Initially I was thinking to display all the posts from specific category in my archives page, but this doesn’t work well if you have thousand of posts for one category, that’s why I want to limit the number of recent posts displayed from specify category.

To display recent posts from specific category, you can make use of the following coding. To change the number of displayed recent posts, simply change the showposts=10 to your desired number; cat=1 is your category number, you have to change this too.

<ul>
<?php $recent = new WP_Query("cat=1&amp;showposts=10"); while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark">
<?php the_title(); ?>
</a></li>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul

In case you need to display all posts from specific category, then you can use the following coding. cat=6 is your category number, please change it.

<ul>
<?php query_posts('cat=6'); ?>
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<?php $wp_query->is_home = false; ?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a> – <?php the_time('j F Y') ?></li>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
</ul>

Thanks to Ready WP Themes for this coding.

Most wordpress themes combine comments with trackbacks, if you want to separate comments and trackbacks so that it will looks more organized, then you can follow the below step by step guide.

Step 1

Open comments.php and look for

<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

Paste after

<?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ?>
<?php if($comment_type == 'comment') { ?>

Step 2

Scroll down a bit and look for

<?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>

Paste before

<?php } else { $trackback = true; } /* End of is_comment statement */ ?>

Step 3

Look for

<?php else : // this is displayed if there are no comments so far ?>

Paste before

<?php if ($trackback == true) { ?>
<h3>Trackbacks</h3>
<ol>
<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>
<?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ?>
<?php if($comment_type != 'comment') { ?>
<li><?php comment_author_link() ?></li>
<?php } ?>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ol>
<?php } ?>

Please keep in mind that you need to backup your wordpress database periodically to prevent your data lose in case of bad plugin installation or an attack by hacker. So do you know how to backup and restore your wordpress database? If you don’t, let me show you how.

DISCLAIMER: I will not going to hold responsible in any way should you encounter problems like loss of database and entire blog/website along the way. It worked excellently well for me.

How to Backup Your WordPress Database

1. Download and install WordPress Database Plugin and active this plugin.

2. In your wordpress dashboard, go to Tools > Backup

3. Under Backup Options, select “Download to your computer” and click on “Backup Now” button.

How to Restore Your WordPress Database

1. Log into your FTP account and delete everything in the /wp-content/cache directory.

2. Log into PHP MyAdmin and select your wordpress database.

3. A list of all of the tables contained in the database will be shown. Select all the tables and select the Drop option to delete them permanently.

4. After wordpress database is empty, it is time to upload your database by clicking Import tab.

5. Locate of the text file and then click “Go” button to import your wordpress database.

Since Twitter became popular, many bloggers like to display recent twitter tweets on their website or blog. To display most recent twitter tweets, simply copy and paste the following code to your sidebar.php file.

<?php
// Your twitter username.
$username = "TwitterUsername";
// Prefix - some text you want displayed before your latest tweet.
// (HTML is OK, but be sure to escape quotes with backslashes: for example href=\"link.html\")
$prefix = "";
// Suffix - some text you want display after your latest tweet. (Same rules as the prefix.)
$suffix = "";
$feed = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:" . $username . "&rpp=1";
function parse_feed($feed) {
$stepOne = explode("<content type=\"html\">", $feed);
$stepTwo = explode("</content>", $stepOne[1]);
$tweet = $stepTwo[0];
$tweet = str_replace(”&lt;”, “<”, $tweet);
$tweet = str_replace(”&gt;”, “>”, $tweet);
return $tweet;
}
$twitterFeed = file_get_contents($feed);
echo stripslashes($prefix) . parse_feed($twitterFeed) . stripslashes($suffix);
?>

Thanks the awesome code from WP Hacks.

There are 2 ways to highlight author’s comments, one is use highlight author comments wordpress plugin, another idea is without wordpress plugin. If you don’t want to use wordpress plugin to highlight author’s comment, you can follow the below few simple steps.

First, you need to open styles.css and add the following into this file.

.authorstyle { background-color: #B3FFCC !important; }

Second, open comments.php, find and locate the following code.

<li <?php echo $oddcomment; ?>id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>"></li>

And then replace with

<li class="<?php if ($comment->user_id == 1) $oddcomment = "authorstyle"; echo $oddcomment; ?>"></li>

Please note that you must change 1 to the user id of the author. Thanks to Matt Cutts for this tutorial.

There are 2 ways to exclude certain categories from your blog, one is use wordpress plugin named Advanced Category Excluder. This plugin was born because there was a no other real alternative to enable content sparationd and some CMS like functionalities in WordPress. The main goal was, to enhance WordPress’s functionalities, to hide some unwanted categories, from defined parts of the blog.

The alternative way is without plugin, you can add the below code inside the loop then it will work.

<?php
if ( have_posts() ) : query_posts($query_string .'&cat=-1,-2'); while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
?>