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How to Use WordPress Conditional Tags

One of the most straightforward, dependable, and useful things in WordPress is what the Codex calls “Conditional Tags.” In her interview for Up and Running, Helen Hou-Sandí said WordPress conditional tags were her favorite WordPress functions for their simplicity and ease of use — they read just like English. We agree with her on that. They’re great. To explain them to you in more depth, we’re sharing a chapter of Up and Running here on WPShout. Let’s get to business understanding conditional tags in WordPress!

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Key Takeaways about WordPress Conditional Tags:

  • WordPress’s conditional tags are prewritten WordPress functions that test several dozen distinct criteria, mostly about the nature of the post or posts that have been retrieved for processing.
  • Each conditional tag returns a boolean (either true or false) based on the result of its check. Combined with PHP if-statements, this allows easy conditional code execution in either plugins or themes.
  • Some conditional tags don’t function exactly as their name might suggest; this chapter covers several of these cases.

One of the most straightforward, dependable, and useful things in WordPress is “conditional tags.” Several of our interviewees mentioned conditional tags being their favorite WordPress functions for their simplicity and ease of use—they read just like English—and we’re pretty much on board.

Here, we’ll discuss the workings of conditional tags, including a few subtle points; list of some of the most useful tags, as well as some of the most confusing; and end with a few examples.

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David Hayes
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Unconditionally: Refactoring Nested If-Statements for Cleaner Code | WPShout
March 29, 2016 3:06 pm

[…] create a real-world-ish WordPress example using WordPress’s wonderful conditional tags. This example actually exists, in bad/bubble form, in our current post on the […]

A Grateful Reader
February 7, 2019 10:42 am

I think it would do well for your quiz at the end to re-word the second question for the quiz at the end.

Conditional tags are not a creation of WordPress, as such, the way the question is worded, there is a perception in which there is no correct answer.

The answer C, if read as a full sentence – Conditional tags would not be useful for: Deleting every image uploaded to the site that is wider than 1000px – is poorly worded and likely has no sense to many programmers as conditional tags could be extremely useful in the process of deleting every image uploaded to the site that is wider than 1000px.

I think what the question is trying to ask is if there is a conditional tag that is a part of WordPress Core which would be useful in image dimension checks.

Thanks for the informative article!

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