It is a must read for people who wants to learn a lot of tips and tricks.
Enjoy!

This question is also worded like the following questions.

1. Tag and Category Views Don’t Show Images
2. Images and archives
3. How do I expand each individual post for the archive

So, what exactly is the problem?

Archive pages like the category view, or monthly view, or a tag view, do not show the full post’s content.

Why it does not ?

Because most of the themes are designed to only show the excerpt of the post, when people are viewing an archive page.

What is the advantage of it?

1. The search engines [like Google or Yahoo], will not list your archive page as the result of a search. You do not want your site visitors to land on an archive page, instead you want them to land on a single post.
2. Most of the time your site’s visitor, is trying to locate one of your interesting posts that they know it exists on your site. Your archive pages should help them get to it faster.

I do not care about the advantages mentioned above. How do I show the complete post on the archive pages as well?

1. Open up the archive.php and look for

the_excerpt();

in it and replace it with

the_content('Continue Reading');


2. Repeat step 1, for search.php, date.php, category.php [These files may not exist in your theme and if it does not exist, ignore this step]

No..No…I see the advantages, but I do not want the excerpts to be automatically created.
Well…when you write a new post, there is an option at the bottom that says “Optional Excerpt”.
You can paste your own excerpts of the post, into this box, so that they get displayed on the archive pages.
Remember you can also put html content into this box.

but there are people who have customized the theme so much, that they do not want to upgrade their theme with my latest version.
They want to know what exactly I changed for making theme WordPress 2.3 compatible.

The new feature that is added in the WordPress 2.3 system is the Tags functionality.
Once you upgrade your WordPress installation to 2.3, you would see a text box under the ‘Write Post’ area, for adding “tags” to both new and existing posts. This will let you store the tags along with the posts in the database.

Step 1: Display the Tags under each post’s content

Add the following code somewhere after the call to the_content() or the_excerpt() within “the loop” in index.php, archive.php, search.php and single.php.

<p><?php if (function_exists("the_tags")) the_tags("Tags: ", ", ", "<br/>");?></p>

This code makes sure the function "the_tags()" exists, before calling that. This way the theme will still work on earlier versions of WordPress.

One Important thing to Note:

the_tags() method will only work, when you made a call to the_post() method while initializing the loop.
Some themes still use start_wp() method instead of the_post(). Those themes will not show the Tags at all, even when you made a call to the_tags().

Step 2: Display a Tag Cloud on the Sidebar

If your theme is Sidebar Widgets Compatible and you are using the Sidebar Widgets option, you could easily drag and drop the Tag Cloud Widget [that comes with WordPress 2.3] and be done with it.

If not, you can add the following code somewhere in the sidebar.php file.

<?php if (function_exists("wp_tag_cloud")) { ?>
<li>
<h2><?php _e("Tags"); ?></h2>
<p>
<?php wp_tag_cloud(); ?>
</p>
</li>
<?php } ?>

Again, this code checks for the existence of the method, before calling it, just to make sure the theme works fine in previous versions of WordPress.

I think we have covered two important steps so far.
When someone clicks on one of the Tags, it will lead them to an archive page [WordPress loads the archive.php if found within the theme folder].
So we will just add a heading for the Archive page to let them know they are viewing the archives for that given Tag.

We will open up the archive.php. Usually there will be code that checks if this is an archive for category, or month or day etc.
We will add the following lines to it.

<?php if (function_exists("is_tag")&& is_tag()) { ?>
<h2>Archive for the Tag "<?php echo single_tag_title(); ?>"</h2>
<?php } ?>

This will just add a heading in case someone is viewing your archive by Tags.

Wow. Thats it?
Yeah, and your site is now ready to Rock and Roll with WordPress 2.3.

Disclaimer :
While I made sure the code given here works fine with my themes, there is no guarantee that this will work with your theme without any issues. If you do have an issue, doing it manually, please contact your theme author.
Do not post it as a comment here. Thanks.

Well. There are four different selectors for a hyperlink.

You would normally see this at the top of the stylesheet.

a:link {text-decoration:none;color:#ff0000}
a:visited {text-decoration:none;color:#0000ff;}
a:hover {text-decoration:underline;}
a:active {text-decoration:underline;}

The first line defines that normal unvisited links will have ‘no underline’, and will look ‘red’ in color.
The second line says when a link is already visited by the user, it should display in ‘blue’ color with ‘no underline’.
The third line says if the user is moving the mouse over this link, show an underline.
The fourth one says to do the same thing as the hover, when the user clicks on it. ‘active’ depicts that fraction of second that the user actually clicks on the link.

In order for these definitions to work as intended in most browsers, they have to be in the same order as we have defined here.

Remember ‘LoVe’ should come before ‘HAte’
This shortcut I found it first on the book ‘Web Standards Solutions’ by Dan Cederholm.

