Using WordPress for this project could work well, but WordPress straight out of the box will probably not suit your needs exactly. And so in this post, we’ll go over how you might structure your book in a WordPress environment.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

There are number of ways to go about turning WordPress into a suitable platform for an online book. At the most basic level, you will need to decide whether to make Posts, Pages, or Custom Posts your principle building block. There could be arguments made for each, but in this tutorial we’re going to make regular WordPress Posts the primary building block – i.e. we’re going to use Posts to publish the content of our book.

It should also be noted that different people will have different preferences and different needs according to their situation. Some may have long chapters while others have many short chapters. Some may have a number of different sections in each chapter while others forgo chapter sections altogether. … And the list goes on.

Therefore, the recommendations listed in this tutorial are just that – recommendations. You may have to change them to suit your particular case, but at the very least, they should give you some ideas.

Why Posts?

The reason I chose to go with Posts for this tutorial is that you typically have more flexibility with Posts.  Of course you could get Pages and Custom Posts to pretty much be as flexible as Posts, but that would take some extra work.

Building Your Site

OK, enough with all the disclaimers. Let’s get to actually building the site.

Changing Posts to Suit Your Needs

While Posts have a lot of flexibility, they come with two characteristics that you probably aren’t going to want:

• They usually have a date affixed to them.
• They publish in reverse chronological order (i.e. the latest post appears first).

Removing the Date from Your Posts

There may be a few exceptions (such as those writing a travelogue, for example), but most people will want to remove the date stamp from their posts. Probably the easiest way to do that is to use a plugin that performs that task for you. The WP Post Date Remover plugin will do that.

If you’d like a more manual option, then you can take a look at this post.

Publish Posts in Chronological Order

As well as removing the date stamp from your posts, most will also want their posts to publish in chronological order (i.e. the first post stays at the top). You can do that with the Default Sort Ascend plugin.

Use Categories for Your Chapters and Major Sections

Perhaps the easiest way to organize all you content is, of course, with your categories function.

If you are breaking your book into major sections (e.g. Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV), then you will want to make categories for each of those.

Under each of those categories, you will create a child category (aka sub-category) for each of your chapters in that part of the book. For example, I have created a hypothetical book with four major sections and twelve individual chapters.

The outline for my hypothetical book looks like this:

Part I – Birth (parent category)

• Chapter 1 – January (child category)
• Chapter 2 – February (child category)
• Chapter 3 – March (child category)

Part II – Beginnings

• Chapter 4 – April
• Chapter 5 – May
• Chapter 6 – June

Part III – The Thick of It

• Chapter 7 – July
• Chapter 8 – August
• Chapter 9 – September

Part IV – The End

• Chapter 10 – October
• Chapter 11 – November
• Chapter 12 – December

And here’s how my category set-up looks in the backend.

Editing Chapter Structure (i.e. Categories)

Of course you’ll want to plan things out in advance as much as possible, but one of the nice things about categories is that they are easy to edit. You can easily change a child category into a parent category or vice versa. You can also easily add new categories to your parent categories, make sub-sub categories, and more.

Some will want to (or need to) pay more attention to categories and sub-categories than others. It all depends on what you want to achieve. However, at least some basic attention to this overall structure will give you a sound foundation behind the scenes. This sound foundation will allow you more flexibility down the road and make it easier for you to lead your visitors through your book in a logical way (or give them clear navigation so they can jump around as they like without getting lost).

A Plugin for Extra Help

Writing is a messy business, and often you’ll find that you need to add a section here or rearrange a few sections there. As you will be using your categories for the different chapters and sections on your site, that means you may want to rearrange them at some point. WordPress doesn’t do this by default, but the My Category Order plugin will allow you to do that.

Custom Menu Creation

Once you have your book’s main sections and chapters laid out (i.e. your parent categories and child categories), you’ll want to display them, so your visitors can clearly follow the flow of your text in the way you intended it to be followed.

A sound category structure will give you the flexibility to take advantage of many things (too many to list here, or to even imagine), but perhaps the easiest way to put a clear, simple navigation menu on your site is to use the WordPress Custom Menus system. (Appearance > Menus)

When your categories are laid out logically in your backend, they will also appear logically in your Custom Menu system, making it easy to both create an original menu, as well as add new sections when needed.

Take a look at how clearly everything is organized on my Custom Menu page.

From there it’s easy to create an equally organized Custom Menu.

I can then pull that Custom Menu into a widget on my sidebar. (Appearance > Widgets)

And here’s what it looks like in action.

Displaying All Sections

Of course different people will have different needs, but one thing that may work for some is to also display ALL of your sections (i.e. all your posts) in one long column down the sidebar.

There are a few things to note about this method. The first is that it will NOT separate your sections out into different chapters. It will simply list them all in an undifferentiated column. However, it will list your sections (your posts) in the correct order from beginning to end – as long as you have them ordered correctly in the backend. (More on that later.)

