Let’s say you slice a website and need a nicely looking block in a sidebar with one recent post from certain category. Like in case with this one below: Daily Style Quote.

Logically following you need to run “the loop” and ask WordPress for just one post from just this particular category.

Here we go:

<div id="dailyStyleQuote">
    	<div id="quoteText">
      <?php query_posts('category_name=Daily Style Quote&posts_per_page=1'); ?>
      <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post();   		
  			the_content('');
		?>
        </div>
    	<div id="quoteBottom">
			<?php the_time('l, F j, Y'); ?>
<?php 
		$category_id = get_cat_ID( 'Daily Style Quote' );
    		$category_link = get_category_link( $category_id );
?>
            <a href="<?php echo $category_link; ?>">archive</a>
		</div>
        <?php endwhile; ?>
    </div>

Got myself puzzled for a bit while slicing a WordPress theme this weekend on how to get a permalink to a certain page in WordPress template, given that you know what’s page title. Use this:

<?php echo get_permalink(get_page_by_title("Page title here")->ID); ?>

So now in your template you can use like this:

<a href="<?php echo get_permalink(get_page_by_title("About")->ID); ?>">About</a>