WordPress 2.6.1 is out. A maintenance release but for many including myself, it’s the time to move up to 2.6 altogether.
As I look back the past few weeks of testing 2.6 on several blogs, I’m delighted to say it’s been a wonderfully smooth experience. Unlike the upgrade to WordPress 2.5, my sites did not experience much trouble when using WordPress 2.6. I deployed 2.6 on several websites and found it was a breeze to work with. It played well with my themes too. Plugins did not break down. Tonight I’ll be upgrading all my sites running WordPress to 2.6.1 and I hope I won’t run into any problems.
… or perhaps entries posted in the last 48 hours? Ever wanted to put a small image label next to your post telling readers “Hey, this post is barely 2 days old. It’s new” ?
Of course, putting a new post label is nothing new. But again, this tiny feature does not come with default WordPress. Luckily with just one or two lines of PHP code, you can modify your WordPress theme to label your new entries automatically.
The following code sample shows how you can label your posts with a tiny image ‘new.gif’ if your post is less than 2 days old. Within your latest entries Loop, we’ll put the ‘new.gif’ image label right new to your post title:
Continue reading ‘Putting a ‘New Post’ image label next to WordPress entries posted within the last 24 hours’
WordPress has given the first planned release date of 7th July 2008 the miss and aiming for the next which is 14th July 2008. There’s a couple of hours left to see if it manage to keep its deadline if WordPress gets released tonight.
WordPress Release Candidate 1 has just been released two days ago so I really doubt they’ll make it today. Of course, I’d be glad to be proven wrong this time.
Continue reading ‘WordPress 2.6 releasing today?’
Sorry for the long and confusing title. Do allow me to illustrate and describe what I have in mind.
What we’re going to do here is for every top-level categories, we will:
- display the category title in bold and the category description.
- list the latest post title prominently displayed as the first entry and short excerpt.
- list is followed by four or five post titles sorted by date.
- finally all children/subcategories of the category listed at the bottom.
Something like what we have here on the right illustration. Using WordPress, I’ve always wanted to replicate the myriad of ways most news and magazine-style websites present its contents.
If you are familiar with wp_list_categories(), which is the one of main category tags that handles how categories are formatted and displayed, you’ll realise wp_list_categories() alone is not enough. We’ll also use get_categories(), get_cat_ID()and a wpdb query direct into WordPress’s database.
Also, I think the coding in this article is more suited for WordPress themers who prefer to hard-code it into their themes. The solution is a very straightforward sequential code where you can just copy and paste it into your sidebar.php (or wherever you wish) for instance.
Let’s get down to the source codes …
Continue reading ‘How to list latest posts and subcategories of each top level categories in WordPress’
