• Rachel Cunliffe Wordpress Tutorial

…I keep finding categories too restrictive, and not very user friendly for navigating. I really like the idea of tags instead. There’s some great plugins for Wordpress that will allow you to use tags instead, and even display a tag-cloud of your tags…

Originally I sort’ve scoffed at this, deciding that if I needed to I could easily add more categories. However, with some of my more recent posts, I found it difficult to fit the post in my category system, and almost abandoned the post because of that.

Remembering Michael’s comment, I looked into converting from categories to tags. I quickly found the plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior. This plugin gave me a lot of options for adding and presenting post tags. Once the plugin was installed, it was an easy process to add tags to my existing posts. Ultimate Tag Warrior has a function by which it will refer to external tag services to give suggestions for tags to use. Not always good suggestions, mind.

The plugin also has a function for generating a ‘tag cloud’, an example of which is now visible in my sidebar. I’ve made mine present the more commonly used tags in a bigger font, one could have it so that the colour of the tag is dependent on it’s popularity.

Now when I make a post I just need to add a few descriptive keywords rather than worry about where I’m going to sort it. It’s still easy enough to find info I post, as the tag cloud is ordered, and topics that I cover a lot have bigger text.

All in all, it seems I wont need to have a second part to my ‘quest’.

There a currently a significant variety of widgets available, and new widgets and widget-enabled themes seem to be coming available with great frequency.

WordPress Widget Plugin Site

Wordpress Widgets Blog

I’d like to hear (well, read) other peoples comments, so if you have anything you’d like to say about my theme, or any suggestions, then click the comments link beneath this post. Oh, and I already know about a 1px ‘margin’ on the left in IE. If anyone has any suggestions on how to fix that I’d really like to hear about it!

Oh, and also if anything broke in IE from the last tweeks I made.

My code examples were screwed up, as my <s and >s were converted to from character codes to normal, which was then read as a tag. I had to go back and put in my gts and lts to get my posts to display properly.

WordPress doesn’t seem to play well with flash, or at least with the code FlashMX spits out. I had to import a Wordpress plugin, in this case I used Kimili Flash Embed for Wordpress, to be able to have the Flash work on my blog.

Although unnesscary, I gave all my past posts categories, in the future I’ll categoriese all my posts, just so any useful information I post can be found easily, assuming anyone else will ever read what I post.

• UrbanGiraffe WordPress Theme Guide: an extensive tutorial about ripping apart the default WordPress theme and making your own theme from it.
• WordPress Codex – Template Tags: descriptions of the special functions that can be used in a WordPress template.