You can do this by using the default “Recent Posts” widget and increasing the number of posts to a number that will be high enough to include the number of posts/sections you have. (Appearance > Widgets)

And here’s what it looks like.

Ordering Your Posts in the Backend

As stated at the beginning, one of the reasons to use Posts over Pages (or Custom Posts) is that they may afford the average user a little more flexibility out of the box. And one advantage that Posts have over Pages is that they are perhaps easier to order and reorder on a large scale … if you know the trick.

So what’s the trick?

Well, Posts, as you probably know, are ordered by date. Whether you are going in chronological order or reverse chronological order, WordPress still looks at the date and the time on the post in order to determine how to arrange it in relation to all the other posts.

Because of this, you can take advantage of time stamps to get your posts in the order you want them.

Setting Up Your Time Stamps

If you write a post in WordPress and then publish it immediately, the post gets stamped as being published at that time. However, you can change the time stamp on your post to any date. You can control the time stamp on the Write/Edit page or in the Edit Posts page.

When starting out, my suggestion would be to publish each post with a time stamp at least a day apart. In that way, you can easily add new sections anywhere into your existing list of sections. All you need to do is to pick a time stamp that rest between the time stamps of the posts on either side.

An Example

So, let’s say I’m going to start posting a book to my site today (May 9 at 1 p.m.). I already have fifty different sections written that I want to post; therefore, I will want to set the time stamp on the first section to be fifty days in the past (March 10 at 1 p.m.). Then for the second section, I will set the time stamp to be for forty-nine days in the past (March 11 at 1 p.m.). And the third will be for forty-eight days in the past (March 12 at 1 p.m.), etc.

In this way, if I decide that I want to add a section that comes after the first section but before the second section, I can then easily just pick a time stamp that rests between the two existing time stamps (i.e. AFTER March 10 at 1 p.m. yet BEFORE March 11 at 1 p.m.). So, for example, I might pick March 10 at 9 p.m. I still want to leave myself clear room on either side in case I decide to add another section.

When I do this, my new section (my new post) automatically becomes the second section in my book, and it pushes the original second section to third … and on down the line for each other section.

(Note: If you are using Custom Menus, then you may still need to manually add your new sections into your navigation, depending on how you’ve set things up.)

Adding Previous & Next Navigation

Something else you will no doubt want to do is to add “Previous and Next” navigation links to the bottom of your posts. Some themes will come with these links included, but many don’t, so we’ll quickly go over how you can get them on your site.

There are plugins you can search for that will do this for you, but you can also manually add a little bit of code to the bottom of your theme’s single.php file. (Some themes these days call in a loop file to the single.php file, and so depending on your theme, you may want to place this code there instead.)

There are different ways to determine exactly how your Previous and Next links display, and so you can check out more info on it at WordPress if you like.

In the meantime, we’ll go over some code that should work for you. Place the following at the bottom of your single.php file. (Appearance > Editor > Single – single.php)

<?php previous_post('&laquo; &laquo; %', '', 'yes'); ?> | <?php next_post('% &raquo; &raquo; ', '', 'yes'); ?>

It will output links for you like this:

Some Plugins to Consider

I’m sure there are tons of plugins out there that could help you present your online book in a better way, but I’ll just mention two here because they seem fairly fundamental. Both of these are more for non-fiction books than fiction.

Index Press

The first is called Index Press. It helps you create an index of your site much like a regular book would have.

Here’s a look at it in action.

WP Section Index

The second is not quite as fundamental, but still useful for some. If you choose to write VERY long sections, and you keep them all on a single page as opposed to breaking them up, then the WP Section Index plugin will generate a mini-index for a single page based on your headings.

For example, you can set the plugin to make an index of all H2 headings in a page. You then set up the plugin’s widget in the sidebar, and it will appear if you have H2 heading in your page. If you don’t have H2 heading in your page, it won’t appear.

Here’s what it looks like in action.

Pagination

And finally, not a plugin, but a little built-in WordPress trick. You can also choose to break a very long post into multiple pages. It’s a simple trick that you can learn here.

The result looks like this (the style will vary according to your theme):

Final Words

Of course everything above is just a basic blueprint. And you will need to decide on things like your homepage, but this basic guide should help you get started. In fact, it may be plenty enough for many. You will want to be careful about adding too much navigation and too many bells and whistles. You don’t want your visitors to get confused.

Keep it simple, make it logical, and provide navigation that will be obvious to your visitor.

Photo: Poet and Heart Shaped Book from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

Probably one of the biggest things you can do, of course, is to get a unique header. And so that’s a given. But there’s another smaller element you can change on every single page that will also make your theme seem different: the way your date is displayed.

Date Icons

In this tutorial, we’re going to go over how you can add date icons to your site to spice up your theme. We’re going to be setting up a theme to show a date icon that looks like this …

Upload Your Date Icon Background

The way this trick works is that it prints the month and the date on top of an image that’s set as a background, and so the first thing you’ll want to do is to upload your date icon background. You will want to make sure that the image is the size you want it to be on your page. (We’ll go over where to find background images at the end of the post.)

