WordPress

Wordpress widgets are a way to customise the sidebar of your blog very easily and where included with the default Wordpress instillation from version 2.2 onwards. With a widgetised theme all you need to do to change the menu system on your blog is drag and drop features and edit some simple parameters like heading.

To include widgets on your blog you need a widget ready Wordpress theme. However, this isn't as easy as it sounds because only a small section of themes are widget enabled.

To make a widget enabled theme you can use any existing theme and just a few lines of code. First off, find the file called sidebar.php in your Wordpress theme directory. You might not have this file, but you are looking for the section of code that displays the navigation menu.

For many sites the blog is only part of the site, not the main reason for the site existing. In these cases the blog is kept in the directory /blog or similar. Occasionally (for what ever reason) it might be necessary to change the directory. To that end here is a small walk through of the steps you need to take in order to do this.

When you write a post in Wordpress you can set certain custom fields. The default search behaviour of Wordpress is to search only the title and main text of the posts, which makes these custom fields not all that useful. With a little bit of tinkering you can get Wordpress to search any custom fields that you have set, so if you store things like "Author" you can allow people to view all posts by that author by clicking on a link or doing a search. To see more information about Wordpress custom fields see this Wordpress codex site article. Wordpress stores these custom fields in a table called postmeta where each custom field name (called meta_key) is associated with a custom field value (called meta_value).