Curtis Henson

My previous post on writing a simple related posts plugin was a popular one, and one reader wanted to take it further for a website he was working on. Well it was painfully obvious that my example was inadequate for doing any sort of fun stuff so I started adding bits and pieces to create a more robust widget. If you haven’t already, you might want to read the first post to get caught up.

This isn’t a true “plugin” in the sense you can activate it in Wordpress, but more of a widget you can plug into your theme. This widget is going to grab posts based on tags and return specific info from the matching posts. This will be a good chance to see some of the guts of Wordpress being used and how you might use them for your own projects.
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When I started building wordpress themes PHP and most of the advanced wordpress functions went over my head. I’ve learned quite a bit since then, but one step taught me a lot about wordpress and PHP. While I was coding my premium wordpress theme I decided to make a very simple related posts widget. There are plenty of plugins that do this but I wanted to learn about writing widgets and further my PHP and I had a pretty good idea on how to do it, so I did it.

Functions.php

I suspect most people creating themes never even create a functions file, much less know what it does. Used correctly it can be a very powerful tool. This is how advanced theme authors Continue Reading