How to make WordPress "Add/Edit Post" form more Tumblr like?

Question

Hi,

WordPress requires you give each blog post at least two fields: a title and text body content.

I'm wondering how to modify WordPress admin so I can sometimes enter a single field for a blog post, in particular a URL, without WordPress requiring a title (related but not the point of this question: a custom theme would then know how to handle a post that only contained a URL, it would treat it like a "Link" post in Tumblr). Ideally it'd be good if the "add/edit post" form could be modified so it only contains this single URL/Link field when this is wanted.

I'm guessing this is possible through a plugin but I'm not certain. I'm hoping some smart WordPress devs are here to share and brainstorm ideas for how this could be done.

Thanks in advance for any help,

Eliot

Answer 1

You could use Wordpress as usual and look for a certain value of a "custom field". Whenever one of your posts has a certain tag (url, for example, or sykes-theme-url if you wish to namespace it), you don't render the post as a usual post but you print out the url together/without a description.

This way you could simply skip printing the post's title for example (much like Tumblr), and instead just post the URL to that-other-place.

See Custom Field-article at Smashing Magazine

Answer 2

You could use the display-part of my other answer but, instead of looping only posts, check for 'links' (builtin WP feature) as well. They are easy to manage and you can have many sets of links, which could be used like categories for your regular posts.

The GUI would not handle posts well, for example in the 'post overview' table, which really would need a title.