Category: WordPress

SDAC WP Plugin Release: SDAC Related Content

I am pleased to announce our first official WordPress plugin release: SDAC Related Content. This plugin was something I created as I had a need to have a related posts plugin for some VIP clients. The plugin had to not modify any DB tables and it had to use caching.

Version 1 of the plugin was a development version that I used for a few clients. Version 2 added an admin panel under Settings in the WordPress admin. This admin panel allows all kinds of customization.

Enjoy!

Category Feeds

A number of my WordPress clients recently have been wishing for a way to offer multiple feeds with specific posts in them completely unaware that this is actually very easy to do with WordPress without any modifications.

You can simply accomplish specific content feeds by using category feeds. For example. If you have a WordPresssports site with 3 categories: Football, Baseball, Hockey and you want to offer a feed specific to each category – all you would need to do is to add “/feed/” to the end of the category URL.

Example: Your category feed is: http://www.sports.com/category/football. For this site – your category feed for football would be: http://www.sports.com/category/football/feed.

Advertising multiple feeds for your site can be very attractive for a few reasons:

  1. Better Focus You can offer subject specific feeds since not all people like to read about everything. (ex. A reader likes your site for your coverage on a certain subject matter – but does not really care or come back for posts about anything else. Ex. With category feeds – you can really let the user/reader decide what they want content to read about on your site.
  2. More Options = Happy Readers People like options. You would be surprised how many people get excited to pick and choose what they want to subscribe to vs. getting everything all at once. If they are forced to get all the content and only 15% of your content pertains to something they do not care about – they are likely to not subscribe at all or after awhile – stop reading your feed. If you offer some choice – people are more likely to subscribe because they will only get the content that they care about.
  3. Featured Posts If you want to offer a special feed for “featured” posts – all you need to do is make certain posts in a category called “Featured” and you then offer a hand selected featured posts feed to your readers.

If you want to list all your categories and their feed links, you can simply add this into your WordPress theme:

<ul>

</ul>

SDAC Recommends: WP Plugin: http:BL

Using Akismet for spam control has worked out really well over the last few years but I started seeing more and more spam get through (daily) so I decided I needed to look into something that would compliment Akismet. Once I installed the http:BL plugin – I have not had one spam comment get through. About the plugin:

http:BL WordPress Plugin allows you to verify IP addresses of clients connecting to your blog against the Project Honey Pot database. Thanks to http:BL API you can quickly check whether your visitor is an email harvester, a comment spammer or any other malicious creature.

If you are having any problems with spam getting through, check out: http:BL.

WordPress 2.7.1 is Released

WordPress 2.7.1 has officially been released. The update contains a number of bug fixes. For more information on WordPress version 2.7.1, read the official WordPress version 2.7.1 documentation.

Download the latest versions of WordPress: <a href="http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.7.1.zipWordPress 2.7.1

View All Options for WordPress

Ever need to view all options for all your plugins (and standard WordPress options like home URL, etc)?
You can view every option available (and edit most) by going to: http://www.yoursiteurl.com/wp-admin/options.php (assuming WordPress is in the root folder).

So now if you need to look at options, make changes, or see a particular value – you can do so on one page.

Conditionally Show Only On Home Page (Front Page)

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:


<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:

Get Top Parent Category (WordPress)

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:

// 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.

WordPress 2.7 is Released

WordPress 2.7 has officially been released. The update contains a number of new features and functions but most notably – the admin has been redesigned and made very customizable. For more information on WordPress version 2.7, read the official WordPress version 2.7 documentation which also contains a video that covers the new features/interface.

Download the latest versions of WordPress: WordPress 2.7

WordPress 2.6.5 is Released

WordPress 2.6.5 has officially been released (version 2.6.4 was skipped). The update contains a critical security fix (XSS exploit) as well as a few bug fixes. For more information on WordPress version 2.6.5, read the official WordPress version 2.6.5 documentation.
Download the latest versions of WordPress: WordPress 2.6.5