Many WordPress themes are setup to display their category pages in the same format as your blog’s homepage, making your categories useless to some. This can cause duplicate content problems, as well as making your categories difficult to avoid. If this isn’t the case for you, then your theme is probably instead setup to just display a post excerpt for each post on your category page. I’ve never been a fan of this either, as this format strips your post of links/styles and doesn’t give you control over how much of the post to display.

Instead, I’ve always liked the idea of showing only the post titles on your category pages. If you are good at making post titles, this should help someone navigating your categories to find what they are looking for.

First, you’ll want to open your archive.php file and find the post loop. It usually starts with this code (or something similar):

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

You’ll want to delete everything from that code down to the end of the loop, which usually ends with this:

<?php endif; ?>

Now, you’ll want to replace the post loop code with the following slightly different code loop:

<?php $temp_category = single_cat_title('',false); if (!empty($temp_category)){ // give index ?>
<h1><?php single_cat_title(); ?></h1>
<p><?php echo(category_description(the_category_ID(false))); ?></p>
<?php if ($posts) : foreach ($posts as $post) : start_wp(); ?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li><br>
<?php endforeach; else: ?>
<p><?php _e('Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.'); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php }else{ // give details or single post ?>
...... code for normal post overview
<?php } ?>

And you’re done! You can add<li>, <ol>, and whatever else as needed, and then style your archives page in your stylesheet to get the look you’re trying to achieve.

I’ve been heavily involved with WordPress for a couple years now and it has been fun to watch WordPress grow in popularity. Blogs have started to devote more time to covering WordPress and new blogs specifically focused on WordPress have been sprouting up everywhere. As a result, there is a lot of great work being produced. Here are a few WordPress posts that I really enjoyed:

• Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins - I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing more WordPress plugins designed specifically for CMS functionality.
• 63 Essential WordPress Hacks, Tutorials, Help Files, and Cheats - This site was lucky enough to have several posts featured here and there is a bunch of other great works here to look through.
• WPDesigner explains how to style individual posts using the post ID. This is an older post, but one I just discovered and I think it goes a long way towards showing you how to style individual posts. This is a great method to improve specific posts that are important to your blog such as an eBook you released, a download page of some sort, etc.
• Sizlopedia explains how to easily post using the WordPress Bookmarklet. I would guess most people are aware of the bookmarklet, but may not know how to put it to use.
• Another classic post by WPDesigner, this one explains How to Display a WordPress Login Form In Your Sidebar. I’m not sure how many people want to do this, but I suppose for a blog with several regular authors this could be useful towards the bottom of your sidebar where it wouldn’t bother your readers.
• Performancing provides a WordPress hack explaining how to build a photo or movie gallery.   This is something I’ve never really had an interest in doing, but some of you might have.
• Miriam at WordPress Garage explains how to make the WordPress editor stop changing your code.  It has never really bothered me, but I see a lot of people complaining about the code formatting that happens automatically.

Over the past six months, Hack WordPress has covered a number of great WordPress hacks.  If you’re a new subscriber and missed most of them, however, it would probably take you awhile to dig through all of these.

The author of Noupe.com has written a quality post about Mastering Your WordPress theme that features a large number of our hacks, as well as some other hacks that were scattered all over the blogosphere.  If you’re looking for a good collection of WordPress hacks, I recommend you check it out!

As an added bonus, if you look closely you’ll see our Recent Comments section featured in the post.

Over the past 4 months since Premium News was launched, Adii and friends have been developing a strong presence in the premium WordPress themes niche.

It all started with the Premium News theme where bloggers were given their first taste of what a news CMS using WordPress can look like. In the time since then, many themes have followed, with the most recent additions (Flash News and Gazette Editions) quickly rising in popularity. Now today it looks like the newest Premium News theme is available, this time being released as a series.

This series is called the Live Wire series, and here are some of the features you can expect in this addition:

• Auto Image Resizer - No more do you need to upload various sizes of images to make the featured posts and thumbnails look great - instead you now only upload one image of any size and our back-end does the rest.
• Author Profiles - We focused a lot of attention and making the author profiles and archives in this theme, really, really pop. This feature makes the Live Wire theme perfectly suited to multi-author blogs. We also included our built-in Gravatar support to display author thumb images.
• Built-in Gravatars - As mentioned above, we’ve included Gravatar functionality into the theme and it works without you having to install a plugin. The use of Gravatars can also be easily switched on and off.
• Custom Page Templates - The theme now includes custom page templates for General Archives, a Sitemap and Image Galleries.
• Color Schemes - Every theme also includes 4 different color schemes to cater for everyone’s taste!
• The Rest - Featured panel, video panel, drop-down menu’s, a tabbed box in the sidebar, integrated banner ad management and lastly easily integrated Flickr & Feedburner.

