Wordpress is getting more and more popular and that tons of blogs are powered by it. The community around Wordpress is excellent providing free themes and plugings in nearly any form ans shape to meet your specific needs. Further on you can achieve amazing things if you know a few Wordpress hacks and have learned some basic programming skills in PHP and SQL. Many programmers have put together solutions that address need on a blog that are not offered out of the box in Wordpress and you can easily use these in your own templates. This articles provides a list of some of the most essential wordpress hacks available.
The WordPress Codex is by far the best place to learn about WordPress and its tweaks. The Wordpress documentation / Codex is simply excellent taking into account that Wordpress is a free software product. If you want to create your own templates or if you’re planning to alter an existing you should get familiar with Codex ASAP. Lets get started with the Wordpress tutorials and techniques!
Getting Started Guides
Before you go on to the more specialised tutorials and techniques addressing very specific solutions within wordpress and wordpress themes you should consider looking at one of these tutorials taking you through all the steps end to end.
How To Create WordPress Themes From Scratch Part 1 2 3
Tutorial showing you how to create a wordpress theme from scratch in these 3 parts of tutorial series. I will cover from Structuring, designing in Photoshop, slicing, coding into fully css based html, and finally wordpress implementation.
How To Create a WordPress Theme: The Ultimate WordPress Theme Tutorial
In only 11 individual lessons this WordPress Theme Tutorial is going to show you how to build a powerful, up-to-date, WordPress Theme from scratch.
Designing for WordPress
Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks has a three-part video series for downloading and installing WordPress, all the way through everything else involved with designing a custom theme. The example theme that is built through the series is a personalized homepage theme.
How to Create a Wordpress Theme from Scratch
This tutorial will look at taking a HTML/CSS template and turning it into a functioning WordPress theme. There is so much you can do when creating your own theme we couldn’t nearly cover it all. So, we’re going to look at how themes are structured, creation of the core files and splitting up that index.html file.
13 Helpful Cheat Sheets for Building WordPress Themes
Choosing a favourite cheat sheet for Wordpress is also a good idea. Here you willl fins a good collection.
Options page
Create an Awesome WordPress Theme Options Page
This is a multi-part part tutorial on how to create an options page for your WordPress Theme to give it premium elements. The tutorial is simple and show you how to allow theme users to set site colors. Once you have the technique it is possible to use it for other theme options.
How to Make a Control Panel for Your WordPress Theme
While there are plenty of good tutorials for designing and coding themes, there are very few that touch on the process of creating a control panel. This one from Cats Who Code takes you through the process, as used in the Mimbo theme.
Custom Fields
How To Get Custom Field Outside WordPress Loop
Custom fields are definitely very useful and are used on many WordPress-powered blogs. Ever thought of using post custom fields outside the WordPress loop? It is possible and this “tutorial” will show you how.
The Loop
Only Show Posts With a specific Custom Field Value
Sometimes you only want to show posts that you’ve added a specific custom field to. For instance, lets say you write book and movie reviews and for each you give them a custom field “review_type” with the value set to either “book” or “movie”. So how would you show posts that are only movie reviews? Easily! (may also just use tags and categories but… I guess I would do that in most cases. Knowing that custom fields can be used like this is still quite useful)
Using Multiple WordPress Loops in Your Theme
The Loop is the heart of Wordpress. It displays all the posts, categories, tags and archives. Creating multiple loops is the way to go if you want to display posts, categories etc. in different ways on the same page.
Filtering posts
Get The Latest Sticky Posts
Sticky posts was introduced in WP2.7 and still exists. So if you have many sticky posts and you want to display only a subset how would you do it? Its not simple at all but you can learn the trick here.
More tips on sticky posts: Definitive Sticky Posts Guide for WordPress
Get Tags Specific to a Particular Category in WordPress
Wouldn’t it be nice to show tags related to the category of the post instead of showing all the tags and eating up page real estate. Here’s the code that shows only the tags related to a particular category.
Author and User Information
Displaying Author Meta Information in WordPress 2.8
One of the (many) nice updates the comes bundled in Wordpress 2.8 is with the_author_meta() template tag. This tag allows a developer to pull and display specific parts of any user’s information within a theme. Even though variations of this have been included in previous releases, this version has simplified it to a much easier syntax.
In this quick overview, we’ll look at some potential uses for the recently overhauled Author Meta template tag.
How to Change the Default Gravatar in Wordpress
As much as I love seeing the mystery man appear in Wordpress comments across the internet, your blog deserves better. In this tutorial we’ll take a custom image and add it as the default gravatar to give your comment section a more personalized touch.
