FDS Repository » Wordpress

Displaying the Latest Current Category Posts in the Sidebar

Omar — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 21:02:06 +0000

With WordPress, I wanted to display a list of the latest 5 posts from the category in which the displaying post is located. I needed to do this outside the loop because I wanted to list the posts in the sidebar. For the life of me couldn’t find anywhere on the net how to do this. Being as I wanted to display these in the sidebar, I had to work out a way of calling the cat_id globally. I’m no programer and at best can only edit or manipulate the simplest of variable, but finally mashed together an answer, several hours later o_O. Ordinarily, inside the loop one would only need to use get_the_category() but in this case the following code is required in order to pull the category ID for use outside the loop:

global $post;
$categories = get_the_category();
$category = $categories[0];
$sidebar_cat_id = $category->cat_ID;
$sidebar_cat_name = $category->cat_name;
?>

Notice I have included cat_name at the end, so that it can be called for a header perhaps, like so:

Latest Posts in

Next I wanted to list the latest 5 titles below the title. This was accomplished with the help of acquiring the $sidebar_cat_id.

$sidebar_related_query = new WP_Query(‘cat=’ . $sidebar_cat_id . ‘&showposts=5&offset=0&orderby=post_date&order=desc’);
while ($sidebar_related_query->have_posts()) : $sidebar_related_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID;
?>

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Et voila.

WordPress SEO Indexing Meta Tags

Omar — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 08:55:09 +0000

It is not always best to have all of your pages indexed and cached by the search engines. Also not all links should be followed, therefore some editing of your wordpress header might be in order. Here is what I sometimes do.
Place the following in your wordpress themes header.php file, if the page is a single, page, or if its the home page then the robots will index and follow links on it. Otherwise search engines will not index the pages but will still follow the links.

Note that if you do not use a home.php page on your wordpress blog, it should be removes from the equasion and read as such:

Moving Kubrick’s Sidebar to the Left

Omar — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 23:26:28 +0000

Within the Theme Editor, select Stylesheet from the theme files listed vertically to the right. The Style.css file should now be presented in the editor window and is ready for editing.

From the editor window, find the following code:

.narrowcolumn {
float: left;
padding: 0 0 20px 45px;
margin: 0px 0 0;
width: 450px;
}

and replace with:

.narrowcolumn {
float: right;
padding: 0 45px 20px 0px;
margin: 0px 0 0;
width: 450px;
}

Next, find:

#sidebar
{
padding: 20px 0 10px 0;
margin-left: 545px;
width: 190px;
}

and replace with:

#sidebar
{
padding: 20px 0 10px 0;
margin-left: 20px;
width: 190px;
}

Embedding YouTube or Google Videos to WordPress v2 Posts

Omar — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 13:53:57 +0000

I had some problems embedding Youtube and Google Video to this site, but eventually worked out a simple solution for both. Paste the following into your editor (ensuring the rich editor is turned off, or alternative temporarily disable javascript if you are using Firefox with the ‘NoScript’ extension)

That’s it… Simply replace ‘web-address-of-the-video-you-want-to-view’ with either youTube or Google Video url and set the appropriate video dimensions.