June 8, 2009
The release of WordPress 2.8 is "tentatively" scheduled for 10th June. It looks like the release may even happen on time, so make sure you're ready to upgrade. How to upgrade if you're running WP 2.7 or 2.7.1 If you are a good person 
running the latest version of WordPress, then upgrading will be easy for you. A button will appear on your desktop asking if you wish to upgrade: click... Read more
June 8, 2009
photo credit: gilleskleinWriting Taexalia's new theme this week, I needed a way to exclude posts from her home page based on tags. We didn't want Twitter archive posts to show up in the "featured" postition. Often in this kind of situation, the posts you want to exclude will be from a specific category, but this time, they weren't: they were in a category with other posts that she *would* want... Read more
June 7, 2009
There are some snippets of code that stand you in very good stead, and this one, to find and display the first image in a post, is one such. I wrote it for Dan's blog nearly a year ago, and have used it so many times since, most recently just yesterday for Taexalia's new blog theme. If you have a magazine-style theme, wanting to find the first image in a post and display it on your home page... Read more
June 3, 2009
Another quickie via Google searchers: how do you automatically publish your RSS feed to Twitter? Firstly, be sure that you want to. I've seen eBay sellers and other ecommerce merchants publishing their product listings to Twitter. If that's a couple of dozen items at a time, at one tweet each, it's a surefire way to lose a lot of followers. Think about what you'd like to read. Automation... Read more
May 23, 2009
We looked before at the difference between WordPress categories and tags, but what do you do if you have a million different categories that really should be tags? Fortunately, WP has a built-in tool which allows you to easily convert categories into tags: find it in Admin > Posts > Categories, linked down at the bottom on the right. It's slightly mis-named, as it doesn't actually... Read more
May 21, 2009
Sooner or later, how much you love the WordPress theme you've chosen, you're going to want to change something about it. Maybe you'll want your post titles to be a little larger, or to change fonts or link colours, or to make your sidebar wider. If you already know HTML, CSS and PHP, then head on over to the Theme Editor and start playing. But for everyone else, this post will be a brief... Read more
May 18, 2009
I think more blog inches have been expended discussing commenting than any other aspect of blogging - and perhaps rightly so. Commenting was, when it first started, revolutionary: it turned the internet from a broadcast medium into something so much richer. I don't think it's overstating the case to say that existence of the Web 2.0, post-Cluetrain internet-as-conversation many of us take for... Read more
May 17, 2009
Several Google searches for this question lately, so let's have a look at this particularly odd bit of WordPress jargon. "Slug" refers to the part of the URL used to point to an individual post, a category archive or a tag archive. This post's title is "What's a slug?" but its slug is whats-a-slug: WordPress automatically makes the post title into a URL-friendly version by removing punctuation... Read more
May 17, 2009
Photo courtesy of Eurovision TV The Beta 1 version of WordPress 2.8 was released last night (in the middle of the Eurovision Song Content - what were they thinking of?!). I'm now testing it in a couple of places, and it has some lovely new features: The theme installer is probably the headline for most people. New themes, like plugins, can now be installed from within the WordPress... Read more
May 11, 2009
My how to make an archive page post the other day inexplicably and inexcusably neglected to include consideration of tags. This post should put that right. Adding a list of tags to your archives is actually pretty easy, but it uses a function you might not expect: wp_tag_cloud, which has a useful "format" parameter, allowing you to output a list of tags either as a list, or "flat" - just... Read more