wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips

Category: Tips

5 steps to a smoother WordPress upgrade

| October 30, 2007 | 8 Comments

Someone just left a comment here on WordPressGarage saying that he upgraded his wife's WordPress blog and lost all the categories. He wanted to know how he could get them back. I asked him if he had backed up the blog before upgrading, and he sadly said no. First of all, that's why ... View Post

Finding the perfect facebook-WordPress system

| October 23, 2007 | 20 Comments

Welcome to our first guest post. The writer, Ryan Hellyer, is a PhD student studying supramolecular chemistry at the University of Otago in New Zealand (I don't even know what that is, but it sounds like you need to be a bit smart to study that). In his spare time, he plays and organises ... View Post

Transferring Simple Tagging tags into another WordPress blog

| October 18, 2007 | 1 Comment

I recently had to migrate an entire blog from one installation to another. WordPress does have an export function, and there are many database backup plugins and managers, but these really only work well with a basic installation that doesn't use any plugins that created tables. So, in my case, I couldn't ... View Post

RSS feed mashup services – easy and free

| September 16, 2007 | 4 Comments

Once you're writing and/or managing a bunch of sites or blogs, you may find that it would be useful to mash all your feeds together into one feed that displays posts from all of your sites in chronological order. For example, you may want to have each site display all the new posts from ... View Post

My favorite WordPress tip

| September 8, 2007 | 1 Comment

Blogging Challenge - Lorelle on WordPress

In Lorelle's latest blog challenge, she asks us to describe our favorite WordPress tip. She says to think back to when we started experimenting with WordPress, and try to remember what tips we found valuable. I started ... View Post

Giving different styles to different WordPress categories

| September 7, 2007 | 19 Comments

WordPress allows you to give different styles to different categories in a range of ways. You can style a category page: this means that every category page can have its own unique style. For example, let's say you have a site about vegetables, where every vegetable is a category. You can style ... View Post

Displaying Flickr images in sidebar or footer of WordPress blog

Miriam Schwab | August 30, 2007 | 3 Comments

We were building a site where we wanted a strip of flickr images from a specific flickr group, or with specific tags, to show up in the footer, and to update automatically as new images became available on the flickr group or with those keywords. The best solution seemed to be ... View Post

7 lessons learned from digg’s home page

| August 11, 2007 | 0 Comments

This past Thursday, one of my sites reached digg's home page. As we watched in disbelief, tens of thousands of readers flooded the site (and brought it crashing down in the classic "digg effect"). This was both exciting and frustrating. We learned a lot from this experience, and I would ... View Post

Videos and excerpts don’t jive – and how to manually create excerpts

| August 7, 2007 | 4 Comments

I just discovered that videos do not show up when you are using excerpts (<?php the_excerpt(); ?>) on certain pages instead of publishing the full content (<?php the_content(); ?>) on the post. I use Viper's Video Quicktags for easily embedding videos in my blogs. Well, ... View Post

StumbleUpon: the search for meaning continues

| July 19, 2007 | 3 Comments

As I mentioned in a previous post, StumbleUpon can be a sudden source of massive traffic to your blog. But how it works is a mystery to me. Today I came across ... View Post