Welcome to my blog

This blog has become schizophrenic; rather than blogging about one thing, it’s covering many aspects of my life. So I thought I’d find a way to present different views. I had already categorised my posts into general areas, now I needed a way to present the different views with some commentary. The best way was a set of category-based pages, with some text at the top describing the area of interest and then the category-based listing of posts below.

This post describes how I implemented a set of category-based page templates in WordPress, covering the design and implementation.
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One of the great things about WordPress is the plethora of plugins that the user community has developed to extend and enhance the basic blog functionality. Some plugins, such as WP-PluginsUsed, are simple and add a function or two you can embed in a page and are implemented as a single php file. Others, such as Now Reading Reloaded, provide significant functionality and involve many files.

Some plugins are purely for administration of the blog, such as Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu, whereas others provide functionality viewable to your readers. I have found the need to tweak some of these, sometimes for look’n'feel, sometimes for functionality. But managing modified plugins can be a challenge. This article looks at the common areas of customisation and how they can be managed.
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