February 14, 2010
Everyone seems to have asked this one this week, so here goes 
The short answer is no, Twitter Tools will only send the automatic notifications of a new blog post to ONE Twitter account. And that's one Twitter account per WordPress install, not one Twitter account per blogger. The easy way around that is to use Twitter Tools to automatically publish to one Twitter account, and something... Read more
September 7, 2009
One feature WordPress lacks is the facility to edit multiple posts at once. If you've changed your URL, for example, you'll be faced with editing dozens or even hundreds of hard-coded image tags in your posts. Moving domains from one host to another often causes WP to render single quotes as “ or â€~, and British pound signs as Á£ - editing all those by hand isn't a task I'd relish... Read more
September 5, 2009
the_category() is the WordPress template tag which shows the category your post is in. If the post is in multiple categories, it will output them all, linked to the respective archive page. By default, the_category() creates an unordered list (i.e. a vertical list with bullet points); this looks a bit odd with most themes, so you might want to change it to an inline list separated with... Read more
August 19, 2009
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
August 11, 2009
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
August 10, 2009
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
August 2, 2009
If you're new to WordPress, the_excerpt() is a template tag that allows you to include just the first 55 words of a post. It's useful if you want a magazine-style front page with lots of snippets of posts; some themes also use it in sidebars for teasers for recent posts. The problem with the_excerpt() is it's not very flexible. It's fixed at 55 words. It's wrapped in <p> tags. The... Read more
July 26, 2009
I have to say that if you've ever had the slightest inclination to write a WordPress plugin, Vladimir Prelovac's book is exactly what you need. I'll write a proper review once I've finished it, because (like reading the best erotica) I have to keep stopping. So if for no other reason than to amuse future-me at how basic I once was, here's what I wrote this afternoon. It translates blog posts into... Read more
July 21, 2009
I had my first sneak preview of this book at WordCamp in Birmingham last year, and was pretty excited to see the nice people at Packt putting out books specifically about WordPress. I've yet to read the rest of the series, but I must say I'm disappointed in the Theme Design offering. When a book has a title like WordPress Theme Design, you expect its remit to be pretty specific: it should be... Read more
June 27, 2009
If you're running a multi-author blog, you've probably thought about including biographical and contact details for each author either on the posts that they write, or on a separate profile page. Though WP admin's users section gives you plenty of options for inputting information, from a potted life-story to your AIM handle, most themes don't take advantage of this. So today, we're going to look... Read more