12 Useful WordPress Template Tags

By Lisa Sabin-Wilson from WordPress Web Design For Dummies

WordPress template tags give you more ways to control how content displays on your website. Here are twelve useful template tags and how to use them when you create a WordPress theme.

These template tags are either very common, helpful or fun. The table lists the tags, their locations in the templates where they're commonly used, and their purposes.

Tags Used in the Comments Template (comments.php)
Tag	Function
<?php comment_author(); ?>	Displays the comment author’s name.
<?php comment_author_link(); ?>	Displays the comment author’s name, linked to the author’s Web site if a URL was provided in the comment form.
<?php comment_text(); ?>	Displays the text of a comment.
<?php comment_date() ?>	Displays the date when a comment was published.
<?php comment_time(); ?>	Displays the time when a comment was published.
<?php echo get_avatar(); ?>	Displays the gravatar (globally recognized avatar) of the comment author.
<?php previous_comments_link() ?>	Displays navigation links to the previous page of comments (if you’re using paged comments).
<?php next_comments_link() ?>	Displays navigation links to the next page of comments (if you’re using paged comments).

Tags Used to Display RSS Feeds
Tag	Function
<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>	Displays the URL of the RSS feed for your site. Usually surrounded by the a href HTML tag to provide a hyperlink to the RSS feed: <a href=" <?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>">RSS Feed</a>.
<?php bloginfo('comments_rss2_url'); ?>	Displays the URL of the RSS feed for your comments. Usually surrounded by the a href HTML tag to provide a hyperlink to the comments RSS feed: <a href=" ="<?php bloginfo('comments_rss2_url'); ?>">Comments RSS</a>.

Tags Used to Display Author Information
Tag	Function
<?php the_author_description(); ?>	Pulls the information from the author bio located in the About Yourself section of the author profile in the Dashboard and displays that information.
<?php the_author_email(); ?>	Pulls the author's e-mail address from the author profile in the Dashboard.

The WordPress Codex page has every conceivable template tag and possible parameters known to the WordPress software. The tags and parameters here are the ones used most often.