To stop other users from (easily) auto-updating plugins that might have had a lot of customisation work done to them (and thus destroying all that work, grrrr) simply change permissions for the plugin in the plugins folder. 444 should be fine. You can change this back as and when you need to edit the plugin.

“Sendit enable you to send newsletters and collect subscribers from your blog. You can manage one or more list and using in post/pages or using the widget(customizable). You can extract content from post or pages or create your content to send to subscribers. You can also edit the template for each mailing lists just put some XHTML code on header and footer. Newsletter will be send in XHTML format.”

Works like a charm.

A tip: by default only admin can see the Newsletter option.

To fix it so that lesser mortals can see amd use the Newsletter system edit:

add_menu_page(__(‘Send’, ’sendit’), __(‘Newsletter’, ’sendit’), 8, __FILE__, ‘invianewsletter’);

(and subsequent lines for sub-menu options)

8 means admin: change this to, say, 5 for Editors.

Full numbers explanation here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities#User_Level_to_Role_Conversion

Another tip: the confirmation page (confirmation.php) didn’t work great with my theme – I had to edit after line 40 to make sure there were the right amount of div tags (div="content" is both a typo and redundant).

a:4:{s:8:”hostname”;s:11:”example.com”;s:8:”username”;s:5:”admin”;s:15:”connection_type”;s:4:”ftps”;s:4:”port”;s:17:”//ftp.example.com”;

the s is the number of characters in the following value.

Claire’s website: clairebirtwistle.com.

The site is entirely bespoke, built by my own fair hands completely from scratch using PHP/MySql from a design Claire created.

Link: Oaktree Accountancy.

Link: 2m Careers.

Link: Toby Williams Wedding Photography

His Press and PR stuff is still there too.

Link: Toby Williams Photography

Geeks is a great website with a lot of good, exciting and energetic young people working on it.

Link: Geeks website.

First tried blogmum’s suggestion of using:

<? query_posts('showposts=3'); ?>

Add this to archives.php to change the number of posts in category, date and author archives; to search.php to change search results’ pages, or to index.php for the front page (as ever, this holds true for the majority of themes, but not absolutely all). The line needs to go *before* the loop

However, this only showed all the categories posts which wasn’t any good for me as the archive pages are category based.

Wordpress documentation gave me the correct solution.

<?php
global $query_string;
query_posts($query_string . "&posts_per_page=11");
?>

Note: Place a call to query_posts() in one of your Template files before The Loop begins. The wp_query object will generate a new SQL query using your parameters. When you do this, WordPress ignores the other parameters it receives via the URL (such as page number or category). If you want to preserve that information, you can use the $query_string global variable in the call to query_posts(), as above.

On geeks.co.uk, some posts are in a top level category, eg all News articles, and some are in sub categories, eg some Game Reviews are in Wii but not PSP etc.

Also, CSS won’t work with spaces in the names of labels so for categories like “Game Reviews” we have to remove the space to be useful as a CSS label.

Sometimes you want the function call to echo the category name to the page, eg when it’s used as a title of the page or in breadcrumbs. Sometimes you just want it returned to use in a CSS label, for example.

So here is my function:

function get_top_cat($css = false, $echo = false){
$maffcat = (array) get_the_category();
$maffpar = get_cat_name($maffcat[0]->category_parent);
if ($maffpar == ''){
$maffcat = (array) get_the_category();
$maffpar = $maffcat[0]->cat_name;
}

}

Stick that in your theme’s functions.php and you should be able to call it by, for example,

get_top_cat('', 'true') - will put top category name with spaces on your page
get_top_cat('true', '') - will put top category name without spaces in your code

in your webpage files like single.php, archive.php etc

Nb. this works for two-level categories – it seems that this could easily be extended for more levels by further nesting.