Taxonomies in WordPress Edit-Post Sidebar

Taxonomies in WordPress are categorized tags. They are useful if you find yourself adding a class of tags over and over, like ingredients on a recipe blog. WordPress 2.8 includes updates that make the hidden taxonomy features easier to use.

I’ve set taxonomies up on my home-brewing blog, Life With Beer, where I have taxonomies for malts, hops, yeast strains, and adjuncts (weird stuff in beer like fruit, spices, and mushrooms). I also sometimes write about local craft-brewed beer, so I also have a craft-brew taxonomy that I use for micro-breweries and brew-pubs.

As an example of how you can use taxonomies to expand your blog to include information that visitors and search engines will love, I’ll be using a post from Life With Beer about kelp beer. (The link takes you to the end of the post where the taxonomies are listed. At the time of writing, it’s the only post where I’m using taxonomies, but it’s enough to illustrate the idea.)

To start using taxonomies, you need to dig through the WordPress Codex to find the relevant functions and add them to your theme. Or you can use Joost de Valk’s taxonomy plugin.

By default, the taxonomy pages look just like your regular tag pages, which is kind of boring, and at best will help a small percentage of visitors navigate your site. But, with just a little extra information on the taxonomy page you can create pages of keyword-rich useful information that visitors and search engines will love.

Taxonomies Linking Brewing Recipes with Ingredients

Coding Your Thesis Taxonomy Pages

Thesis doesn’t do well creating a page title for taxonomy pages, so the first thing we need to do is fix that.

Right under the title, we want to add some extra introductory content. To do that we’re going to roll our own WordPress query that only gets a post with the same page name as the taxonomy slug and print it out.

Since I want all of this to be grouped together, I’m putting it in the same function and using the bottom-border of #archive_info to separate it from the list of posts that are associated with the tag.

The second function creates text that introduces the list of posts that are associated with the taxonomy.

Read through the code comments, because there’s are a couple of areas that need special attention.

function custom_taxonomy_intro(){
	global $wp_query, $thesis;
	if ( is_tax() ) {	
	
/*
 * get taxonomy variables that we'll	use
 * to create a page title
 * and query the database
 * for information stored in a private post
*/	
		$taxonomy 	= get_taxonomy ( get_query_var('taxonomy') );
		$term = $wp_query->get_queried_object();
		$title = $term->name;
		$query_term = get_query_var('term');
/*
 * create headline
 * 
*/
		
		?>
		<div class="post_box top">
		<div class="headline_area">
		<h1 class="entry-title">label ;?&gt; Archive</h1>
		&lt;?php
		thesis_hook_after_headline($post_count);		
		echo "</div>";		//end headline_area

/*
 * custom WP_Query that only
 * gets pages with the same name
 * as the taxonomy term
*/

		$query='pagename='.$query_term;
		$tax_post = new WP_Query();
		$tax_post-&gt;query($query);

//Wordpress loop

		while ($tax_post-&gt;have_posts()) : $tax_post-&gt;the_post(); 
			$post_image = thesis_post_image_info('image');
						
			if ($post_image['show'] &amp;&amp; $post_image['y'] == 'before-post'){
				echo $post_image['output'];
			}

			echo "<div class='format_text entry-content'>";
			the_content();
			echo "</div>";
		endwhile;
		echo "</div>";		//end  post_box top

		
	}
}
add_action('thesis_hook_before_content','custom_taxonomy_intro');

function custom_taxonomy_post_list(){
	global $wp_query;
	if (is_tax()){
		$term = $wp_query-&gt;get_queried_object();
		$title = $term-&gt;name;

/*
 * create intro text
 * by concatenating text with term
 * adjust to your needs
*/

		if ( is_tax('craft-brew')){
			$pre="Posts about ";
		} else {
			$pre="Recipes that use ";
		}
	
		echo "<div><p>".$pre." ".$title.":</p></div>";	//add #taxonomy-intro to custom-css file
	}	
}

add_action('thesis_hook_archive_info','custom_taxonomy_post_list');

Notes on Taxonomy Pages

You need to create a page to hold the introductory content with the same title as the taxonomy term. This page isn’t intended to be accessed by visitors or search engines, it’s just there to hold the unique content that you’re going to use at the start of your taxonomy page.

