If you’re a Wordpress blogger and are the type that likes to get under the hood and tweak things to you’re liking, you know how valuable it is to have resources you can rely on when you need a helping hand. I know this is certainly the case for me.

Recently I’ve been doing a little hacking on this site’s Wordpress installation to accommodate a new feature that Tish and I plan to launch soon. In the middle of doing some tinkering the other day I realized there was one particular thing I was stuck on – how to use separate styles for specific categories. Deciding it would be counterproductive and rather silly to just sit there hacking away at something I had no clue about, I figured the smarter thing to do would be to hop onto Google and track down a solution. That’s when I discovered WordpressGarage, a great blog full of very useful content aimed at making your Wordpress experience more productive.

The woman behind the blog
WordpressGarage is authored by Miriam Schwab who while not blogging about all things Wordpress is also a managing director for Illuminea, a company which she is the founder of. Illuminea provides English business content for small to medium sized businesses in Israel. How Miriam also manages to find time to write such great content on WordpressGarage is beyond me, but we should all be thankful that she does.

So what kind of goodies will you find?
When I review blogs I like to point out a few outstanding posts from them as a way to give potential readers a glimpse of what they can expect to find. From WordpressGarage I’ve chosen a few posts I believe every Wordpress user will find handy.

• Akisment Auntie Spam – If you operate a blog that has a decent amount of traffic and popularity you can expect to receive a LOT of spam comments. Each week I receive hundreds of spam comments and to say it’s a little difficult to weed through them all looking for any legit comments that may have slipped through the cracks would be an understatement. Thanks to Akisment Auntie Spam that hassle is now a thing of the past. If you use Akismet and the Firefox browser, you owe it to yourself to check out this post.
• Different styles for different categories – Ahh yes, this is the post which led me to WordpressGarage. If you’ve ever thought it would be cool to have a different style to your blog depending on which category readers are browsing, check out this post for some very helpful information.
• Display single post pages differently – This goes hand in hand with the previous article. If you plan to style a category different from the rest of your site, you’re probably going to want the posts in that category to have that same style as well.
• To-do list for Wordpress installations – Miriam put together a great list of plugins she likes to activate with every new Wordpress installation. I created a list like this as well a couple months ago. There are definitely some plugins that should always be included with every new installation of Wordpress.

These posts are just a small sample of all the great content you’ll find. If you’re a Wordpress user it’s really a no brainer to add WordpressGarage to your list of daily reads. If there’s one thing we can really never have too much of, it’s great sites with useful content to search through when we get stuck and need little help. Miriam has indeed provided us with an excellent resource.

Categories: Blogging, Reviews