Image handling
Display Thumbnails For Related Posts in Wordpress
In this tutorial you’ll learn how to increase pageviews by adding thumbnails to related posts using the popular YARPP plugin and Wordpress custom fields.
How To Use Thumbnails Generated By WordPress In Your Theme
WordPress has built in functionality to generate thumbnails of the images you add to your post. This post shows you how to use thumbnails generated by WordPress in your theme without requiring any third party script, plugin or custom field.
How To Get First Image from post and display it
Most WordPress users are using custom fields to display thumbs on their blog homepage. It is a good idea, but do you know that with a simple php function using regular expressions, you can grab the first image from the post, and display it.
Autoload Attachment From WordPress Post
There is no script to automatically load a thumbnail from a WordPress post by default. However, it is very useful for those who are using WordPress Image Gallery. But you can achieve that by using plugin. Here, I will show you how to do it manually and add into your theme.
Using Custom Fields to Display Post Thumbnails
One of the most interesting features in WordPress is using Custom Fields, which can turn your WordPress blog into a fully customizable CMS website. I use custom fields to create image thumbnail for each post here on Noupe and on Devsnippets as well and display the thumbnails on the home page and the Archive page.
Comments
Styling Your Wordpress Comments
A fun part of customizing WordPress themes is designing a comments format which complements the rest of the site. Darrenhoyt has shared his three examples from recent projects, including code samples and downloads to the original .PSDs on ‘Styling Your WordPress Comments’. All of them looks stunning, are you ready to customize your comments template now?
Alternating Colors For Comments
Styling Author Comments
Numbering Your Comments
Displaying Total Number Of Comments On Your Blog (or trackbacks)
Feed and Integration
Show Your Latest Tweet In 5 Lines of Code
This will show you how to use WordPress’ built in RSS parser to display your latest tweet in 5 lines of code. It lets you show your latest tweet with no more than 5 lines of code using the twitter search feed. Add this code to functions.php.
RSS feeds are very useful, and indeed, very popular. WordPress creates RSS feeds by default, which is good in 99% of times. But how to create your own, custom RSS Feed? Just read this post to find out!
Hooks and events
List All Hooked WordPress Functions
Hooks are provided by WordPress to allow your plugin to ‘hook into’ the rest of WordPress; that is, to call functions in your plugin at specific times, and thereby set your plugin in motion. LEarn how to create your own hook listing for debugging purposes.
For a thorough listing of all action and filter hooks in WP see Adam Brown’s WP Hooks Database.
Using Cron to Schedule Events in WordPress
It is so simple to schedule events in wordpress and still very powerful. What could you use it for? It could be creating a daily backup of the database, etc, The snippet you get here is a simple example but it shows you how little it takes.
Login
Create a Login Form Overlay
One of the most important things to a website with any hopes of establishing a user connection is having user accounts. With tutorial you can make the login page a bit more attractive and fast and simple to access.
Widgets
Creating a widget ready footer in Wordpress
It is a common site now to see a widget ready footer on a wordpress powered site, it adds some extra areas to add widgets that would maybe look out of place in the sidebar. It is good to have widgets at the bottom of the blog for links to other posts and maybe some details about yourself. This tutorial is going to show you how to create 3 footer widget areas which can be edited from the admin area of your wordpress installation.
Essential Wordpress Hacks to BOOST your Blog
This article is an attempt to offer the majority of Wordpress users an supplement to Codex, plugins by providing really nice to have Wordpress Hacks that anyone can use. Finally this article provides a list of the best resources ever to find hacks for WP. Create widgets with Recent Posts, Popular Posts, Future Posts, Recent Comments etc.
Post and Page Template Elements
How to Make Unique Front Page Teasers for Wordpress Posts
Want some distinction between your blog’s front and post pages? Wish your post displayed differently when viewed in a list? With Wordpress, it’s easier than you think. In this post we’ll highlight an incredibly useful, but often overlooked Wordpress tag.
How to Display Ratings with Wordpress Links
Give your links some extra importance using a commonly overlooked feature in Wordpress.
Detect Visitor Browser Within WordPress
One of the more frustrating things about coding for the web is the fact that different browsers often render the same code differently than one another. Many people don’t know this, but WordPress provides several global variables that we can use to do browser detection. Here’s a useful function which you can add to your functions.php file that adds browser specific css classes to body tag so that you can control looks for different browsers.
