monkeydo.org

Whilst working on another wordpress based site I had a requirement to only show the latest post on the front page but when clicking through to the category I needed to show all posts.

Unfortunately Wordpress only has a global “blog posts” setting which applies to all pages. This was no good to me as I was relying heavily on the categories as a core navigation tool within the template design and by only showing the latest post when clicking a category menu item the usability of the site was massively impaired.

Thankfully I tracked down a plugin that allows you to change the number of posts shown depending on the page type, sadly it’s not supported by the author any more but you can still grab it from his archive at drunkenmonkey.org,  the file you seek is “custom query string”.

How about this for a cool way of presenting images in your blog posts? An inline thumbnail that when you click on it your site gets faded back and the image opens out over the top of your page.

It’s much cooler to see it in action than to describe it so here is an example. Click on the picture below of my girlfriend’s dog looking all fancy (and a little embarrassed) in his Christmas jumper and you’ll see what a great effect it is.

“So Monkey Great Sage” I hear you ask, “how can I obtain such a wonderous effect for my own pictures of dogs?”. It’s actually so simple it shouldn’t be allowed. It’s all done with the Lightbox 2 plugin for Wordpress, which is based on the Lightbox JS v2.2 javascript by Lokesh Dhakar and converted to a plugin by some dude who’s name I can’t spot on his plugins page…he may be called Peppe.

You can download it and find out how to install it and even how to use it with a multiple image set at the Lightbox2 Wordpress Plugin Page.