In WordPress, there are three ways to respond to a post: you can leave a comment, leave a trackback, or just link to the post to create a pingback. When displaying all of the responses to your posts, it’s a good idea to separate the comments from the pingbacks and trackbacks. Uninterrupted comment threads are a pleasure to read, as are well-styled lists of pingbacks. This is an excellent way to improve the usability, organization, and stylishness of your comment areas.

I had the situation come up where I need a password-protected post in WordPress. Of course that is super easy in WordPress, you can set up a password for it right in the “Publish” box before publishing. But by default, WordPress appends “Protected: ” to the front of the post title, before and after the password has been entered. I didn’t like that, and thought that the password box was clue enough that the material was password protected.

Tag clouds accomplish their varied font sizes by applying inline styling to each tag. The resulting font sizes can be really weird like style=’font-size:29.3947354754px;’. There is nothing inherently wrong about that, but it feels a bit unsettling and less controllable

I had the occasion yesterday to have a page with a section on it where it would output a very specific set of other pages, which would need to change dynamically. What I could have done is built a special page template for this page, and inside that template run a query_posts() to get these posts. But I wanted this page to remain editable from the admin. Besides, creating a special page template every time you need to do something like this is too cumbersome. WordPress is extensible enough to do better. Hence, the Custom Query Shortcode!

The default output for WordPress’ post_class template tag includes class names for just about every type of page view imaginable, but not the Category ID.

When someone comments on your site, cookies with the information the entered are saved to their computers. WordPress makes it easy to access that information. In fact, in your comments.php template they are ready-to-go PHP variables you can spit out anywhere you’d like.

Implementing a solid set of navigational links for your WordPress site is one of the best ways to encourage visitors to stick around awhile and check out additional content.

Let’s say your blog is set to display ten posts per page, as specified via the WordPress Admin under Settings > Reading. Once set, ten posts will appear on your home page, archive pages, search results, and so on. In other words, if it isn’t a single-view page or an actual “page” page, you’re gonna get ten posts per page. It’s a global setting.

Let’s say you want to have a special theme for your WordPress site for mobile users. You don’t want to use a pre-canned solution or anything third-party, you just want to create and design the theme yourself. So what you need to happen is for the site to detect mobile users and server up an alternate theme instead. Here is how I might do it.

This is a nice feed offering, but many people use the Subscribe to Comments plugin and find the individual-post feeds to be unnecessary. In this situation, it is easy enough to remove all comment-feed links from the theme-template files, but even after the physical links are removed, WordPress will continue to generate links in the section of your pages.