After much digging around and trying to find a suitable plugin or PHP if/then statement, I came across a nice little site that did it for me using the functions.php page.

I would love to say I wrote this handy bit of code myself but I did not. Much praise to for the skilled coder at brassblogs.

Now, the way to use this is to take the code listed below and add it to your functions file. Or, to make it easier, I’ve pasted the complete information into this text file.


< ? php

function inherit_template() {
if (is_category()) {
$catid = get_query_var('cat');
if ( file_exists(TEMPLATEPATH . '/category-' . $catid . '.php') ) {
include( TEMPLATEPATH . '/category-' . $catid . '.php');
exit;
}

$cat = &get_category($catid);
$parent = $cat->category_parent;
while ($parent) {
$cat = &get_category($parent);
if ( file_exists(TEMPLATEPATH . '/category-' . $cat->cat_ID . '.php') ) {
include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/category-' . $cat->cat_ID . '.php');
exit;
}

$parent = $cat->category_parent;
}
}
}

add_action('template_redirect', 'inherit_template', 1);
?>


After you add that to your functions.php file, you simply need to make a template for EACH PARENT CATEGORY. The child categories will then use the template that their PARENT uses. YEA!

It’s very easy to make a category template. The simplest way is to take the existing archive.php file in your WordPress theme and save it as category-ID.php where the ID is the NUMBER of the category. You can check this by going into your wp-admin, clicking on the category and reading the complete URL for the ID= (it will be at the end of the string).

So, if your category is #1, you will make category-1.php. You can style this page in any way you want; you can change link colors, text colors or even make it look completely different from the rest of your WordPress blog – it’s completely up to you!

This will apply to all parent categories that you want to use a special template; simply find the category ID, create the page, name it category-XX.php (where XX is your category ID) and upload it to your theme folder. Or use the sample you can download here.

Again, credit goes to brassblogs.com! Thanks!

The post How to force child categories to use the PARENT category template in WordPress appeared first on Custom Wordpress Theme Design.

Sometimes you want to display a WordPress feature, such as recent comments, tags, etc., without using a widget. For me, it’s occassionally easier to STYLE, especially if I’m not using a Theme that I built or that I’m familiar with.

A great code around is shown below, courtesy of to Kyle Eslick and found on wprecipes. I’ve used it on some sites and I find it works great. ONE NOTE: if you want less than 10 comments, simply change the code to a lesser number.

php
  global $wpdb;
  $sql = "SELECT DISTINCT ID, post_title, post_password,
comment_ID, comment_post_ID, comment_author,
comment_date_gmt,comment_approved,
comment_type,comment_author_url,
SUBSTRING(comment_content,1,30) AS com_excerpt
FROM
$wpdb->comments LEFT OUTER JOIN $wpdb->posts ON
 ($wpdb->comments.comment_post_ID = $wpdb->posts.ID)
 WHERE comment_approved = '1' AND comment_type = ''
AND post_password = ''
ORDER BY comment_date_gmt DESC LIMIT 10";

  $comments = $wpdb->get_results($sql);
  $output = $pre_HTML;
  $output .= "n

";
  foreach ($comments as $comment) {
    $output .= "n
	
".strip_tags($comment->comment_author) .":"
 . "ID)."#comment-" . $comment->comment_ID
. "" title="on ".$comment->post_title .
"">" . strip_tags($comment->com_excerpt)."

";
  }
  $output .= "n

";
  $output .= $post_HTML;
  echo $output;

The post Display recent comments on your WordPress blog appeared first on Custom Wordpress Theme Design.

Yea WordPress! Starting in version 2.9, thumbnail support is built into the code, which means that instead of doing all the hard work, WordPress has done it for you! For the most part anyway…

It’s a pretty simple process.

1. Add a line of code to functions.php

add_theme_support('post-thumbnails');

2. Define the size of the thumbnails – you have a couple options. You can hard crop it, which is what I have done in the example below (add ‘true’ to the end of the dimensions), or you can resize the box. Box resizing shrinks an image without distortion until it fits inside the “box” you’ve specified with your dimensions.

set_post_thumbnail_size( 100, 100, true ); // 100 pixels wide by 100 pixels tall, hard crop mode

Together this will look like:

3. Add the code to your template

That’s it! Now when you login to your wp-admin panel scroll down – on the right side under ‘Categories’:

Click on ‘set thumbnail’ and you get this box:

Be sure to select ‘Use as thumbnail’ and then ‘save’. Then close the window with the X on top right.

Here’s an example of it used on one of my sites:

The post Adding thumbnail support to your WordPress theme appeared first on Custom Wordpress Theme Design.

Want to display your blogroll but maybe just a certain CATEGORY only? Such as ‘affiliate links’ or ‘friends’….

It’s easy.

1. Locate the category ID number by going into the Link manager in WordPress and hovering over the category name. That should show you the ID. If that doesn’t work, click on the category name and the ID is the number at the end of the URL.

2. Find the code that displays the bookmarks. It should look like this:

<?php wp_list_bookmarks(''); ?>

3. Edit that code to choose the Category ID that you want to display:

<?php wp_list_bookmarks(‘category=766′); ?>

That’s it!

The post Display WordPress Blogroll Links By Category appeared first on Custom Wordpress Theme Design.

Code snippets

You want to use something a little bit more attractive than the standard ‘SUBMIT’ button – even changing the text to ‘PUSH ME NOW’ isn’t as visually appealing as a nice graphic you’ve made to match the color and theme of your site. We all know graphics help make a website jump from OKAY to STUNNING! So, how do you do it?

It’s simple. Here’s the code:

<input type=”image” name=”cmdSubmit” alt=”Submit Form” src=”/images/submit.png” value=”Submit”>

Simply put that in place of your standard form submit code and you’re ready to go!

The post Make your SUBMIT button an IMAGE using HTML appeared first on Custom Wordpress Theme Design.

This week I wanted to create a page that would hold all of the blog posts that I made in the category ‘Portfolio’. I didn’t create a portfolio page because I wanted to be able to add a post each time I had a new item to add to my portfolio.

<authors note: I have about 100 things to add to this portfolio. If you would like to see my complete portfolio, please visit my website, CimmeronStudios.com>

So, I hit the WordPress CODEX to dig into the best way to create a page that would display posts based on whatever variable I wanted to add, in this case, the category ID.

To begin, be sure to create a new TEMPLATE for your page. To achieve what we want here, we want to MODIFY the existing LOOP. Now, the LOOP is basically what powers your WordPress site. Here’s the very basics (taken from WordPress.org)

The Loop is used by WordPress to display each of your posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each of the posts to be displayed on the current page and formats them according to how they match specified criteria within The Loop tags.

For a very detailed explanation of the LOOP, check out the WordPress Codex.

So, back to our page. I’m going to run through this in a step by step fashion.

1. Create a new page template. You can do this by taking the existing page.php and saving it as a template, such as template-portfolio.php.  To do that, you will need to remember to place a bit of code at the top of the page so that WP recognizes that it is a template:

2. Locate the following line of code on this new template page:

<? php query_posts(‘posts_per_page=1&cat=7′);
if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

3. Next, we will alter this part of the code to display only what we WANT to have displayed. We will do that by using a query:

query_posts

There are a TON of variables that we can use at this point, however, I’m going to use just 2 for this example. Category ID and Number of Posts to display.

The Query has to be added before the loop to make this work, so you will insert your Query like so:

The highlighted area (above) shows you where you’ll be adding your information. Basically, the area between the ( and the ‘ ….


('YourInformation=5&YourInformation=1')

That is where you tell the page WHAT to display. In my example, we have:

posts_per_page=5

5 posts will be displayed on this page

Next we have the important one:

cat=19

This means that ALL POSTS from Category ID number 19 will be displayed.

You can change this by using the Category name, as well: category_name

After you change out your Query values, you can upload the template to your server, go to the PAGE and assign it to that TEMPLATE – That’s all there is to it!

Here are a few other items that you may want to use when customizing. REMEMBER: You can string multiple variables together by using the & as long as you keep everything within the (‘ ‘):

tag=

tag_id=

author=

author_name=

That should be enough to get you what you’re after. Any questions? Feel free to send me an email or comment below!

The post Displaying Category POSTS on a WordPress Blog Page appeared first on Custom Wordpress Theme Design.