We want to reach something like this.

You can see live preview here: Ideal WordPress Footer and you can decide whether you want to have something like this on your blog.

Basically we have 3 parts for this project:

• ‘Sharing is sexy’ plugin
• Author page
• Related post with thumbnails

It’s simple to apply on your own blog but if you have any questions let me know. This soultions works for me so it must work for you as well.

‘Sharing is sexy’

This is very simple to install and the effect in my opinion is amazing.

First you need to go to this location: sexybookmarks and click ‘Download’ button. This is a simple WordPress plugin that you need to upload to your WordPress server and activate using admin panel.

Next you setup your networks and other options using WordPress admin panel. ‘Sharing is sexy’ functionality will appear automatically, you can choose if you want to see it on homepage or only in posts, pages.

If you want to put your bookmarks manually use this code in your theme:

<?php if(function_exists('selfserv_sexy')) { selfserv_sexy(); } ?>

and setup this one using plugin admin page:

Menu Location (in relevance to content):
Above Content | Below Content | Manual Mode

It will work, trust me.

Author page

This is also pretty cool and looks very nice on blogs. To setup this one I use this link: Displaying Author Pic and Bio in Your WordPress Post the Non-Gravatar Way but I made some modifications.

I use static text message ‘about me‘ and put it direct to my WordPress theme code. It means that I took css code from link above and use this php code in my actual theme:

<div class="authbio">
<img src="your_photo_url/images/sample.jpg" alt="" class="alignleft"/>
Put static text in wordpress theme with html tags like <strong> etc...
</div>


CSS code that i’ve added to my theme style.css is:

.authbio{
color: #666;
font-weight: normal;
background: #fff;
border: 1px solid #ccc;
width: 420px;
height:60px;
padding: 8px;
margin-bottom:5px;
}

and this one for image:

img.alignleft {
float:left;
background-color: #fff;
border:1px solid #ccc;
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 7px 2px 0;
display: inline;
}

After small CSS changes it looks like this:

Related post with thumbnails

We need plugin that will match related posts and add preview images to them.

First step is download and active this plugin: YARPP and then use tips from this article:
Display Thumbnails For Related Posts in WordPress.

You need to add this php code to your theme:

<?php if (function_exists('related_posts')){ ?>
<?php related_posts();?>
<?php }?>

Download Related Post Template File from link above and put it to plugins directory and add propere CSS code to your style.css

/* Related Posts */
ol.related-posts {clear:both; text-align:center; margin:10px 0px 0px 0px; padding:0;}
ol.related-posts li{width:120px; float:left; display:inline; margin-right:15px;; padding:0;}
ol.related-posts img{clear:both; padding:5px; background:#F7F7F7; border:1px solid #DDD;}
ol.related-posts a{clear:both; display:block; border:none; text-decoration:none;}
ol.related-posts li{font-size:12px;}

Then all you need to do is activate new tempalte with plugin admin page.

If you have problems let me know, I can help you .. it is pretty easy to implement using link above. Remember that you need to manually add post thumbnails to your posts using custom fields after you setup everything.

You can read more about this website update and tweaking footer and other WordPress stuff :

• iTunes Skins – Web site update Part I
• iTunes Skins – Web site update Part II

Good luck and hope to see some implementation of my ideas in future.