Making your post links pretty

Pretty permalinks are links that are more pleasing to the eye than standard links and, ultimately, more pleasing to search-engine spiders. (See Book V for an explanation of why search engines like pretty permalinks.) Pretty permalinks look something like this:http://yourdomain.com/2011/01/01/pretty-permalinksBreak down that URL, and you see the date when the post was made, in year/month/day format. You also see the topic of the post.To choose how your permalinks look, click Permalinks in the Settingsdrop-down list. The Permalink Settings page opens.In...

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Content

The first pillar of my daily action on the Web is content. Although the Web has seen a growing shift away from content to community, I still believethat content is king. Communities based around common interests fall flat unless they have the content there for people to gravitate around. Facebook groups, for example, dominate because of the wealth of content they offer: the posts, links, videos, and other media people create within that group. Without the content, the group wouldn’t exi...

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Using the tag for images

When you use the WordPress image uploader to include an image in yourpost or page, a Description text box appears, in which you can enter adescription of the image. (We cover using the WordPress image uploaderin detail in Book IV, Chapter 3.) This text automatically becomes what’sreferred to as the <ALT> tag.The <ALT> tag’s real purpose is to provide a description of the image forpeople who, for some reason or another, can’t actually see the image. In atext-based browser that doesn’t display images, for example, visitors see thedescription,...

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Creating categories that attract search engines

One little-known SEO tip for WordPress users: The names you give thecategories you create for your blog provide rich keywords that attractsearch engines like bees to honey. A few services — Technorati (http://technorati.com) being one of the biggest — treat categories in WordPress like tags. These services use those categories to classify recent blog posts on any given topic. The names you give your categories in WordPress can serve as topic tags for Technorati and similar services.Search engines also see your categories as keywords that are relevant...

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Writing content with readers in mind

When you write your posts and pages, and want to make sure that your con-tent appears in the first page of search results so that people will find yoursite, you need to keep those people in mind when you’re composing thecontent.When search engines visit your site to crawl through your content, theydon’t see how nicely you’ve designed your site. They’re looking for words — which they’re grabbing to include in their databases. You, the site owner, want to make sure that your posts and pages use the words and phrases that you want to include in search...

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Planting keywords in your Web site

If you’re interested in a higher ranking for your site, we strongly recommend using custom permalinks. By using custom permalinks, you’re automatically inserting keywords into the URLs of your posts and pages, letting searchengines include those posts and pages in their databases of information on those topics. If a provider that has the Apache mod_rewrite module enabled hosts your site, you can use the custom permalink structure for your WordPress-powered site.Keywords are the first step on your journey toward great search engineresults. Search...

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Optimizing Your WordPress Blog

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of preparing your site tomake it as easy as possible for the major search engines to crawl and cacheyour data in their systems so that your site appears as high as possible inthe search returns. Book V contains more information on search engine opti-mization, as well as marketing your blog and tracking its presence in searchengines and social media by using analytics. This section gives you a briefintroduction to SEO practices with WordPress, and from here, you can moveon to Book V to take a real...

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Working with Custom Post Types

A new feature in WordPress (new as of version 3.0) is a feature calledcustom post types. This feature allows you, the site owner, to create different content types for your WordPress site that give you more creative control over how different types of content are entered, published, and displayed on your WordPress Web site.Personally, we wish WordPress had called this feature custom content types so that people didn’t incorrectly think that custom post types pertain to posts only. Custom post types aren’t really the posts that you know as blog...

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Custom Styles for Sticky, Category, and Tag Posts

The method for putting a very basic WordPresstheme together, which includes a Main Index template that uses theWordPress Loop. You can use a custom tag to display custom styles forsticky posts, categories, and tags on your blog. That special tag looks likethis:<div <?php post_class() ?> id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”>The post_class() section is the coolest part of the template. This tem-plate tag tells WordPress to insert specific HTML markup in your templatethat allows you to use CSS to make custom styles for sticky posts, catego-ries,...

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Comprehension the Framework Requirements

When you can begin blogging with Wordpress, you need to set up your base camp. Doing so includes more than basically downloading andinstating the Wordpress programming. You additionally need to create your area (your web journal location) and your Web hosting administration (the place that houses your website). In spite of the fact that you at first download your Wordpress programming onto your hard drive, you instate it on a Web host.Getting a Web server and introducing programming on it is something you mayas of recently have done on your site;...