Thats all folks, for now.

Most of the users complain that when you click on that, it does not work.

Yes, It wont work till all the browser manufacturers support that.

what is it anyway ?
Have you seen a mailto: added to links to the email addresses? It is for opening a mail compose window on your email program automatically when you click on those links. Browsers understand this keyword mailto and acts accordingly.

Similarly, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is suggesting to have feed: to be added to the feed links, so anytime the user clicks on it, the browser can launch the feed reader program(if it is installed on that machine) automatically.

It won’t work as of now, because not all browsers are made to understand this tag.
Till they upgrade, you can safely remove this feed: part from your feed links.

[Reposted from one of my other sites]

You might have seen this following piece of code in some theme’s style.css file.
#content h2 { font-size:1.4em;}
or this
#content h2 { font-size:14px;}
or this
#content h2 { font-size:10pt;}

What is the difference between all of these ? which one is better ?

In reality, there is nothing like ‘one is better than the other’, but it depends more on the context where it is applied.

‘1em’ means the size of the character ‘M’ for the given font when the browser displays the page at the normal text size.
(Similarly 1ex = size of character ‘X’)

‘1px’ means 1 pixel size. if your monitor’s display is set to 800 by 600 resolution, that means it displays 800 pixels horizontally, and 600 pixels vertically.

‘1pt’ means 1 point size. This is a fixed size across all fonts = 1/72 of an inch. Fixed size fonts might be usable in some cases but not for all.

Q : so what are Relative units for font ?

A : something like ‘em’, ‘ex’, ‘px’ etc

Q : What are Fixed units for font ?

A : something like ‘pt’, ‘in‘, ‘cm‘, ‘mm‘ etc

Q : What is the advantage of having a Relative Size set for a font ?

With every modern browser, you have the capability to change the text size of a given web page you are viewing.
If you are using Firefox, it is available in the toolbar (View > Text Size > Increase ) or in Internet Explorer, it is available in toolbar (View > Text Size > Larger )

If your website’s CSS defines the page element’s font-size in relative units (such as em, ex or px), then the browser will show the page in a bigger font size.
else, the page always shows up with the same sized font, no matter what you change in the browser settings.

So, if you want to have a web page, that is readable by those people with minor visual impairment, you should use relative units for the font size.
If you are a theme author, you make sure, your theme uses them as much as possible, so the sites using your theme are accessible to everyone.

Thats all folks, for now.

Further Reading:
1. W3C’s Tips.
2. CSS2 Syntax

Most of our themes displays a list of pages as navigational elements at the top. We use the wp_list_pages() method, so any new page you create, will automatically display in that navigation.

I would like to present a few of the most common questions people ask, when they use one of our themes.

1. How to hide certain pages from the navigation ?
2. How to display the pages in a different order ?
3. Why is my child page, is not listed in the navigation ? etc.

wp_list_pages() – is the wordpress method that generates a list of ‘links to pages’.
Something like

<li class="page_item"><a href="http://wpthemepark.com/about/" title="About">About</a></li>
<li class="page_item"><a href="http://wpthemepark.com/archives/" title="Archives">Archives</a></li>
<li class="page_item"><a href="http://wpthemepark.com/contact/" title="Contact">Contact</a></li>


We can call this method using different set of arguments.

Lets look at the Question 1 :

How to hide certain pages from the navigation ?

Suppose you wanted to hide ‘about’ and ‘contact’ pages from the top navigation.
1. You login to your wordpress blog, and go to ‘Manage’ -> Pages
2. You would see the list of all pages you created.
3. Note down the Page Ids, the numbers on the left side of the Page Names, like 2 and 4.
4. Now we have to modify the call to wp_list_pages in the header.php (Have a backup of this file if you want to go back to the original state) .
5. Find wp_list_pages within this file.
6. Add an additional argument “exclude=2,4″ to that.

<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&depth=1&exclude=2,4');?>


Thats it. These pages will not get displayed in the top navigation.

Lets look at the Question 2 :

How to display the pages in a different order ?

1. You login to your wordpress blog, and go to ‘Manage’ -> Pages
2. Click on ‘Edit’ on the page you wanted to be first in the navigation.
3. On the right hand side, you will see ‘Page Order’ box.
4. Expand that box, enter ‘1′ as the value.
5. Again go back to ‘Manage’ – > Pages
6. Click on Edit on the page you wanted to be second in the navigation
7. On the right hand side, enter ‘2′ for the Page Order.
8. Now we have to modify the call to wp_list_pages in the header.php (Have a backup of this file if you want to go back to the original state) .
9. Find wp_list_pages within this file.
10. Add an additional argument “sort_column=menu_order” to that.

