Ever need to add your own class to your WordPress comment template but not sure how because of the function comment_class that controls the classes? Check out the function comment_class and you will see adding your own custom classes very easily.

Allow this sounds pretty basic - it is a lifesaver for doing a lot of customizations.

There a are two functions that are used quite a bit to conditionally show content on the very front page (home page or page 1 of your blog). First - we had the function is_home(), but in WordPress version 2.5 - a new function was introduced: is_front_page().

You might think both would conditionally only display content on the home page (front page, page 1 of your blog) - but you actually need to use the following code to accomplish showing something ONLY on the front page of your paged blog:

So - if you want to easily show something on what I would consider the front page - use the code above to successfully achieve that. (This is particularly helpful if you have ads that run speficically on the home page and others that are ROS (run of site).

Further reading:

• documentation on conditional tags
• Bug Report on this issue

There are many times when you need to show or get the top most (root) parent category in WordPress - regardless of how many subcategories you might be deep. I have used this logic for page navigation (highlight the top parent tab) - as well as within some custom loops/sidebar code.

They way to do this:

To test this you can simply put it in your header and echo out $topParent and you will see the "slug" of the category.
If you want to see the category name and not necessarily the slug - you can simply echo $topParentName.

There is a great function you might be aware of that allows you to get one WordPress post and display it anywhere you would like (header, sidebar, home page, etc).

To show only one post, use the function get_post.

Example:

The code above will show the title and content of the post with the post ID of 10. If you are not sure what your post ID is, go to the manage screen in the WP-Admin, and hover over the post title. In your browser status bar, you will see the URL - and the post ID is the number at the end of the URL.

If you ever wanted to only show the content of the category you were on in the category view of WordPress (instead of the category you are on plus all of it's subcategories - you can easily do so by adding the code below to the template that is used to show your category content

You would start your loop with this:

Put your title, content functions here

and where you normally see the

call, put

to close the additional (in_category) if statement.

This code gets the current category and then only displays categories that are in that category (not sub category)

If you would like to exclude one post from your blog, archive, search results or wherever you need to on your blog, you can do so by putting in a small piece of code within the particular WordPress loop:

The following example will show all posts except for the post with the ID of 179:

This is something that I get a lot of requests for and is very useful in a number of situations.

If you ever need to exclude a single category from a WordPress page (archives, index, category page, etc) you can easily do so by using a little conditional tag code within the WordPress loop.

The example below will skip over any post that is in the category with the ID of 35:

This can be helpful if you want to not show a particular category in your blog (if you have a category based site setup) - or if you want to hide some categories from your search results.

I needed to be able filter out the text "Private:" for posts and pages that were password protected but did not want to edit any core WordPress files. To filter out that text, I added the following code into my functions.php file (within my theme directory):

(I also posted this filter in the WordPress Support Forum)

There are several tidbits of code that I have collected over the past few years that make it easier and easier to turn a simple WordPress installation into a very functional content management system (CMS). There are many times when it would be nice to show logged in members certain bits of information (certain categories, posts, or just a simple "Welcome back!") and of course there is a simple way of doing this:

That bit of code will allow you to do something like this which will allow you to show the logged in user's preferred user name (selected in the User preferences), and then a list of member only pages (private page parent is page ID 20 - I am showing all sub pages of the members-only pages marked as private). If the user is not logged in, they will get a Welcome visitor! greeting :

You can make it as simple as a change in greeting for members and non-members, or put in specific logic like I did with showing the pages. The potential is limitless.

There are some times when you want to limit your search to a particular category, or perhaps multiple categories. This is relatively simple to do in WordPress by adding a hidden field to your search code. (See example below)

You can see I added my hidden input field on the third line. When I add this in, it then adds onto the query used to search. Your search will go from something like http://www.sandboxdev.com/?s=WordPress to http://www.sandboxdev.com/?s=WordPress&cat=22 and will only return posts in the category ID you choose.