Stephanie Leary

Writer and WordPress consultant

  • Books
    • Content Strategy for WordPress (2015)
    • WordPress for Web Developers (2013)
    • Beginning WordPress 3 (2010)
  • Blog
    • Fascism Watch (2016-17)
    • Content Modeling for WordPress series
    • WordPress Hidden Gems series
  • Work
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Category (or taxonomy) drill-down pages

June 14, 2016 Stephanie Leary 2 Comments

Diagram of three category pages. On the first two, for categories that have children, only a list of linked child categories is shown. The third, for a category with no more children, shows the usual post loop.

WordPress category archives are very inclusive. They list all the posts in a category, including all the child categories. This is also true for all other hierarchical taxonomies. If you have a deep hierarchy, it might make more sense to have your users drill down until they … [Read more...]

WordPress categories, content strategy, taxonomies, themes

preserving HTML

February 19, 2010 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

Several of the description fields in WordPress will strip any HTML entered into them. You can preserve them with a little work, though. User Descriptions The biography field on the user profile page accepts a limited number of HTML tags — the same ones allowed in comments. If you … [Read more...]

WordPress bio, biography, categories, descriptions, html, Metadata, rich text, tags, taxonomy, Users and Roles

using shortcodes everywhere

February 13, 2010 Stephanie Leary 104 Comments

Read this in Spanish | Leer esta en Español Read this in Turkish | Türkçe bunu okuyun At the moment, shortcodes in WordPress are processed only in post/page content. You can use them in lots of other places, though, if you enable them for each field you want. Here's how to use … [Read more...]

WordPress bio, biography, categories, Content, descriptions, html, Metadata, rich text, shortcodes, tags, taxonomy, template tags

Create private categories

January 16, 2010 Stephanie Leary 4 Comments

Have you ever tried to create a category consisting entirely of private posts? It's a pain to have to remember to set the visibility for each post before publishing it. One of my users simply couldn't remember to do it, resulting in a lot of accidentally public posts on that … [Read more...]

WordPress categories, Privacy, private, restriction

Hidden feeds: categories, tags, authors, search terms, links

December 14, 2009 Stephanie Leary 4 Comments

WordPress generates a number of other feeds in addition to those for posts and comments. There's a feed for each of your categories and tags. You can also get feeds of posts written by an individual author. You can even get feeds for search results! Since WordPress doesn't … [Read more...]

WordPress atom, Blogroll, categories, feeds, links, Notifications, opml, Permalinks, rss, search, tags

Using categories and tags as meta keywords

August 15, 2009 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

Your categories and keywords are valuable bits of metadata, but WordPress doesn't use them in its meta tags. Even the popular All in One SEO Pack plugin uses only categories, not tags. … [Read more...]

WordPress categories, keywords, Metadata, tags, template tags, Templates

Removing the category base from permalinks

August 7, 2009 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

Search the web for ways of removing the category base from your WordPress permalinks, and you'll come up with a lot of wacky methods that don't really work. They can be quite complicated; this one requires changing two theme files and .htaccess and still produces 404 errors on … [Read more...]

WordPress archives, categories, Permalinks

Latest WordPress Book

Content Strategy for WordPress

A short book for content strategists and managers on implementing a complete content strategy in WordPress: evaluation, analysis, content modeling, editing and workflows, and long-term planning and maintenance.

Read the sample chapter

Kindle Nook iBooks Kobo Smashwords

WordPress for Web Developers

WordPress for Web Developers (9781430258667)

This is a book for professional web designers and developers who already know HTML and CSS, and want to learn to build sites with WordPress. The book begins with a detailed tour of the administration screens and settings, then digs into server-side topics like performance and security. The second half of the book is devoted to development: learning to build WordPress themes and plugins.

This is the second, much-revised and updated edition of Beginning WordPress 3, with a more accurate title. Everything’s been updated for WordPress 3.6.

WordPress for Web Developers is out now. See what's inside...

The best WordPress features you’ve never noticed

  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Screen Options
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Bulk Edit
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Private Status
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Dashboard Feed Readers
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Options.php

Content Modeling for WordPress series

  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 1: analyze content
  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 2: functional and organizational requirements
  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 3: a sample content model

This is an excerpt from Content Strategy for WordPress.My latest books are Content Strategy for WordPress (2015) and WordPress for Web Developers (2013). Sign up to be notified when I have a new book for you.

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