WordPress archives for a single category
I've had a little rash of Google hits for variations on "wp_get_archives for single category" over the last couple of days. I hate to have to tell you this, people-from-Google, but that's the wrong template tag. Let's take a quick look at template tags for creating archives: wp_get_archives() creates a date-based list of archives' pages. By default, they're monthly, but you can add a... Read more
How to fix "Press This" 404 errors
As the White King advised, I'll begin at the beginning. Press This is a bookmarklet built into WordPress, that allows you to grab bits of the web and post them easily to your blog. If you're not already using it, find it in Admin > Tools; drag-and-drop the link to your browser's bookmarks bar, and you'll have a handy button for instant blogging without cut and paste. At least, you should do.... Read more
How to reset your WordPress password when you can't get in to admin
Changing your WordPress password is easy enough if you can actually sign in to WP - just go to Users > My Profile, scroll to the bottom and input the new pw twice: job done. But if you can't get into WordPress in the first place, things get a little more complicated. What you're supposed to do is go through the password reset routine: from your WP login screen... Read more
Plugin : No Curly Quotes
One of the most annoying things WordPress does is to turn perfectly good inverted commas and double quotes into curly quotes ‘ ’ and “ ”. This might look pretty (depending on what font you're using, it actually looks rather ugly), but if you're using WordPress to share snippets of code, it messes things up horribly. I blogged before about how to turn this behaviour off... Read more
4 plugins to share your posts on social networking sites
It's weird how everyone wants to know the same thing at once: today's question (it's been asked by three separate people) is "how do you get those little links for Facebook and Twitter on the bottom of your posts?" There are any number of ways to add individual site buttons to your posts, but here are four plugins that make it easy for you and link to a whole bunch of different networks at once.... Read more
WordPress 2.8.4 security release available
There's a new release of WordPress available this morning: 2.8.4 is labelled a security release, so you should upgrade as soon as possible. If there's not a link on your dashboard, you can upgrade automatically through Tools > Upgrade. A word also about what this upgrade is for. Late yesterday (if you're in my time zone), a vulnerability was discovered: it was possible to generate a new... Read more
There's no place like is_home : WordPress conditional tags
Conditional tags are used in WordPress to change content according to what sort of page is being displayed. is_home() will test if the page is your blog's home page; is_single() tests if it's a single post page. Why do this when the WordPress template hierarchy tests for these things anyway? Most obviously, conditional tags help to cut down the number of theme files you need: if there are... Read more
How a WordPress theme works
When you're creating or modifying a WordPress theme so it works the way you want it to, one of the most important things to understand is which file WordPress is using to create which page. This post looks at how WordPress's template hierarchy works, and answers questions like "if I don't have an archive.php, what next?" WordPress is database-driven. This means that rather than creating a... Read more
Tweaking Twitter Tools to show your URL
I love Twitter Tools. It's one of my favourite plugins for two reasons: it does a whole bunch of different things that I'd expect to need different plugins for, and it always works. But one thing's always slightly bugged me. When it creates a tweet for a new blog post, it sends Twitter the whole, long pretty permalink, and Twitter automatically shortens that to a bit.ly URL. Frankly, I'd... Read more
Help! I can't activate my WordPress feed
I've heard from a few people new to WordPress that they're having trouble finding where to activate their WordPress RSS feed. This is a great problem because it has a very simple solution: You don't need to activate your RSS feed in WordPress. Find the feed for your blog posts by adding /feed to your main blog URL - and this will work for your wordpress.com blog too. More about RSS... Read more
