Sometimes we need to exclude a few unimportant categories from our main feed or other pages. A quick search through the web, you will arrive at wprecipes’ tutorial, which unfortunately happens to be erroneous because wrong function was used (as of 15 Dec 2011). Anyway, in this blogpost I am gonna show how to exclude categories in RSS Feed, as well as Homepage, Search Page and more.

There are a number of ways to achieve what we want, but the best and cleanest method is to exclude using WordPress Action Hook.

The term “Standalone” here refers to a page that run using WordPress engine but does not display using your WordPress theme. It means that your page can access all PHP functions in WordPress but you get to decide how the page looks like. The good news is, to do this using WordPress is amazingly easy.

If you are using XAMPP for Mac OS like me, and was asked to enter FTP login information when you upgrade Wordpress core and download themes or plugins, then this guide is for you. After searching for solution online, I found that this is a permission problem due to your Mac’s username is different compared to the default user name in XAMPP for Mac, called nobody.

If you are a developer, in some cases you need to get all categories and their IDs. You might start referring to wordpress codex but most likely you will end up with no solution, just like me. Rather than counting on wordpress’s built-in function, you can write your own MySQL query to accomplish this.

In some occasion, you might need to add a same piece of codes to your blog posts over and over again, and when you need to make changes to them, you need to manually change all of them. This is very tedious. Not anymore, if you make a plugin that does the purpose.

Wordpress added a new major feature in version 2.9 – The Post Thumbnail. Now everyone can easily make your website looks more magazine-like and professional. I will show you how to add the feature to your theme within 5 minutes.

If you followed guides for the new post thumbnail feature before Wordpress 2.9 is out, they might tell you to paste this codes (or similar) into The Loop. However, the functions names actually changed when Wordpress 2.9 is out.

WordPress version 2.9 “Carmen” named in honor of magical jazz vocalist Carmen McRae is available for download. I will soon check and make required changes for all my themes.

Explains the template tag functions for wordpress theme demo bar plugin. Currently there are:

• wptdb_output()
• wptdb_list_themes()

Since version 1.4, you can display theme info such as number of previews and theme preview URL in posts and pages using shortcode. To make the process easier, use Media Button (see screenshot for more info)