WordPress is current seeking people to beta test WordPress version 2.9. As stated on the WordPress blog the new version should be ready for beta testing by the end of October. The first round of beta testing focuses on the stability of the new features in addition to removing bugs.

If you would like to get involved with the testing of the first beta version, visit the WordPress blog for details on how to take part.

WordPress is shooting for a late November or early December release of the final, public version of 2.9. This should make for a very interesting holiday season for us bloggers !


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This article will deal with how to hide certain categories and subcategories from displaying in your navigation menus. We have covered a couple of different ways to display WordPress categories and subcategories, but sometimes excluding some links can help to present even cleaner navigational menus.


Why do we need this ?
There are many different reasons that we may not want to display all of our categories all the time. For this article we are going to look at the “Photography Category” (link opens in new window) on this blog.

I wanted the photographs grouped upon the type of image, for example flowers, the ocean, sunsets, and the like through the use of subcategories. While that was going to be the main focus of this category, I also wanted the ability to create smaller photo albums based upon WHERE the picture was taken. Only about 30% of the photos would actually be placed in a geographic location sub-subcategory. I wanted this additional sorting ability so that I could write posts about the travel destinations portrayed in the photos and insert these photo albums into the posts.

See this graphical display:





The problem I ran into when I set this up is that all of the sub-subcategories under the geographic locations subcategory were displaying in the navigation menu on the parent category and subcategory pages. Obviously this was not needed. This was going to create crowded and messy navigation menus on down the line. I wanted to exclude the sub-subcategories from all displays except for inside the actual “Geographic Locations” subcategory.


How To Accomplish This
You might want to quickly read the article “How To Display Subcategories” to familiarize yourself with the “list categories” template tag that we are using to display the subcategory navigation menus.

The original template tag looked like this:

<?php wp_list_categories(’child_of=5&style=list&title_li=’); ?>

When you visit the “Photography Category” that template tag displays the navigation menu of subcategories. The menu appears on the page directly below the page header image.

The following changes were made:

<?php wp_list_categories(’child_of=5&depth=1&exclude=111&style=list&title_li=’); ?>

You will obviously need to change the number values above to match the category ID numbers of your specific blog, but the above tag can be broken down as follows:

• Child_of=. This parameter tells WordPress to display all of the subcategories under the photography parent category. If this was the only parameter, then all of the subcategories and sub-subcategories shown in the image above would be displayed in the menu.
• Depth=. This parameter tells WordPress to display ONLY the subcategories directly under the photography category. Sub-subcategories and all deeper category depths will not be displayed in the menu. So all of the actual location sub-subcategories such as San Fransisco would be excluded. Different values can be entered here to regulate how many depths you would like to display. You can visit the WordPress site at the link below for more information on this.
• Exclude=. This parameter tells WordPress to NOT display the link to the “Geographic Locations” subcategory. This was a personal preference of mine and is not required. I excluded this category from the navigation menu as I wanted to hard code this link to the bottom of the navigation menu as opposed to having it appear in alphabetical order.
• style=list&title_li=. These are display property parameters that will tell WordPress how to display the list. You can learn more about these on the WordPress Codex site here. (opens in new window)

From here, all I needed to do was set-up a template file for my “Geographic Locations” subcategory ( How To Do This ) and add a special navigation menu that would display the different location sub-subcategories. The template tag used to accomplish this goal was:

<?php wp_list_categories(’child_of=111&depth=1&style=&title_li=’); ?>


In Conclusion
What we did above was completely hide all references to the “Geographic Locations” sub-sub categories from ALL areas of this blog except for when you are actually in the geographic locations subcategory. You are presented with links to the “Patrick’s Point”, “Sierra Nevada Mountains”, and “San Francisco” photo album categories only after you have clicked on the “Photos By Geographic Locations” link.

This blog is not a “travel destination” blog so most of the visitors are probably just here to look at a certain type of photograph, ie: flowers, and are not overly concerned with WHERE the photo was taken. I don’t need to overwhelm the visitor with unwanted links to 100 different geographic locations. Instead I present them with one link to a page where they can then sort photos based upon location if they desire.

I think that you will find your navigational menus much cleaner and easier to navigate by removing some of the unneeded links. Take a look and see if you can’t hold off on displaying certain links until the visitor reaches a certain location or depth of your blog.


For more information on the “list categories” template tag and the different parameters that you can set, visit the WordPress Codex Site.


