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WordPress Snippet: More Posts in the Same Category

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From an SEO perspective there’s no point in displaying the exact same content in every single sidebar on your WordPress site. A great piece of snippet offers a great solution on a very dynamic single post sidebar. Just to be clear, this snippet only works if you use just use one category per post for your posts.

[php]

More posts from this category

[/php]

As you can see this snippet does two things. First, it displays the seven latest posts of the category used for the post you’re currently reading. Secondly, it shows a link to the category archive used. A great way to get your readers to stay longer on your blog. While you’re at it, consider styling those category views using WordPress category templates.

You need these two too

If your theme currently doesn’t have a separate single post sidebar you should have a look at the Widget Logic plugin. It allows you to specify which widget should be displayed on which view. Also, you will need plugin that will allow you to use php inside a widget like Exec PHP.

Finding Harmony Between Categories and Tags on Blogs

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With the emerging of tags, and I’m not talking about Technorati tags here but tags as a part of your own blog, categories can become redundant. A lot of blogs out there has got a bunch of categories, and with the addition of tags, they suddenly have duplicates of everything. Or perhaps they have a lot of categories, because the categories have been used as tags, basically, which perhaps was a great idea back then, but today is totally unnecessary.

Finding a balance between categories and tags might not be as easy, nor as obvious, as one would like to think.

The Ideal Category/Tag Setup

In my opinion, categories and tags are two completely different things. Mind you, I’m tackling this issue as both a designer and a publisher. The ideal setup for your particular fancy or site might be something completely different, there’s the whole matter of what you need and want as well, of course.

I define categories and tags like this:

  • Categories are main sections of the site. If you’ve got an entertainment blog, “music” might be one category, and “movies” another, but no more niched than that.
  • Tags are descriptions of post content. This means that if you’ve got a post in that “music” category, it might be tagged “metal” because that’s the genre, and “Alice Cooper” because that’s the artist.

The benefits of this way to look at categories and tags, is that categories can be treated as true sections of your site. Most blogging platforms support category specific styling, so that music category can have a cool guitar at top, or use a special color, or whatever. The point is that you can style a specific category in a fitting way, making it more obvious that it is one of the (few) main sections of your blog.

It might take some time to apply a more sound use of categories on your blog, but defining your sections is a good thing.

Tags, on the other hand, are like a loose search query. The point isn’t to style everything tagged “Alice Cooper” in a specific way, since it might be posts from completely diverse areas (i.e. different categories), but rather to list everything relevant.

Applying This

The Blog Herald had a gadzillion tags before its redesign. Since it uses WordPress, I used the included script to convert categories to tags, and then sorted the content in more relevant categories, like news and features, and so on. It might take some time to apply a more sound use of categories on your blog, but defining your sections is a good thing.

If you’re using a blog platform as a CMS (something I’ve touched before), using categories as main sections of your site makes even more sense. After all, you’ve got your menu right there, in the categories, and you’ll be using the blog platform as it is meant to be used, the only difference is that you’ll style the various categories a bit more elaborately than you might have for a traditional blog.

What are your thoughts on how to use categories and tags on a blog? Share your thoughts in the comments!

The Devlounge Redesign: Sneak Peak #1

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It’s been a bit quiet on the Devlounge redesign front for some time now. Juggling a lot of project can do that to a man. However, things are rolling again, so expect a relaunch soon enough. No, I won’t make an estimate yet, those always break anyway, right? Maybe I shouldn’t have said that…

I will, however, give a sneak peak as to what you can expect from Devlounge once the redesign is rolled out. I’m talking about the new categorization of our content.

Brand New Categories

Screenshot from next DevloungeToday’s categories doesn’t really work well with how Devlounge have evolved. I’m sure the plan behind the current layout is both cunning and brilliant, but things change over time, no matter how well you plan them. A good and logical categorization of content for such an editorial site as Devlounge is crucial. I repeat: it’s crucial!

That’s why these will be our new main categories, replacing the old ones.

