The WordPress Codex says that “WordPress, straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines“. Well, that may be true … to a certain degree, but there is more than enough work that you’ll need to do after you’ve installed WordPress in order to get it playing nicely with Google (and other search engines).
What most people don’t realize is that, while Google does love WordPress, it’s WordPress THEMES that actually interface with search engines … not WordPress itself.
So, that means that a WordPress theme could very well be hurting your rankings in the search engines … not helping! (more…)
If there was one question I get asked the most about WordPress themes, it’s this one: how do I make a custom static homepage at the root of my blog’s address (e.g. http://example.com/) and have my blog posts go into a /blog section (http://example.com/blog)?
WordPress is becoming more and more usable as a Content Management System, so naturally the question comes up.
But they don’t want to abandon the idea of a blog either. Blogs can be an integral part of a business website, and it makes sense that businesses and individuals would want the site and the blog managed from the same WordPress installation. (more…)
I’ve recently released a plugin that is far more robust than the methods outlined below. It actually duplicates the functionality of WordPress Page Templates, and allows you to create individual post templates, selectable on a per post basis via a dropdown menu. Head over to my WordPress Plugins page and find the “Post Templates Plugin”
UPDATED:
Austin recommends using a filter in your functions.php file as an alternative to the method below. IMO, his suggestion is much simpler and quite elegant. Here’s the code to add to your theme’s functions.php file. (be sure you paste this code between <?php ?> tags):
add_filter('single_template', create_function('$t', 'foreach( (array) get_the_category() as $cat ) { if ( file_exists(TEMPLATEPATH . "/single-{$cat->term_id}.php") ) return TEMPLATEPATH . "/single-{$cat->term_id}.php"; } return $t;' ));
It helps solve the multiple categories issue since it cycles through all the categories in the array and checks to see which one of them has an associated post template. When it finds one, it uses the post template file, but if it doesn’t, then it falls back on the default single.php template.
So if you are used to placing posts in multiple categories, be sure to only create post templates for the categories you know won’t ever conflict.
Again, I highly recommend using this technique. It’s much simpler and works much better. If you care to, however, the original article is still below.
END UPDATE
A few months ago, I wrote a post over at the Blog Herald explaining how to set up and use WordPress Page Templates to control the way indivudual WordPress “Pages” appeared on your blog. The process was pretty simple … create the page template, insert the necessary code at the top of the file, and upload it to your themes folder.
What what about blog posts? As far as I could tell, there’s no way to do a similar thing with single posts without some manual code (see the “Unique Single Template” section).
Is it possible to have post templates like page templates???
Cory sent me this simple question a few days ago, and it got me thinking. So I started investigating. (more…)
OK, first of all I want to preface this by saying that I have never, and will never try to game any ranking system. OOO — take that back, I did include sponsored links in some of my first free WordPress themes, but other than that, I’ve never tried to game a ranking engine. AND, I would never recommend you doing so either.
However, one of the very fortunate side effects of releasing free WordPress themes is that you get a killer amount of backlinks for your trouble.
And to be honest, I don’t really mind recognizing, and leveraging that fact to my benefit.
Always include two links in the footer
That’s right, as of right now, there is no blowback for including a link to the support page of the theme, along with your name as the author. This means (more…)
Over at BlogginPro, the question was posed:
My biggest question is “what will happen if we take the newly updated theme, and place it on a blog running a previous version of WordPress?”
Is there some way to check which version of WordPress is being run, or will we have to put out a WordPress 2.3 only version of each and every theme?
I’m not normally an active commenter on blogs, but since I knew the answer to the question, I figured I’d speak up and answer the question. Because of this, I figured I’d go ahead and answer it here as well.
PHP comes with the built in capability to check to see if a function exists. Since template tags are nothing more than PHP functions, it makes sense that you can very easily use the function_exists condition to check the availability of the function before actually calling it. It would go a little something like this: (more…)
OK, I admit being a sucker for all the “tag hype” in the WordPress Community too. I’ve seen all the WordPress bloggers (that is, bloggers who specialize in WordPress tips) try to be the first to write a tutorial on how to implement tagging in your WordPress theme. I’ve even been tempted to do it myself, although I’ve resisted.
And I subscribe to a good many blogs that specialize in this kind of information too.
And as I’ve been following these blogs, I’ve been waiting on one, JUST ONE, to mention the 2 template tags for “tags” that I noticed in the Default theme that came with my WordPress 2.3 beta download. Seriously, I’ve been waiting to see how long it would take for someone to realize that no one has written on them yet and capitalize on it. But as of yet, no one has (at least that I have seen). So, I decided to take a few minutes and let everyone know about two overlooked template/conditional tags that are available for the new version of WordPress: (more…)
7 Must-Have Plugins
I run at least 5 WordPress powered websites, and every time I add a new site to that list, I have a checklist of plugins that I absolutely HAVE to get installed ASAP! Some of them are simply aesthetic plugins, making the dashboard look pretty or more functional, and others are workhorse plugins, absolutely necessary for the site to run smoothly.
I generally don’t recommend plugins, but everybody has to use them sooner or later. So I wanted to share with you the 7 plugins that I install every time I begin or upgrade a WordPress installation. (more…)