Writing guest posts on other blogs can be a pretty rewarding experience. Firstly you get to experience comments from a different audience, who may have something different to share, secondly you get a little more traffic back to your blog, but, once you’ve written your fabulous guest post how do you link to it from your own blog?

Typically a quick short post is used to let your readers know about guest posts on other blogs, and give a little link love over to the kindly host, and to be honest this is usually quite sufficient, but there may be a better way.

This plugin allows a guest post to be found successfully by someone searching your blog, as they would any other article, but doesn’t display the full contents to readers, to avoid stealing the limelight from the site you have actually written the post on in the first place.

Read the full details about Fun with guest posts Wordpress plugin.

It’s amazing how much you can forget in such a short period of time.

I’ve been away from Wordpress for a little while. There was a point where not a day went by when I wasn’t changing my theme, or modifying a plugin, but then I got caught up trying to find something as easy as Wordpress to use, but developed with content management in mind. I didn’t find it, not by a long shot, but that is another story.

Now I am back with Wordpress and determined to find the right set of plugins, themes, widgets, etc to make it into a strongly focussed content management system I realise how much value there is in regular hacking.

Things which once where second nature to me, adding admin menus for example, now seem odd and I a lot of functionality is setting just out reach of memory. I know I know it, I just can’t quite reach it.

It is coming back fairly quickly; however, my first few new plugins are likely to be pretty simple. I am working on some more complex ones but I think perhaps I will let them breathe while I re-familiarise myself with it all.

I have been several versions of Wordpress behind for a little while and, with this blog, have just caught up. My verdict? Widgets are pretty cool. Having said that it seems clear that the creators of widgets have missed a trick. Why stop with the sidebar?

Widgets give you control over the layout and contents of your sidebar, but there is no reason why you can’t use them to control other parts of your site. For example, in just ten minutes I was able to convert my home page to give me control over most of the layout. Now I am going to explain how.

Register a second sidebar

In the functions.php file, in my theme folder, I have now registered two sidebars. One is controlling my footer, and the other the content of my home page;

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') ) {
    register_sidebar(array(
	'name' => 'footer',
        'before_widget' => '<div class="segment">',
        'after_widget' => '</div>',
        'before_title' => '<h3>',
        'after_title' => '</h3>',
    ));
	register_sidebar(array(
	'name' => 'home page contents',
        'before_widget' => '',
        'after_widget' => '',
        'before_title' => '',
        'after_title' => '',
    ));
 
}

I’ve given then nice names so I recognise them in the admin console.

Create and register the home page content widget

Again in functions.php, I have produced a function to output the standard contents of the home page loop without any change. The example has a placeholder for simplicity:

function widget_home_page_content(){
 
?>
	<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
 
		<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
 
		*** Loop Contents ****
 
	<?php else : ?>
 
 
 
	<?php endif; ?>
<?php
 
}

I have then registered this function as a new widget

register_sidebar_widget('Home Page Content',widget_home_page_content);

Pretty simple so far right?

Convert your index to a sidebar

I have replaced the Wordpress loop in my index file, with a call to the second sidebar. My entire index file now looks like this:

<?php get_header(); ?>
 
	<div id="content">
	<?php if ( function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') ) { dynamic_sidebar(2); } ?>
	</div>
 
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
 
<?php get_footer(); ?>

I can now start to produce and use widgets to place content above and below the contents of my home page, without messing with the theme. I could even go further and break the loop into parts, giving even more control over the precise way posts are displayed, or make a single page theme, using widgets to control the layout.

I’m just wondering how far it is possible go using only widgets.

Categories have been around forever, but native tagging is a relatively new thing in Wordpress. I have mixed feelings about tags, in fact I have never really used them, and I wonder how useful they really are.

The benefits of categories are pretty clear. Firstly they provide a well ordered (usually) structure to a blog that is essential for navigation. If you don’t have categories, you probably have lost readers.

Secondly they are often very useful in partitioning a site. I have used them to separate a blog from a photoblog, and change the entire look of the blog accordingly.

But what about tags?

My first though about tags in Wordpress was that they were a sticking plaster, designed to cover up the problem of poor category management rather than look at the problem. Over time categories have a tendency to build up, often with very few posts to their name.

Tags are, by their very nature, less strictly organised, than categories. They can describe their contents without having to fit into a rigid classification system that, somehow, never really seems to fit the content of each individual post.

Lorelle likens tags to an index; that seems reasonable, but she also asks whether they are actually working, and if they are, who for exactly.

The answers seem to suggest that they are used to help explain what a post is about, which I don’t really understand, and to help bring in traffic. There is also, clearly, some confusion as to whether people expect them to be innies or outies.

Personally I don’t use them, either as an author or as a user, and I have yet to read comments from anyone that really likes them. Sure, some have said they bring in more traffic, but not that they really like to have them there to use. There must be people that do I’m sure, but the fact that they are not obvious leads me to question the necessity of tagging.

So forget about whether you like them as an author, how do you feel about them as a reader? I’d be interested to hear some thoughts.

So, this is it, the difficult first post. With that I welcome anyone who happens upon the site, presumably by accident, and I will explain the purpose of this blog.

I have been blogging for several years now and for that time, aside from my formative months with Blogger, I have used Wordpress. I’ve always used my own themes and it didn’t take me too long to start finding weird and wonderful ways to expand my designs.

Recently I have been looking for several things: A new project to occupy my time, a content management system that ticks all of my particular boxes, and an outlet for my writing that is a little tighter than my personal blog.

An low, Fun with Wordpress was born.

I will expand upon all of those points at a later date, and in much more detail, but for now I just want to kick off this blog. It is still a little rough as I haven’t had time to give it all the polish it needs, but that will come. We need not stand on ceremony here.