Here are some screen shots of the new series:

Live Wire 2.0

Live Wire Edition

Live Wire Style

What is the price? True to the previous pricing structure, these themes are $99.95 each for a single-use license. If you would rather purchase a developer’s license, you can get that for $249.95. All three themes are interchangeable, and purchasers of the developers license will get all 12 styles!

Check out the Live Wire Premium News Themes

So far, today has started out great. In addition to the first round of the NCAA tournament starting off today, I just noticed that Hack WordPress has reached its second milestone. Today is the first time we jumped the 1000 subscriber mark! Here is a quick screen shot I took to remember it by:

As for Hack WordPress news, I am pleased to announce that we have added WordPress forums and a new theme to Hack WordPress. I hope to have the forums stocked with information sometime this weekend. As for the theme change, this is only the first phase. I have a few more features to add, a comment section redesign to work on, and I am going to be adding more color to it in the coming weeks to try to make the theme a little brighter.

If the theme changes look a little familiar, that is because it was based upon Brian Gardner’s Revolution Pro theme. One thing many people don’t realize is that many of these premium WordPress themes are not designed specifically to be installed and activated (although most can be and will work well). They are designed to be used as templates for someone to create their own design. If you dig through Brian’s showcase, you can see tons of examples of people that have taken one of the Revolution designs and adjusted it to fit their needs.

Some things you’ll find now here at Hack WordPress:

• A bigger emphasis on Gravatars - I’ve talked in the past about how I felt it was important to support Gravatars. In addition to finding them with the comments you leave, you’ll now also find them in the recent comments section of the sidebar.
• Recent trackbacks are now displayed - Whenever you send a trackback or pingback to Hack WordPress, it will now be displayed in the sidebar with a link back to your website.
• Better emphasis on categories - In a recent review of Hack WordPress, Ben Cook pointed out a couple things that he felt would improve our site. The first tip was that our archives need more emphasis. Our categories are now at the top and have drop-down’s for any children categories. His other tip will be addressed in phase two of the redesign.

The next phase will include more color and an improved comment section, among other things. In the meantime, if you run into any browser incompatibilities, please let us know. You can also let us know if there are any other improvements you would like to see.

Thanks again for supporting Hack WordPress! The great readership support, comments, and community around this blog makes it so much fun to write for.

One common challenge that often faces domainers is how to easily display their domains that they have for sale. It can often be a lot of work trying to find buyers for your domains if you don’t have high end generic names where buyers come to you. The ideal solution is to display them on some sort of web page where you can send traffic to it to help find buyers.

There are a few good website templates you can get, but I found and even better solution.  That solution is a WordPress plugin called Domain Portfolio. This plugin will actually create a domain page for you, and allows you to easily input your domain information into your dashboard. It will then display it on the page within a table. Information you can include are the domain name, expiration date, registrar, asking price, and of course your contact information. Here is a screen shot of how it looks on the author’s blog:

I’ve actually installed this on one of my blogs and really like the way it is set up (you can see it here). People even have the option of searching your displayed domains to see if you have any available under certain keywords that they might be looking for!

Other features include:

• List all of your domain names for sale in one place.
• A page for each domain where users can send their offers and contact you.
• Have 100s of domains? No problem! Use the Bulk add or XML import tool!
• Visitors can sort lists by anything! Alphabetically, by expiry date, price, status or even registrar!
• Control how many domain names are listed on each page.
• Seamless integration with WordPress.
• Support for IDN domain names, supports most languages and can create punycode automatically. (Punycode feature requires PHP5)
• Now grabs information from Google, Yahoo and MSN.
• Automatic keyword recognition.
• Easily style all aspects of the portfolio and table through CSS. Even change each row and column individually with “id” tags.

The author also lists a few things that are in the works for future releases:

• “Buy Now” button that goes through PayPal IPN.
• Categories.
• Sort and jump to page by letter or extension.
• Automatic expiry date retrieval. (other than .org)
• Warning on a domain’s expiry.
• Some other surprises.

If you have domain names you’d like to display, I recommend you check this out!