03.11.08 |
Reply | Tags: News sources often show user comments in reverse order, with newest comments first. That’s useful when comments aren’t usually threaded or there’s a lot of them.
For Wordpress, it needs either a plugin or some hacking. The manual tweak is quite simple. Just replace in comments.php this:
foreach ($comments as $comment) :
for this:
foreach (array_reverse($comments) as $comment) :
There’s more info in the Wordpress support forum.
02.25.08 |
Reply | Tags: As Wordpress user, did you ever pay attention to that «Post Slug» box in the sidebar of the new/edit post page? It’s there for a good reason. If you are using the cute permalinks that use the post title as part of the URL, chances are you are letting it pick sometimes more keywords than Google will be really happy about. An interview with the Google guy Matt Cutts makes it clear: if your permalink is too wordy, it will start to look not very specific and, therefore, each keyword in it will hold less than nominal weight for search results. That’s why you edit the post slug before letting it go on air.
See this same post. There’s nothing specifically wrong with the title, it uses only four meaningful words. But, if I was using the category as a keyword in the post permalink, the word Wordpress would appear duplicated. That would start to look dangerously spammy.
It’s not just that. Even if I’m talking about how this issue is fixed for Wordpress, the post content is useful for anyone using «google-friendly permalinks» as a query. They may figure how to use this knowledge for their own Content Management System. So, even though I am a nice fellow that blogs for the experience and not to pay bills, I should think this post can help more people if the word Wordpress is removed from the url. After all, it’s already in the page title, the post header, and several times in the body text. If Mr. Google —that octopus dude we know they hide in a box classifying the Internet all day long— really thinks it’s an important keyword, he’s not really going to miss it.
But, in my opinion, the real issue is the failure of purpose. Did you ever hear this style of permalinks described as «pretty»? Well, when they clutter the URL box, look noisy and, for raw URL links, become div width hostile, they aren’t pretty no more. That’s the third and most important reason to edit it. There’s nice but lazy people out there. They may copy your permalink, paste it and go, and since they are referring you, you don’t want to make their blogs and forums look ugly.
02.17.08 |
6 replies | Tags: You can easily filter or exclude categories from the home page and/or the feed. That’s useful to keep them cleaner or, as in my case, to show posts in the visitor’s language.
I’m using this for WP 2.3.3. I show here some of the $query options, just pick the ones you need. This goes in your theme’s functions.php:
function myKewlFilter($query) {
if (($query->is_home) ||($query->is_search) || ($query->is_feed) || ($query->is_archive)) {
$query->set('cat','35, -51');
return $query;
}
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts','myKewlFilter');
The numbers for cat are the category IDs, they are positive to show that category only and negative to exclude all posts from that category. You can find the IDs at Manage | Categories. This won’t work for the category page itself —that’s it, you’ll get the expected category anyway and the filter will be ignored. If you need to do that, read this post about how to combine several categories.
To exclude categories from the prev/next links, use the last two parameters. This excludes the categories 51, 24 and 30:
previous_post_link('« %link','%title', true, '51 and 24 and 30');
02.17.08 |
1 reply | Tags: I needed to AND the selected category and the language category for the categories page. Everywhere else I just added the language category as a filter, that works even for tag pages, but at the categorized posts page I needed to combine both so I would get ‘Whatever posts AND English posts’ instead of ‘Whatever posts OR English posts’. This is what I added on top of the category.php:
//Merging language category with selected category, ignore if bilingual.
$cat_tit = single_cat_title("",false);
if ($wpidioma == 'en') {
$langcat=51;
} elseif ($wpidioma == 'es') {
$langcat=35;
}
query_posts(array('category__and'=>array($langcat,$cat), 'paged'=>$paged));
$cat and $paged are automatically available so there’s no need to load them. query_posts deletes the values that come from $query_string, so I stored the title in a variable and passed the $paged value again.
You may want to read the Wordpress reference page for query_posts about the other parameters it can take.
02.17.08 |
1 reply | Tags: In a bilingual blog based in Wordpress, knowing the tag Id’s is useful to filter the tag cloud so it only includes a specific set of tags. For version 2.3.3, there isn’t any admin page to check them, so they must be found manually.
Since, once I’ve got my tag clouds filtered, I’ll need very rarely to check the Id’s —to add a new tag to the list—, I went with a quick and dirty solution:
$posttags = get_the_tags();
if ($posttags) {
echo '<!-- Tag Ids: ';
foreach($posttags as $tag) { echo $tag->term_id . ' '; }
echo ' -->';
}
Adding this in single.php before or after the tag line allows me to read the Id’s just by selecting and viewing the source code of the selection (I use Firefox). Then I can add the numbers to wp_tag_cloud with ‘include=542,543,…’.
