web2feel.com – Free wordpress themes – Tutorials – Tips and tricks

I am a PC user and I like it, but at the same time I miss some cool editors like Coda or Textmate which are made for Mac OS X. I am using Notepad++ since I began coding themes. It is a free, source code editor with GPL license and it supports a wide array of languages. That includes html, php, css, javascript, xml etc, which coders primarily work with.

If you are a wordpress coder, you would know that there are so many things you have to repeat everytime you create a new template. Let that be the writing template tags, the loops, custom query loops, stylesheet etc etc. Normally we find a way around this by copy-pasting the codes from the Codex site, or from a previous template. But even this takes it’s share of time while googling for it , finding the right one and importing it. So in the end, a major part of the time we spend on the project is actually spent outside the editor.

Notepad++ has a plugin which could help us save much time from the above mentioned hassles. It is called”Quicktext” and can be accessed under the “Plugins” tab of its menu. It lets us create custom tags , which can be replaced by predefined code snippets. That means I just type the word “loop”, select that word and when I hit the tab button the word is replaced by the actual WordPress loop. But of course this would only happen if I have already assigned the WordPress loop snippet to that custom tag called “loop”.

I have made a small video of Quicktext in action and it also shows how to create new custom quick text tags. It has no audio but the video explains it all. Try full screen if the text is not clear for you.

You can create a wide range of Quicktext tags which you commonly use during your coding projects. I recommend this WordPress cheat sheet as a reference. You can make your own custom tags based on that cheat sheet and believe me, it will save you a great deal of time.

Good day..and Get creative…