WordPress Tips

When building your WordPress theme, you might have been planning it to be used mainly as a blog theme or perhaps you lean in the web pages direction. Either way, to make a fully integrated WordPress theme, you need to make sure both Pages and Posts are fully supported. And that means you should have a single.php and a page.php included in your theme and they shouldn’t look the same. You may think this is obvious, but I’ve seen many times when a theme is geared just toward web pages or just toward blogs (the most common) and then have a junky default index.php for handling the other half because the theme wasn’t fully thought through. Posts and Pages are both first-class citizens in WordPress and should be treated that way. And your clients will love you if you do.

WordPress isn’t always the friendliest thing in the world to style and the WordPress menus are no different. To get at the WordPress menu CSS takes a couple of hoops to jump through, but I’ll walk you through them now to illustrate how it can be done.

Someone asked this over at http://wordpress.stackexchange.com and I put a lot of research into it, so I figured I’d post it here too. Someone had asked how to go about securing RSS feeds behind a firewall in WordPress. It’s not an overly easy process so I dug in to try and figure it out.