Creating a featured articles section from a particular category

Creating a Featured Articles section for your WordPress blog involves 3 basic steps: Create a new category called Featured. Place the code (provided below) into sidebar.php. Style the Featured section to match the rest of your sidebar. Featured Articles code Place the following code in the preferred location of your sidebar—or anywhere else you may want to display your Featured Articles: <ul> <?php query_posts('category_name=Featured&showposts=5'); while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> <li> <a... [Read the full story]

Adding a Print This Button to Your Theme

If you ever visit our actual website, you’ve probably noticed the “Print This” button that we display below each post.  Depending on the type of website or blog you are running, having a button like this may be a good fit for your blog.  I’ve found it to be good to have this button available to readers for any type of website that offers tutorials, recipes, guides, or pretty much anything that might require a visitor to print something you’ve written. If you think you’d like to offer your readers the option... [Read the full story]

Making a Categories Drop-Down Menu

Tired of your old navigation?  So, what about creating a Magazine-style dropdown menu? I propose here a dropdown menu listing your pages and sub pages, including one last item to show up your categories directly in the menu. HTML and PHP We will start by using WordPress core functions in order to retrieve our pages and categories. Edit the header.php of your theme, and replace your old nav code by this one: <ul id="nav" class="clearfloat"> <li><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/" class="on">Home</a></li> <?php... [Read the full story]

Converting The Author Display To Link To The Author

If you are setting up a WordPress blog to work with a variety of authors, it is probably a good idea to also set up the author display to actually be a link to the bloggers website. For whatever reason, many themes are created to simply display the author’s name using text by default instead of converting it to a link to the author’s website. Fortunately, this is an easy change to make with a minimal amount of coding adjustments required. Here is what you need to do. When editing your theme, you’ll want to look for... [Read the full story]

Converting Your Category Pages to Display Post Titles

I’ve always liked the idea of showing only the post titles on your category pages. If you are good at making post titles, this should help someone navigating your categories to find what they are looking for. First, you’ll want to open your archive.php file and find the post loop. It usually starts with this code (or something similar): <?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> You’ll want to delete everything from that code down to the end of the loop, which usually ends with this: <?php... [Read the full story]