We’re going to discuss how to properly implement custom loops on your WordPress site. Using Custom loops gives developers the power to work with a more complex content management system than WordPress offers out of the box.
You may want to feature boxes on your homepage with the five most recent stories from different categories. You may want to feature a cluster of stories from a certain category/tag/post type in your sidebar. You’ll have a hard time doing that if you are just using untouched/standard themes.
WordPress’ custom loops gives you the power to sprinkle content all over your site in any manner of your choosing. There are right and wrong ways to do this. We’ll go over the different ways and explore the pros and cons of each one.
Then we’ll discuss standard and creative ways to use the custom loop to make your web site come alive and stand out from more ordinary, standard sites. We’ll also discuss performance strategies such as transients and caching, so that using multiple custom loops won’t slow your site down to a crawl.
This presentation will be aimed at theme and plugin developers with an intermediate skill level, giving them a good introduction to some of the more complex query techniques. The presentation will also introduce beginners to tools, techniques and resources, so they may learn the “right way” as they build up their skills, rather than unlearning them after they become experienced.