This is what my date icon background looks like without the month and date printed on it …

Get the URL for the Image

Once your background image is uploaded to your site, you’ll need to find the URL for it. You’ll need this for later.

You can find the URL by clicking on the “Edit” link that appears when you hover over the icon in your media library.

Add Date Code to Your Theme

Next you’ll need to add some code to the files in your theme where you want the icon to show up. If you want it to show up on the homepage (index.php), on single pages (single.php), on category pages (category.php or achives.php), etc., you will need to add this code to each of those templates.

There are a number of different ways to write the code to make this work, but we’ll just use this one way. There are also a lot of different places you could put the code depending on where you want the icon to show up on your pages. So you may want to play around with this in a few different spots on your particular theme to get it the way you want it.

For example, you may want to put the icon just to the left of the title of the post. You may want to put it under the title and to the left of your other meta data (author, category, etc.).

(Note: In this tutorial, we will NOT be including the year on the icon. Of course many people will want to have the year on their posts, so you may want to just add this date icon IN ADDITION to the original date that your theme already uses if it includes the year. In this way, a user can quickly glance at the icon and see the date and month clearly, but then if they have questions about what year it is, they can look at the “fine print” to also find the year.)

Here’s the code we’ll be adding to our theme files:

<div class="icon-date">
                 <h3><?php the_time('M'); ?></h3>
                 <h4><?php the_time('j'); ?></h4>
</div>

Again, you may need to play around with this. In this tutorial, because of the way my theme is already set up, I am choosing to put it under the title and beside the meta data. I have also decided to leave the original date stamp from my theme in the file because it contains the year in it.

Add Styling to Your Stylesheet

Next you will need to add CSS code to your stylesheet to bring it all together. (Appearance > Stylesheet – style.css)

Here’s our styling:

.icon-date {
               background: #FFFFFF url(http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/date2.gif);
               float: left;
               width: 45px;
               height: 50px;
               margin: 0px;
               padding: 0px;
               }

.icon-date h3 {
              font-family: Times New Roman, Helvetica, Sans-Serif;
              color: #FFFFFF;
              font-size: 10px;
              font-weight: bold;
              padding: 1px 0px 0px 7px;
              margin: 0px;
              text-transform: uppercase;
              }

.icon-date h4 {
               font-family: Arial, Times New Roman, Helvetica, Sans-Serif;
               color: #173774;
               font-size: 22px;
               font-weight: bold;
               padding: 7px 4px 0px 0px;
               margin: 0px;
               text-align: center;
               }

Get the URL for Your Background Icon

You’ll notice in the first section of the CSS code above, there is a spot for the URL of your background image. In the example above, it’s this line:

background: #FFFFFF url(http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/date2.gif);

Of course you will need to put the URL for your own background image in that space.

Adjust Your CSS

The CSS above works for me in my particular case, but there’s a good chance this exact code will not work for you; therefore, you will most likely need to adjust things here and there to get it looking right. Unfortunately, there’s no real way around this. How your date prints out on your background image will depend on your image itself – the colors, the style, the size, exactly where you want the date to print, etc.

So just start playing around with things. Move things left or right, up or down by playing with the padding, for example. Get the font size and color the way you like them. Change the fonts altogether if you like, etc.

Think of this code as more of a rough guide. If you look at it and play with it, you should be able to pick up the basic ideas behind it. From there you can make it your own.

The Result

So here’s a before and after picture of the posts on my site. As mentioned before, you’ll notice that I left the original date in meta data section.

Where to Get Calendar Background Icons

Of course you’ll need an icon to upload in the first place, so the question is where to get them. Of course you could make your own if you have some graphic skills. And in this way you could really get something unique and themed to your site’s content.

But barring that, you can search for something along the lines of “calendar background icon” on design sites that have downloadable icons or look for “icon search engines” and search there. You might also take a look at this post from Smashing Magazine to help you get a start.

Photo: New Year’s Day Calendar from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

They grow tired of the default selection of widgets that ship with WordPress, and try as they might, they just can’t find what they’re looking for in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

If this sounds like you, perhaps it’s time to step up your game and . . .

your very own WordPress widget!

Getting started with widget development

At a minimum, you’ll need the following:

• An understanding of the Widgets API
• At least a passing familiarity with PHP scripting

If you’re still a bit hazy on the whole concept of WordPress widgets, and how and why they came to be, you should probably brush up on your general knowledge before you take a crack at any development of your own.

Check out the introductory section on widgets in the WordPress Codex, which will point you in the direction of some other excellent resources for further reading. You could also take a look at this page on the Automattic blog for some additional background on how widgets became a part of WordPress.

Four excellent tutorials on creating WordPress widgets

If you’re ready to take the plunge and write your own widget, we’ve scoured the interwebs and rounded up some high quality tutorials to help you get the ball rolling. These resources should help you immensely on your journey to glorious Widgetdom. They’re arranged roughly in order of complexity, from simplest to hardest.