Hopefully this article has been a help to those of us who are not “code” addicts. I like to pass-along tidbits of information that might allow non-programmers the ability to modify their own websites. Please keep in mind that I am not a professional programmer but I have been building and modifying websites since 1995 using HTML, cgi, perl, MIVA, PHP, and CSS. Suggestions on other ways to reach the desired goals above are always welcome … please consider leaving a comment !

Always remember to save copies of your original files BEFORE you modify them. This will allow you to easily revert your web site if the changes do not work.

Comments ( leave a comment here ) and thoughts ALWAYS welcome !

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Can you tell that this blog has 41 categories and 84 tags in my tag cloud ?


I figured that it was about time to group some of my WordPress posts and show you why I am doing what I am doing. I have written a few “How To” articles but I haven’t brought them together under one roof to show you how these simple steps can help you clean-up your blog.

With this being my fifth blog and about 20th web site, I really wanted this one to have a cleaner, smoother look. It drives me nuts when I visit a blog and it takes 12 minutes to load because of all of the JavaScript gadgets in the side column, or the 4 navigation columns and one very skinny content column, or having 10 full length posts on the front page. None of that is needed, and your actually killing (through suffocation) your visitors. Navigation is very helpful. Excessive navigation is just a needle in a haystack.

For example, this blog grows every time I post a new article. Maybe I add a new tag or a new category … Maybe I use only ones … but it always grows in some fashion. I have been running this blog for about 2 months now and I have 84 tags and 41 categories, but you cannot tell that from my side columns. It could grow to over 200 categories and 10,000 tags in the next month and my side columns and header will never change.

While you are on this page, reading this article, I am going to guess that you have absolutely no interest in knowing that this blog has a sub-sub-category that contains photographs of Agate Beach in Northern California. If you wanted to look at photographs you would use the photography link in the header. There is no need to list all categories in the side column. This is the same navigational concept they use a Yahoo andd other organized web portals. The front page has a link to the “sports” section. There is no need to have links to all of the separate team pages until AFTER you have clicked through to the sports section.


So clean up your blog round 1 contains:

1. Moving Your Tag Cloud

I wrote about HOW to move your tag cloud in the article Toxic Tag Clouds. What this will allow you to do is physically move your tag cloud off your side column and place it on a page instead. This can clean up a massive amount of real estate in your side column. After you place your tag cloud on a WordPress page just place a link to it in your side column or in the header links. People who love tags can easily find your tags and you will not be creating the amazonian jungle of links in your side column.

2. Use Multiple Levels Of Categories For Better Navigation

This blog has 4 parent categories, 35 sub-categories, and 2 sub-sub categories. The only links the appear in my header links are to the 4 parent categories … tech, ramblings, writing, and photography. After you click on one of those links you will be given sub-category links to better refine your search.

Let’s use Yahoo as an example here. You go to the front of yahoo and find 4 parent categories … News, Sports, Movies, TV. You click on the Sports link and then can choose from 10 sub-categories in the header bar … let’s say these subcategories are the 10 different sports teams. You click on one of the sports teams link and you are presented with some sub-sub-category links in the header bar … players on the team, team stats, team schedule and so on. You do not need to place the “team schedule” link on the very front of Yahoo because only a very small fraction of people are going to be interested in that … yet the navigation is extremely clear so that the people who DO follow that team can quickly and easily get to that page.

I have fallen in love with subcategories because they offer much better navigation then tags. By using multiple category depths you can accomplish this navigational style. It is really the only way and should be almost considered a MUST DO.

To accomplish this goal I have written a couple of different articles. The first article that you should look at is: How To Display Subcategories & WordPress Category Templates. This article will show you how to create separate templates for each of your parent categories. We are using separate templates because it allows us to display the subcategories that are the children of that particular category. Again, clean, simple navigation is what we are going for.

The second article is How To Display WordPress SubCategories: Descendant Function. This article will show you how to display the subcategories that are under the parent category of the article you are currently reading. For example, this article is in the tech category so I would only want to display “tech” subcategories. Again, it would be a mess if I included all 35 of my subcategories, but to include the directly related categories is good for navigation. Read your reader’s mind and give them what is most related to their interests. You can see an example of this in the Related Posts section at the bottom of this post.

The third article deals with How To Exclude Certain Categories From Menus. This is very useful in presenting a clean navigational menu. There in no need to display second or third level subcategories before your visitor has gone to the first level sub category. It only creates confusion and an overwhelming number of links.

