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Add Gravatars to your Site
Blogging Since WordPress 2.5 we have been able to add gravatars into our comments without the need for a plugin. Before this you’d need to use a plugin (or a bit of complex coding) to do the same job. If you don’t know much about gravatars or why you would want them then read Kevin’s post on Why you should add Gravatars to your Blog. He briefly mentioned the new WP2.5 Gravatar tag, however I’ll go into its usage further. The ...
Continue readingHighlight Featured Posts
WordPress Coding & Design Sometimes you want to write a post that stands out from the rest. Usually giving the selected post an additional CSS class will do the trick, but how do you work out which posts need highlighting? This is simply done by creating a new category called ‘Featured’ (note you can call the category anything you like, but I’ll refer to it as Featured in this post). If you create a new category called ‘Featured’ to ...
Continue readingIndex Your Posts
WordPress Coding & Design When you write a post on WordPress a visitor can see this post on a variety of pages – the front page, the category page(s) that the post is under, the archive page, the author’s page, the tag page(s), plus, of course, the single post page. If you display the full post on each of those pages then there’s the potential for duplicate content issues. That aside it also doesn’t allow for easy navigation through your site to ...
Continue readingAlternating Comment Styles
WordPress Coding & Design Following on from last weeks post on highlighting your comments, I figured another useful post would be about setting up your comments to have alternating styles. We do this by adding an additional CSS class to every other comment, then you can style this class in your stylesheet with, perhaps, a different background colour, a border, or even put the user’s gravatar on the opposite side of the comment to normal. To work out which comments ...
Continue readingHighlight Your Comments
WordPress Coding & Design Once you start to receive comments on your blog you’re going to want to have your comments stand out above the crowd, after all, it is your site! You’ll notice here on Blogging Tips that if the author of the post leaves a comment on their post then it stands out with white text on a red background compared to all the other comments with black text on a white background. Whilst there are a couple of plugins out there that can do this ...
Continue readingImprove Your Front Page Title
WordPress Coding & Design There are a few plugins out there to give you greater ease over your page titles – SEO Title Tag, All-in-one SEO pack are just a couple of the more popular ones. However, I don’t believe a standard blog necessarily needs these unless you have more than the basic static pages, as your post titles should be sufficiently well written anyway. The one page that does need a good title is your front page, yet for some reason the developers ...
Continue readingPage Templates – Create a Links Page
WordPress Coding & Design These days sidebars get so easily cluttered with recent posts, categories and tags, recent comments, top commentators etc. The list is endless. Throw in your blogroll and your sidebar can become longer than the page content! Moving your blogroll into its own page can keep things neater and allow you to have a longer list that doesn’t clutter up your sidebar. The way to do this is with a page template. Creating a Page Template Your theme ...
Continue readingList Your Recent Posts
WordPress Coding & Design When new visitors come to your site via an internal page they won’t see the most recent posts you’ve written without having to go to the front page. If there’s nothing to entice them further into the site then they’ll leave just as quick as they came. So you want to put your latest posts in their face pretty much! In WordPress this is easily done using the get_posts() template tag. The basic usage of this tag is ...
Continue readingStatic Pages in WordPress
WordPress Coding & Design At first, most bloggers don’t consider the need for a static page. Maybe one that has some about details on, but nothing more. As time goes on they may add one or two more pages, then a couple more. If they’ve stuck with the same theme then they’re most likely manually coding in the page links into their site, or they come manually coded in the case of some of the free themes available. Good idea? Well not necessarily, not if ...
Continue readingTemplate Tags, Categories and Tag Clouds
WordPress Coding & Design Template tags are functions defined in the core WordPress files and are globally available for use in your templates. There are a lot of tags available for different aspects of your template files. To get a complete list of what’s available see the Template Tags on the WordPress Codex. Some accept many parameters (information passed to the function enclosed in the brackets/parentheses), others do not accept any parameters. To use a ...
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