Displaying WordPress categories in a horizontal dropdown menu

One thing more WordPress bloggers have been doing lately is moving their categories over to a horizontal menu, rather than displaying them in the sidebar. Depending on the type of blog you run and how well you keep your categories organized, I think this can be a great idea to help manage the website and improve overall navigation. Doing something like this allows for a much better use of sub-categories, and gives you the option of displaying them in a drop-down to give your blog a much more professional feeling. If you... [Read the full story]

Showing Only a Post Excerpt in WordPress

Depending on the type of blog you run, you may at some point have an interest in only showing only a short excerpt of a post on your blog’s homepage. This could be for a variety of reasons, ranging from attempting to increase page views to trying to make your homepage more easily navigated and organized. Another really popular place for using the post excerpt is for your archive pages, which helps you to avoid being penalized for duplicate content by the search engine spiders. No matter what the reason is, if you are interested... [Read the full story]

Blocking Your WordPress Categories and Archives From Google

We all know that duplicate content can be a problem. People copy your work, re-post it on their website, then you both are penalized for duplicate content! Unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done about that, but did you know that often blogs have duplicate content within their own blog? The biggest culprit for duplicate internal content is your archives page, which is usually used for categories and monthly archives. Unless you only display partial posts in your archives, you’ll want to make sure Google doesn’t... [Read the full story]

Setting Up Auto-Discovery for Your WordPress Feeds

Have you ever noticed that many next generation web browsers will often detect a blog’s feed by displaying a feed icon on the right side of the address bar?  This is something many estabalished sites have taken the time to set up to encourage feed subscribers, but something that most WordPress themes don’t do by default.   In order to instruct next generation web browsers to automatically detect your WordPress blog’s feed(s), you’ll simply need to do is make a quick modification to your header.php file and add... [Read the full story]

Adding Edit Buttons To Your WordPress Theme

Theme authors often forget to do is add “edit” buttons to posts, pages, and comments.   Having access to these buttons can save blog authors a lot of time when trying to manage their blogs.  As a result, I decided to write up a quick tutorial that explains the really simple process of adding edit buttons to your WordPress theme.  If you’d like to add an “Edit” button on your individual posts or pages, here is the code you will want to place somewhere in your post and/or page template (usually called... [Read the full story]