I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been a little afraid to run queries directly on my WordPress database. This post goes through how to accomplish many tasks using queries. Sometimes the task of going post by post to make a change would take you 10 times as long as just running a simple query.
(I use the WP-DBManager plugin to manage database backups and optimization, and it has a panel where you can run queries on your database, so you wouldn’t even need to figure out how to get into PHP MyAdmin to run these queries.)
Learning to use custom loops is a must if you want to get beyond the basics in customizing themes for WordPress. This guide is clear and concise and even includes info about using the custom loop in the sidebar and in the Thesis theme, as well as creating a related posts section in your theme. (For the record, if I’m doing much with this kind of thing in the sidebar, I usually install Justin Tadlock’s Query Posts plugin which is seriously the most awesome plugin I know of.)
