In my new theme, I am using this coded trick to display the excerpt on a single post only if I’ve got text inside. Usually if you use the_excerpt and you don’t have one, it will fake one for you.

This is not something that I wanted to do on the single post page. So I used the following code to check if the excerpt existed.

if ( !empty( $post->post_excerpt ) ) :

Once this action is taken into account, you can factor in what code you want to out put if the post_excerpt isn’t empty.

if ( !empty( $post->post_excerpt ) ) :
	the_excerpt();
else :
	false;
endif;

The above code checks if there is an excerpt and print’s it to the screen. If there isn’t an except, it doesn’t do anything.

This is a simple one.

/**
 * Your Blog title
 *
 */
function my_blog_title() {
	$blogname = get_bloginfo('name');
    return '<span class="blog-title">' . $blogname . '</span>';
}		  	
add_shortcode('blog-title', 'my_blog_title');

Just add this to your functions.php file and then add [blog-title] in any post or page and it will return your Blog Title. :)

How might you display a Google ad after the first post or anything you like? It is very simple. You just need to add the variable $loopcounter in the Loop. If the $loopcounter is less than or equal to 1, then include your option. Check out the code:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); $loopcounter++; ?>

  // your loop

  <?php if ($loopcounter <= 1) { include (STYLESHEETPATH . '/you-file.php'); } ?>

<?php endwhile; ?>

<?php else : ?>

<?php endif; ?>

Pretty simple huh. Well in the $loopcounter line, you may change the include to point to any file or maybe a custom widget like so:

<?php if ($loopcounter <= 1) { dynamic_sidebar( 'Plus Post' ); } ?>

Or use your code directly in between the { & }.