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The Prevalent Provision of Adobe Reader

Adobe Reader, the  prevalent provision  for review Pdf records crosswise over stages and gadgets is presently ready in the Windows Phone Store for all the Windows Phone 8 clients.The official Adobe Reader for Windows Phone permits you to gain entrance to an extensive variety of Pdf sorts incorporating the watchword secured reports. The application gives you a chance to view, open and inquiry Pdf records and gives you a chance to zoom in on content or pictures.The route all through the Pdf substance is smooth and you can utilize the...

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Using Sidebar Templates

You can create separate sidebar templates for different pages of your site byusing a simple include statement. When you write an include statement,you’re simply telling WordPress that you want it to include a specific file ona specific page.The code that pulls the usual Sidebar template (sidebar.php) into all theother templates, such as the Main Index template (index.php), looks likethis:<?php get_sidebar(); ?>What if you create a page and want to use a sidebar that has different infor-mation from what you have in the Sidebar template (sidebar.php)?...

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Adding the tag

When you have the category ID number in hand, you’re ready to add the <query_post> tag to your template.Here are two parameters that you can use with the <query_posts> tag:✦ showposts=X: This parameter tells WordPress how many posts youwant to display. If you want to display only three posts, enter show-posts=3.✦ cat=X: This parameter tells WordPress that you want to pull posts fromthe category with this specific ID number. If the ID category is 40, entercat=40.Follow these steps to add the <query_post> tag to your template:1....

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Finding the category ID number

You can’t easily find the unique ID number for a category unless you know where to look. To locate it, follow these steps:1. Click Categories in the Posts drop-down list.The Categories page opens.2. Hover your mouse over the name of the category for which you needthe ID number.The category ID number appears in the status bar of your browser.Figure 6-5 shows the category ID in a browser’s status bar. (MozillaFirefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari have similar status bars.) The last part of the URL displayed in the status bar is tag_ID=1, which means...

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Pulling in Content from a Single Category

WordPress makes it possible to pull in very specific types of content on yourWeb site through the <query_posts> template tag. If you place this tem-plate tag before The Loop (see Book VI), it lets you specify which categoryyou want to pull information from. If you have a category called WordPressand you want to display the last three posts from that category — on your front page, in your blog sidebar, or somewhere else on your site — you can use this template tag.The <query_posts> template tag has several parameters that let you dis-play...

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Creating a Template for Each Post Category

You don’t have to limit yourself to creating a static-page template for yoursite. You can use specific templates for the categories you’ve created onyour blog (which we talk about in Book III, Chapter 7) and create unique sec-tions for your site, as Lisa did (with an espresso chaser, of course).Figure 6-4 shows Lisa’s design portfolio. Design Portfolio is the name of a category that she created in the WordPress Dashboard. Instead of using a static page for the display of her portfolio, she used a category template to handle the display of all posts...

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Creating Different Page Views Using WordPress Templates

The Add New Page page opens, where you can write a new post to your WordPress blog.1. Click Add New in the Pages drop-down list.2. Type the title in the Title text box and the page content in the largetext box.3. Select the page template from the Page Template drop-down list.By default, the Page Template drop-down list in the Attributes module appears on the right side of the page. You can reposition the modules on this page; see Book III, Chapter 2 for more information.4. Click the Publish button to save and publish the page to your site.Figure...

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How to Create a Template

To use a page template, you have to create one. You can create this file in a text-editor program, such as Notepad. (To see how to create a template, flip over to Book VI, which gives you extensive information on WordPress templates and themes.) To create an About page, for example, you can save the template with the name about.php.When you have your template created, follow these steps to make it part of WordPress:1. Upload the template file to your WordPress theme folder.You can find that folder on your Web server in /wp-content/themes.2. Log...

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Using WordPress Templates

As we explain on the previous posts , a static page contains content thatdoesn’t appear on the blog page, but as a separate page within your site.You can have numerous static pages on your site, and each page can havea different design, based on the template you create. (Flip to Book VI to find out all about choosing and using templates on your site.) You can create several static-page templates and assign them to specific pages within your site by adding code to the top of the static-page templates.Here’s the code that appears at the top of the...

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Exploring Different Uses for Custom Fields

In this chapter, we use the example of adding your current mood to yourblog posts by using Custom Fields. But you can use Custom Fields to defineall sorts of different data on your posts and pages; you’re limited only byyour imagination when it comes to what kind of data you want to include.Obviously, we can’t cover every possible use for Custom Fields, but we can give you some ideas that you may want to try out on your own site — at the very least, you can implement some of these ideas just to get yourself into the flow of using Custom Fields,...

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