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 and stylishness of your comment areas.

This page in the codex has a particularly interesting infographic that shows a flowchart of how WordPress chooses which template file it is going to use to render the page. For example, did you know if you have a published page with “contact” as the slug, it will look for and use page-contact.php automatically?

There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I have a “blank” WordPress theme for myself, because I make a lot of WordPress themes. Starting from Kubrick, or any other pre-made theme, would be absurd. There is to much stuff there that would to be stripped out or fought against to be useful.

So, I have my own starter theme. It’s been in a folder called BLANK-theme on my computer for a while, so I’m going to call it BLANK. And now I’m making it available for you. Read on to find out the scoop on it and you can decide if it would be of any use to you.

I usually reserve most of my blacklisting content for Perishable Press, but after posting about using WordPress’ built-in tools to stop comment spam, several DiW readers have asked about a good custom blacklist that may be used for the “Comment Moderation” and/or “Comment Blacklist” features in the WordPress “Discussion Settings” screen. Over the years, I have built up an extensive custom blacklist of terms that has proven quite effective at keeping spam and other garbage out of the comments section, even without using any anti-spam plugins such as Akismet. It’s strictly plug-n-play, and should help protect your site (and reputation) against all sorts of malicious nonsense.

Working on a new theme for the next Digging into WordPress book update, I found myself really getting into the whole “widgetizing” thing. Widgets enable non-technical users to customize your theme according to their specific layout needs, and with so many different widgets available, the possibilities are endless. You may have thought about widgets as something you do in the sidebar, but there is no reason to stop there. You can widgetize just about every part of your theme. In this post, we’ll show you how to do widgetize your theme in two easy steps. Once we get the basics down, we’ll dig into some sweet tips and tricks.

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.

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.

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.

Tag clouds accomplish their varied font sizes by applying inline styling to each tag. The resulting font sizes can be really weird with values like font-size: 29.3947354754px;.

Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong about that, but it feels a bit unsettling and less controllable. Awesomely, Mike Summers sent in a solution he uses on his own site..