3. Widget and Plugin Madness !

You will notice in the above article that we are doing a lot of hand coding to accomplish these goals. You may be asking yourself why we are not using widgets and plugins. The answer, for me, is a simple one … flexibility. I don’t want to use sidebar widgets because my whole goal is to clean-up the sidebar, not add more to it. As for general plugins, many of them lack flexibility. They may do one or two of the things I was looking for but very rarely will they accomplish everything.

In addition, when you hand-code something you have the option to NOT place the code in certain locations. I can place these little code changes anywhere I want in my template files, BUT I also have the option to leave these functions off certain OTHER pages or sub-template files. I can also place the code anywhere I would like to on the page. For example, if you visit my “Photos By Geographic Location” in the photography section you notice a double navigational menu. If I so desire I could easily remove the second menu without affecting the first menu. How ? Because they are not controlled by a single master “plugin” program.



So get out there and clean-up those blogs. Get your navigational menus in order. Let your visitors just flow through your site. Trust me, you don’t want to have to force them to find their way through the jungle.

For example, take a peek at the mess I have going on in my last blog … Lohman Trading. In the next month or so I will really need to attend to this blog. The navigation is overwhelming. I will be applying all of the techniques mentioned above !


Hopefully this article has been a help to those of us who are not “code” addicts. I like to pass-along tidbits of information that might allow non-programmers the ability to modify their own websites. Please keep in mind that I am not a professional programmer but I have been building and modifying websites since 1995 using HTML, cgi, perl, MIVA, PHP, and CSS. Suggestions on other ways to reach the desired goals above are always welcome … please consider leaving a comment !

Always remember to save copies of your original files BEFORE you modify them. This will allow you to easily revert your web site if the changes do not work.

Comments ( leave a comment here ) and thoughts ALWAYS welcome !

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Would you like to write better posts ? I have something that may greatly help you in your quest. Actually, it is WordPress that has a plugin that may help.

Earlier today it was announced that Automattic acquired “After The Deadline” which is more then just an amazing spell checker. This program will also check your grammar and your writing style. It does all this in a true contextual setting helping you write one amazing post. ( as long as your content is good. ) This program should be a lot better then many other plugins that are available.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I definitely plan to download it in the next couple of days. I am sure that I could use it.

You can download the WordPress plugin here:

After The Deadline Plugin Page

Don’t leave yet … I have more for you. This little tidbit of information is thanks to Ken … over at Adgitize … who turned me on to this service.

Let’s face it, your headline is one of the most important parts of your post. It is the first thing a visitor will read and it is the one thing that will capture attention in search engines. If you have a desire to try and write more powerful headlines then this service could help you.

Advanced Marketing Institute’s Headline Analyzer will analyze your blog post headline and give it an Emotional Marketing Value score. There are three categories of emotional words … intellectual, emotional, and spiritual … that help influence your score. A score of 30% – 40% is good and a score of 50% to 75% is great.

You can check out the analyzer here …

EMV Headline Analyzer

I have recently bookmarked this service and try to use this tool for a lot of my post titles. As a side note, the headline for this post scored a 40% in the intellectual and spiritual categories.


PS … Yes, I am well aware of the mis-spellings in the graphic. They are intentional.

Comments ( leave a comment here ) and thoughts ALWAYS welcome !

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In this article we are going to take a look at creating and displaying different side columns in different locations of your WordPress blog. This will be a lot like Creating Multiple Header Files, but we will be modifying the functions file so that we can use widgets in our side column.

Why do we want to do this ?

The benefits of creating different side columns can be seen right away. You can easily give each “section” of your blog a completely fresh and unique look … especially if you use Category Templates. You may also want to run a thinner or wider side column on certain pages in your blog. For example, a 300 wide column may be unfeasible on a WordPress page that contains a forum plugin. For that page you may need extra room for the forum, so cutting the side column down to around 150 may make more sense.

You will notice that the side column on the index page of this blog ( here ) is quite a bit different then the side column on this page. Not only is the width about 1/2 the size of the column on this page, but it also displays different widgets.

There are a couple of different ways to accomplish this feat, I am just going to focus on the method that I used for this blog.

Before we begin, please note that we are creating a SECOND sidebar. We are not replacing the first sidebar, so do not delete any of the code for your first, original sidebar. (unless, of course, that is your desire)

Step 1. Modifying The Functions File

You do not necessarily need to start with this, but since most of us probably do not modify the functions.php file very often I figure that we will get the “hard” stuff out of the way first.

