I like the idea of shutting off comments after a certain number of days. Here on Digging Into WordPress we do it after 90. After that kind of time, the “community” of the discussion is long over. I think a good practice for turning off comments is to instead leave a message informing visitors that the comment thread is closed, and offer a course of action in case they have something of grave importance to share. Here is an example from CSS-Tricks:

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.

David Hollander of SparkWeb Interactive sent us in a little code clip for inserting Google Maps into Posts/Pages by the use of shortcodes. Google actually has copy-and-pastable iframe code already in Google Maps that is really easy to snag, but David was having problems with the Visual text editor screwing up the code when saving the Post. With a short code, no problem.

The default output for WordPress’ post_class template tag includes class names for just about every type of page view imaginable:

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.

But what if you want to display different numbers of posts for different types of page views? For example, instead of showing just ten posts on your search-results pages, you may want to show a whole bunch, like maybe fifty or something. Perhaps you would also like to limit the number of posts displayed on your category archives to only five.

Typically when you use one of WordPress functions to output a list of “stuff” from WordPress, you can pass a parameter to eliminate the “title” that WordPress likes to put in there by default. For example, with wp_list_categories you pass along “title_li=” with nothing after the equals sign to remove the title that normally accompanies the output. With the function to output links (e.g. blogroll), you use the function wp_list_bookmarks, but unfortunately using that same parameter the same way is ineffective at removing the title.

As a dynamic blogging system, WordPress consists of PHP files (the WP core) that interact with a MySQL database to generate the web pages for your website. When everything is working properly, this dynamic interaction keeps WordPress humming along like a champ, but when your database crashes, WordPress can’t operate and will deliver the following message to your visitors:

By default, WordPress generates an RSS feed for the comments on every published post. Many sites take advantage of this by displaying a feed link next to the comments area. This enables visitors to subscribe to the comment thread and stay current with conversation. It’s convenient, simple, and super useful. For example, a typical feed menu for many blogs includes the following items:

With WordPress, there are various distinct types of page views. For example, there are category-archive views, tag-archive views, author-archive views, date-archive views, single-post views, single-page views, and so forth. And of course you know that you can target single-post views in your theme template with the conditional tag, is_single():

Inside the loop, if you use the function the_date() to display the date the post was published, you may run into trouble. Specifically, if there are two posts published on the same day, the second one will return nothing for a date.

WordPress’ powerful action-hook system makes it possible to insert functionality at any point in your theme. Most WordPress themes include some of the built-in WordPress hooks by default. For example, most of us are aware of the two most common WordPress hooks: wp_head() and wp_footer(), which generally appear in the theme’s header and footer sections. These two hooks provide WordPress a location at which to execute various scripts and functions. For example, the wp_head() hook is where WordPress generates a variety of <link /> and <script></script> elements, among other things.

Just as I hoped, someone wrote in with a far nicer solution to my Global Custom Fields solution than I originally had. Big thanks to David Hollander for this.

Custom fields allow us to attach data to Posts or Pages that we can yank out and use at will in our templates. They are awesomely flexible and single-handedly allow WordPress to be used for about any CMS need. The fact that they can only be used on single Posts can be limiting in some circumstances. Sometimes you wish you could grab a custom value that you can control and is consistent globally, regardless of the current post. In this post we’ll look at a technique to do so.

Now that we have seen how to setup Tumblr-style posts, it would be nice to be able to segregate the Tumblr-posts category from the main feed into its own, separate feed. This would enable readers to subscribe exclusively to the Tumblr-posts feed and maybe display it in their sidebar or something.