Handy WordPress Hacks

Posted on September 17, 2007

With a few tweaks in WordPress you can unlock the constraints of the categories and extend them in virtually any direction you want to go. Additionally you can structure your site to have short user-friendly URLs.

Create category based sections. By editing the tabs in your main navigation you can create tabs that index specific categories of your site. This is the method used on thoughtsparks.net for the tabs at the top of the page. The links are wrapped within list-item tags <li></li>. The list-items are placed after the home link and before the page links code.
Syndicate category based feeds. The category for tutorials would have the feed address: http://www.thoughtsparks.net/category/tutorials/feed. Potentially this enables one to reuse any group of content. This feed then could be syndicated through a service like Feedburner. This feed now can be picked-up as http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThoughtSparksTutorials.
Make very short user-friendly URLs. In the very beginning configuration of a WordPress install is the time to decide on the best URL permalink method for your site. Rather than a URL structure that is http://www.domainname.com/?p=123/, your domain references can be http://www.domainname.com/the-name-of-the-post/.

To setup a short URL structure: