Monthly Archive for July, 2005

This is a write up on how I got asides working on WordPress 1.5 using 2 different loops. It only took me about 20 minutes to setup thanks to an error on my part which cost me an extra 10 minutes. In other words, this is really easy and only takes a few minutes.

The first thing you need to do is create a category for these posts, I named mine ‘asides’ but you can use whatever name you want. Note the category ID number for this category.

You will most likely want to exclude this category from the posts on your front page, this is done very easily and explained on the WordPress Codex. In your index.php page within your theme directory you will want to add lines 3 and 5. Every WordPress theme should have the rest of the lines and you can ignore everything else in between them, that should just be the code to display each post. You will need to replace 25 with the ID number for the category you created.

The only thing left to do is add your new loop somewhere in your page to display the asides. I chose to add these in my sidebar and I used to following code.

The important lines of code here are 3,4,5, 11, and 12. Line 3 resets the loop so you can actually have a second one. It also tells the query to only pull from category 25(replace with your category ID) and to only pull the first 6, which you can also customize to your liking. Lines 4 and 5 start the new loop just like on your frontpage. Everything in between is where you would style your aside and use the template tags. Lines 11 and 12 close the loop and from there you can add whatever code you want, for example I added a link to the archives and rss feeds for asides.

Here is the CSS I used to style my asides, feel free to snag it if you like …

Thanks to binarybonsai.com I was informed about the new plugin Extended Live Archives. This plugin is an addon to the Super Archives plugin, also known as Live Archives, which adds category support into the archive browser.

I found out about this a few days ago and have been messing around with it in an effort to customize it to my liking. I finally came up with something decent and finished it up today. Here is the CSS I used for this plugin.

I am not able to test this on any browsers other than Firefox and Safari so if you notice anything wrong please let me know.