How to Update a WordPress Theme to 2.3 Compatible

Posted by SEO Dave on January 17th, 2008 at 02:57am

With the advent of WordPress 2.3 we now have tags, a bit like WordPress categories tags can be added to any post you create and so from an SEO perspective can be useful in creating new content from old. There’s more to WordPress 2.3 than just tag support, but from a theme perspective it’s the biggest change.

Pretty easy to make a WordPress theme 2.3 compatible, however in the process of doing so you make the theme no longer work with earlier versions of WordPress. Fortunately I’ve created some tag code that solves the problem (the basic tag code breaks earlier versions of WordPress if you don’t use the function exists coding below) and so rather than creating 2 versions of your WordPress themes, you only need to make one :-))

Going to cover two locations for the tagging code, but you can use this sort of code elsewhere. Sidebar (menu) which will be a tagging cloud and single.php (single blog posts).

Adding Tagging Code to The Sidebar

Add the following code somewhere in your sidebar.php file. You might have to edit it to match your themes CSS info etc…, take a look at the code responsible for Categories and copy relevant CSS info.

< ?php if ( function_exists('wp_tag_cloud')){ ?>

< ?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=22&number=50'); ?>
< ?php } ?>

This will create a list of tags (up to 50, change the number 50 for less/more tags) on your menu with the smallest tag having font size 8 and largest tag font size 22 (pretty obvious what to change if you want different fonts).

If your theme doesn’t really work with tag clouds on the menu (can look terrible) you could add this code to the foooter.php instead.

Adding Tagging Code to Single Posts

Open single.php and find this code

< ?php the_content() ;?>

Add the following code below or close to below it.

< ?php /* Tags WP 2.3 Code Start */ if ( function_exists('is_tag')){ ?>

< ?php /* Tags WP 2.3 Code End */ } ?>

This will create a simple list of tags to your blog pages like you see at 1-70 Horde Leveling Guide Review which at the time of writing this WordPress 2.3 tagging tutorial will show at least one tag (World of Warcraft).

The above code can also be added to archive pages like index.php, archive.php and category.php (if they all exist). By adding to all these pages your tags will be shown on the home page, category pages and monthly archive pages.

WordPress 2.3 Compatible themes

There’s more you can do with tags, for example you can see on this site when you view the World of Warcraft tag page the title of the page is the name of the tag and there’s a header with the name of the tag as well. Because every theme is different it’s not possible to explain how to do this in a way that will work most of the time.

If you want these types of features on your blog without the hassle of changing code I suggest you checkout my Google AdSense WordPress Themes site where all WordPress themes are 2.3 compatible and include these and many more features (all widget ready, include targeted AdSense coding and of course SEO optimisation).

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