Posts Tagged ‘blog’
How to add Related Posts with (or without) Thumbnails to your WP Blog
July 20, 2009 by Emily
Tutorials
Adding related posts to your blog is a great way to help your readers find other posts on your site that interest them. And if you have ads, increasing the number of pageviews on your blog can turn out to be quite lucrative. I recently had a request from a client to use a certain widget that she had seen on many other blogs that adds a list of recent posts along with a thumbnail image from that post. But after looking at the widget and researching the many other plugins that are available to add this functionality, I decided I wanted to find a way to code it directly into the template.
One reason for this is that the more plugins installed on a blog, the more that can slow down the loading time of that blog. If you can hard-code a function into the template, it’s almost always preferable to using a plugin. Plus many of the plugins or widgets I looked at gave very little control over things like styling or where the list appears in the template or even how they even figured out what was “related”. What if you want them to be related by tag instead of category or vice versa? What if you just want other posts by the same author?
After doing some more googling and modifying some of the code I found I figured out how to do everything I wanted to and more. My client was extremely pleased with the results and was amazed that I’d even been able to implement it without using a plugin or the widget she had originally wanted:
“It IS cool! A zillion people are going to see it now and want it on their WP blogs! Thanks!”
Which leads us to this post. I thought I would share my findings so that you can implement the same feature on your own WordPress blog. Below I will show you how to add related posts by category, tag or author. I will preface this by saying you should probably have some very basic knowledge about how to edit a template in WordPress, but for the most part, you can copy the code directly and paste it into your template. That’s it. For people with more advanced knowledge I’ll point out things that you can edit further and customize to your liking.
7 commentsWordPress 2.8 “Baker” Released
June 11, 2009 by Emily
Around the Web,Downloads
The newest version of WordPress dropped late in the day yesterday. 2.7 was a very big release, completely changing the admin area and adding lots of new features but 2.8 seems to be more about taking all that new stuff and making improvements to it. They’ve also added a few new features that they probably wanted to get to in 2.7, but just didn’t have the time for. The new improvements and features include:
- Optimizing scripts and styles to make WP faster.
- Adding a theme directory, similar to the already built-in plugin directory, so you can search for and install new themes right from your admin.
- Redoing the widget system for easier use and customization.
- Improvements to the screen options (the tab in the top right-hand corner of the admin). Having a big monitor, I especially like being able to choose 3 or 4 columns on my dashboard. You can also now choose how many entries to display on the Edit Post/Page screens. Check out the tab on any page in the admin and see what options you have, in a lot of places you can get rid of things you don’t use so the admin is less cluttered.
- Improvements to custom taxonomies, which you can read more about in detail here.
- Improvements to the theme editor like syntax highlighting and numbering (you probably don’t care about this unless you are a developer).
Go here to see the full, very long list of improvements in 2.8.
Hopefully, you already have 2.7 in which case you’ll be able to upgrade to 2.8 in seconds with the click of the Upgrade button, but you can still download it here and install the old fashioned way. If you are a Swank Web Hosting customer and still have WP 2.7 or less feel free to contact us for a free upgrade, we’ve noticed an uptick of site hacking lately, especially on WP blogs with version 2.5 or lower.
WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” Now Available!
December 11, 2008 by Emily
Around the Web,Downloads
After a bunch of betas and two release candidates the WordPress team has finally released WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” for download. 2.7 is a HUGE leap forward as far as the interface as well as new features it offers. The team has really been listening to it’s users and quietly going down the list adding the most requested features starting back in 2.5 earlier this year, but 2.7 is definitely the culmination of this.
The biggest difference in 2.7 is the new admin interface. Yes, another new admin interface. But this one seems to be here to stay (Matt says we should expect it to still basically be the same a year from now). It was developed with the user in mind to make the area simple to navigate and with as few clicks as possible. The dashboard and the Post pages are also almost completely customizable giving you the ability to drag and drop boxes wherever you want or removing them altogether. Also, don’t forget to check “Your Profile” under Users as the 2.5 color scheme feature is still there and personally, I think the blue color scheme is much nicer than the default gray one.
Perhaps the best new feature in 2.7 is finally the ability to perform one-click upgrades directly from the admin area. No more manual upgrades! No more having to pay your designer to do your upgrades (believe me we don’t mind!). Related to this is the new plugin interface which lets you search for and install new plugins from the plugins database directly inside your admin area. With the plugins database integrated the themes database can’t be that far behind!
Also new is the Comments and Post/Page management interfaces. You can reply to comments directly for the admin now. If you need to edit a category or a tag on a post, you no longer need to open the whole post up, just use the quick edit link to change those things directly from the post management page.
For comments, they have also added new features like threaded comments and paged comments. However, these features will need to be added to your current template, they won’t work unless you have a 2.7 compatible theme. If you need help making your theme 2.7 compatible (or even 2.5 compatible since many themes still don’t support gravatars) feel free to contact us and we can get you set up with all these snazzy new features.
So what are you waiting for? Upgrade your blog today! We can help if you need it, and just think, next time you’ll be able to upgrade with a the click of a button! This is not one of those releases where you need to wait around and see if anything goes wrong. As I mentioned above, there have been several betas and release candidates, plus it already went live on WordPress.com, so millions of people are already using it. This is a very strong release with features that you don’t want to miss out on.
Here’s a nice visual introduction video:
Here are some resources to check out plugin/theme compatibility as well as upgrading your theme to use new 2.7 features:
- 2.7 Plugin Compatibility
- 2.7 Theme Compatibility
- Migrating your Plugins and Themes to 2.7
- How to Create a 2.7 Compatible Comments.php
