With most of the WordPress sites I develop, I don’t want the homepage to be the default blog page with a loop of posts. Luckily, there’s an easy remedy by setting the front page (under Settings -> Reading) to a page called Home and the posts page to a page called Blog.

That works great… at least until you’re trying to pull a featured image or custom field from the Blog page. Because of how it overrides the page template to be index.php, if you call the function the_post_thumbnail(), you’ll get the thumbnail of the most recent blog post instead of the page. Same goes for any other post functions like the_content() or the_permalink(). Here’s how I suggest getting data from your posts page.

The Solution: get_option( ‘page_for_posts’)

For a long time, I wasn’t quite sure how to get around this issue, but then I found this…

get_option( 'page_for_posts' );

All it does is return the page id for whatever you have set as your posts page. From there, you can use that ID to do almost anything else you need to like…

Get the featured image of the Blog page:

$blogpageid = get_option( 'page_for_posts' );
if( has_post_thumbnail($blogpageid) ) {
     the_post_thumbnail($blogpageid);
}

Get an ACF field from the Blog page:

$blogpageid = get_option( 'page_for_posts' );
$customfield = get_field('text_custom_field', $blogpageid);

Set up the post data for the Blog page:

$blogpageid = get_option( 'page_for_posts' );
$post = get_post($blogpageid);
setup_postdata($post);
the_title();
the_post_thumbnail();
the_content();
wp_reset_postdata();

Conclusion

Even though this is such a simple solution, it was one of the more difficult things for me to find because a search for it returned so many irrelevant results. Hopefully it will help you out. I would love to hear in the comments if you have another way of accomplishing the same thing.

The post Getting Data from Your Posts Page in WordPress appeared first on Josh Jenkins.

My work music this week was odd. I put on a few things that I haven’t listened to in a while (Mastodon, Interpol, Frightened Rabbit), some metal (Silent Planet), and a couple of old favorites (Manchester Orchestra, Typhoon). I also included the new Mutemath song. Jury’s still out for me on it.

The post Work Music 8/21/15 appeared first on Josh Jenkins.

1. Advanced Custom Fields Pro

Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) allows WordPress to become much more than a blogging platform. In fact, before I began using ACF, I wasn’t a big fan of WordPress as a whole. I just didn’t feel like it was flexible enough to do what I needed.

With ACF, you can make WordPress as flexible as any CMS. It allows you to add custom fields to just about anything including posts, pages, custom post types, and widget, and there are 20 field types included out of the box. Here are a few of my favorite:

• Relationship – The Relationship field is used for advance linking to another object. A use case for a relationship field might be attaching a custom post type, like a resource, as the call to action on a page.
• Repeater – The Repeater field allows you to create a field or group of fields and repeat that as many times as needed. A use case for this might be on an FAQ page where you have an arbitrary number of questions and answers.
• Flexible Content – You can do some crazy stuff with Flexible Content fields. It’s a lot like repeater except you can create different groups of fields. For example, you might create a group of fields for a full width image, a pull-quote, and a block of copy and then you can use them as many times and in any order you want.

2. Yoast SEO

There are a lot of SEO WordPress plugins available and many of them work very well, but I’ve not seen one that helps foster good SEO habits as well as Yoast SEO. Of course you can do all the normal SEO tasks like XML sitemaps, cleaning up permalink, and meta data, but where it really shines is with its content analysis.

Once you enter a keyword for a page or post in the meta data, the plugin tells you exactly what you need to do to improve the chances that it will rank highly. It considers things as simple as the page title to as obscure as the Flesch Readability score and tells you exactly what you can do to make it better. It also assigns a color to your post as whole (red, orange, yellow, green) so you can see you you’re doing at a glance.

3. WooCommerce

WooCommerce has become my go-to e-commerce solution in WordPress. While not every site I work on has an e-commerce component, more and more do, and I always choose WooCommerce. It handles all the standard sales needs well including shipping, taxes, digital items, and payment/order processing processing and has a relatively easy to use theme/hook development system (though I think it could be a bit simpler).

Where WooCommerce sets itself apart is with the number of extensions it supports. Here are some examples I’ve used:

• UPS Shipping Extension – This extension grabs shipping costs based on weight and size from the UPS API and charges customers based on what it finds so you always have an accurate representation of what shipping will cost.
• WooCommerce Groups – With this extension, you can sell a subscription to online content. When paired with the groups plugin, you can make entire sections of the site members-only and charge for access.
• Mijireh – Mijireh because is a payment gateway that will automatically detect the look of your site and match it nearly perfectly plus it keeps me from having to buy an SSL certificate or worrying about PCI compliance so I love it.

The post WordPress Plugins I Can’t live Without appeared first on Josh Jenkins.