Recently I worked on a project where a single RSS feed was imported and displayed in multiple columns on the web page. Certain pages display feed items in two columns, others in groups of three or more. This technique uses WordPress’ built-in fetch_feed functionality to parse external feeds, and a slice of PHP magic to display them in multiple columns. It’s flexible too, enabling any number of columns and feed items from anywhere in your theme/template files.

As a popular WordPress resource, we get quite a few requests for 1-to-1 WordPress support, but unfortunately don’t have the resources to help everyone directly. We would love to help everyone out with specific questions and technical support, but really it’s just a matter of time that’s required for our own work, etc. So as you might suspect, we frequently see emails like look like this:

WordPress does an excellent job of keeping track of what’s happening with the loop, but once you start customizing parameters and setting up multiple loops, it’s a good idea to explicitly reset them using one of three WordPress template tags. In this DigWP post, we’ll explore each of these three loop-reset techniques to get a better understanding of when and how to use them in your WordPress themes.

WordPress ships with its own version of the jQuery library (for longevity’s sake, as I write this WordPress is at version 3.2.1).

So to use jQuery in your WordPress plugins and themes “The Right Way” all you need to do is enqueue the script (probably via your theme’s functions.php file). Here is a basic example: