WordPress Development

Stop Category Pages From Showing No Results Message

If you have a category page which has no posts, it will normally trigger your theme's no posts found message. Seems sensible! However, I have an edge case where I don't want that message displayed.

How To Prevent Category Widget From Using Category Description As Title Attribute

The Categories widget in WordPress uses the category description as the title attribute for the list items displayed by the widget. While this may be great for very short descriptions, it doesn't make sense when longer descriptions are in use.

WordPress Optimization Myth: Saving Database Calls

Tonight I read an article on WPTuts+ titled 10 Quick Tips: Optimizing & Speeding Up Your WordPress Site. For the most part it's a good article with lots of great tips, but there is one tip which is just plain incorrect:

Using a constant instead of get_option('home'); saves a database call.

How To Change The WordPress Post Template Via URL Parameter

Have you ever wanted to be able to serve up an alternative version of your posts, perhaps tweaking the layout or even the content of the posts? Not all the time, just in certain circumstances?

I've had two cases recently where I've needed to do this. My solution: to change the post template when a certain URL parameter is added to the URL.