Matt Varone - Creative Developer

— When you build up a website you should keep in mind how you´ll want search engines to index your content. The main reason you’ll want to take control is to get all the juice out of your content and prevent possible indexing problems. Although this apply for all sites in this article I’m going to focus in a WordPress based site situation.

Why you should control search engines

It’s very important to know what and how you want search engines to index your site, if you don’t take the time to do it you are relying on them to “figure it out” for you, and that is not good. In a default WordPress installation you get different instances of your content repeated trough the site. For example take a post. It will appear in the homepage, in it’s single version, listed under a category, in the author pages, in search result, etc. Are you comfortable having duplicated content indexed and letting Search Engines pick/guess which version of it is the one you consider the most relevant? I bet you wont. Thats why it’s good to take this into consideration.
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— Quick post today. I recently had been working in a site with a CMS powered by WordPress and was asked to list nicely all the full names and emails of all the active users. As I didn’t found a function/solution out of the box thought of sharing it with you.

One thing to keep in mind is that WordPress keeps users data in two separates tables, users and usermeta. The first one stores what I would say its the most relevant information of the user for the system, the username, the email, password, etc. And the second one stores all remaining data, first name, last name, etc. Depending of which plugins you have installed you could have more/different fields. To mix the information of these two tables into one object WordPress provides the get_userdata(); function, which returns an object that we can use to easily display the information we want. To call this function we need to provide a user ID number, so to list all users with their details we have to first know the IDs of them.
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— Following the same idea of last month´s post Taking Advantage of Functions.php in WordPress Themes I´m releasing a couple more functions I gather trough previous months that might become useful to you to quickly develop your themes. I like to have my own library to easily get my themes code done faster thus getting more time to spend working on the design. Remember that to use these functions you have to drop functions.php file in your theme folder.

The Functions

Note: For the examples i’m using function_exists() as a good practice, as if the function don’t exist the code wont break your theme.

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