When viewing your functions.php file ( in your current templates folder ) you should notice …. function_exists(’register_sidebar’) … . That little batch of code registers your CURRENT side bar and allows it to show-up in your appearance > widgets section of admin. What we need to do is throw-in a new little piece of code to register our new side column. The code I used for this blog is …

if ( function_exists(’register_sidebar’) )
register_sidebar(array(’name’=>’frontsidebar’,
‘before_widget’ => ‘<div class=”widget-front”>’,
‘after_widget’ => ‘</div>’,
‘before_title’ => ‘<div class=”widget-title-front”><h2 >’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h2></div>’,
));

Basically this little piece of code is a copy-and-paste duplicate of MY original sidebar code. I just pasted it directly below the code for the first sidebar in my functions.php. It is suggested that you do the same … copy your original code and then paste it.

From that point I just changed the name of the sidebar (frontsidebar) and changed the div classes (widget-front). Note that you will also need go into your stylesheet (style.css) and create your new div classes shown above.

Ok … now swing over to Appearance > Widgets in your WordPress admin. On the right hand side your new “mainsidebar” should appear. You will be able to add widgets to it later.

Step 2. Creating frontsidebar.php

In this step we are going to create the actual sidebar file. One of the simplest ways to do this is to make an exact copy of your current sidebar file (probably named sidebar.php), save it under the new name “frontsidebar.php”, and make the changes noted below. Make sure to NOT delete your original sidebar file.

The basic elements of a sidebar file look like:

<div id=”sidebar-main”>
<?
global $options;
foreach ($options as $value) {
if (get_settings( $value['id'] ) === FALSE) { $$value['id'] = $value['std']; } else { $$value['id'] = get_settings( $value['id'] ); }

?>
<div id=”mini-left”>
<?php if ( !function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(frontsidebar) ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>
</div>


Obviously your div classes may have different names then mine. Make sure your names are unique and then go into stylesheet and create those classes. This is where you will want to create the look of your side column. Probably make it look different then your main sidebar.

The important thing here is the name of your dynamic sidebar. Make sure to change that name to the exact name that you used to create your new sidebar in your functions file (above). That is the one key element that must be done.

Step 3. Call Your New Side Column

Step 3 is definitely the easiest … place the code to call your new sidebar.

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . “/frontsidebar.php”); ?>

Make sure the sidebar name that appears in your call matches the name of the PHP file that you created directly above. Note that it does not need to match the name you used in the functions file. If you want to use your new side column IN PLACE OF your original side column then just replace the call for the original column. If you want to use BOTH side columns on the same page then, obviously, leave the call for the first side column and just add the new call in the location you would like it to appear.

Step 4. Add Widgets & Div Classes

The final step is kind of a no-brainer. First, you can now go into Appearance > Widgets in your WordPress admin and add any widgets you would like to your new side column.

Lastly … just another reminder … make sure to go into your stylesheet and add all of your new div classes. Obviously, if you want your side column to look exactly like your first one, then you can just use all of the same classes. But, if you want your new column to look differently, then mess around adding new classes and settings to give it a unique look.

Through the use of your classes … float right, float left, padding, margin … you can do a lot of different things with your 2 (or more) different side columns.

• You can run a different side column in a different location … ie: my home page compared to the rest of my site.
• You can run 2 side columns on the same page right next to each other.
• You can run a left side column and a right side column.
• You can run a left side column and 2 right side columns.
• And so on ….

Think about this … if you decorate your blog by the seasons or change the look occationally … then how easy would it be to create 4 different sidebar columns. Just change the call in step #3 to a different sidebar to change the look instantly !

I actually have 3 different side columns on this blog, but I only currently have 2 in use.


Hopefully this article has been a help to those of us who are not “code” addicts. I like to pass-along tidbits of information that might allow non-programmers the ability to modify their own websites. Please keep in mind that I am not a professional programmer but I have been building and modifying websites since 1995 using HTML, cgi, perl, MIVA, PHP, and CSS. Suggestions on other ways to reach the desired goals above are always welcome … please consider leaving a comment !

Always remember to save copies of your original files BEFORE you modify them. This will allow you to easily revert your web site if the changes do not work.

Comments ( leave a comment here ) and thoughts ALWAYS welcome !

• Go ahead and STALK ME – electronically of course – Subscribe Here