WordPress Stuff

In 2006, one of my websites was falling apart under the load of hundreds of posts. It was time to find a new blogging engine and luckily I found WordPress. With some HTML, CSS, and PHP knowledge you can really do just about whatever you want with it. I was good with those first two but was a complete novice about PHP when I first started. Luckily there are a lot of people out there willing to help out beginners and share what they know. Now I feel I'm at a point where I can give a little bit back. I don't have the time to check out support forums and I can't really give out email advice. But I can post some things here that might help out other WordPress users trying to solve issues they have that I went through.

Please note that I'm not going to pretend there aren't better, cleaner, or more efficient ways to do some of these things out there. All I can tell you is what I've done on my sites. Also, as I mentioned above, a lot of what I have learned came from others. There are a lot of WordPress sites out where you can find how to do things. I'm not going to just copy and paste interesting stuff from there to here. The following is code I either created or (more usually) adapted to serve a specific purpose on one of my sites that might also be useful to others.


POST EXPIRE

: If you run a WordPress installation with two loops, one of which is a "featured" loop that shows the most recent post in a certain category, POST-EXPIRE will show you how to make that section disappear and have its post move to your other loop after a certain number of days.

POST LITE

: If you run a WordPress installation with two loops, one of which is a "featured" loop that shows the most recent post in a certain category and the other a loop that shows the rest of your content, POST-LITE will show you how to selectively make certain featured posts appear in the top loop but then not move to the bottom loop when a new featured post goes up.

SMART BACK TO LAST PAGE

: Create a back button that only appears in a certain category and doesn't send readers off your site.