Building a Better Category Menu

Building a Better Category Menu

A couple of days ago I showed you how to make a category menu. In this post I'm going to show you how to create an even more advanced version of the same function, that not only has all the same features, but also includes the ability to be sorted into a different order.

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Creating a Category Menu in Wordpress

Creating a Category Menu in Wordpress

One of the most common features on any blog or website is category highlighting showing you which category you're in or the page is in. Wordpress, by default, does not have a function to do this. Thus it's up to us developers to write our own custom functions to do this, and that's exactly what's I'm going to be teaching you in this tutorial.

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Building a Custom “Search By Category” Wordpress Plugin

Building a Custom “Search By Category” Wordpress Plugin

With an ever increasing amount of content building on your Wordpress site, your users will inevitably need to search your site to find that specific helpful article from way back. To help narrow the search results, I’m going to show you how to code a plugin that allows the user to search based on category.

This is a Nettuts +Tut.

How to control a category in the Wordpress loop

How to control a category in the Wordpress loop

While reading though some twitter updates this morning, I stumbled across one that was asking if anyone knew a way to exclude a specific category in Wordpress from the loop, unless it was certian page template. After a quick minute of thinking, I came up with this small function that will do just that.

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Search By Category – WP Plugin

Search By Category – WP Plugin

Search by Category allows your visitor to select which category they want to search your blog inside of. This allows visitors to find the exact article they're looking for and helps increase viewer loyalty.

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Wordpress Plugin Templates v2.0

Wordpress Plugin Templates v2.0

Not that long ago I released my Wordpress Plugin Templates and they were greatly received by you all. Through this wide spread attraction, it was inevitable that a flaw would be found and some improvements be suggested. So I took these suggestions and an idea I had, and updated these templates to allow for less editing of the template files and faster plugin development all around.

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Even More Advanced Thumbnail Selection in Wordpress

Even More Advanced Thumbnail Selection in Wordpress

About 3 weeks ago I did a screencast on how to build a dynamic thumbnail selector for Wordpress. When I wrote that function, I noticed that if the post was in more than 1 of the specified categories, then it choose the first one (alphabetically). This bothered me enough that today I devised a system that will select the category based on a hierarchy we give to the options.

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Wordpress Plugin Templates

Wordpress Plugin Templates

Wordpress plugins have become my new addiction in the WP environment, thus I've noticed that I'm using the same few beginning steps every time. This led me to create a template file so that I just open, edit, and continue on my merry way of coding my plugin. I'm posting these templates for free use no matter what you're working on. I'll even be a nice guy and let you repost them as your own.

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Optimizing the “Google Syntax Highlighter” WP plugin

Optimizing the “Google Syntax Highlighter” WP plugin

Google Syntax Highlighter may be Wordpress' most popular syntax highlighter plugin, but it's not the most efficient. With plenty of extra JavaScript and sloppy PHP writing, it's quite the bloat-ware if left unchecked. So here's 2 fixes showing how to put GSH on a diet and still get all the features of the plugin.

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Advanced Wordpress Thumbnail Selection

Advanced Wordpress Thumbnail Selection

Thumbnails in Wordpress themes are a critical part of relaying the topic or aspect of the article/post you've written. With some simple tricks you can add your own to your theme, and there are even plugins out there to do it for you. The fact of the matter is that these systems you have in place have faults, so here's a video detailing how to create an advanced Wordpress Thumbnail generator in your own theme.

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