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Unless you have been living under a rock for the last year or so, you will know all about the fearsome honey badger (profanity warning):
What you may not know is that the honey badger is also a WordPress aficionado. I say aficionado, but you may in fact not want to take on board any of the “advice” that WP Honey Badger offers.
Everyone likes a competition.
Back on 1st February we invited you to submit your sites for the WPMU WordPress Design Competition, and the response was certainly healthy! Submissions for consideration are now officially closed.
Over 50 sites were submitted, and from those 50, I have produced a shortlist of 10 sites. Those 10 sites will now be judged by the WPMU.org and WPMU DEV team. If you have been shortlisted, you will have received an email asking you to prove ownership of the site(s) you have submitted.
We posed this exact question last week, when we had a couple of free copies of the WordPress 3 Cookbook to hand out.
These are just a few of the many noteworthy responses that we got back from you guys:
“I would like to make WordPress (even more) user-friendly for independent journalists, in order to empower free speech around the globe. I would like to modify the Dashboard with a more simple and social-media oriented layout”.
You may have noticed that we introduced the WPMU 100 on Monday and issued a call for votes. For those who don’t know, the WPMU 100 will be a ranking table of the best WordPress-focused blogs in existence. For anyone interested in WordPress, the WPMU 100 will be a valuable resource.
Today, we are doing something a little different. It’s competition time!
How Good Are You?
If you’re reading this, you are probably passionate about WordPress website design. But how good are you? How well do you compare to your WPMU-reading peers? Now is the time to find out!
We have decided on an ambitious undertaking here at WPMU. We are going to produce a definitive list of the top 100 WordPress-focused blogs, which will be known as The WPMU 100.
The league table will be based upon an objective analysis of publicly-available data (such as PageRank, Alexa rating, inbound links, and comments).
If you ever have the need to display the name of your current category without a link, the following code will let you do that.
<?php
foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) {
echo $category->cat_name . ‘ ‘;
}
?>
You will need to insert this in your theme’s files in the appropriate place.
Get WordPress Category Name in Action
Let’s take a look at a few quick examples of how you can use this.
If your site is very ad-heavy above the fold, you may start to encounter problems in Google’s search results.
Google recently announced a change in their “page layout algorithm” that is designed to penalize pages that are stuffed with ads and light on content, especially in the area above the fold (i.e. the screen area that you see before you scroll down the page).
Almost nothing is more frustrating for a user than searching around for a login link in order to get to important content.
The following method found at Vandweerd.com will automatically detect whether a user is logged in or not and put a login or a logout link right on your menu bar.
*** Please note, this method only works when you are using WordPress’ custom menus. (The menu function available in the admin section: Appearance > Menus.)
Add Code to Your Functions File
The WordPress Codex is a wonderful resource for all WordPress users. In true open source style, it was created and is maintained by folk just like you and I. If you have a question about WordPress, your first port of call should always be the Codex. If you want to know more about how you can contribute to the Codex, click here.
The WordPress theme and plugin community is in a sorry state. Developers stumble from town to town, cap in hand, begging for just enough donations or advertisement hits to make it through the day.
Okay – perhaps I am being a little hyperbolic. But with hopelessly outdated plugins, repository hacks, and the simple fact that honest developers can’t sell their themes and/or plugins via WordPress.org, surely there is a better option?