How to Create WordPress Widgets

from MakeUseOf.com

This tutorial focuses on creating basic widgets with limited functionality. A good place to start for first-time widget developers.

Creating WordPress Widgets

from Azulia Designs

Another entry-level tutorial that gives you a broad overview of creating widget-enabled plugins, as well as widgetizing WordPress themes. Well-written and easy to follow.

Build Your Own WordPress Widget

from Johnathan Andersen Design

This tutorial is getting a little more into the technical ends of things, with a more detailed writing style and greater level of assumed knowledge. If you can get your head around the first two articles, this one should take your widget writing skills to the next level.

Advanced WordPress Widgets

from WP Roots

Another higher-end tute that takes you right into the meaty heart of advanced widget development. It’s quite long and detailed, so we’d recommend reading the more basic articles first, and making sure your PHP knowledge is up to scratch.

Over to you – have you attempted to write your own WordPress widget? How did it turn out? Can you recommend any good resources for learning widget development?

_{Photo courtesy of Wonderfully Complex.}

Even though the dark overlords at Google have restricted a lot of the data that used to be available in Analytics, it’s still an extremely valuable tool for gathering intelligence on your site visitors. Analytics can show you where they landed, what they read, how long they stayed, what they were searching for, and a heap of other valuable stuff.

Google Analytics gives you a closer look at your site's performance

As a serious WordPress blogger who aspires to greatness, you really can’t afford to be without it. This article shows you how to add Google Analytics to WordPress with minimal fuss and very little effort.

Step One: Get a Google Analytics account

If you haven’t already signed up for analytics, you’ll need to venture over to Google and get hooked up with a free account. Don’t worry, it’s quick and painless.

Once you’ve completed the sign up process, you’ll be given a piece of JavaScript code. It looks like this:

This code allows Google to gather anonymous data on how your website is being used

Step Two: Add the Google Analytics code to your WordPress theme

To do this, you’ll need to open up the footer.php file of your WordPress theme. You can either use an FTP client to access your server, or edit your theme files directly from the WordPress dashboard. Your file editor is located under the ‘Appearance’ tab in the sidebar menu.

In the list of template files to the right of the text editor, find footer.php and open it. To add Google Analytics to WordPress, you now just need to copy and paste your code immediately before the closing </body> tag. Like so:

Make sure you save your footer.php file once you’ve pasted in the new code. Google Analytics should now be able to track every page of your WordPress site and provide you with that sweet juicy data.

Step Three: Double check that your analytics is working

To make sure that the script has installed correctly, go back to your Google Analytics home page and click the admin panel in the top right corner of the screen. Open the relevant account, and click the ‘tracking code’ panel. If the Tracking Status is ‘Receiving Data’, then you’ve successfully added Google Analytics to your WordPress site.

Alternatively, use a Google Analytics plugin

If you’re not comfortable hacking around in your WordPress template files, or you want to explore some additional options and functionality, you can also add Google Analytics to WordPress with the use of a plugin. These plugins will typically give you an interface in your WordPress dashboard where you can add the code directly, without having to delve into your theme files.

There are quite a few Google Analytics plugins to choose from, and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend one over the others. Have a look for yourself in the WordPress plugin directory.

_{Photo courtesy of Flood.}

Even if you’re juggling work, family, friends, sport and fifty other things at once, learning WordPress isn’t beyond your capabilities. If you’re willing to invest a bit of free time whenever you’ve got it, you can master the fundamentals of WordPress a lot quicker than you might imagine.

This is a day-by-day WordPress learning regime that anyone can follow. In compiling this tutorial, I’ve made the following assumptions:

• You already have WordPress installed, or have at least used the platform a few times before. (You really should have access to a WordPress install before you start learning).
• You’re able to devote 2 or 3 hours per day to learning WordPress (before work, after school, on your lunch break, whenever).

So on with the show. Find out how to learn WordPress in a quick and logical manner with this 7 day plan.

Monday

Venture over to the WordPress Codex and read the Getting Started section.

This collection of articles walks you through the fundamentals of how to learn WordPress, and introduces you to all the essential concepts of the software. As you read, you’re encouraged to practice the things you’re learning on your own WordPress site.

The writing style is a bit dry and encyclopedic, but the information is rock solid. If you can follow and understand most of it then your week of learning WordPress is off to an excellent start.

Tuesday

Get your head around WordPress themes.

Understanding how themes work is absolutely key to learning WordPress. Choosing a new theme is probably the first customization that you’ll make to your site, so it’s important to know what you’re doing.

As a starting point, check out Using Themes in the Codex. Once you’re comfortable with the concept of themes and how they work, venture over to the WordPress Theme Directory and start doing some exploring.

Wednesday

Familiarize yourself with the WordPress Plugin Directory.

The Directory is by far the largest collection of free WordPress plugins on the web, and you’ll certainly be spending some time here if you want to become a serious WordPress user.

