How to make Custom Loop not crop featured images?

You can use: get_the_post_thumbnail function <?php echo get_the_post_thumbnail( $post_id, $size, $attr ); ?> In the size paramenters you can pass a two dimensional array of height, and width, or use ‘full’ to get the full image.

Emoticons not working on my site

Turns out that WP emoticons don’t work if you have a period, one space, and then a smiley. So this will not work: Some text. 😉 but this will work: Some text. 😉 Unbelievable.

Change the background of each post according to the category

I do not know this theme. But you must use this two functions somewhere: get_theme_mod (‘background_image’, $default); set_theme_mod (‘background_image’, $_category_image_absolute_path); Maybe, you can define new modification names with this functions. For example, ‘backgroud_image_entertainment’, ‘background_image_storysode’, etc. (as is shown in the referred web page) by using set_theme_mod. set_theme_mod (‘backround_image_entertainment’, $_category_image_absolute_path); Then, you should add some functions … Read more