One thing more WordPress bloggers have been doing lately is moving their categories over to a horizontal menu, rather than displaying them in the sidebar.   Depending on the type of blog you run and how well you keep your categories organized, I think this can be a great idea to help manage the website and improve overall navigation.  Doing something like this allows for a much better use of sub-categories, and gives you the option of displaying them in a drop-down to give your blog a much more professional feeling.

If you are interested in moving your WordPress categories into a menu and then displaying sub-categories in a drop-down menu, Anthology of Ideas has taken the time to write a detailed post explaining how to display WordPress categories in a horizontal drop-down menu.   You can also view their menu to see if you like it.  I recommend you check it out before attempting this on your own.

Of course doing this will require the use of Javascript, but the author does a great job of detailing the process and provides the CSS required to style it properly.  Once you have everything up and running correctly, you can then adjust the colors and margins to give your new menu the look and feel you want it to have, as well as fully integrate it into your WordPress theme.

I like the idea of having the sub-categories be drop-down menus, but one downside I see is that displaying categories in a menu sort of eliminates using a traditional menu for your pages.  It would be hard, in my opinion, to achieve a good look with more than one menu, so you then have to find a different way to display your blog pages.   I think you are probably best off using this method mostly if you are trying to achieve a magazine-style look or some sort of a content management system (CMS).

What do you think of moving your categories to a menu and displaying your sub-categories in drop-down boxes?

As WordPress Hacks continues to grow and expand, I’ve been digging through the archives and found a lot of great information (I know I’m a little biased). While I want readers to dig through the archives, it seems at some point that the natural progression is to create a WordPress eBook for readers to get a bunch of information in one convenient location.

So my question is this…..Would you be interested in a WordPress eBook? Let me know which of the following applies to you:

1. I would be interested in purchasing a WordPress eBook at an affordable price. (Price would be $10.00 or less)
2. I would be interested in downloading a WordPress eBook only if it was free.
3. I would not be interested in downloading the WordPress eBook.

Update: This post launched what would eventually become the Success with WordPress eBook!

This post is being submitted as part of the tutorial blog writing project over at Daily Blog Tips. If you are interested in participating, all tutorials must be submitted by midnight of January 27th, 2008.

Depending on the type of blog you run, you may at some point have an interest in only showing only a short excerpt of a post on your blog’s homepage. This could be for a variety of reasons, ranging from attempting to increase page views to trying to make your homepage more easily navigated and organized.

Another really popular place for using the post excerpt is for your archive pages, which helps you to avoid being penalized for duplicate content by the search engine spiders.

No matter what the reason is, if you are interested in switching some of your templates to show post excerpts, it isn’t very difficult to do. Go to the template you want to make the change on and find the following code:

< ?php the_content(); ?>

Depending on your theme, it may include something in the parenthesis. Change this code to the following:

< ?php the_excerpt(); ?>

This will cause your blog theme to only display the first 55 words (and strip pictures/formatting). If you’d like to add a link to allow readers to then click over and read the full post, you can instead use something like the following excerpt code:

<?php the_excerpt(__('Continue Reading This Entry'));?>

You can of course adjust the wording to fit your personal needs.

If you’d prefer to show an excerpt longer than 55 words, or want to display your pictures and formating, you’ll have to do a little manual work. You currently have two choices:

1. Use the More tag – Once you’ve written your post, you can switch over to Code view in your WordPress Write panel, click where you want the excerpt to stop and click the More button.  (See the screenshot above)
2. Optional Excerpt field – Paste the part of the post you’d like to display as an excerpt in this field of your WordPress Write panel. It should correctly display everything in the excerpt including links and specific formating.

If you use either of these methods, you’ll notice that your feed is only displaying partial posts. If you’d prefer to have the feed display the entire post, but keep the partial post on your actual website, I recommend using the Full Text RSS Feed WordPress plugin to override this and have the feed display the entire post.

Questions?  Let me know in the comments below.

Ever wonder where Matt Mullenweg came up with the idea for what we now know as WordPress? I bet most people have wondered at some point, because at the time, the idea of starting up a business where the product would be free and everyone had access to the code was a recipe for disaster.  At the time, the concept of open source software wasn’t exactly mainstream and there wasn’t a good way to monetize it.

I was happy to discover that back in 2003, you can actually find a blog post by Matt on his blog titled The Blogging Software Dilemma, where he writes about the idea of the perfect blogging software. Here is a bit of his post:

What to do? Well, Textpattern looks like everything I could ever want, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be licensed under something politically I could agree with. Fortunately, b2/cafelog is GPL, which means that I could use the existing codebase to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michel would be working on right now if only he was around. The work would never be lost, as if I fell of the face of the planet a year from now, whatever code I made would be free to the world, and if someone else wanted to pick it up they could. I’ve decided that this the course of action I’d like to go in, now all I need is a name. What should it do? Well, it would be nice to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger. Someday, right?

Click over to read the rest.   You can certainly see the wheels turning as Matt began to put together when would eventually become WordPress, and almost a year later Matt updated the post stating that this idea eventually became WordPress.  Thanks Matt for seeing this idea through and to the rest of the WordPress team that has made it happen.  Your hard work has made all of our online lives better!

[via We Love WP]

Premium themes continue to be released at a fast pace and the quality seems to keep getting better and better.   Magnus Jepson has been in the premium theme game for awhile now, releasing premium themes on his own website, as well as collaborating with Adii on a Premium News theme called NewsPress.   Now it looks like he has released another theme in his “Press” series, this one called PolaroidPress.

PolaroidPress is a 2-column theme that features a randomizer that allows you to upload and use several different images for the header.   Other features include:

• Artistic background
• CSS menu
• Widget ready sidebar
• Layered Photoshop file with the multiple license pack

Here are some samples of the unique look you’ll get:

PolaroidPress Blog Page Template

PolaroidPress Single Page Template

PolaroidPress Post Page Template

You can see the variety of pictures in the headers of the above screen shots.  I also love the RSS button in the menu at the top.  You can see a live demo of the theme here.

Magnus supports his themes, offers free upgrades if any changes are made, and has very competitive prices.   You can purchase the single-use version of the theme for only $49.00, or use it on multiple websites for only $99.00. Click here to get more details!