Have a look in the ‘Most Popular’ section to see which plugins are widely used. Whenever you look at a plugin, pay attention to its average user rating (the yellow stars) and how recently it was updated. Poorly-rated and out-of-date plugins should generally be avoided.

For a broad overview of what’s currently hot among WordPress users, have a read of The Top 100 WordPress Plugins For Your Site.

Thursday

Learn about WordPress SEO.

You can take some simple yet powerful steps to improve your site’s visibility in Google. Spend an hour or so learning the core aspects of WordPress SEO, and you’ll be much better off for it. We have a very excellent three part tutorial on this very subject.

If you’re a complete newbie to the concept of Search Engine Optimization, a great resource to get you off the ground is the Beginner’s Guide to SEO, which is available for free on the SEOmoz website.

Friday

Learn how WordPress hosting works.

As your WordPress site grows, so do your hosting requirements. If you’re just staring out with a new WordPress site, then just about any old hosting plan will do the trick. But as you build up more content and hopefully more traffic, you need to find a hosting provider that can properly support your site.

The crew over at WP Shout have put together a very comprehensive review of WordPress hosting providers, harvested from interviews with 252 different WordPress users. Well worth a read if you’re not too familiar with the market and various providers. For further reading, we also did an article recently on the pros and cons and free WordPress hosting.

Saturday

Learn where to learn more.

Knowing how to learn WordPress really boils down to knowing where to look. It’s important that you identify a list of reliable and comprehensive resources that you can turn to for guidance. Get in the habit of reading the right blogs and the right books, and you’ll start learning WordPress almost by osmosis.

To point you in the right direction, we’ve got an article on 10 free resources for learning WordPress, comprised of blogs and eBooks dedicated to the mighty WP.

Sunday

Crack a beer and congratulate yourself.

On the seventh day, the Lord rested. If you’ve put in a solid couple of hours learning WordPress for the past six days, then give yourself a big pat on the back. You’re now vastly more informed and capable than you were a week ago, and well on your way to becoming a hardcore WordPress rockstar.

All you gotta do now is keep at it!

_{Photos: Leo Reynolds, Mag3737, Chris in Plymouth and Mark Brannan.}

Part 3 of a Series

This post is the third and final part in a series.  Part 1 is here: Custom Fields. Part 2 is here: Custom Post Types.

Today we’ll go over “custom taxonomies.”

What Exactly does Taxonomy Mean?

Taxonomy is defined as “the branch of science concerned with classification.” So another way to put it is taxonomy means grouping things together – i.e. classifying them.

You’re no doubt already familiar with taxonomies in WordPress:

• Categories: Your categories are a type of taxonomy. You are grouping different posts together into categories.
• Tags: Tags are another type of taxonomy. When you create tags for your posts, you are creating groups of posts that are tied together with the tag you gave them.

How Categories and Tags Work on Your Site

I’m sure you know this information, but we’ll go over it here so you’ll have a point of reference fresh in mind for when we start defining WordPress custom taxonomies.

With both categories and tags, you can click on a link and see all the posts in that group. If you have a category called Pizza Restaurants, then you can access all those posts by navigating to the Pizza Restaurants category.

If you have a tag called “budget” (as in budget restaurants), then you can navigate to the tag page for “budget” and see all the posts that you tagged with that term.

And So What are Custom Taxonomies?

And so “custom taxonomies” work exactly the same way as categories and tags, except they’re “custom,” of course. You get to make them up from scratch. And like categories and tags, you can set them up to appear on your editing screen in either way: in a checkbox fashion with pre-determined terms like categories, or with an empty text box like tags that you can write whatever you like in.

Custom Taxonomies vs. Custom Fields

You may remember in Part 1 of this series, we talked about custom fields and how they are like extra boxes you put on your editing screen. And as you can see above, custom taxonomies also appear on your editing screen as extra boxes. And so because of that, it’s easy to confuse the two.

The simple difference between a custom taxonomy and a custom field is that with a taxonomy you are putting a post into a group that can be accessed as a group. In other words, it’s like putting a post into a special type of category. All the posts in that “category” (with that taxonomy) are linked together just as regular categories and tags link posts together.

The content published from a custom field is not linked together with other posts. It is simply displayed on the page.

So, again, in essence, a custom taxonomy that you make up yourself is really just a special type of category or a special type of tag. And, of course, you can have as many as you like.

Why Custom Taxonomies?

So if custom taxonomies are really just like categories and tags, why would you need them when you have categories and tags?

Well, some people don’t. For some, they can make due with categories and tags. But let’s take our hypothetical food-themed site from the previous two posts as an example again.

Even though I only have three different types of posts (restaurant reviews, recipes, nutrition posts), there are A LOT of different pieces of information in each.

If I tried to put everything that I wanted to group together in categories, I would have a large number of categories checked. For example, on one Pizza Restaurant post I might have Pizza, Downtown, Budget, and Walking Distance to Subway all checked in my categories box.

That’s not a problem, of course. I can make as many categories as I like; however, when I print the categories out on my post, they all get printed out together in one line because the code just says, “Get the categories.” And so that’s what it does, it gets every category checked and displays them in a line.

