If you create custom themes for Wordpress, chances are you’ve already used category templates in the past. They usually look like this:

category-x.php

where x corresponds to the ID number of the category, and are extremely useful if you want to give a specific category a certain look. For example, if you wanted to add an “Asides” area to your theme, you’d create a category named Asides, get the numerical ID of that category (e.g. “3″) and create a template file named category-3.php

My problem, of course, was having to find the ID of the category, which could vary from one WP installation to another. The truth is that I usually chose to go the route of conditional queries instead, doing something like this:

if ( is_category(‘asides’) ) {
// what I’d like to show for my asides
}

Wordpress 2.9, however, has added support for slug-based category templates. So instead of naming my template category-3.php, I can go ahead and name it something wonderfully semantic like category-asides.php

The hierarchy in which Wordpress looks for which template to use has been updated as well. Now, it’ll look for the slug-based template first, then the ID-based template, and finally the default template.

Do you use Wordpress category templates in your themes?

As a result of last nights post, I dove in and added a check to my Robots Meta plugin that checks whether you're allowing search engines to spider your site.

If not, it'll throw an ugly warning on each and every page until you fix it:

The code for it is easy, and as I'd like other plugins to start using it as well, let me give it to you here:

function blog_public_warning() {
  if ( '0' == get_option('blog_public') ) {
    echo "<div id='message' class='error'><p>";
    echo "<strong>Robots Meta Issue: You're blocking access to robots.</strong>";
    echo " You must <a href='options-privacy.php'>go to your Privacy settings</a>";
    echo " and set your blog visible to everyone.";
    echo "</p></div>";
  }
}
add_action('admin_footer', 'blog_public_warning');

That's easy enough, I think each and every WordPress plugin to do with SEO should do this check, to be honest.

Checking Blog Privacy Settings is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!