Conditional Shortcodes is a WordPress plugin that gives the power of conditional tags to the people writing and editing the content.

As theme designers know, you do some things differently when showing one post than when showing many, and WordPress has tools for handling this. First, there are the different theme files (e.g. single.php for single posts), including the ability to have a special theme file for each post or category if desired. In addition, there are the conditional tags, functions such as is_single and is_archive, for more surgical changes.

But all of that flexibility goes to the theme designer. In general, people on the content creation side have maybe two tools for changing the display of things. They have the <!–more–> tag to limit what gets shown outside of the single-post page. Alternatively, if the theme uses it, they can provide a custom excerpt for those other pages. That’s it.

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GigaPanic! is a WordPress plugin I was planning to write. I even have notes for the steps it had to perform. Unfortunately, I have no idea what it is supposed to do. Let me explain.

I have a notebook problem. Not notebook computer, but actual notebooks filled with lined paper. Every year, I go to Target after their back-to-school sale and buy a bunch of notebooks for around 12 cents each. Most of them stay in the car, so whenever I am out and about, I can grab a notebook if I need one. Now, because it is easy to grab a new notebook, I end up with a lot of them that are mostly empty but have a few pages of important notes. And this leads to problems.

I grabbed one of these many sparsely-used notebooks off of my desk the other day, in case I needed to take any notes while my eldest son was at Cub Scouts. In the back, I found a whole to-do list of WordPress plugins that I either wanted to update new features, etc.) or write. The list is many months old, but most the list makes sense, even if it is out of date. Then there is GigaPanic!

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Starting with version 2.8, WordPress automatically puts relational link tags in the heads of posts. This is not a bad thing at all. Not only are they standards compliant, but they can improve browser performance due to prefetching of the linked pages.

So how does WordPress pick the next and previous posts for the links? It links to the next and previous posts chronologically. Now if your blog is single-subject, that may be just fine. But if you have multiple categories, this may mean that the links are not ideal. In fact, even if you don’t factor in categories, some posts are simply more long-term than others. For example, WordPress want to link my post about the TTFTitles Wordpress Plugin to a post about being rejected from BlogRush. Given that TTFTitles is still widely used, but BlogRush doesn’t even exist anymore, it seems like a poor link choice has been made.

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[17-Apr-10 Updated to fix error message noticed in 2.9.2 (but possibly there all along).]

[08-Jun-09 Updated to note 2.7.1 compatibility.]

The Atropos plugin lets you set an expiration date for your posts. This is done in a new Advanced Options section of the post edit page.

Just pick your month and put in the date and year and your post will automatically be deleted at the end of that day. Note that the expired posts are DELETED. Be sure that you want to do this. I disavow any responsibility if you delete your entire blog because you weren’t being careful.

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