In a lot of WordPress sites’ sidebars, you’ll probably see the monthly archive links make an appearance. These are a list of links that categorize your post by month. If you want to get more specific, you can even group the posts by week or even day. Unless you’re using widgets, these lists are output using the wp_get_archives function. Here are some examples:

• <?php wp_get_archives(); ?> – Lists the monthly archives (no parameters needed, it’s monthly by default)
• <?php wp_get_archives('type=weekly'); ?> – Lists the weekly archives
• <?php wp_get_archives('type=daily'); ?> – Lists the daily archives
• Bonus: <?php wp_get_archives('type=yearly'); ?> – Lists the yearly archives

So what’s the problem? Well, depending on the site, monthly archive links aren’t very useful to your visitors. I mean, how many times have you visited a site and said “Hmm…I want to check out some posts written in January 2008″?

Probably never, and these links waste valuable space in your sidebar (or footer, whatever) that could be occupied by more useful links.

In this post, we’ll go over how to insert the following into your WordPress theme, including a widget alternative (if available):

• Popular post links (three separate methods)
• Featured articles/links using the Blogroll
• Recent post links

There are a few methods to get a link list of popular/useful posts. Here they are:

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One way to increase visitor engagements is to reward their comments by showcasing them on your website. Additionally, you can also feature the top commenters as well, linking back to their website in the process. Here we’ll create a dedicated Page Template to display those comments and commenters in one place.

In short, this tutorial will teach you how to:

1. create a Page Template,
2. use SQL queries in your code to fetch comments with varying parameters,
3. create a section of the Page that’s only viewable by Admin,
4. add support for a comment-related plugin.

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The inspiration for this tutorial comes from a tweet I received with feedback for the soon-to-be-released RS12 theme.

Although the widgetized footer did not ultimately make it in the release of the RS12 theme, I decided to write this tutorial to show people how exactly to add a widgetized footer in your theme. In this guide, you’ll learn:

• The HTML and CSS code needed to produce the widgetized footer
• How to add commonly used WordPress template tags as placeholders
• How to widgetize the footer and place widgets inside it

There’s going to be a lot of code in this post, so if you’re up for it, read on…

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