Recently, I have been getting a lot of requests for multiple-loop configurations in WordPress. It seems that multiple-column, multiple-loop configurations are in high demand these days, especially ones that display posts like this:

• First column, first loop: display posts #1-5
• Second column, second loop: display posts #6-10
• Third column, third loop: display posts #11-15

Using WordPress and a little CSS, this configuration is relatively easy to accomplish. Let’s cut right to the chase..

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More and more these days, we are all finding WordPress being used as a content management system. It shouldn’t be too tough to see why — highly customizable, a community growing in size and knowledge, and a plethora of options in the way of plugins and simple yet highly effective PHP edits. Thanks to these, you have access to an open source script that allows you to show what you want, when you want, where you want, and how you want in virtually no time. But what happens when you only want a simple variation from one page to the next?

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Authenticate Lite is a follow-up version of the original Authenticate custom-content plugin for WordPress. Just as with the full version of Authenticate, Authenticate Lite enables universal and/or targeted inclusion of custom content for both feeds and posts. Ideal for adding copyright information, distribution policy, thank-you messages, custom links, special offers, etc. Custom content may be added to any location within posts or feeds — before, after, or even within post content. This highly flexible content-addition plugin works great on all 2+ versions of WordPress (i.e., 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.5+).

Usage examples include:

• Selective display of targeted advertisements
• Invite readers to take advantage of special offers
• Add a copyright message or feed distribution policy
• Include universal footer content for all feed content
• Include universal footer content for all single-view posts
• Improve the brand awareness of your site by adding a custom site logo
• Add custom messages targeting site visitors, feed subscribers, or both
• Send unique “thank-you” messages to subscribers and visitors
• Spice things up by displaying a periodically updated thumbnail or banner image
• Selectively include links and other information for a targeted collection of posts
• Anything! This plugin provides an easy, versatile way to add custom footer content
• Implement a plagiarism-detection string in all of your content for easy identification

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Most WordPress-powered blogs display posts in sequential order within a single column. Like this, for example:

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Note: This information is intended primarily for WordPress versions previous to 2.3, but may be applicable in other versions as well.

For those of you running an older version of WordPress that is generating errors such as:

Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067
Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067
Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 
Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 
Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 
Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 
Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067 
Warning: parse_url(http://) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse url in /home/path/to/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1067

You can easily resolve the issue by suppressing these errors, which are automatically generated whenever the parse_url() function tries to parse an empty value for the URL. To silence the errors, open the file wp-includes/functions.php and locate the following code (around line #1067):

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Keeping an eye on all things WordPress, I have noticed an ongoing fascination with configuring the ultimate WordPress <title> tags. Many bloggers use various plugins to generate differently configured <title> tags depending on particular page views. A good example of this is seen in the All in One SEO Pack, which, among many other things, enables users to specify custom titles for several different types of pages. While there is nothing wrong with this approach, some of us prefer to run WordPress with as few plugins as possible. If you want to create perfect WordPress title tags without a plugin, this post will certainly help you do it. First we’ll explore some of the basics, continue with some common examples, and then conclude with a comprehensive, highly flexible script for generating distinct page titles. All of the techniques presented in this article should work well with virtually all versions of WordPress.

The Basics

The <title> tag is used within the <head> section of (X)HTML pages to communicate the title of the document to both humans (your visitors) and machines (search engines). For dynamically generated sites, such as those powered by WordPress, many different types of pages exist, including:

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After almost three years of blogging here at Perishable Press, I had an epiphany about my author comment links. Way back when, after installing WordPress in a subdirectory called “/press/”, I decided to set the URL for my Administrative User Profile’s website as “http://perishablepress.com/press/”. After all, it seemed to make sense at the time, plus it really didn’t seem to matter; nobody was going to see my personal profile information anyway, right?

Wrong.

Three years later, I finally realize that it does matter. The URL that you enter as your profile’s website address is the URL that will be used for every author commentator link on your site. Yes, I know what you’re probably thinking, “what an idiot! I thought everybody knew that!” Well, no, obviously not everybody. It may have occurred to me momentarily or subconsciously at some point along the way, but it wasn’t until just a few days ago that the light bulb finally flashed.

So what’s the big deal? First and foremost, one of the most highly visible and prevalent links to your site comes from your own author commentator links. These links are used to represent your site for every one of your own comments. Other commentators and visitors recognize the link, note the location, and possibly use it when linking back to your site. Thus, it is important to represent your site by linking to the optimal URL in your author commentator links.

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Just a quick WordPress snippet for future reference. I recently explained how to disable comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks via SQL. Here’s a good way to do it via PHP:

<?php 
function close_comments( $posts ) {
	if ( !is_single() ) { return $posts; }
	if ( time() - strtotime( $posts[0]->post_date_gmt ) > ( 30 * 24 * 60 * 60 ) ) {
		$posts[0]->comment_status = 'closed';
		$posts[0]->ping_status    = 'closed';
	}
	return $posts;
}
add_filter( 'the_posts', 'close_comments' ); 
?>

You can run this script as a plugin, through your theme’s functions.php, or through a custom user-functions.php file. Simply set the desired number of days by changing the number “30” to whatever you would like. As is, this script will close comments, pingbacks and trackbacks on all articles posted more than 30 days ago.

