How to set a home page and blog page on Wordpress

By default Wordpress displays all the posts on the front page of your blog. For a more traditional website look, we would normally have a static front page, and possibly another page displaying our blog. This is very easy to implement in Wordpress, without touching any code. Before we begin, please create two pages, one named ‘Home’ and another named ‘Blog’ or whatever you want to name the page containing all your posts. Then follow the steps below.

1. Go to Settings > Reading
2. You will see a Front Page displays option, select ‘A static page’.
3. Set the Front Page option to point to the ‘Home’ page we created earlier.
4. Set the Posts Page option to point to the ‘Blog’ page we created earlier.

If you have dynamic menu generation in place (using for example the wp_list_pages function), you will most probably see your new setup implemented on the front end of your blog. See, that was simple, yay for Wordpress!

Inserting Flash Video into Wordpress

Videos are a good way of spicing up your blog posts, and luckily with Wordpress inserting Flash Video is a snap. I use the excellent Hana Flv Player for inserting videos. You can choose from 4 different players and it also does give you a few more options you can play around with.

Here is a sample flv file I’ve created from one of my favourite TV shows, ‘The Big Bang Theory’

If you’d like to go down an easier route and host your video on Youtube, you can use the Smart Youtube plugin which is pretty much perfect for this sort of thing. Below is a great video being displayed using this plugin.

How to break down a Wordpress post title into two parts

I am using a wordpress post to display testimonials, using the post content as the testimonial itself and its title for displaying the person giving the testimonial, and his company. In order to separate the name of the person from his company name and thus style them differently, I used the following code:

< ?php
	$title = $post->post_title;
	$namecompany = explode("-", $title);
	echo ($namecompany[0].' - '); ?>
	< ?php echo ($namecompany[1]); ?>

As you can see, we are using the $post->post_title variable which contains the title of the post, and then using the PHP function explode to break up the title into two parts based on the dash separator.

Filter for excluding certain categories in Wordpress

Put this code in the Functions.php file:

// filter for exluding certain categories
function myFeedExcluder($query) {
if ($query->is_feed) {
$query->set('cat','-12');
}
return $query;
}

add_filter('pre_get_posts','myFeedExcluder');

This will exclude category 12 from your RSS feeds. If you want to exclude more than one category, put them in separated by commas ‘-12,-25,-33′.

Best PNG Fix plugin for Wordpress

The best plugin I’ve found for handling IE Png problems is the HITS PNG Fix plugin