If you’re having problems and are using post titles in your URLs, check that the last segment of the permalink for the holder page, matches the last segment of the taxonomy page URL. On Life With Beer, my matching URLs for roast barley in my malts taxonomy look like this:

Holder Page: http://www.yoursite.com/roast-barley
Taxonomy Page: http://www.yoursite.com/malts/roast-barley

SEO Issues for Taxonomy Pages

You want search engines to crawl these taxonomy pages.

To avoid duplicate content penalties, you don’t want to allow search engines to access the holder pages. The easiest way to do this is to keep these pages private. This keeps the holder pages out of search engines, stops it from popping up in standard WordPress functions, and gives a 404 error to anyone who guesses the URL (after reading this article?).

WordPress Page Privacy Settings

The All-In-One SEO plugin treats these pages like tag pages and prevents search engines from crawling the taxonomy pages.

Thesis doesn’t recognize taxonomy pages (actually, both Thesis and All-In-One SEO both don’t recognize taxonomies, but Thesis uses a more strict function when excluding tag pages). So, even if you’re excluding search engines from your tag pages, search engines are still able to crawl your taxonomy pages which is exactly what we want.

All other things being equal, it’s better to dump the All-In-One SEO plugin and just use Thesis’s SEO functions. Alternately, bug the All-In-One SEO plugin people to add the option to decide whether to block search engines from taxonomy pages.

Thesis Custom Taxonomy Pages that Visitors and Search Engines Will Love is a post from: Damon Gudaitis

I have two regular blogs running Thesis and one development blog also running Thesis. Each blog has about a dozen plugins in common.

Updating WordPress, the plugins, and Thesis is a pain as it is, so you can imagine how I feel about updating everything three times.

For WordPress and the plugins the solution is WP Hive which lets you use one set of source files for multiple sites. Each site gets its own settings and themes. Each site gets its own set of .htaccess and robots.txt files.

WP-Hive doesn’t let you create your own set of Thesis customizations for each set. The problem is that Thesis isn’t a theme so much as a framework and, if you like using the Thesis framework, then you’re probably going to want to use it for all of your sites each with its own set of customizations.

You can get around this by uploading Thesis multiple times renaming the Thesis theme folder each time. But if you’re lazy like me you’re not going to like updating each Thesis installation every time a new release comes out. Luckily there is a much more simple and elegant solution that makes updating and maintaining your blogs easily.

Add this code to your custom_functions.php file in your WP Hive enabled WordPress installation.

function thesis_hive() {
	// Get the correct host name
	$hostname = $_SERVER['X_FORWARDED_HOST'] == false ? $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] : $_SERVER['X_FORWARDED_HOST'];

	// Strip any leading or training dots
	$hostname = strtolower(trim($hostname, "."));

	// Strip the www prefix
	if (substr($hostname, 0, 4) == "www.") {
		$hostname = substr($hostname,4);
	}
	
	//custom css
	if ( ! file_exists(THESIS_CUSTOM . '/' . $hostname . '_custom.css') ) {
		fopen(THESIS_CUSTOM . '/' . $hostname. '_custom.css','w+');
	}
	
	echo '<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.'.$hostname.'/wp-content/themes/thesis/custom/' . $hostname. '_custom.css" type="text/css"/>';
	
	//custom_functions.php
	if ( ! file_exists(THESIS_CUSTOM . '/' . $hostname . '_custom_functions.php') ) {
		fopen(THESIS_CUSTOM . '/' . $hostname . '_custom_functions.php','w+');
	}
	
	if (file_exists(THESIS_CUSTOM . '/'.$hostname.'_custom_functions.php')){
		include(THESIS_CUSTOM . '/'.$hostname.'_custom_functions.php');
	}
}

add_action('wp_head','thesis_hive');

This will code will automatically create a new set of custom.css and custom_functions.php file for each site the first time someone visits the site after adding the code and link or include the files.