As you may observe, the WordPress installation that powers Perishable Press is located in a subdirectory named press. This configuration was intentional, as I wanted to have the option to easily install and maintain multiple versions of WordPress in variously named subdirectories. As much as I enjoy this flexibility, many would argue the SEO-related benefits of installing WordPress in your site’s root directory, or at least making it appear that way by using WordPress’ easily customizable “Blog Address” options setting.

For example, say you have WordPress installed in a subdirectory called “gibbonz”, but you want your blog’s home page to exist at http://your-domain.tld/ and not http://your-domain.tld/gibbonz, as would be the case by default. To make this happen, you have several choices, including this method, which I summarize here, assuming the “gibbonz” scenario outlined in the preceding discussion:

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Authenticate is a free WordPress plugin that enables universal and/or targeted inclusion of custom content for both feeds and posts. Ideal for adding copyright information, distribution policy, thank-you messages, custom links, special offers, and much more. Custom content may be added to any location within posts or feeds — before, after, or even within post content. This highly flexible content-addition plugin works great on all 2+ versions of WordPress (i.e., 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.5+).

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Great news! Contact Coldform is now available in Spanish (Spain). Special thanks to Fernando Tellado of Ayuda Wordpress for his superb Spanish translation of the Coldform. Fernando has articulately translated both the administration panel and all of the (X)HTML/text output as well. Contact Coldform is now the perfect solution for Spanish users of WordPress who desire a super-clean, standards-based contact form. Thanks Fernando! :)

For more information, check out Fernando’s post, Plugin Contact Coldform en Español. There you may obtain more information and also download the Spanish (Spain) version of Contact Coldform. You may also download the Spanish version via the Coldform home page. Also, check out Ayuda Wordpress’ post comparing Contact Coldform to Cforms II.

For the past several months and up until just recently, Perishable Press had been suffering from unpredictable episodes of the dreaded white screen of death. Although blank white screens happen to virtually all WordPress users now and then, certain configurations seem to trigger crashes more frequently than others. Here, I am referring to WordPress version 2.3.

In this case, the unpredictable crashes, inconsistent errors, and general instability began several months ago after I had completed my WordPress theme restoration project. Prior to that, I had removed all of my alternate themes and placed them on a subdomain. Meanwhile, after the themes had been removed, I decided to enable the default WordPress cache (don’t ask why). For the next month or so, before restoring my themes, my site performed exquisitely: uptime at 99% (on a shared server, no less), virtually no errors, and so on. Then, after restoring alternate theme functionality, the site began locking up and crashing multiple times each day. Here is a summary of the sequence of events (estimated time frames):

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This may surprise you, but I post quite a bit of content that never appears in the site’s main feed. It is my impression that a vast majority of subscribers are interested in web/graphic-design and development-related topics, and are really much less interested (if at all) in the miscellaneous odds and ends that wind up in the ever-expanding Perishable Press database.

In the past, the process of excluding content from the main feed typically involved changing the post-date to something at least a year or so in the past. The thinking was that I could always return to these posts at some point in the future and put them back into sequential order. Although effective, this process quickly became far too tedious and time-consuming to prove practical. Keeping my eyes open for possible solutions, I have accumulated several excellent techniques for excluding content from WordPress feeds.

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In the current version of my custom contact-form WordPress plugin, Contact Coldform, there is no built-in method of sending emails to multiple addresses. The thought of adding such functionality had not occurred to me until recently, when a Coldform user asked about enabling it. After a bit of investigation, it turns out that integrating multiple-recipient functionality into Contact Coldform is as easy as it is practical. I will definitely be adding this feature to the next release of the Coldform, however, here is the modification procedure for those who just can’t wait.

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Recently, I reactivated an older version (1.16) of Jalenack’s Wordspew Shoutbox plugin for the Dead Letter Art chat forum. The DLa collective (of which I am a member) has been working on a new issue of their ‘zine and needed an easy online chat location for impromptu business dealz (ideas, planning, etc.). Almost immediately after reactivating the Shoutbox plugin, the chat forum was flooded with an endless wave of spam. The rate and volume of spam was so high as to render the forum utterly useless. — Ugh.

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Recently, I found occasion to consolidate and localize my WordPress feeds. A couple of years ago, shortly after I first began using Feedburner to deliver and monitor my site’s feeds, I began listing my Feedburner-assigned feed URL in addition to my localized WordPress feed URL. As time went on, inconsistent feed linkage here at Perishable Press had greatly convoluted the feed-subscription process. Confounding factors include:

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Several months ago, I changed my email address to stop spam. Since then, I have been updating every instance of my old address that I can find. In WordPress, I edited all of my theme files and updated my profile information in the “Users” admin area. Several days later while digging through the comments table in the WordPress database, I realized that the user-profile update is only pro-actively effective. There were still hundreds of instances of my old email address associated with comment-author information in the comments table. No big whoop for some, but the devastating inconsistency of it all would have kept me from a good night’s sleep (or maybe that was the caffeine..).

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