One of the more limiting features of the Widgets in WordPress is the inability to disperse your different blogroll link lists to different areas of your template. By using the Links Widget packaged within WordPress, your blogrolls will all appear in the same spot. This is a fine thing, if you only have one blogroll category. But what about those sites that have more than one… or even several, blogroll categories??

Further, what if that particular person doesn’t want all the blogrolls to appear in the same spot, listed one after another? Using the Links Widget, you have no choice really - at least not at this time. You place the Blogroll Widget in your sidebar and all your link lists appear in the same spot.

A little known.. and little used.. cool little feature in WordPress is the ability to use custom fields. I have to admit that I was a WordPress user for quite some time before I realized how cool this little tool can be. This post explores some of the possibilities of using custom fields in the WordPress.Org (self-hosted) software.

You can display all sorts of things:

• Current mood
• Currently reading
• Currently listening to
• Todays weather

These small tid bits of information can be added to the bottom of each post easily through the use of Custom Fields.

But first - where do you find custom fields?

In your WordPress administration panel, click “Write” then scroll down, beneath the text box where you write your post and you will see a blue bar with the words “Custom Fields”…. click the plus sign in the top right-hand corner of that blue bar and you see the following:

You can give different sections of your site a unique title so that your readers know where they are within your site. It’s a little thing - but its helpful to keep your visitors mindful of where they are at. For instance, if they are on a category page - it’s nice to have a title at the top that says something like “You are browsing the X category”… or when they click on one of your tags, give an announcement at the top of the page that says something like “Browsing posts tagged with: X” - that kind of thing.

With WordPress templates, you can create all sorts of different templates for different custom displays. However, to accomplish the title idea - you really only need one single template and a handful of conditional tags.

Create a template and name it: archive.php