With custom taxonomies, however, I can print out each individual taxonomy wherever I like.

Decision Time: Custom Taxonomy or Custom Field

Another way to think of the difference between a custom taxonomy and a custom field is that a custom taxonomy usually gets printed on the page as a link (grouping together all the other posts with that taxonomy) while a custom field just gets printed on the page plain, without a link.

And so with this in mind, you will need to decide which types of information you want to be linked together in a group, and which types of information you want to just have printed out plain on the page.

In general, you might want to consider linking common terms that you repeat again and again together, and then leave specific things to be printed out without a link.

Choosing Taxonomy or Field: Some Examples

Going back to our restaurant review example, let’s take a look at a few of the different pieces of information we’re going to want to include, and then we’ll decide if we should use a custom taxonomy, a custom field, or both.

• Address & phone number – (custom field) This is obviously going to be unique to each restaurant, and so we don’t want to link this information together with other posts/restaurants. No other restaurant will have the exact same phone number and address. However, see the next section.
• Location – (custom taxonomy) Here we could use some general location indicators, such as Downtown, Northside, Southside, Eastside, Westside, etc. For this, it would be a good idea to use a custom taxonomy because then someone could click on the link for Downtown, for example, and see all the restaurants reviewed in the downtown area.
• Type of cuisine – (custom taxonomy) This might be a good one to use a custom taxonomy. You could have taxonomies such as Pizza, Seafood, Vegetarian, Chinese, Indian, Sandwiches, etc. Again, someone could click on Pizza and be taken to all the other pizza restaurant reviews.
• Price range – (maybe both) If you are giving exact prices, such as $7.95 – $24.95, then you will want to use custom fields. If you are giving general prices, such as Budget, Mid-range, Expensive, Very Expensive, then you will probably want to use custom taxonomies. That way, someone could click on Budget, for example, and see all the budget restaurant reviews.

Important Technical Notes

When you set up a taxonomy, you will need to decide if it’s going to be hierarchical (meaning it can have sub groups) or if it will be non-hierarchical.

An easy way to think about this, again, is to think about categories and tags.

The category box is hierarchical. It can have sub-categories (children). But that also means that the choices in the box are set up beforehand. If you are only going to a few choices that you uses again and again, then you will probably want to go with hierarchical.

The tag box is non-hierarchical. With tags, of course, you typically have many more than you do categories.

And so when thinking about whether you want a certain taxonomy to be hierarchical or not, just ask yourself, “Would I make this a category or a tag?”

How to Create a Custom Taxonomy

Plugins

Unless you’re a coder, as in the past two posts, I would suggest going with a plugin that will help you create your taxonomies. There are a number of them out there. Here are two.

More Taxonomies – This plugin (still in beta) is part of a suite of three plugins to deal with custom fields, custom post types, and custom taxonomies. The other two are the More Fields plugin and the More Types plugin.

Magic Fields 2 – I checked this plugin out recently, and it did the job nicely for me without any problems.

The settings on a custom taxonomy plugin will look something like the following. Notice how it lets me choose where which “post types” I want to place the custom taxonomy box in. In this case, I just chose my “review” type posts. So that taxonomy box shows up on my “Review Posts” screen but not on my regular post or page screens.

Manually

If you’d like to do it manually, you can see the WordPress Codex section for it.

How to Display a Custom Taxonomy

As with  custom fields, you need to insert code in your theme’s files where you want your custom taxonomy content to appear.

Here’s the way I did for the example I used in this post. Here it is again.

This piece of code is for the first line, the “location” line.

<?php echo get_the_term_list( $post->ID, 'location', 'Location: ', ', ', '' ); ?>

You’ll notice that I included some text before the content – I included Location: and then printed the content (in this case it was “Downtown”). If you wanted something else for your text, you would just change my wording (the Location with a capital “L” and the colon.). If you just wanted to print the content without any text before it, then you would just delete that word.

So that’s some basic code you can use. But in my example, you’ll notice that my text before the content is in bold. So actually my real piece of code looks like this (with <strong> around my text).

<?php echo get_the_term_list( $post->ID, 'location', '<strong>Location:</strong> ', ', ', '' ); ?>

And my entire section of code looks like this …

<?php echo get_the_term_list( $post->ID, 'location', '<strong>Location:</strong> ', ', ', '' ); ?>
<br />
<?php echo get_the_term_list( $post->ID, 'price', '<strong>Price:</strong> ', ', ', '' ); ?>
<br />
<?php echo get_the_term_list( $post->ID, 'cuisine', '<strong>Cuisine:</strong> ', ', ', '' ); ?>
<br />
<?php echo get_the_term_list( $post->ID, 'subway', '<strong>Subway:</strong> ', ', ', '' ); ?>
<br />
<br />

Using Other Plugins

Once you get your taxonomies set up, there are other types of plugins you can get to display them. Here’s an example of a custom taxonomy widget plugin I tried.

