Ant Ramm

I’ve just about finished putting together the first incarnation of my personal blog/portfolio site. Here’s a short post about the WordPress plugins I’ve used to further customise the site.

• Advanced Category Excluder - allows you to select the categories you don’t want to appear on specific types of listing pages of your site (Archive, Home, RSS Posts, RSS Comments and Search). I use this to stop items from my Projects page from appearing on my homepage, archives or any RSS page.
• Advanced Permalinks - allows you to be more flexible about your permalink structure. I only use this in a really basic form to allow me to have my categories URLs at root level, e.g. http://www.antramm.com/projects instead of http://www.antramm.com/category/projects.
• Feed Locations - Allows you to change your feed locations (for example to FeedBurner) and still use the standard WordPress API calls to insert the <link rel="alternate" /> into the head of the HTML document.
• FeedWordPress - Gives WordPress the ability to aggregate content from other RSS feeds. I use this to aggregate content from my other sites - CuMu.Li and Things to Play With. Whenever posts are added to either site they should appear here within about 1 hour.
• Post Templates By Category - Categories can have custom templates by creating a file in your theme called category-[id].php, where [id] is the ID of the category you wish to have a custom listing template for. I use this approach to remove the dates on the posts within my Projects listing page. However, you can’t do the same for a single post within a category without this plugin. This allows you to create a template called single-cat-[id].php, when any single post within category [id] is displayed it will be formatted using this template. I use this plugin for formatting the single post pages in my Projects category, I don’t want to display the date on posts in this category.

Also, I’ve found some really good tips for creating WordPress themes in this blog post