Digging into WordPress

I’ve long been a fan of “art directing” posts. That is, to apply unique CSS styling to an individual page of content when the situation calls for it. In the past, I’ve used the Art Direction plugin and I even created a screencast on using it.

As it turns out, there is a major problem with the art direction plugin. Using it with any caching plugin will result in a crazy epic meltdown of your site. Without too much gory detail, in trying to cache my blog CSS-Tricks, I tried all the major caching plugins (DB Cache, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache) and ultimately it would trash my WordPress database and serve up white pages. Very not good. The happy ending is that Frederick Townes from W3 Edge and creator of the W3 Total Cache plugin helped me out by patching the art direction plugin and getting CSS-Tricks cached with W3 Total Cache. I would love to release the updated code, but it’s not my code to release. We managed to get in touch with the original author, who said he planed to eventually update it but didn’t sound too particularly interested in the patch.

SO, with that extensive backstory, what is a poor fellow to do if they want to apply custom CSS to pages TODAY? Couple ideas, read on.

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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.

I ran across some simple code in the official WordPress forums with a solution (thanks, t31os_!).

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If you have posts that include the nofollow attribute on links, you may at some point decide to remove them. By default, WordPress doesn’t insert nofollow attributes in post content, but there are a variety of plugins that will insert nofollow into all links in post content. Or perhaps you have been manually adding nofollow tags to your post links for SEO purposes. Regardless of how they got there, it’s very easy to clean things up and remove all nofollow attributes from post content.

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