In this case, I decided to show the different locations of the restaurants. This was pulled from my newly created “location” taxonomy.

End of the Series

If you’ve gone through all three parts of this series, hopefully you have a better understanding of how these three confusing terms – custom fields, custom post types, and custom taxonomies – are different, and yet how they can work hand in hand.

And even more importantly, hopefully these posts have given you some ideas for you own site.

If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out Part 1 of the series (Custom Fields) and Part 2 (Custom Post Types).

Photo: Arrows on grow from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

Step 1: Don’t hack the core.

Here’s the most important tip: Don’t edit the /wp-includes/comment-template.php file. Someone may have suggested it to you in the forums as the quickest way to customize the comments template, but it’s never really a good idea to edit the WordPress core files. There’s a better way.

Step 2: Edit the Comment Form Tag.

Open the file containing the comment form tag. Here’s what it looks like:

<?php comment_form() ?>

More than likely the theme file that you’re looking for is going to be comments.php.

There are some some different parameters you can pass to the function for modifying the form. The codex has several handy examples for editing the comments template. Let’s do a simple one.

If you want to remove the HTML text that follows the form (“You may use these HTML tags and attributes…”), here’s how to modify the tag:

<?php
$comments_args = array(
        // remove "Text or HTML to be displayed after the set of comment fields"
        'comment_notes_after' => '',
);

comment_form($comments_args);
?>

Not so difficult, right? Now, let’s change the title of the comment form. By default it says “Leave a Reply”. Let’s change that to “Comment”.

<?php
$comments_args = array(
        // change "Leave a Reply" to "Comment"
       'title_reply'=>'Comment',
);

comment_form($comments_args);
?>

You can change the text to be something more creative than “Comment”, such as “Discuss this post” or “Have something to say?”

The codex includes several more examples, but these simple ones should be enough to get you started. You can also rest assured that these quick edits to your theme’s comments file will be safe, even when you upgrade the WordPress core.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

When I first tried the app I thought, “Wow, Spotify is faster than the internet itself!” It’s lightning fast. Pumping out a feed to Facebook of all of the songs you listen to can be a bit annoying and overwhelming to your friends and followers. A better place for that is to show your latest activity in the sidebar of your WordPress blog.

The Latest Spotify Activity plugin for WordPress lets you display a stream of the latest songs you’ve listened to right on your website. It even shows which song is currently playing on your Spotify app. Here’s how to get it working:

Step 1: Signup for a Last.fm account (if you’re not already a member)

A Last.fm account is required for showing your latest activity. It’s free – all you have to do is sign up and have a username to enter into the plugin’s settings.

Step 2: Enable Last.fm scrobbling in your Spotify app’s preferences.

This part of the step is done within Spotify. Since Spotify doesn’t currently have an API, you will have to use “Last.fm Scrobbling” to display your latest songs. To set up scrobbling, simply open the user preferences in Spotify. Enter your Last.fm username and password and check “Scrobble to Last.fm”.

Step 3: Install the Latest Spotify Activity plugin.

The Latest Spotify Activity plugin is available for free from the WordPress plugin repository. Install and activate it and then you’ll have the option to add the widget to your sidebar or any other widgetized area.

Input your username, select how many recent activities you want to show and click save. It will look something similar to the one pictured here.

That’s it! Now you’ll be streaming all of your latest activity from Spotify.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

We’ll go through it in five steps.

Step 1: Create a New Template File

On your server, find your theme’s folder (wp-content/themes/your-theme).

Create a new file and name it something unique and appropriate (e.g. full-width-page.php). Remember to end it with the .php extension.

After that, find the file named page.php. Open that, copy the contents, and then go back to the file you just created (full-width-page.php), and paste those contents into your new file.

Now, at the VERY TOP of your new file (i.e. BEFORE the content you just added into it), put the following:

<?php
 /*
 Template Name: Full Width
 */
 ?>

It should look something like this:

Step 2: Remove the Sidebar

Next you’ll want to remove the sidebar. Search for the following code and take it out.

<?php get_sidebar() ?>

Step 3: Replace the Div ID

Next, you’ll need to find the Div ID for the content and change it, so we can style it the way we like.

More than likely, the div ID for the content will look like this:

<div id="content">

Change the name “content” to something unique and identifiable like “content-fullwidth.”

<div id="content-fullwidth">

Save the file, and you’re done with the template file.

Step 4: Style Your New Template File

Now you’ll need to widen the content area to give you more space.

Go to your style sheet in your admin area (Appearance > Editor > Stylesheet – style.css) and search for the section that controls the content area of your blog.

Typically your content area in your style sheet is named “#content” (easily enough).

Copy this section and then paste it into the style sheet again, renaming #content to the same name you gave your Div ID in Step 3 above (#content-fullwidth).

Then change the width to something wider.

Save your file, and that’s it for the style sheet.

Step 5: Choose Full Width

When you write a Page now, you should see an option on the right hand side for the “Full Width” template that you created.

