This article introduces one of the most important topics in WordPress development: the WordPress loop, or more commonly simply “the loop.” If you’re interested in under more of the key concepts of developing WordPress themes, check out our free course on getting started with WordPress themes.

In this week’s Quick Guide we’re covering how to improve your “post lists” screens in WordPress. That is, we’re taking control the look of your “posts”, “pages”, etc lists by changing what appears in those columns. We’ll do that using that Admin Columns plugin (which was called CodePress Admin Columns until fairly recently 😉).

WordPress posts have two types of texts associated with them: the post’s content, and its excerpt. The content is the main part of the post, and the excerpt is either filled out in its own field or generated by WordPress by extracting the first part of the content.

From time to time, you’ll need to change the post type of one or more of your WordPress posts. In this Quick Guide, we’ll explain how to change a WordPress post’s post type using a handy plugin called Post Type Switcher.

So, you want to remove the date from your WordPress post URLs? I get it. Those /2016/07/09/post-slug URLs that seemed pretty cool when you (or someone else) set it up get old.

In this text and video Quick Guide, we’ll walk you through the easiest way to duplicate posts and pages in WordPress, using the free and aptly named Duplicate Post plugin.

If you want to require a featured image before your WordPress posts will publish, then we’ve got the perfect plugin for you. Actually, we wrote it! In this Quick Guide, we’ll cover using our Require Featured Image plugin to make a featured image required on all your posts.

In this text and video Quick Guide, we’ll cover how to schedule a post update or a page update, so that your scheduled post revision is automatically set to go live at a particular time.

Say you have a category page on which you’re asked to display all the posts that belong to that category’s subcategories. So far no sweat – a category page displays by default all its descendant posts, whether they belong directly to that category or any of its subcategories. But here’s the twist: say you have to display them in such a way that the subcategory names are displayed (challenge no. 1), and under each subcategory’s name you have to display all its posts (challenge no. 2).

Making a widget to show a random post uses two underlying concepts you need to get familiar with to be good at WordPress development: making use of WP_Query objects, and making widgets. If you’ve not checked them before, check out our Quick Guides which more thoroughly introduce both: