By no means is this a complete list of all the plugins that everyone uses everytime, but it’s what I personally use for all of my installs.

I’ve compiled a zip file that contains the following plugins (in no particular order):

• All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your WordPress site for search engines by automatically optimizing your titles and meta tags.
• WP Database Backup – Allows you to automatically schedule backups of your WordPress database. Download or send the backup to your email.
• Sitemap Generator – Quickly creates a human-readable sitemap for your WordPress site.
• Contact Form 7 – Let’s you quickly create contact forms for your WordPress site. Supports multiple contact forms and customize the form and content flexibly with simple markup. Supports AJAX submission and validation, CAPTCHA and Akismet spam filtering.
• My Page Order – Allows you to order your pages and subpages through the use of a drag and drop interface. Also supports a widget that uses all the page order options.
• Google Sitemap Generator – This plugin generates XML sitemaps that help search engines index your site with greater efficiency.

Download my Must Have WordPress plugins. My zip file includes a readme.txt file that has a link to each plugin homepage for install instructions, screen grabs and FAQs. Please feel free to contact me for any additional suggestions!

Download Must Have WordPress Plugins Zip

“Basically I want to take all of the posts in the “Freelance” category and remove them from the main content so that I can link to them from a page instead of including them in the Loop. ”

Here is the code to exclude an entire category from appearing within the WordPress loop:

<?php query_posts('cat=-3'); ?>
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<!-- Display the Title as a link to the Post's permalink. -->
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
<?php the_content(); ?>
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
<p>Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.</p>
<?php endif; ?>

Basically, what you’re doing with the above code is telling the loop that if it’s in category 3, just remove it from the query that the loop is using.

Hopefully you’ve found this quick tutorial valuable. Contact me if you have any questions or would do it a different way. There’s 1,001 ways to do everything – that’s why I love coding.

 $current = $post->ID;
$parent = $post->post_parent;
$get_grandparent = get_post($parent);
$grandparent = $get_grandparent->post_parent;
$get_greatgrandparent = get_post($grandparent);
$greatgrandparent = $get_greatgrandparent->post_parent; 
echo "parent = $parent; grandparent = $grandparent; greatgrandparent = $greatgrandparent";

If you wanted to, you could continue this pattern to N number of ancestors…

Hopefully you’ve found this quick tutorial valuable. Contact me if you have any questions or would do it a different way. There’s 1,001 ways to do everything – that’s why I love coding.

Here is an example of one of the shorter titles I was given:

Here is an example of one of the longer titles I was given:

A series of quick if/else statements and use of the strlen function in PHP allows me to assign different classes depending on the length of the dynamic title. I figured out, based on the CSS on the H1 class, that 14 was my magic number.

Here’s the quick snippet of code I used:

$title = $post->post_title;
$char_title = strlen($title);

if ($char_title > 14) {$header_style = "double";}

else {$header_style = "single";}

I grab the post title using common WordPress calls and make it into the $title variable. The I use the strlen function to determine the number of characters (including spaces) in the title. If it’s greater than 14, it assigns the $header_style variable the class “double” or else it assigns it the “single” class.

Here is how I used it within the WordPress loop:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class="<?php echo $header_style ?>"><h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2></div>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

Hopefully you’ve found this quick tutorial valuable. Contact me if you have any questions or would do it a different way. There’s 1,001 ways to do everything – that’s why I love coding.