UserAgent Theme Switcher is a plugin which changes the theme your blog uses depending on what browser the visitor uses.

Problems with designing for different browsers isn’t as much of an issue as it was a few years back however being able to determine the design a visitor is still useful, particular for those using mobile browsers.

The plugin works with Google Chrome, Safari, Safari Mobile, Firefox, Internet Explorer 6 to 8, and Opera Mini. There is unfortunately no way to add new browsers through the settings area though.

UserAgent Theme Switcher is a good plugin though it isn’t a complete solution. It needs support for more mobile browsers and more desktop browsers. Hopefully this will come in the future.

It will certainly prove useful to many WordPress users though and is definitely worth checking out.

Download: UserAgent Theme Switcher

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WordPress shortcodes are very useful tools that allow developers to provide extra functionality to their theme / plugin users.

Shortcodes are often used for:

Creating nicely-styled lists
Embedding contact forms
Displaying content in columns
Including google maps in post content
Applying extra styles to text and images
Creating download buttons
And anything else you can think of . . .
So let’s learn the very basics of how to create shortcodes for your plugin or theme.

First, a simple shortcode to display text (such as an author bio). Paste the code below into your functions.php or main plugin file:

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function bioText() { return 'The author is an experienced WordPres developer, blogger, and more. '; } add_shortcode('biotext', 'bioText');

You can now use [biotext] in your post content and it will be replaced with:

The author is an experienced WordPres developer, blogger, and more.

That’s a really, really, simple example, so let’s get a little more advanced now. This shortcode is almost exactly the same as the one above, except it let’s us define the text we want to be displayed.

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function bioText( $atts, $content = null ) { return '<div class="biotext">"'.$content.'"</div>'; } add_shortcode('biotext', 'bioText');

Now you’d use the shortcode like this:

[biotext]This is the text I want to display.[/biotext]

which will render as:

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<div class="biotext">This is the text I want to display.</div>

Because our text gets wrapped in a DIV tag, we can style it any way that we want.

These are both simple examples, and we can get a lot more advanced. In follow up posts, I will demonstrate how to begin adding variables to your short codes.

For now, you might be interested in checking out some of these resources:

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/wordpress/wordpress-shortcodes-the-right-way/
http://codex.wordpress.org/Shortcode_API
http://www.problogdesign.com/wordpress/working-with-wordpress-shortcodes/
http://pippinspages.com/freebies/wp-utility-short-codes-plugin-free/

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