premium WordPress Themes?
• Maximize SEO with the SEO Sniper WordPress Plugin
• How To: Creating a Print Stylesheet for Your WordPress Blog
• How To: Resetting Your WordPress Password

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank this month’s sponsors:

• SkinPress - SkinPress provides a large variety of website templates, including over 60 free WordPress templates.
• PressBox - Pressbox is a new quality premium WordPress theme that is available with 3 different licenses to choose from.  You can see a demo here.

If you have WordPress themes, WordPress plugins, or other WordPress related products and services that you’d like to promote, we currently have a couple advertising spots available. Advertising rates may be going up soon, but all existing advertisers are grandfathered in at their existing rate for a few months, so now is a good time to sign up! Please check out our advertising page, then contact us if you are interested.

This sliding doors CSS hack allows you to create sophisticated tabs for your navigation bar. Sadly, Wordpress core functions wp_list_pages() and wp_list_categories() don’t allow you to add the required span tag to use this technique.

We are going to see how to proceed in order to use sliding doors in our Wordpress theme.

Sliding doors, why?

There’s many articles available on the web about the sliding doors technique, so I’m not going to talk a lot about it. For people who don’t already know this famous hack, here’s a quick example.

Let’s build a typical navigation list:

<ul id="nav">
<li><a href="#">link n°1</a></li>
<li><a href="#">link n°2</a></li>
<li><a href="#">link n°3</a></li>
</ul>

If we apply, via CSS, background images to our links in order to make this menu prettier, we’ll quickly see a big problem: We must add a fixed width to the links, otherwise the image will be truncated if the link is too short, or the link will overflow the image if its width is too long.

That’s why sliding doors are very useful: We just have to add a span element inside the link, and then, in our CSS, assign a different background image to both the span element and the link.

<ul id="nav">
<li><a href="#"><span>link n°1</span></a></li>
<li><a href="#"><span>link n°2</span></a></li>
<li><a href="#"><span>link n°3</span></a></li>
</ul>

Our CSS should look like this:

#nav a, #nav a:visited {
display:block;
}
#nav a:hover, #nav a:active {
background:url(images/tab-right.jpg) no-repeat 100% 1px;
float:left;
}
#nav a span {
float:left;
display:block;
}
#nav a:hover span {
float:left;
display:block;
background: url(images/tab-left.jpg) no-repeat 0 1px;
}

Please note, as this is only an example, the CSS above isn’t complete and only shows how to apply the sliding doors hack.

You can see a live demo of a navigation menu which uses this technique on my blog here.

Using the sliding doors hack within Wordpress

I saw many blog posts where some users told you to modify Wordpress core in order to apply this technique. Personally, I never really liked this idea: First, the Wordpress core wasn’t made for being modified. And secondly, if you do, when you’ll upgrade your WP version, you’ll have to re-modify the core. Not user friendly at all!

Instead of this, let’s use a regular expression, by using the php preg_replace() function. We are going to get our pages (or categories) without displaying it, and passing it as a parameter to preg_replace(). The two remaining parameters will be, of course, our regular expression: The pattern we’re looking for, and this pattern’s replacement.

To create this menu, paste the following code instead of the wp_list_pages() (or wp_list_categories()) function in the header.php of your Wordpress theme.

To list your pages:

<ul id="nav">
<li><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><span>Home</span></a></li>
<?php echo preg_replace('@\<li([^>]*)>\<a([^>]*)>(.*?)\<\/a>@i’, ‘<li$1><a$2><span>$3</span></a>’, wp_list_pages(’echo=0&orderby=name&exlude=181&title_li=&depth=1′)); ?>
</ul>

To list your categories:

<ul id="nav">
<li><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><span>Home</span></a></li>
<?php echo preg_replace('@\<li([^>]*)>\<a([^>]*)>(.*?)\<\/a>@i’, ‘<li$1><a$2><span>$3</span></a>’, wp_list_categories(’echo=0&orderby=name&exlude=181&title_li=&depth=1′)); ?>
</ul>

Right now, your new menu is ready. You just have to make it sexy with CSS. Have fun!