For the new blogger, receiving a comment can be a memorable experience. We feel validated and being jugded. We’re excited our blog got found by some one.

Unfortunately, some of those comments which make us so happy, turns out to be a spam by some spammers who post these comments for their own benefits. Some spams are easy to spot, they are usually comments filled with links to pharmaceutical drugs or sexual topics, or comments which didn’t apply to our blog topic. But some are very difficult to differentiate either it is spam or some visitor appreciating your post; leaving positive comments that look authentic, however the words they choose could apply to any blog or blogger; copied and pasted throughout the blogosphere.
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Nextgen Gallery is my favourite gallery plugin for WordPress. It provides shortcode to insert gallery in posts,pages, sidebars etc. In this post, we are going to use nextgen’s built in functions to show these galleries, albums in WordPress template files. Ideally we show the Nextgen gallery on a page or post using the shortcode [Gallery not found] , where x is the gallery id which you want to show. One way is to execute this short code in any template file using this do_shortcode method, explained in the post. But we are going to use the alternate method which is the right way to do it.

How to show the Nextgen Gallery

$ngg = new NextGEN_Shortcodes;
echo $ngg->show_gallery( array("id"=>$gallery_id,"images"=>num_img,"template"=>"mygallery") );

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Adding Shortcode:

In your functions.php, add this code:

// add the shortcode handler for YouTube videos
function addYouTube($atts, $content = null) {
  extract(shortcode_atts(array( "id" => '' ), $atts));
  return "<object width="425" height="355" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/'.$id.'?version=3&amp;autohide=1&amp;showinfo=0" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><embed width="425" height="355" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/'.$id.'?version=3&amp;autohide=1&amp;showinfo=0" allowScriptAccess="always" allowscriptaccess="always" /></object>";
}
add_shortcode('youtube', 'addYouTube');

This lets you use a shortcode in your post that looks like [youtube id="xxxxx"]

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While you already use many functions in WordPress to communicate with the database, there is an easy and safe way to do this directly, using the $wpdb class. Built on the great ezSQL class by Justin Vincent, $wpdb enables you to address queries to any table in your database, and it also helps you handle the returned data. Because this functionality is built into WordPress, there is no need to open a separate database connection (in which case, you would be duplicating code), and there is no need to perform hacks such as modifying a result set after it has been queried.

In this article, we will learn how to get started with the $wpdb class, how to retrieve data from your WordPress database and how to run more advanced queries that update or delete something in the database. The techniques here will remove some of the constraints that you run into with functions such as get_posts() and wp_list_categories(), allowing you to tailor queries to your particular needs. This method can also make your website more efficient by getting only the data that you need — nothing more, nothing less.

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