Twentyeleven offers a lot of cool features, one of my favorites is the Showcase template. However one of the downsides in my opinion (and probably yours, if you’ve found this article) is lack of a sidebar on your single posts and pages.
Others have pointed out viable solutions, however I wanted to stick to best practices and keep my parent theme unmodified.
Here I will explore how to add the sidebar to a twentyeleven child theme in only half a dozen lines of code.
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Google’s +1 buttons have been popping up left and right, and according to Google
… +1’s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query. This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking …
and if that isn’t enough, consider the limited Field Trial of Google+ already reaching an estimated user base between 10 and 20 million, adding a +1 button to your content becomes even more important.
While there are plugins that exist to add +1 buttons to your WordPress blog, I will explain how to modify your theme and add the +1 button without using plugins.
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It has been a while since I last had a need to integrate a Google Custom Search Engine into a WordPress blog, but it seems a lot has changed. The layout options have changed, and the IFrame option I was used to using has been deprecated.
Fortunately, this has allowed me to discover one of the more useful options, the results only layout. With this option and a few minor modifications, you will be able to leverage Google’s search with your existing WordPress search box.
So to begin, if haven’t done so already, create your own custom search engine. I’ll leave it to you to decide on the name, description, sites to index, etc. and focus on the settings that impact you integrating your custom search into WordPress.
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