A pet peeve of mine, if you will. By default, WordPress will set the link to any image that you upload to the file itself. That’s great if you’re using some sort of LightBox setup, but 99% of the time you aren’t. It’s just the image. So if you forget to remove the link…..no dice.

Well, not if you add this handy line to your functions file

update_option('image_default_link_type', 'none');

Yep, that’s it.

** UPDATE 12/21/2011 **

Thanks to @mitcho for pointing out that we don’t need the option to update every time, only once. So here’s a slightly modified function to check the value first, then update if it isn’t set to ‘none’.

$image_set = get_option( 'image_default_link_type' );
	if (!$image_set == 'none') {
		update_option('image_default_link_type', 'none');
	}

**UPDATE** I’ve released a slightly modified version of this into a plugin that has a TinyMCE button. You can get it here.

Folks that have been on the web for any length of time know that putting your email address on a forward-facing website is just asking for spam. While Gmail and other providers are pretty good at flagging them, it’s still an unnecessary burden, especially if you are using your own mailserver. But for many businesses and sites, you’ve gotta have it out there. So what to do?

The folks over at catswhocode recently published a post with a handful of WP shortcodes, one of which was obfuscating an email address using a convoluted regex and count method. Well, you could do that. But why not use a built-in WP function?

WordPress has an antispambot function that’s been in core since version 0.71. The only problem is that you can’t use it in a post, page, or widget on it’s own. So I’ve written a simple shortcode to allow you to call that function wherever you may need it.

This would go into your functions.php file

function emailbot_ssc($attr) {
		extract( shortcode_atts( array(
			'address'	=> '',
		), $attr ) );
	return '<a class="email_link" href="mailto:'.antispambot($attr['address']).'" title="Send Us An Email" target="_blank">'.antispambot($attr['address']).'</a>';
	}
add_shortcode("email", "emailbot_ssc");

And to use the shortcode (on the HTML tab, not the visual editor)

[email address="you@emailcompany.com"]

that’s it. And remember, if you need to use this (or any shortcode) in a widget, you’ll need to enable it if your theme hasn’t already done so.

There are thousands of contact form plugins out there. Hell, you can even roll your own if you want to. But I’m lazy. And I want to focus on other things. So this is one of the few areas that I use a plugin. I’ve found that Contact Form 7 is the easiest to set up and configure. There was only one problem with it: the javascript loaded on every page. And being anal about things, I only wanted it on the actual contact page. So I decided to write a quick function to fix that, without hacking the actual plugin.

A few notes:

• This assumes that you have everything in the default folders
• This is based on Thesis v1.8, and CF7 v2.3 updated for v2.4.5

/* Adds in scripts for contact form 7 */
	remove_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'wpcf7_enqueue_scripts' ); // Removes the scripts from loading on all pages for CF 7
	add_action('thesis_hook_footer','new_cf7_scripts'); // Adds back in the scripts on the appropriate page

function new_cf7_scripts() {
	if (is_page(array('contact','another-page'))) { // Change the name to match the name(s) of the pages using the form ?>
    <script src="<?php bloginfo('home'); ?>/wp-content/plugins/contact-form-7/jquery.form.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
	<script src="<?php bloginfo('home'); ?>/wp-content/plugins/contact-form-7/scripts.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<?php } }

Not terribly difficult. Just drop that into your custom-functions.php file and you should be good to go.

I’m just gonna say it. I hate TweetMeme. It’s slow, the javascript load time is horrible, and it breaks a lot. But until now, there really wasn’t much option otherwise.

Enter the ‘official’ Twitter button.

I’ve begun switching over all the sites I manage over to this instead. I don’t have any hard metrics, but I have noticed a decrease in load time. Here’s the quick and dirty on how to do it.

add_action('thesis_hook_before_post','custom_twitter'); //Add Twitter share for posts and singles
add_action('thesis_hook_before_teaser','custom_twitter'); //Add Twitter share for teasers

function custom_twitter() { ?>
 <p class="twitter">
 <a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="<?php the_permalink() ?>" data-text="<?php the_title_attribute(); ?>" data-count="vertical" data-via="YOUR_TWITTER_NAME">Tweet</a>
 <script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

 </p>
 <?php }

I personally add in a line of CSS here:

.custom p.twitter {float:right; margin:0 15px 15px;}

One of the biggest things I see people try to do with Thesis is get a clickable banner image in their header (instead of just the text / tagline). And understandably so, people are a bit apprehensive about writing functions and using filters (although they shouldn’t be. But that’s for another tutorial).
However, it doesn’t have to be that hard. You can get your own image in there with just a few lines of CSS. Here is what you need to do:

• Get an image (make note of the dimensions of the image. It’ll matter later)
• Upload the image into your /custom/images folder within your Thesis theme (preferred) or into your uploads folder
• Copy the code below into you custom.css file, with a few modifications

Here’s the code

.custom #header {
	height:180px;
	padding:0;
	background:none;
	margin:0 auto;
	}

.custom #header #logo a {
	text-align:center;
	display: block;
	height: 180px; /* Must match the height given in the previous area */
    width: 600px; /* Not required, but will allow the image to be centered)*/
	background: url(images/FILENAME.PNG) no-repeat;
	outline: none;
}
.custom #header #logo, .custom #header #tagline {
	text-indent: -9999px;
}

Things To Keep In Mind

• If you put the image anywhere other than the custom/images/ folder, you need to put in the entire URL of the image in line 13.
• Make sure to put in the height of the image in both places (line 2 and line 11)

That’s really all there is to it. Problems? Feel free to comment.