/**
 * Custom Title Case for the_title()
 * @returns $content (title with title case)
 */
add_filter( 'the_title', 'sdac_use_title_case' );
add_filter( 'wp_title', 'sdac_use_title_case' );
function sdac_use_title_case( $content ) {
	$content = ucwords( $content );
	return $content;
}

// Adjust your author permalink
add_action( 'init', 'custom_theme_init' );
function custom_theme_init() {
   global $wp_rewrite;
   // Change the value of the author permalink to teacher
   $wp_rewrite->author_base = 'teacher';
}

Flush your permalinks (Settings > Permalinks) and now all your /author/ pages will now be /teacher/.

Getting the general query together was a snap – but the orderby did not work unless I had the meta_key defined (this is documented but was overlooked initially).

Example

$now = time();
$args = array(
	'category_name' => 'Events',
	'meta_query' => array(
		array(
			'key' => 'sdac_event_time_stamp',
			'value' => $now,
			'compare' => '>=',
			'type' => 'NUMERIC'
		)
	),
	'meta_key' => 'sdac_event_time_stamp',
	'order' => 'ASC',
	'orderby' => 'meta_value_num'
 );
$events_query = new WP_Query( $args);

If you take a look at the query itself – the trick was to capture the time now ($now) and then use the compare within the meta_query. Overall – this sort of query makes working with custom fields a lot easier. If you have not checked it out yet – take a look.

Documentation
Function Reference/WP Query

Example: You have a WordPress site set up to show/sell products (in this example – you sell books and posters). You have a custom taxonomy called “catalog” that you use to organize all the products.

If you want to show all items that are marked “posters” in your custom catalog taxonomy you can simply use this query:

query_posts( array( 'catalog' => 'posters' ) );

Of course – you can create more complicated custom taxonomy queries, but this will get you started. By using custom taxonomies (and custom post types) – you can really open the door to creating complex content management systems (and/or really cool sites that need something more than your standard categories/tags/posts/pages).

Further documentation: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/query_posts

Remember – keep it simple!

Change the Length

Instead of only showing the default 55 words where you want to change it to something longer or shorter. To change this – just add/modify this in your functions.php file:

add_filter('excerpt_length', 'sdac_excerpt_length');
function sdac_excerpt_length( $length ) {
	return 75;
}

In that code example – I am setting the length to be 75 words.

Change the Ending

Instead of showing the default [...] after the excerpt – you can omit that or change it. To change this – just add/modify this in your functions.php file:

add_filter('excerpt_more', 'jappler_excerpt_more');
function jappler_excerpt_more( $more ) {
        global $post;
	return '... <a>ID ).'"&gt;Read More &raquo;</a>';
}

In that example – I added a read more which links to the post permalink. (This filter is available with WordPress 2.9+)

Hopefully these examples will help a little bit the next time you want to use the excerpt but wished it was easy to change the output.

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

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:

<p>Show this text only on the home page</p>

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

They way to do this:

// get parent category slug
$parentCatList = get_category_parents($cat,false,',');
$parentCatListArray = split(",",$parentCatList);
$topParentName = $parentCatListArray[0];
$sdacReplace = array(" " => "-", "(" => "", ")" => "");
$topParent = strtolower(strtr($topParentName,$sdacReplace));

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.

To show only one post, use the function get_post.

Example:

post_title;
$sdac_content = $show_post_id->post_content;
?>
<h2></h2>

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.

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)