Web Cash

I’ve been playing around with developing Wordpress sites for a while now. I love how quick and easy it is to launch a site and update content.

One of the greatest features is the thousands of plug-ins available for Wordpress. You can find a plug-in for just about anything you want to do - or if you have some PHP know-how, you can develop your own.

Here are five basic Wordpress plug-ins that I’d recommend using for any project you start.
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There are tons of free Wordpress templates available, but at some point you’ll probably want to modify one or make your own. Even if you know HTML pretty well, this can be a daunting task at first.

Wordpress templates have a decent amount of simple PHP mixed in, and you need to utilize a special file structure for the template to operate correctly. Before you dive into making a Wordpress template, let’s look at the basic structure of a Wordpress template compared to a normal website template.
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One reason I’ve heard people say that they prefer a full-blown CMS to Wordpress is that Wordpress doesn’t allow time delayed posting. I was about to figure out a way to mod Wordpress to make this possible - until I realized that there is some decent built-in functionality for time delaying.

You can easily delay the release of your posts into the main indexes (front page, archives, “Recent Posts” list, etc). With a little bit of code, you can also restrict people from viewing the page before its appointed “Published” date.
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If you look at your Wordpress template, the thing that drives your page is called “the loop.” That’s Wordpress speak for looping through the result set (the posts) retrieved from the database.

If you wanted to make custom queries, you could certainly do that by diving straight into the database. However, Wordpress comes with some built in functions for helping you query the database and display the results. By using these template tags, you can add custom loops in your template to display other post information.
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Every couple of days, I quickly browse through the Akismet spam bin to see if any real comments got sucked in. There usually aren’t any.

However, I’ve been struck recently by seemingly pointless spam comments. They are clearly generated by a bot, but they don’t include any kind of backlink… what’s the purpose of that?
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