A conditional tag can make the browsing experience for your visitors a little different depending on which page they are browsing. I use conditional tags extensively on this website. How do you think I get the list of all previous tutorials I’ve written listed on only the tutorial pages? How is it the recent post listings display on the sidebar on every page, except the homepage? This is all through conditional tags. In this tutorial I’ll go over:

• What exactly a conditional tag is
• A list of the WP conditional tags and what their functions are
• How to put a conditional tag to use while avoiding errors
• Real examples of conditional tags used in WordPress themes

To learn everything you need to know about conditional tags and how it relates to WordPress themes, read on…

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Today we have a simple, nice-looking WordPress theme. It was originally designed by DemusDesign and (of course) ported into WordPress by myself. This is widget-ready and has a small optional splash page included (details below).

Live Demo | Download

And the details of the bonus splash homepage…

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Here is another free WordPress theme designed by Ben Swift and coded by me. This one is widget-ready and has great looking dark greenish color scheme. Like the previous theme, you may have to exclude some pages from the top list. Please refer to the Codex if you’re not sure how to do this.

Live Demo | Download

So you’ve uploaded a WordPress theme, head on over to the theme editor to make some changes, and get the dreaded If this file were writable you could edit it message? Not to worry, this is a quick fix. You don’t have to fire up your FTP client and reupload a new template file every time you make a change. You can use the theme editor like everyone else, with just a few quick changes to your file permissions, and I’ll show you how.

• What exactly are file permissions, and what do I need to set them to?
• How to change file permissions via an FTP client (in bulk)
• How to change file permissions via cPanel

Let’s read on…

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This is a ported theme, designed by FreeCSS.info, and integrated into WordPress by myself. It’s called Ecofriendly and has space for an “about” area, similar to FreeCSS.info’s other theme here - WP Sleek. You can place some little blurb of information, displayed on all your pages, editable the about.php file. This is useful for announcements and whatnot. The header space is a little cramped, so you may have to manually exclude pages and input a shorter version of your blog title directly, if your current one is too long and overflows.

Live Demo | Download

UPDATE (4/20/08): If you downloaded this theme before this date, please redownload and use the new page.php file. The old one is blank, causing pages to not show up. Thanks to William in the comments for pointing out this error.

This should really go without saying, but backing up your any website (not just a WordPress site) on a regular basis is extremely important. Although a lot of web hosts may offer free backups, it is still your responsibility to keep recent backups yourself, preferably hosted on a local hard drive. So many things can go wrong, I’m not going to get into specifics. In this tutorial I’ll go over several methods of backing up your WordPress sites.

• The difference of a database backup and a “full” backup
• How to manually backup your WordPress database
• How to manually backup your WordPress files
• How to backup your WordPress site with WordPress plugins

If you want to have peace of mind and start taking backups regularly, read on to learn how.

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Today we have a very special free WordPress theme release. This is a ported theme, designed by Gerhard of 1234.info and integrated into WordPress by myself. This is the latest release of the famous Multiflex series of templates. The theme has a widgetized sidebar. It has been tested to be compatible with WordPress 2.5. This one has some other very interesting features, which will be detailed below.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the features…

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Elegant Orange is a very simple WordPress theme with a nice elegant style. The sidebar is widget-ready.

Live Demo | Download

Today we have a very nice free WordPress theme, designed by Ben Swift and coded into WordPress by myself. It’s a basic theme (hence the name), nothing too fancy and very clean-coded. Check out the live demo here. You can download this theme here. Screenshot is below.

If you like this one…be sure to check back often because we should have some more of Ben’s templates coded into WordPress here in the near future.

In this tutorial, I’ll be going over The Loop, and how WordPress uses it to display your posts and pages. Keep in mind, this is slightly more advanced than our previous tutorials. Hopefully you will find this ultimate guide easier to understand than what’s available in the WordPress documentation. Here’s what we will go over:

• A definition of The Loop.
• Basic flow of The Loop.
• Template tags used in The Loop
• What to do after The Loop
• Template file hierarchy

If you want to get a better understanding of how a WordPress theme really works behind the scenes, read on.

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