Kevin Shoffner

always pondering

WordPress

Adding Tags To Individual Posts in WordPress

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Have you ever wanted to know how to add Tags to each Post within your WordPress theme? If you theme does not have it built-in, there is no need for a plugin, so please take a moment to look this quick tutorial over because with just a bit of understanding of what is going on, you can look like a master at PHP and developing.

There are many ways to do the following steps (I actually prefer using FTP, but I am going to assume in this tutorial that you do not know what FTP means, and will show you how to do everything within the WordPress Dashboard.

In this example I am going to use the really clean coded free WordPress theme called Noteblog. Nicely coded, and generally speaking fast loading theme.

Step #1: Login to WordPress. If you do not know how to do this, stop and contact somebody that can help you – I am likely available if you contact me…

Step #2: Are you logged into your WordPress Dashboard now? Yes? Awesomesauce!

Go to the left navigation and look for

Appearance >> Editor

From there on the Right side of the screen look for

template-parts

Click on it and you will see a few files drop down under it. Look for

content.php

Step #3: Here’s where the magic happens, so pay attention.

Look for the code at the bottom that says

</div<!-- .enter-content -->
</article><!-- #post-## -->

At that point you will be adding some very common code between

</div><!-- .entry-content -->

and

</article><!-- #post-## -->

to actually make tags display on your Posts, and be SEO ready.

So the default method of the WordPress core code (which can be found at the WordPress Codex here)

the_tags

code would look something like this:

 </div><!-- .entry-content -->
 <p><?php the_tags(); ?></p>
</article><!-- #post-## -->

and would display like the following on your site:

 

Don’t forget to look at the many variations of how you can use the_tags function, and you can really impress your friends and family.

Redirect Old Domain to New Domain keeping URL

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Something I see lots of times with clients is they are re-branding themselves or simply found a new domain they like better. Normally that’s an easy 301 Redirect in the registrar, cPanel, or .htaccess file. BUT – what if the site is very popular and has lots of links (Pinterest, etc) to direct posts. You doing want to send all site traffic to the homepage. But the good news is, you can fix this.

So how do you the redirect?

Redirect Old Domain to New Domain keeping URL

Open .htaccess
Add the following code

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !new-domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://new-domain.com/$1 [L,R=301] What does this mean? It means you are telling the server to send all traffic from the current site to the new domain with a wild card redirect. So if that's HTTP or if HTTPS, it will go to the same URL but the domain is the new domain. Easy enough and enjoy. Let me know if you have other ideas on how you do it.

Removing /index.php/ from WordPress URL’s

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Occasionally, I have clients ask why their URL’s for WordPress have changed or maybe they moved from one hosting provider to another and they now see /index.php/ in their URL.  This does not only pertain to WordPress though, as it could affect other Content Management Systems (CMS) or even general software.

Recently I was helped setup a person who had moved their WordPress site and a great billing/time tracking online system, that I encourage you to look into, called Pancake from Hostgator to InMotion. But once everything was moved over they noticed this issue in all URL’s and it caused Pancake to really act up without being any issue with Pancake itself, and just made WordPress links look ugly.  So that’s when I realized it was time for me to do a quick walk-through on how removing/index.php/ from WordPress URL’s without a plugin being needed.

So I want you to go into your .htaccess file within the root directory of your website. Open it with your favorite text editor, and make sure this information is there and at the top of the file. Save and put back on the server.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]
</IfModule>
Note, if you are using Rackspace, you may need to add a little more code:


<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymlinks
# Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
RewriteEngine On

# On some hosts (including Rackspace), you need to remove the "#" that comes before RewriteBase to avoid 404 errors:
# RewriteBase /

# Block access to hidden files and directories.
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} -d [OR]
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} -f
RewriteRule "(^|/)\." - [F]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.+)\.(\d+)\.(js|css|png|jpe?g|gif)$ $1.$3 [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [L]
</IfModule>
I realize this is not the most exciting topic, nor the easiest to explain, so if you have any questions please let me know.

Contact Form 7 Confirmation Message Tip

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Do you use Contact Form 7 for WordPress? If so, this quick tip will be helpful for you.

A number of my clients as for customizations and tweaks to be done to the plugin to make it function a little differently than the default, but there is one customization that is hidden but anybody can do.

Success Message Position

Many of my clients who use Contact Form 7 ask about the success message. So if you have ever wanted to move the Contact Form 7 Confirmation Message from the bottom of the form to anywhere else on the form, it may be much easier than you think. Just add the
[response]
shortcode to your form where you want it to display.

Let’s just say you have a form that requests First Name, Last Name, Email Address, and a standard Text Box. A form like that, will look something like this:

Generic Contact Form 7 Form

And your backend Contact Form 7 form settings and layout would look something like this:

<p>First Name (required)<br />
[text* first-name placeholder"First Name"] </p>
<p>Last Name (required)<br />
[text* last-name placeholder"Last Name"] </p>
<p>Email Address (required)<br />
[email* your-email placeholder"user@domain.com"] </p>
<p>Message (required)<br />
[textarea* your-message] </p>
<p>[submit "Send"]</p>

Good so far? Now if you were to click send right now you would get a little confirmation message on the screen that says something generic and it would be at the bottom of the form:

Generic Standard Contact Form 7 Message

This is pretty and everything, but we have a problem… Maybe your form is too long or you think your visitors will not see the confirmation… Now what?

The fix:

There is a built-in feature that is not shared by the developer very well, but is very useful. Simply add in the shortcode [response] wherever you would like the success message to be displayed after clicking Send and it will display there.

<p>[response]</p>

<p>First Name (required)<br />
[text* first-name placeholder"First Name"] </p>
<p>Last Name (required)<br />
[text* last-name placeholder"Last Name"] </p>
<p>Email Address (required)<br />
[email* your-email placeholder"user@domain.com"] </p>
<p>Message (required)<br />
[textarea* your-message] </p>
<p>[submit "Send"]</p>

The Success Message is going to be at the very top of the form now

New placement of Contact Form 7 Success Message

Meta Refresh vs 301 redirects (.htacess) ?

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Lots of people ask me what the difference between using the Meta Refresh tag verses using the .htaccess 301 redirect function is, so I am here to explain their differences.

So what is the Meta Refresh Tag?

Mostly people want to use this in the <head> section of their webpage to redirect to a different page/site.  For instance, let’s say you had a page that once lived at domain.com/awesome.html but now it is actually located at domain.com/pretty-cool.php.  It may be hard to reach out to all of your visitors, or you have a great search ranking you don’t want to mess up.  You can go into your old page file and add something like this:

<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;'http://domain.com/pretty-cool.php'" />
</head>

This now lets your visitor go straight to the new location without them having to think.  So far so good, right?  Not exactly…

Biggest problem with Meta Refresh is lots of sites use this method to redirect you to rogue or completely different sites.  You probably don’t want your visitors, or Google, thinking you are trying to send your visitors to some completely different place.  You can do this for a short period of time as a bandaid, but I definitely would not recommend it for a long period of time.

So, what do you do instead?

301 Redirect

This is to tell your site, users, and Google you are permanently changing the location of the page.  Most importantly it tells all search engines “hey, the website or page has moved – please don’t hurt me, just look over here now.”

How to do a 301 Redirect is pretty simple.

Open your .htaccess file (or create one) found in your root directory and add a new line:
Redirect 301 http://domain.com/awesome.html http://domain.com/pretty-cool.php
If you want to redirect entire site to a new site, and not just files, you can do this:
Redirect 301 / http://domain2.com/
Save the .htaccess file, make sure it’s on your site, and you are done.

 

Different types of Redirects:

301 = permanent

302 = temporary

 

 

What do you like to use and why?