The Original vs the New Full Width Page

Photo: Wide Load from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

Have you ever wished writing a post in WordPress was as easy as writing in Microsoft Word? Many may not know it, but you can write a post in Word and then publish directly to your WordPress site.

Although you can obviously write your posts in Word and then copy them into the WordPress editor, maybe the biggest reason to post directly from Word is to take advantage of the impressive graphics capabilities it offers. From image manipulation to “SmartArt” to sophisticated charts and graphs, Microsoft Word has a lot to offer.

A Simple Example of Some MS Word Graphics in a WordPress Post

Step-by-Step Guide for Publishing to WordPress with Word

A few points before we really get started.

1. A WARNING: Before we go any further, there’s one piece of information you should know. When you attempt to publish a post from Word to your site, Microsoft gives the following warning: “When Word sends information to the blog service provider, it may be possible for other people to see that information. This includes your user name and password. Do you want to continue?”

To be honest, I can’t really tell you how risky this is. When I searched around trying to find out, I came up more or less empty-handed. So before even starting this process, you should know that.

2. Something else you may find of interest is that Microsoft also has a very nice “offline blogging tool” called Windows Live Writer. However, Live Writer doesn’t have the same graphics capabilities as Word.

3. Finally, the steps in this tutorial follow publishing a post to WordPress via the latest version of Microsoft Word (2010 Version). You can also publish with MS Word 2007; however, some things may be slightly different.

Set Up Your WordPress Site to Accept Posts

The first step is to set up your blog to accept posts from outside the site (in this case, from you using MS Word).

In your blog’s admin area, go to Settings > Writing > Remote Publishing. Check the XML-RPC and click “Save Changes.”

Open a “New” Document

In the newest version of Word, go File > New > Blog post.

Set Up a Connection with Your Blog

Because this is the first time you are using the blogging template, you will be presented with a dialogue box for you to set up a connection to your site (or “Register” it). You do not have to do this now (you can do it the first time you attempt to publish your post); however, we’ll go ahead and do it to get it out of the way.

After you do this once, you will not need to do it again unless you decide to set up another site to publish to. You can publish to multiple sites and easily switch between them in the MS Word interface.

Choose WordPress

On the pull down list, of course choose “WordPress.”

Enter Your Site’s Info

Next, enter you’re sites info in the box. Simply replace the section that says <Enter your blog URL here> with the URL to your site (e.g. http://example.com/xmlrpc.php).

Keep in mind that if your blog is in a subfolder, you will need to enter the folder too (e.g. http://example.com/blog/xmlrpc.php).

NOTE: Remember that your complete URL here must end with xmlrpc.php. This is the name of the file that Word needs to communicate with.

Fill in the User Name and Password with the username and password you use to enter your site with.

* You will see an link here for “Picture Options.” You can just leave that as it is, and it will upload your pictures to your Uploads folder on your blog. You will also be able to access them in your Media Library in the admin area of your site.

Writing Your Post

Once your connection to your site is set up, you will come to the writing screen. This is a simplified version of what you would normally see in a Word Document. The ribbon at the top has fewer tabs, for example, and the default layout is set to a cleaner looking “Web Layout” view.

One thing you may notice is that the screen is very wide. Therefore, the way things look laid out in Word are not going to be the same as they are when you publish the post to your blog. This can be true inside the WordPress editor too, but the layout you’ll find in Word is likely to be much, much wider.

Because of this, one thing you may want to eventually do is to set your margins in Word to something narrower. It may be difficult to get it lined up exactly as you would like, but at least you will have a better feel for the approximate way things will look once they’re published on your site.

Graphics

You can reach all of the nice Word graphics capabilities through the “Insert” tab at the top. There you’ll see the ability to insert tables, pictures, shapes, SmartArt, etc.

By default, that top ribbon is hidden until you click on one of the tabs—either “Blog Post” or “Insert.” You can make it stay open by clicking the tiny down arrow on the far right-hand side.

The way to get to all the options for an image is to first insert the image, and then double click on it. You should see a new tab open called “Format” and above that “Picture Tools.”

Insert a Category

To place your post in a category, in the “Blog Post” tab, click the “Insert Category” button. If you already have categories on your site, you should see them there.

Publish or Save as Draft

To publish your post (or save it as a draft – “Publish as Draft”), in the “Blog Post” tab, hit “Publish.”

Extra Options

You will notice a few other options in the “Blog Post” tab.

• Home Page – Opens your default browser to your site’s home page
• Open Existing – Imports existing posts from your site so you can edit them
• Manage Accounts – Allows you to switch to (or add) other sites to manage

A Few Notes

A few other things to take note of.

• If you need to update your post, just hit publish again when you’re ready.
• Whichever font you use in Word, your post will publish with that font, regardless of the font you have set on your blog.

Using Word as Your Offline Editor

You may or may not want to use MS Word full time for your blog editor, but at least you know it’s there should you or your clients need some graphics that aren’t easily made in other place.

Joseph Foley on Google+