When developing the colorful Quintessential Theme (opens in new tab), I initially planned on displaying five random posts from each of my most popular tags and categories in the super-slick sliding-panel sidebar. Because I am running an older version of WordPress, however, this task proved to be quite the educational experience.

In newer versions (from 2.5 I think) of WordPress, the query_posts() function enables users to display posts in random order using the orderby=rand parameter. This would have made my life easy, as I could have included the following code for each of my random post lists:

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Importing and displaying external RSS feeds on your site is a great way to share your online activity with your visitors. If you are active on Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, or Tumblr, your visitors will enjoy staying current with your updates. Many social media sites provide exclusive feeds for user-generated content that may be imported and displayed on virtually any web page. In this article, you will learn three ways to import and display feed content on your WordPress-powered website — without installing yet another plugin.

Update: This article applies to older versions of WordPress (less than 2.8). For WordPress 2.8 and better, please check out this post at Digging into WordPress. Thanks!

On the menu for this tutorial:

• Importing and displaying feeds with WordPress & Magpie (simple method)
• Importing and displaying feeds with WordPress & Magpie (advanced method)
• Importing and displaying feeds with SimplePie (WordPress not required)

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Here at Perishable Press, the number of posts listed in my archives is rapidly approaching the 700 mark. While this is good news in general, displaying such a large number of posts in an effective, user-friendly fashion continues to prove challenging. Unfortunately, my current strategy of simply dumping all posts into an unordered list just isn’t working. I think it’s fair to say that archive lists containing more than like 50 or 100 post titles are effectively useless and nothing more than a usability nightmare. With growing numbers of blogs building up massive collections of posts, finding better ways to display vast quantities of archived material becomes increasingly important.

One solution that seems popular involves breaking the archives down into various categories, tags, and time periods. This provides meta-context to each list of titles and usually eliminates the need for any hideously long post listings. This solution works well, especially when the different category lists are displayed adjacently in multiple vertical columns. For example, a blog with three categories would do well to display each category’s archive listings in its own vertical column. Something like this:

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After hearing about the recently released “premium” version of Dyasonhat’s Smart Sort Plugin for WordPress, I just had to give it a try. Occasionally working on projects requiring customized ordering of posts, I like to keep my utility belt well-equipped with any plugins or code techniques that will facilitate the process of man-handling post order. In this article, I discuss my experience with WP Smart Sort Premium.

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As we have seen in our previous post, WordPress Custom Fields Part I, custom fields provide an excellent way to add flexible content to your posts and pages. By assigning various types of content to different custom fields, you gain complete control over when, where, and how to display the associated information. For example, sub-headings may be displayed in the sidebar, footnotes may be consolidated into a single region, post images may be displayed before the post title, and so on. In this follow-up article, we will review the basics of custom fields and then jump into a few custom-field tips and tricks.

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I recently developed a theme that makes heavy use of WordPress’ custom fields. The custom-field functionality of WordPress makes it possible to rig up just about any customized layout quickly and easily. Custom fields enable designers to organize post content into different sections, making it possible to create non-linear page layouts, with different types of content easily removed from the normal post loop and relocated to different parts of the document. This organizational and design flexibility has the added benefit of making it super-easy to update your content, redesign your theme, and handle blog maintenance in general. In the first part of this mini-series, we walk through the process of implementing and using custom fields; then, in part two, I will share some delicious tips and tricks to help you get the most out of everything that custom fields have to offer.

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Recently, I discussed how to implement a horizontally sequenced display order for WordPress posts in two columns. In that tutorial, I explain how to separate odd and even posts using a dual-loop configuration and PHP’s modulus operator. Such technique serves well a variety of configurational scenarios, but is limited to the display of the default (admin-specified) number of posts from all categories. In this tutorial, we adapt this odd-and-even loop configuration to accommodate a much greater degree of customization. Specifically, we will focus on separating any number of odd and even posts from any specific category or group of categories. Several additional configurational customizations will also be covered.

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

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Recently, reader Luke Knowles asked how to customize the sort order of his posts in WordPress. Looking into a solution to this question proved quite enlightening. Within moments I was able to discern 4 methods for modifying post order, and then several days later I discovered 2 additional custom sorting techniques. After updating the reply to Luke’s comment, it seemed like some good information that other WordPressers may find useful. So, here are six ways to customize the sort order of posts in WordPress..

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In this article, I present several heavily commented examples of WordPress loops. I have found that many readers appreciate these types of loop examples, as it helps them to understand how the loop works while enabling them to easily copy, paste, and adapt the code for their own purposes. In our first example, we examine a basic WordPress loop. When implemented, this loop will display “x” number of posts, where “x” represents the number specified via the WordPress Admin reading options panel. To use this code, simply copy & paste into your WordPress theme’s index.php file ¹ and customize accordingly.

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Readers occasionally ask for help with their WordPress loops. Usually, these requests involve modifying the loop with some customized functionality. Frequently, such customization involves one of these popular behaviors:

• Exclude a specific category
• Exclude multiple categories
• Display only one post or excerpt
• Display some fixed number of posts
• Play nice with additional loops on the same page

In this article, I present the swiss-army knife of WordPress loops. This highly versatile, “super” loop is standard WordPress code, easily implemented, and fully equipped to handle all of the custom behaviors mentioned above. Further, the PHP employed is self-contained, making it ultra-easy to pimp it up tough with your own (X)HTML markup. This tight little loop is perfect for “latest-post” excerpts, “aside” posts, news/headlines, site updates, urgent messages, and so much more. And since it plays well with multiple loops, the configurational possibilities are simply endless. Ready? Let’s get on with it..

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Two of the themes developed by Perishable Press, Apathy and Information, depend on three WordPress loops to operate as intended. For each of these themes, the three loops consist of two "side" loops and one main loop. The side loops each display posts from one specific category, while the main loop displays posts from every category not specified in the side loops.

There are many different multi-loop configurations currently available for WordPress users. Needless to say, despite a wide variety of available loop setups, implementing a customized multiple loop frequently requires a great deal of time of energy. Certain loop sets accomplish one task, but fail at another, while others refuse to provide enough flexibility in general. Indeed, after countless rounds of trial and error establishing multiple loops, we finally developed the almost-perfect triple-loop configuration.

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