<?php wp_list_pages ('title_li=&depth=1& sort_column=menu_order');?>


Thats it. Your Pages list will be sorted in that order.

Lets look at the Question 1 :

Why is my child page, is not listed in the navigation ?

Because our themes are defined in such a way that it only displays top level pages in the navigation.

You might have seen “depth=1″ as an argument in the examples presented above.This argument makes the child pages to be not displayed in the top navigation.

Thats all for now, folks.
[Reposted from one of my other sites]

They want to hide their site’s title from displaying at their header. It is most probably because their header image already has it as part of the image itself.

Lets take a look at the most common approaches people take, for doing this.

Approach (1) : Delete the blog’s Title through Options Page

People go ahead and login to their wordpress, click on the Options and they look at the text box with the label “Weblog Title”. They just clear the text in that box and click on “Update Options”.
Start from

Click to Zoom!
and make it look like

Click to Zoom!

Wow ! That seems to work., isn’t it ?

Wait a minute, lets take a closer look !
As a result of your change, the following undesirable effects were created.

Issue #1 : Search Engines do not see the site’s title

You only intended your site’s title to hide from your vistor’s eyes, but now even search engine’s can not see your site’s title.
A site’s title enclosed in <h1> and </h1> tags, is one of the main things, search engines look at when they crawl around your site.
If the search engines do not know your site’s title, how will they display your site as part of any search results.?

Issue #2 : Site Title does not appear in the browser’s top bar

If the user has opened many browser windows or browser tabs, he/she may not be able to find the window/tab that your website is on.

Issue #3 : Site’s Feeds do not display a title, either

If the user subscribes to your RSS Feeds, they also do not display your site’s title.

Some feed reader softwares also reject feeds that do not have a title.

Oh my God! This approach has some serious issues, isn’t it ?

Approach (2) : Delete the line from header.php

Somewhat knowledgeable users open up the header.php in the theme directory. They know what is the line that causes the title to display in the header.
They just look for

<h1><a href="<?php bloginfo('siteurl');?>/" title="<?php bloginfo('name');?>"><?php bloginfo('name');?></a></h1>

and delete the whole line or make it

<h1></h1>

Yes. Now the site’s title do not appear in their header and they are happy !

Wait, They will still have the Issue #1 as we discussed for Approach #1.

Approach (3) : Hiding it through CSS Style definition

If we really think about the problem at hand, it is very simple. We want to hide the site’s title from the header of the site, as we already have the site’s title as part of the header image.
We only have to hide it from people browsing the site in the browser, and not from the search engines or feed readers.
Lets take a look at the CSS based solution for this.

Add

#header h1 { display:none }

at the end of style.css and save it.

Now let’s refresh the site and see if the title is hidden. It is still showing up? You have to clear your browser’s cache and refresh the page again.

Ok…Now it seems to work !

Is there any of the Issues 1, 2 and 3 as we discussed earlier ?

Nope !

Well, may be this is the proper way to hide the site’s title from the header ?

I believe so !

Disclaimer :

This would work in most of the wordpress themes [at least the ones that I created]. If it does not work in one of my themes, please go to Support Forums for my themes and if it is someone else’s theme, please contact the author of that theme.
Commenting on this post for help with your site, is not recommended.

Thanks.
[Reposted from one of my other sites]

and the thing is, it is not consistently doing so. Sometimes it is just happening in IE and sometimes it happens only on certain posts or only on homepage.

Here are the list of things you can do to fix that.

Step 1. Validate !
This is the most common cause for this issue. Try to validate the page that has this issue, at W3C’s Validator.
Once you fix the issues found by the validator, Refresh the page and see if the problem is gone.
If not, go to step 2.

Step 2. Check your Images Width
The next cause could be, your images are wider than the ‘main content’ div (usually #content in most of the themes).
If it is OK, try to resize the image to fit within the content DIV.
May be, you can give a smaller size image on the page, and the full-size image can be hyperlinked to that small image. This also helps in faster loading of your page.

If the problem persists, go to Step 3.

Step 3. Reduce the size of the ‘Content Area’

You can open up your style.css and look for the ‘width’ definitions for #content and/or #sidebar.
Try to reduce the width by 5px or 10px or 15px or 20px or 25px till you get things right.
(Most Layouts will still look good, after reducing the width by this method.)

Most cases would be solved by now. (If you guys have any other suggestions, please let me know).
Thats all for now, folks !

Also, it would be hard to come up with something that covers every aspect of WordPress. I know I am only proficient on the theme development, but have limited knowledge on things like Plugins and the various hooks WordPress exposes.

Also I have never used WordPress MU [Multi User], it might be hard for me to cover that topic too.

Considering all of the above, I would like to say, this book is not going to be published for now.

So I have decided to take a different direction for this website. Please stay tuned and see where we take it off !

Thanks.