+
How to: Create and use WordPress page templates
It is possible to create a template that can be used for pages and this may be used to give some pages a different look and feel.
Quick Tip – Separate Page Templates in Wordpress
Display each of your blog’s pages with distinction! Learn how to easily make a variety of page templates from within Wordpress.
How To Embed CSS in your posts With Custom Field
Need a different style on a particular post then here’s nice custom field hack from WP-Recipes letting you do just that.
Create an Archives page in Wordpress
Have you ever seen Archives pages in Wordpress and thought ah I could do with one of them on my blog. In this tutorial you will learn how to do it
Need to Block & Exclude Categories in Wordpress? Here is the Solution
Sometimes we need to create a special category to feature posts or other information in the homepage or somewhere else, but don’t want it to appear in the template under the category list or get indexed by Search Engines because of potential duplicate content issues. One alternative is to block that category from being indexed. The other option is to completely remove it from the template to limit any possibilities to be found and indexed. I will explore both techniques in this post.
Related posts
- Premium Wordpress Theme for Personal Blog, myweblog Personal blogging is still very popular and the variation of...
- New Photo-Blogging Wordpress Theme, Aperture Recently Woothemes released a new Premium Wordpress Theme called Aperture....
- Premuim Wordpress Business Theme, The Station The Station is an interesting business theme with many different...
- Premuim Wordpress Business Theme, eBusiness In my opinion Wordpress is more than ready to be...
- Build an Awesome Community News Feature for Your Wordpress Blog In this article tripwire magazine provides a detailed tutorial...
Please remember to share this post!
Submit
More Links
August 10th, 2009 at 9:12 am
great collection
thanks alot
August 10th, 2009 at 9:38 am
Thanks alot its very helpfull
August 10th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Very nice article! Surely I will need it soon….
Thank you!
August 10th, 2009 at 11:16 am
I really enjoyed your post. There’s really a lack of quality posts for Wordpress developers. You just got yourself a loyal fan.
Keep it up!
Lynda
August 10th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
What I would still like to see is a solution to allow me, the admin of a Wordpress site, to have different content blocks in my sidebar on different pages (ie. ‘About page’ has ads a, b, c as well as contact block…. ‘Products’ page only has ad c and no contact block but a newsletter subscription).
Is there a way to change sidebars on the fly without having to have a separate page template for each section?
August 10th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
cool.. great reference.. thank you for sharing.
August 10th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Nice collection, thanks Lars!
Featured here: http://www.presidiacreative.com/best-of-the-web-31/
August 10th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
@Michael: I think what you’re looking for is “Widget Context Plugin”. Details here.
August 10th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Thanks. I’ll take a look at that option.
August 10th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
@ME Webhost (Lynda), Thanks, looking forward to see you back!
August 11th, 2009 at 10:55 am
This article has been shared on favSHARE.net.
August 11th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
I have finally gotten the opportunity to do a WordPress project for a client, and would like to see if its right for my blogging purpose as well.
But have no clue what its about other than the name WordPress…
thanks for this tremendous list of resources I can’t wait to dive in and get my hands dirty…
–
Thanks & Regards
Noel from nopun.com
a professional graphic design studio
August 11th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Thanks for posting this great resource!
August 11th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Great tips…very useful one.
August 13th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Thanks for sharing this great list.
August 28th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Great references. There is some much info out there, thanks for taking the time and putting a bunch of it together. Thanks man!
August 28th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
These tutorials are simply great i had bookmarked your website and keep on visiting its really a great resource for beginners.
August 29th, 2009 at 9:30 am
@Imran: Thanks for the feedback. Hope to see you bac ksoon
August 29th, 2009 at 9:31 am
@Nate: You welcome, hope you will find the tuts useful
August 31st, 2009 at 11:17 am
thanks for your sharing
September 1st, 2009 at 3:39 am
This is list are great, very helpful.
September 10th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
awesome collection thanks
September 14th, 2009 at 9:24 am
A complete list for wordpress theme developers. Thanks for making this and sharing.
October 13th, 2009 at 4:40 am
thanks for your sahring
November 16th, 2009 at 3:16 am
Thanks for this great article. I will keep reading your site
December 15th, 2009 at 4:02 am
40+ Awesome Tutorials and Techniques for WordPress Theme Developers – A tutorial list specifically aimed at theme development
December 17th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
great blog post! these links are awesome
January 23rd, 2010 at 6:11 pm
This is absolutely awesome collection of yours!:)
January 23rd, 2010 at 9:58 pm
@Tuzigoot, Thanks! Really great that you liked the post.