On a recent job, the client consistently demanded a splash page for their website. Despite my consistent groans and insistence that the implementation of a splash page on their website would instantly turn it, them and me to the dark side, I gave in.

I reluctantly implemented a quick solution using WordPress. I used php to check if the user was referred to the index page from within the site or from out with the site.

Usually splash pages use an "index.html" page in the website root with a link to a directory such as "blog". But I had installed WordPress in the root. I could not be bothered moving the installation folder from the root to another folder to suit the splash page nonsense. So I used php with an if statement to check if the user was referred to the site from outside the domain or within and thus display content accordingly:

Enter








Welcome to the main page
By the way Alan is a total ledge!

In reference to the above code; all that is before the else statement i.e. the following code:

Enter

Will be the output splash page. All that is after the else statement i.e. the following code:

Welcome to the main page
By the way Alan is a total ledge!

Will be output when the user clicks enter on the splash page.

At the start of this brief article I stated that ‘Wordpress’, “only comes with one basic feed option as default”, this is only half of the reality.

WordPress is actually equipped to separate various categories into associated feeds, but such a function is disabled with the default install.

In order to access the feeds for categories, place the following one line of code anywhere on your site, the ’sidebar’ would be most fantastic:

After adding the above code, a list of categories will be rendered with dedicated RSS links, so that you can reference them elsewhere if you so wished.

I wanted to have some text at the bottom of every page and thus have it prewritten in the ‘Write‘ section of my admin section of my WordPress blod. I did not want to have to go through the rigmoral of entering the same text everytime that I wanted to write a new post. I asked myself:

How could I do this?

Step 1: Editing the ‘wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php‘ file.

The file that needs to be edited is ‘edit-form-advanced.php‘ in the ‘wp-admin‘ folder. The line in question is 100. I looked for the following portion of code on line 100 of the ‘edit-form-advanced.php‘ file:

<? php echo $content ?>
I AM AMAZING!

For the sake of this example, the text, I want to have pre-written in the ‘Post’ field in the ‘Write’ page is “I AM AMAZING!“. In order to achieve my objective I simply alter the above code to the following:

<? php echo $content ?>
I AM AMAZING!

Step 2: Save and upload.

I then saved my changes and uploaded the changed ‘edit-form-advanced.php‘ file to my webserver in the ‘wp-admin‘ folder, and perfection is mine!

I wanted to just show my ‘website news’ category in the root of my WordPress installation. But by default index.php shows the latest posts from all categories, this was not what I wanted. So how could I get what I want?

Step 1

I take a look in index.php. It displays:

Step 2

After looking at this code I could see, clearly, there was no statement to restrict what category to show, which was what I wanted. So I checked in the Administration>Categories section in the Administration part of my site to find out the category ID of the category I wanted to just show on my index.php in my WordPress installation root, the category ID was ‘2?. I changed index.php to the following and uploaded it to my webserver: