Customize Your Excerpt Length Per Template

I’ve seen a variety of posts from people devising different ways to customize the_excerpt length. In WordPress, most people are familiar with 2 ways to display their content: the_content, and the_excerpt. Both give fairly predictable results as to what you get. the_content gives you all of your content, with formatting intact. the_excerpt gives you your set excerpt, stripping away formatting, links, etc. But you had one excerpt length, and that was it! What if you want various excerpts? Well I’ve seen ways to craft various excerpts by creating different functions that had to be called per template, but as of WP 3.3 that is no more! Check it out!

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Set Your Featured Image Automagically From the First Image in the Post

Here’s a nifty trick that just came through my RSS reader. Let’s give credit where it’s due first because I didn’t come up with this! It came through my reader from the WP Snippets site, this post right here. We’re going to grab the first image from the post, and set it as your featured image automagically!

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How I Built My Nifty Login Box at the Top of VoodooPress

When you visit the site, you can see our nifty login/out and register box at the top of the page. Go ahead, take a peak! See it there? Cool! I wanted to add that into my theme, make it easy to move from site to site, and between themes. Let’s take a peak and see how that’s done!

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CSS3 Lightbox Effect For Your Featured Images

I keep mentioning that I’m slowly working on a custom theme for my personal blog. I work in fits and starts whenever something inspires me. Well today that inspiration struck! I saw this post from c.bavota of bavotasan.com and I really wanted to work this out. One of my main goals for my new theme is to keep things lightweight, and use css whenever possible. This gave me my opportunity! First you’ll need to check out the link above to see how the idea works. Then we adapt:

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Reader Request – Use Category Slug Based Images for Posts

One of our VoodooPress readers had a question recently. Seems they were using the front end posting form we started talking about here. They became concerned that allowing users to upload new images for every post using this technique would soon fill their hosting allotment. That’s a valid concern. Let’s look at one possible technique here.

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Preserving Pagination With Query Posts – Why Do My Page 1 Posts Appear on Page 2?

So you’ve made a custom template of some sort, or you’ve tried to exclude a category from your home page. You used query_posts because that’s what all the cool kids are doing. But now when you click to go to the next page of your site, it says page 2, but you see all the same posts as page 1. Why is WordPress lying to you? Let’s take a look!

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CSS3 Featured Image Style and Hover Animation Effects

Lately I have been (slowly) working on an overhaul for my personal blog. I haven’t made a custom theme in well over a year. Also, I’m no designer. Making a theme is a long and drawn out process for me. But one thing I did know is that I wanted to really lighten up the site, make it not so dark, but also give it a bit of a fun feel. A great way to accomplish this is with some great CSS3 effects. One thing I had to work out was how to be able to use CSS3 on the featured image. I’m sure this is simple if you are experienced, but I hack my way through things, so this one took me a minute to figure out.

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Add a Login Logout Link to Only One Specific Menu

A while back we had a nice little post one here about how to add a login/logout link to your nav menu. I recommend reading that through first if you haven’t before. It’ll get you up to speed and ready for this next tidbit of information. Today we will expand on that idea, with a login/logout link added to only one menu, with a referrer redirect! I’ll explain it all next.

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Don’t Forget TwentyEleven’s Responsive Structure When Customizing

I took a look at VoodooPress today on my phone, and you know what? It looked downright butt nasty! Just a few things were out of place, but it was bad. Twentyeleven has a responsive structure built right in. If you forget to account for it, your site may look bad too! Here’s a few quick fixes.

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