Have you ever seen WordPress archives where you select something (usually a month/year) from a dropdown and it takes you to a page where you can view that? It’s fairly common. WordPress almost has built in functionality for it, since you can specifically tell the wp_get_archives() function that you want the values to be returned as <option></option>s. We can kick it up a notch though, and make the results show dynamically on the same page as the dropdowns through some Ajaxy JavaScript. We’ll even allow for multiple dropdowns (include the category as well) and make sure it’s flexible for your own alterations.

One of the awesome things about WordPress is that it’s a dynamic publishing system that uses a database to store your site’s information: posts, options, plugin and theme settings – all of this data is stored in your site’s database. It’s like the brain of your WordPress installation.

Unfortunately the WordPress database is also a prime target in many website attacks. Spammers and other bad guys target various database tables with automated scripts, SQL injection, and other malicious code. Needless to say it’s critical to protect your database and keep recent backups. One of the smartest ways to protect your site’s database is to change the default table prefix to something obscure and difficult to guess. Sort of like a password.

There are many ways to customize the WordPress Dashboard. Over the years, the Dashboard has evolved into a highly flexible information portal, enabling an overall, big-picture view of the main components of your site, while also providing granular data on everything from recent comments and plugin updates to incoming links and WordPress news. And that’s just the default functionality, there are also a ton of dashboard widgets and plugins available in the WordPress Plugin Directory that you can use to transform your Dashboard into just about anything, or even disable it completely.

Once a WordPress powered site starts getting quite a bit of content, the default built-in search becomes fairly useless. It just isn’t very smart. If you wrote a comprehensive article about He-Man, but since have written five other articles that just mentioned He-Man in passing, a search for “He-Man” will turn up your comprehensive article sixth. There have been various tweaks and plugins and whatnot that attempt to improve upon this default functionality. But why not leverage the best search engine ever written instead?

We’re now accepting orders for printed copies of Digging Into WordPress version 3.0. The books currently are finishing up at the printers, and should be ready to ship within the next week or so. From what we’ve seen so far, the finished books are looking incredible. To give you a taste, here are a few shots of the newly printed books featuring the new dark/black cover and black coil binding:

Shortcodes are WordPress’ way of creating shortcuts for code snippets, strings of text, or anything else that you need to display on your site. So this means that you can save time by replacing your most commonly typed words and phrases with WordPress shortcodes. For example, if you are frequently typing your blog’s URL, you could place the following code your theme’s functions.php:

This chart is one entire page in our book, but I thought it would be good to focus on specifically. Template hierarchy has gotten a bit more advanced since the last time we covered it.

The idea is that WordPress will look for files in a theme to use to render the current page in a specific order. For example, let say you have a page for showing posts from a certain category like this. On this site, all our category pages are currently the same and use “archive.php” template. This file is pretty far down the hierarchy, and is shared with other types of views, for example, tag and category pages.

In our recent post on pimping the wp-config.php file, we explain that using strong Security Keys is an important part of securing your WordPress installation. In this post, we want to zoom-in on Security Keys and look at what they are, how they work, and how to use them to greatly improve the security of your site.

It’s here! Digging Into WordPress Version 3.0 is here and it’s packed with lots of awesome WordPress goodness, including an entire new chapter on WordPress 3, plus lots of updated core content, and a super-sleek new cover that I think is a huge improvement. You’ve got to check out the book’s sweet dark/black cover, expertly crafted by Chris: