Tags are often a misunderstood element of WordPress. Many people for some reason use tags and categories interchangeably, which dilutes the point of either function.

The way I like to explain the relation of tags and categories to your blog is that of a book with chapters and an index. Categories are the chapters to a book and tags are the index to the same book. Categories should focus on high level segregation; whereas, tags are more on the granular bases with your information division.

I’ve come to conclude that every year I need to evaluate my WordPress plugins and decide what’s valuable and what is excess. Sometimes I get in a rut and use the same plugin over and over without looking at what has recently been developed.

Recently, I have done a plugin inventory and realized there are a lot of really cool plugins that I could be using (and some old ones that are no longer necessary). From this inventory I have updated what I call my “Meat & Potatoes” plugins. These are the plugins that I use on most every new blog install. I say I add these plugins with most blogs because there are two types of blogs people setup—blogs that want comments and blogs that hate comments.

Lately, I have been getting a lot of requests on how to 301 pages in WordPress. It is actually a really simple process, but a step that makes it even easier is using a plugin titled, WP htaccess Control.

This plugin makes optimizing your .htaccess file very easy, and therefore, I have added it to my “meat and potato” plugins I use to setup every blog with. I will have to write another post on what all the features are, but in short this plugin gives you access to your .htaccess file via your WordPress admin dashboard.

To setup a 301 with the WP htaccess Control plugin, you need to go to the plugin admin (titled WP htaControl). Here go to the third menu (custom htaccess) and enter the following code (be sure to change the structure and domain for your circumstances:

If you look at my last two post (see here and here) you will notice that in one post I am displaying my code as an image and the other as regular text. In fact, looking at my last entries before the last one they were all images. Every time I tried to add the code to display wordpress would read it as regular code and make my post look funky.

I finally got wise and found a plugin that allowed me to show my code without messing everything up. The plugin is Code Everything and it is super easy. Basically, all you do is add <code> before and </code> after your coding example, and walla you see the example you want to show. I know this really is insignificant, but you have no idea how much time that this little plugin saves me (and hopefully you).

For the last several years I have been working on a wordpress MU project that seems to be the bane of my existence. I will work on it non-stop for several days, and then leave it alone for a few months and then go back and find errors that I hadn’t noticed before. It is really frustrating but some day I will actually finish and launch this project.

One of my biggest issues though, is my desire to have the theme editor active while I am in the development phase. Obviously, it is not wise to have the theme editor available when you launch a community. Having your theme editor global allows any user the ability to change the theme for your whole community. Yet, I spend a lot of my time in the wordpress admin area and having to jump from admin to ftp is annoying (yes, I admit I am lazy, efficient, but lazy).

Anyway, WordPress MU deactivates the theme editor by default. Since I go periods of time without touching MU when I come back I have to update my wordpress instance. Every time I lose my precious theme editor, and every time I have to dig through Google to find the solution to bring it back.

auction-tag One of my favorite things to do is to find wordpress plugins. In fact, the plugins are what made me fall in love with wordpress. There are so many things that you can build and do with plugins. The nice thing is that you don’t have to pay someone to create these programs. I always tell clients, when I am using wordpress as their CMS solution, that there is probably few things they will ever need to build since the wordpress opensource community is so vast.

Currently, I am creating a finance website and was asked to include an auction into the site. Surprisingly, there are not a lot of auction plugins. However, I did find a plugin I was impressed with—wpauctions.com (yes, this is an affiliate link). Unfortunately, to get all the plugin’s functionality you need to put down $40 (they do have a free version you can use to test drive the plugin).

However, for me it was worth it because it added an additional layer to the overall site. The function that was valuable for me was the ability to put an auction into any of my posts or pages. I have a real gripe with ecommerce solutions that require a defined page or post that I am restricted to.

Earlier this year I wrote about a quick way to fix wordpress themes that wouldn’t wrap text around your images correctly. It was just snidbit of code that you dropped into your style sheet, but it worked like a charm. I have since used the code on several free themes.

Recently, I was having issues with a couple wordpress themes not being able to use the caption section with the image function. Here are some screen shots I created for a friend showing the problem I was having:

Looks Fine in the Post Editor

These days I use wordpress for anything related to web management or development, or at least some variation of wordpress (bbpress, buddypress, and anything else press). Recently, I received a forwarded email from a friend who was making a case for wordpress. The email was to the executive leaders of his company who are thinking of creating a custom blog system from scratch and trashing their current wordpress blog they’ve had for over a year.

I do not doubt other individuals have run into similar issues with their own company. When I worked for Oracle I spoke with many billion dollar companies who felt they could create something better than what Oracle had.

podcast_cr If you ask any of my friends I am passionate about blogging. I even have a vanity license plate that says “Blogger.” So, I admit I am a bit of a fanatic.

However, being the fanatic blogger that I am, I also get the priviledge of being annoyed by certain elements of blogging that probably doesn’t bother the majority of the blogosphere.

My biggest gripe deals with the podcasting element of blogging. I build a lot of blogs and there really isn’t a good free theme for either video or audio. Not to mention that the audio podcast plugins are not that great.

03-17-09_wordpress-theme I help develop a lot of custom wordpress themes (you can see some of my work in the gallery). One common mistake that a lot of developers make is having images in post be styled according to wordpress standards. Case in point, the theme for MyMarketer is a free theme. When I tried on the theme all the images in my posts no longer held their formatting.

I came across this problem with one of my freelance projects and asked the developer of the project his thoughts. Here is the email he sent:

Actually we need to add extra CSS classes for customized themes, so the final CSS rules would be: