If your moving content around quickly on your WordPress or if your designing a template with no content to fill it, then your going to run in blank query results, Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here. – WordPress default phrase. Now if you don’t have any posts at all then having a default phase is need but if there are posts in your blog and you only want to display a specific category independent from the main loop and the category is doesn’t have any posts then the there is no need to show the box at all. Now I do realized that if the you add a loop to your template then you know it’s there and you’ll make sure there is content to fill it. That being said there is only really two (maybe more) times in which you may want not to show a section if a post category doesn’t exist and/or hasn’t any posts. First is WordPress MU in which a new blog won’t have the category set up and will certainly not have any posts in it. Second when your creating themes for WordPress.org’s Theme Directory or resale and you want to add special features and display methods.

Recently I working on a little pet project of mind in which the content will not be created by me however will be generated by my logged in users. The problem with letting other people into the website and have control over it is that as a coder I need to add in fail safes, and make ever step idiot proof. In this case I need to make sure that the user doesn’t create an epic saga of text and post it on the main page. Like most of my projects, it uses the WordPress engine to allow the users to enter in their data. WordPress has a two built in methods to decrease the output of text to a more manageable size.

Using PHP in the simplest sense is to use includes. Includes call multiple files together to form one static HTML base document. PHP is a server side language and thereby the language is processed prior to leaving the sending the server. So by the time the file gets to your browser it’s already full HTML. When using PHP without a database and just for the includes and mathematical logic the page won’t be fully dynamically created but at lest it will decease reputation in the documents.