How to Order Your WordPress Sticky Posts the Way You Want Them |New WordPress Magazine Themes

Saturday, June 16, 2012

How to Order Your WordPress Sticky Posts the Way You Want Them

Posted: 16 Jun 2012 10:33 AM PDT

If you have more than one sticky post on your site (those posts that you set to stay at the top of homepage no matter what), then you may have found yourself running into a problem trying to order them.

I myself had this problem. With more than one sticky on my site, I tried rearranging them by changing the publish dates. Of course WordPress arranges posts to show the most recent first by default, and so I thought this would work.

And it did.

But then it didn't for some reason.

And then it did again.

But then, yet again, it didn't.

I could find no rhyme or reason for why it would work one day but not the next. I had read that sticky posts are ordered by their ID numbers and not the publish time, but that simply wasn't holding true for me. Some days setting a more recent date would work. And then some days it wouldn't.

WordPress Sticky Order Solution

Fed up, I went looking for a plugin to help me. And I found my solution in the Q2W3 Post Order plugin.

In addition to letting you sort sticky posts, it lets you sort the order of …

All posts on your site – this orders the posts on your homepage (this is what I used to get my sticky posts ordered – there isn't actually an special section for sticky posts)
Posts in a category – this arranges how posts appear inside the category only (i.e. doesn't change the order on the homepage)
Posts for a tag – again, like categories, this orders how your posts appear on the tag page only, not how they appear on the homepage

How It Works

The plugin is very simple to use. First choose exactly what you would like to order:

All posts
Posts in a category
Posts by tag

And then simply plug in the number for the order that you would like.

(Note: You only choose an order for those posts you'd like to arrange at the top. All other posts without a number remain in their original order.)

Extra Notes

One nice feature of this plugin is that it will automatically resort the order of your ordered posts if you happen to change one. In other words, if you have a post placed in the #3 position but then move it into the #1 position, all the other numbers change automatically: The original #1 goes to #2, the original #2 goes to #3, etc.

One other thing to note is that if you are using sticky posts, they will still appear above all the regular posts, even if you have a regular post set to Position #1. In other words, a sticky post will never be displaced out of the top position by this plugin as long as it remains a sticky.

Photo: man & sticky notes from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

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Dear WordPress Theme – Stop Eating My YouTube Embed Code!

Posted: 16 Jun 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Tell me I’m not alone… you’ve been here, right?

You’ve spent hours pulling your hair out in an endless loop of breaking and fixing your theme trying to get it to stop eating your YouTube embed code. No matter what you try, the post refuses to show the video, or it shows the frame, but gets stuck on “loading” or (and this is the one that really gets me!) it works perfectly, but when you go back in and re-save the post – the code disappears.

I don’t know about you – but I start hearing, “Hulk, smash!!” in my head.

Thankfully, I found an incredibly simple answer: the IFRAME Embed For YouTube plugin.

This nifty, light little plugin has minimal settings and only one requirement – a link. So, it’s great for anyone that posts a lot of video and it’s a true lifesaver when you have a site that you’re turning over to a client.

Simple Settings

Here’s a look at the settings page:

That’s it… just set the size of the video. (I suggest using YouTube’s style guide to choose a standard size.)

Simple Application

The plugin adds an icon to your editing toolbar:

Place your cursor where you want the video to appear, click the icon and you’ll get a box like this where you can paste in the URL of the video you want to embed.

That’s it – the video appears and, on every theme I’ve used, the code sticks with the post no matter how many times you go back in and edit and update the post.

Limitations – Of Course

So, of course there’s a catch.

Since you’re only grabbing the URL of the video – and not the full embed code – you lose the custom options that you may have been grabbing from the embed section. You can’t manage whether or not suggested videos show or enable advanced security options.

For me, it’s been worth it to give up those check boxes!

On my own sites, adding a video is now sometimes easier than adding an image – plus, as we know, Google likes video – and who couldn’t use more traffic from Google?

On the sites that I develop and hand over to clients… this plugin is a must. Even if the theme that I implement doesn’t eat YouTube code, “coding” freaks out most of them. Copying the embed code from YouTube and pasting it into the HTML tab of a post is waaaaay too much to ask. But, they completely understand how to copy and paste the link.

Photo: Teeth Wind Up Toys from Pixmac.

Rachel Honoway on Google+

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Saturday, June 16, 2012