Your custom folder will look like this:

cache/
custom_functions.php
custom.css
hostname1.com_custom_functions.php
hostname1.com_custom.css
subdomain.hostname1.com_custom_functions.php
subdomain.hostname1.com_custom.css
hostname2_custom_functions.php
hostname2_custom.css
etc…

Use the main custom_functions.php file for functions you want to use in all of your sites and the hostname_custom_functions.php file for functions that are specific to that one site.

The various custom.css files can be used the same way.

Final Notes

One drawback of this approach is that calling the functions within Thesis limits the scope. I don’t think you’ll be able to use WordPress functions and WordPress hooks in the hostname_custom_functions.php files. This hasn’t been a problem for me, but you should be aware of it when implementing a Thesis hive.

Thanks to Alex Tran in the comments who mentions a thread in the Thesis forums about creating multiple Thesis image rotators with WP Hive. My Thesis hive script doesn’t allow for multiple image rotators so, if that’s important to you, then go check it out.

Finally, if you have multiple Thesis sites, then you really should have a Thesis Developers License.

Thesis Hive: Multiple Thesis Sites, One Set of Files is a post from: Damon Gudaitis

First of all, props to Chris who first suggested the fix to the WordPress Google Website Optimizer Plugin in the comments on my WordPress Displaying Code in Square Brackets post. Chris shares his ideas on how to make money online at The Net Hustle.

If you’re having trouble getting the Google Website Optimizer plugin to work with shortcode (code in square brackets that you insert into your posts add plugin functionality), then you need to change the echo statements to return statements in the google-website-optimizer-for-wordpress.php file.

I added some other modifications to the script to make it easier to read. I only just started testing it, but I’m pretty confident the code below will work without modification.

Copy the code and replace the function of the same name in google-website-optimizer-for-wordpress.php (everything between the two lines that start with add_action, but not including the add_action lines).

function go4wp_tracking_script($content) { global $wp_query; if (is_single() or is_page()) { if ($wp_query->post) { $post = $wp_query->post; $tracking = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'go_tracking_script_test', true); $conversion = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'go_tracking_script_conversion', true); //this line got edited after original post //if the page/post has both test and conversion code, display both if (get_post_meta($post->ID, 'go_tracking_script_test', true) && get_post_meta($post->ID, 'go_tracking_script_conversion', true)) { return $content.$tracking.$conversion; //if the page/post has test code display it } else if (get_post_meta($post->ID, 'go_tracking_script_test', true)) { return $content.$tracking; //if the page/post has conversion code, display it } else if (get_post_meta($post->ID, 'go_tracking_script_conversion', true)) { return $content.$conversion; //if the page/post does not have test and/or conversion code, display the normal content } else { return $content; } } } else { return $content; } }

Shortcode with WordPress Google Website Optimizer Plugin is a post from: Damon Gudaitis

You probably want to search for shortcode.

Shortcode is the term used for code that bloggers and plugin developers can use to embed code within a WordPress Post or Page.

The purpose of the remainder of this post is to SEO for words that non-coders search for so that people who don’t know what shortcode is can find this post and learn what search terms to use in order to find a solution. I’ll also share the solution to my specific problem.

WordPress Caption and Form Code Not Working

I recently had a problem with another WordPress blog of mine where code nested in square brackets started displaying. In my case, the problem was with the image caption code and with my contact forms (I tried changing contact form plugins to see if that solved the problem.

I stupidly performed a bunch of updates at the same time with only a cursory check in between so I wasn’t really sure what caused the problem. So off I went to Google to figure out if it knew.

The problem was that there weren’t any relevant results in the language that I used for my searches and I didn’t know the correct technical term. My searches included terms like:

• square brackets display code WordPress
• WordPress not parsing code square brackets

and similar combinations.

Luckily, I know enough PHP and WordPress to figure out that the technical term for the code that gets inserted in to Posts and Pages in WordPress is shortcode. If you’re having any problems with stuff displaying within square brackets that shouldn’t be displayed, try searching with the term shortcode.

I can’t find the post that helped me but the problem was with the Google Website Optimizer for WordPress plugin.

I hope this helps you figure out your problem.

[edit]I posted a fix for this problem in my Shortcode with Google Website Optimizer for WordPress post.[/edit]

WordPress Displaying Code in Square Brackets? is a post from: Damon Gudaitis