WordPress School: Categories and Tags

We’ve covered WordPress posts and Pages, the core content elements associated with a basic WordPress site. Today we are going to focus on posts, specifically how they are organized and structured within a WordPress site. Categories are your site’s Table of Contents. Tags are your site’s index words. Honestly, it is that simple. Think of […]

Blog Exercises: Spell Checkup on Categories and Tags

Oh no! I was writing out a tag in WordPress and the auto-suggest feature popped up with a misspelled tag name! Yikes! Today’s blog exercise is to clean up your tag and category names to ensure you’ve not made the same mistakes. To review your category names in WordPress, go to Posts > Categories and […]

Blog Exercises: Dissecting Post Categories

In a recent article, Noah Weiss shared his struggle to figure out categories and tags on his personal site. I know many of you following these Blog Exercises have also struggled to figure out your categories, so I thought Noah’s site would be a perfect example, He has gratefully given me permission to rip his […]

Using WordPress Categories To Style Posts

By Abhijit Nadgouda UPDATED 2010: See below One of the reasons WordPress fits so many bills is its flexibility. It lets you do things at a much lesser cost, not necessarily money, but time and effort too, as compared to others. This article is about styling WordPress posts differently using the categories they are classified […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Tags, Tagging, and Categories

This past year was proclaimed by many as the Year of the Tag as Technorati’s tag services and features roared onto our blogs. By December of 2005, there was barely a blog without some form of tags on display. Panic turned from not getting into Google fast enough to not showing up fast enough on […]

Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags

There has been a lot of talk about the differences and similarities between categories and tags, and how to implement their use. I’d like to talk about the process of choosing categories for your posts. But first, let’s take a moment to examine what categories and tags are. What are Categories and Tags? In the […]

Tags Are Not Categories – Got It?

Tags are Not Categories by Carthik Sharma agrees with my opinion that categories are not the same as tags, and he makes a good point. Categories organize, hierarchically. Tags need not. Tags provide meta-information, Categories need not. Tags cross-connect, Categories do not. By cross connect, I mean, when you go looking for posts tagged with […]

Creating Multiple Single Posts for Different Categories

Tips Apply to the Full Version of WordPress. UPDATE: While the following technique works, I recommend it only as an extreme measure. I now recommend following the techniques in Conditional Tags on the WordPress Codex. Use the is_category or one of the other conditional tag options to create a stylesheet or web page customization for […]

Show Just One Category in WordPress Categories

Tip Applies to the Full Version of WordPress A challenge come up on the forum for a user who had a very interesting wish. When clicking on a category from the main page, he wanted a page showing the categories, but ONLY the categories from that category, not the children of the categories. Let me […]

Categories versus Tags: Defining the Limitations

I recently talked about categories and tags, what they do and which one to choose and adding Technorati tags to WordPressMU sites, like wordpress.com, and I want to share with you a recent struggle I went through on this issue. I have spent the past five days debating about the name of a new category […]

Categories versus Tags – What’s the Difference and Which One?

Categories and Tags are for your visitors, not just search engines. Think of your visitors’ needs first. Categories and Tags are about navigation and sorting, grouping your content to help visitors find related information. Categories and Tags are not fashion statements. Don’t be colorful or imaginative with either. Categories are your site’s table of contents. […]

WordPress School: What’s the Difference Between the Display Posts and Archive Shortcodes

In Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course, we’ve been exploring shortcodes. In this tutorial, let’s take a look at two shortcodes that appear to be the same on the surface. WordPress has long had the ability to generate a list of posts in a Page or post with a bit of code in the archives() […]

Blog Exercises: Ingredients of a Well-Designed Site

I was asked by a student in my WordPress class recently what defined a “professional blog,” one that met all the criteria for a well-designed, well-formed site that met web standards. What a marvelous question! We brainstormed all the elements that make up a web standard site, and mixed in personal preferences of the students […]

How to Avoid the New WordPress.com Interface

For the past three to four years, WordPress.com users have been “experimenting” with the what is known as the “new” WordPress.com interface. A drag-and-drop-meets-wysiwymg interface (What You See is What You MIGHT Get), it is designed to make interaction with WordPress easier. I’m still waiting. What it continues to do is make my students and […]

WordPress School: Integrating Policies

In this mini-series on adding policies to your WordPress site for Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course, we’re going to look at the technical decisions you need to make on how to integrate these policies. The next follow-up articles will discuss how to write and format each of the four policies we’ll cover in this […]