  • Code focusing on PHP, CSS, XHTML and similar, tutorials and snippets
  • Design on trends, web 2.0, inspiration, critique and praise
  • Opinion being commentary on the web from the staff, will probably delay this one for focusing reasons
  • Publishing blog platforms, forum systems, open source applications as well as paid ones, things you need to publish a website, basically
  • Strategy for launch and relaunch, monetization and SEO, things to help you succeed
  • Webapps is about online tools, necessities, desktop replacements, cool apps, things like that

There might or there might not be room for sub-categories. With tags, I personally think that pinpointing a post’s topic is better left to the tags, the fewer categories you can get away with, the better.

I’d say that the categories Code and Design are the most important ones, the primaries, with Publishing being secondary, and the rest being less frequent on the site. How does that sound to you? Let me know in the comments.

New Author and Category: Actionscript

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I’d like to take a moment to introduce you to the newest member to join our staff team: Alex Jillard. Alex is an experienced flash and actionscript developer, who approached me about bringing flash related articles and tutorials to Devlounge. We are always looking to expand our reach, and we think by catering to flash developers in just another step in doing just that. Tomorrow, a new category will be added to the articles page called “Flash and Actionscript”. Watch for it to begin to be populated very soon. We are very excited to have Alex on board, and we hope many of you will find his posts informative and useful.

To get an idea of what to expect from Alex, here are some of his favorite articles he has written:

Also, here is a teaser to an extensive XML / Actionscript article he is currently working on:

Using Actionscript to get XML content where you want it
I find that there are many tutorials out there showing how to make a simple xml driven project, like a photo gallery or menu, which is great, but if you want to use xml elsewhere, you’d be a bit stuck.

The goal of this tutorial is to teach you how to use xml and Actionscript together to get dynamic xml driven content exactly where you want it. I will be showing you some logic for using and creating xml, a good technique for getting that xml into Flash and breaking it down so it is easy to access as you need it, and how to that data onto your website or application where you need it.

To give some visuals and examples to the tutorial, I’ll step you through making a website using everything you’ll learn. In the end you should have gathered enough knowledge to use xml when and where you need it.

Looking for your input

One thing Alex has asked if for me to ask you, the readers, for article suggestions. What kind of tutorials do you want to see involving Actionscript and Flash, and what do you want to know in general? Please leave your suggestions in the comments; we’d really love to hear them!

How2 K2 – Categories

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The following article was originally written at Cory’s Weblog. For more articles like this either read Cory’s articles here at DevLounge or visit his personal site.

In this edition of how2 k2, I am going to be discussing categories and some cool things you can do involving them. So, open up your website, get your k2 files at hand, and get ready to further hack-up your blog.

Hiding Categories From The Sidebar

Open your sidebar.php and page-archives.php files and look for the function called list_cats. This is what generates the category list that you see on the default k2 archive pages.

[php][/php]

To exclude a certain category, or categories, from appearing anywhere where this list is placed, add the ID number of the category to the last set of quotations. To find the ID number of the category, look in your admin panel under manage > categories. For example, to exclude categories 2 and 9, you would use the following code:

[php][/php]

Notice that you need to separate each category that you are specifying the exclude with a comma.

Also, if you would like to exclude the display of categories in the ELA plugin, just configure it in the options of for the plugin.

Category Clouds

Decidedly Bored has a great article discussing how to make a cloud much like the tag cloud for the UTW plugin, but using categories instead.

The category cloud is a creative alternative to the usual, mundane method of displaying categories in a list. It gives the reader a quick visual representation of the relative spread of entries amongst your categories.

If you are interested, check out his article here.

Conversational Categories

If you are a freak about every little detail of WordPress, then you will find this hack quite cool. After doing a little research about cool things you can do with categories, I came across a great plugin allowing you to make your meta data “talk” to you (for a lack of a better phrase). Basically, instead of displaying categories like “Category 1, Category 2″, it displays them a little nicer such as “Category 1 and Category 2″. This can make the site look a little more user friendly.

All you have to do is download this file, save it with a .php file extension, and drop it into your plugins folder. Once you activate it, it will create a new php fuction called the_nice_category().

Now, just replace the original calling for the category for which it is filed, with the following:

[php][/php]

Note: This is done in theloop.php.

More information about this plugin can be found at it’s official page.

Well, I think that is enough for this article. I hope you enjoyed the tips and as always, your questions and feedback are always welcome in the comments. Have fun and happy modding!

~Cory

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