Tweaking and Manipulating WordPress

This is a guest post by Muhammad Siyab.

WordPress is a very flexible and versatile blogging platform, and can be adapted for use as almost anything (CMS. Tumblelog, etc). In this post, I’ll be telling you how to make your WordPress blog more ‘magazine style’. You will learn how to include post-thumbnails, how to display specific posts on the homepage, automatically update a page which contains posts from a certain category, and more.

Using if/else to check for pages

You can use conditional tags such as if/else to check which page the user is currently on and what content to display to them. The basic structure goes like this:

<?php if( it is a particular page ) { ?>
—-DO THIS—–
<?php } else { ?> /* If the page is NOT the specified one */
—-DO THIS—–
<?php } ?>

Using conditional tags will make your sidebar dynamic and alive. It is good to have a dynamic sidebar that displays information according to the particular page.

Let’s put this into action. Suppose, you want to display your work details and testimonials to the reader, if they are on the About page of your blog. Else, (if they are not on the about page), you want to display your most recent posts. The code to do the job would look like:

<?php if (is_page(’About Me’) ) { ?>
–YOUR WORK DETAILS AND TESTIMONIALS HERE –
<?php } else { ?>
–MOST RECENT POSTS CODE HERE –
<?php } ?>

What the above piece of code does is that it checks first what page the current page is. If the current page has the exact title ‘About Me’, then your work and testimonial details are shown. If the page is not the about page, your most recent posts are shown. Note that the title of the page(’About Me’) in this code and the about page must match exactly, otherwise the code will not work.

You can view all the applicable conditionals on the WordPress Codex.

Automatically Update Pages

Suppose you have a page in which you show whole posts or link to posts in a certain category. Each time you write a new post, you manually enter the information into the page. This is tedious and time consuming. You can, instead have those pages automatically updated for you! The code to use is:

<?php
$posts = get_posts('numberposts=number&category=cat-id&order=order‘);
foreach($posts as $post) :
?>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php endforeach; ?>

Now, if you want to display only a specific number of posts, say only 5, change number to 5. To display all posts, either remove the whole of numberposts=number or set it to a very high value. You also have to change cat-id to the id of the category in which the posts belong. To arrange the posts in descending order(newest first), change order to DESC. To arrange posts in ascending order, (oldest first), change order to ASC.
Also, this code only displays the titles of the post. If you want to display the whole content as well, add <?php the_content(); ?>(For the whole content) or <?php the_excerpt(); ?> (For excerpts) below the <?php the_title(); ?>

WARNING - WordPress doesn’t allow you to add PHP code in your pages or posts in the text-editor. You’ll have to use a PHP executing plugin such as Exec-PHP to do it, or use a page template (the more complicated option).

Custom Fields to Display Post Thumbnails

Custom fields are one of the best features on WordPress, but sadly, not everyone exploits them.

Using custom fields, you can easily prop up thumbnail images next to your blog post. It’s very easy to do so. Insert the following code in your index.php file, wherever you like (preferably next to the title)

<?php
$thumb = get_post_meta($post->ID, "thumb", true);
if ($thumb != "") { ?>
<img src="<?php bloginfo('url')?>/wp-content/uploads/<?php $values = get_post_custom_values("thumb"); echo $values[0]; ?>” alt=”<?php the_title(); ?>” class=”thumb” style=”height:100px; width:100px;” />
<?php } else {} ?>

Now to decipher this code.

$thumb = get_post_meta($post->ID, “thumb”, true); - The code sets up a variable called $thumb and gets the value of the custom field named ‘thumb’ from the current post.

if ($thumb != “”) - Sometimes, you don’t want to include post thumbnails. Perfectly okay. This line checks to see whether the ‘thumb’ key has a value or not. If if does have a value(that is you have specified an image), it continues on with the rest of the code. If it doesn’t have a value, the script stops right there and shows nothing.

The next two lines of the code set up an image tag, and also defines the path of the image file. Note: If your uploads folder is different from the default(’wp-content/uploads/’), change wp-content/uploads/. The $values=… echo $values[0] part prints out the value of the custom field named ‘thumb’.

Also, the class=”thumb” part allows you to manipulate the position and styling of your thumbnail image using CSS.

You can change the height and width attributes to change the size of your thumbnail images, if you want.

The last line of code, (<?php } else {} ?>) finishes off the script by declaring nothing to do in case there is no thumbnail image.

Now, to include post thumbnails, you have to specify custom fields. In the WordPress Post editor area, scroll down to where it says ‘Custom Fields’. Like so:

In the key area, enter the name of the field, that is, ‘thumb‘. In the Value dialog, enter the address of the the image. Take care not to break the path to the image.

And you’re done. You just have to take the extra step of defining the thumbnail custom field, but it’s worth the effort

Bonus Tip

You can use custom fields not only for post thumbnails, but for anything. For example I use them to display taglines(One liners to introduce the post), for my latest post. The code goes like this:

<?php $values = get_post_custom_values("tagline"); echo $values[0]; ?>

Easy as a pie.

Muhammad Siyab blogs at PuttingBlogsFirst.com. He even has a starter’s guide for new bloggers.

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