Taking WordPress to the Next Level

WordPress is by far, the most flexible blogging engine available in the world (wide web). In fact, I personally consider that WordPress has been under-rated as a mere blogging engine. I feel it is more or less, a CMS or at least it can be modified to function like a CMS. In this post, I will teach you some ways that can take WordPress to the next level.

Use Multiple Loops on the Homepage

In order to get the reader stick to your blog, you must get that professionalism right on your homepage because it is the homepage that will reflect your entire blog and content. You can customize your homepage to look more professional by using multiple WordPress Loops to show posts based on various criteria. For example, on My Blog (Amitash.com), you can see that I have listed out posts form one category as featured posts on the top. Below that I listed 4 posts from another category, and then the reviews and guides follow.

I was able to show posts from specific categories on the homepage in separate sections using multiple loops, whereas by default, most WordPress themes come with a single loop. Let me show you how to create a loop of posts for a separate category. Such loops can be many on a particular page.

First, find the main loop in your WordPress theme Index.php file, it will look something like:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<!– All Post Styling and info (like titles, excerpts) would be here!

–>

<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>

<p><?php the_excerpt(); ?></p>

<?php endif; ?>

Between the main loop, you can add custom loops to get posts from a particular category or with a specific tag or posts that match certain custom fields. Let’s see how to do it.

I added the following code in between the main loop to get 3 posts from category 140 (This is the category ID). Obviously, you can enter any category ID and any number of posts to get.

<?php $recent = new WP_Query(“cat=140&showposts=3″);

>have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();?>

<!– Custom Loop Styling –>

<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>

<p><?php the_excerpt(); ?></p>

<?php endwhile; ?>

Just like the above custom query, you can add many but all must be within the main loop. If you look at my blog again, then you will also notice that I used separate divs for each section and customized them and you can add the following code to apply separate styling for specified categories.

<?php if (is_category(array(142,146,167,168,169,181,189))) {?>

<div class=”special”>

<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>

<p><?php the_excerpt(); ?></p>

</div>

<?php } elseif (is_category(array(145,148,199))) { ?>

<div class=”superspecial”>

<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>

<p><?php the_excerpt(); ?></p>

</div>

<?php } else { ?>

<div class=”normal”>

<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>

<p><?php the_excerpt(); ?></p>

</div>

<?php } ?>

Therefore, we can specialize some category’s display. Note that the numbers displayed are Category IDs.

Although category styling can be done in 2 ways, unfortunately for tags, there is only one possible way and that is using the if-else-elseif statements. To do this, first you must have a tag.php file in your theme’s root folder. For example:

<?php if (has_tag(array(‘sharp’,'mild’,'extreme’))) {?>

<div class=”specialtags”>

<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>

<p><?php the_excerpt(); ?></p>

</div>

<?php } elseif…

And the code continues just like in the categories.

For custom search results page, you must have a search.php file in your theme’s root folder.

Use Custom Fields Professionally

If you see on my blog’s homepage, I have a Software Reviews section and a How-To section. These sections, I have created using the multiple loops trick I explained earlier. But you can see that they have additional data like review stars, watch video button etc. If you are wondering how I achieved this and what a lot of coding I did, then you might be mistaken because this trick requires minimal hard-coding into your theme files.

Have you heard of WordPress Custom Fields? With Custom Fields, these extra data can be easily inserted anywhere in your theme within the loop. For example, in my blog, I add videos to the How-to section using custom fields. When there is an empty custom field value, a “No Video” button appears. I first added a “Video” Custom Field Key with a YouTube Video URL as a value. Then I added the following code to the How-To Custom query in my theme’s index.php.

<?php

$video = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘Video’, true);

if ($video == ”)

{ ?>

<a href=”#” class=”video”>No Video</a>

<?php } else { ?>

<a target=”_blank” href=”http://www.youtube.com/v/<?php echo $video; ?

>&amp;showsearch=0&amp;rel=0&amp;hd=1&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%2526fmt%3D18″

class=”button”>Watch Video</a>

<?php } ?>

Similarly, you can use custom fields in any way. I also used this technique to add review starts alongside my Software reviews. The extent to which custom fields can be used is limited by your imagination only. Thank you for reading this article. If you have any difficulty with any aspect of the tutorial, then ask it in the comment box below or look into WordPress Codex for detailed information. There are few more ways of taking WordPress to the next level that I will cover in the next article.