Most of the WordPress blogs look more or less similar these days, to stand uniquely out from the rest, you have got to tweak it. And by tweaking, we mean really getting your hands dirty down on the blog theme and PHP codes. We’ve previously showcased more than 40 WordPress tricks and hacks you can perform on your blog but we quickly realized there are still a lot of impressive WordPress tricks, hacks and plugins out there that we thought are really great.
So as a sequel, here’s another 30+ WordPress tricks and hack. If you are wondering how some bloggers add those cool functions, mods or displays on their WordPress blog, be sure to run through our list. You might just find the solution in here.
More WordPress related articles we’ve previously written:
- Most Wanted WordPress tricks and hacks
- 49 Most downloaded WordPress themes
- WordPress themes for Video Blogging
- 16 WordPress premium themes that don’t suck
- 20 Desktop blogging clients
- You’ve Installed WordPress, So What’s Next?
Full list after jump.
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Apple Flashy Accordion Sidebar
Use the Accordion plugin in jQuery UI to create an Apple-alike WordPress sidebar.
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Adding Tabs to Sidebar
Creating tabs on WordPress sidebar with Yahoo! UI Library
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Sidebar With Dynamic Contents
Every blog visitor has different habits, but many tend to ignore sidebars because they are always the same. Mixing things up and keeping the contents of the sidebar relevant to the post can make them a bit more likely to be noticed.
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Allow Users To Submit Blog Post
This plugin allows you to add highly customisable forms to your website that allows non-registered users and/or subscribers (also configurable) to submit posts.
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Paginated Comments
Give you the ability to break your comments into a number of search engine optimized pages.
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Image Caption
Extracts the title or alt attribute from images within your blog post and generates a neat caption directly underneath those images. Supports custom CSS styling for captions.
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Random Redirect
Allows you to create a link to yourblog.example.com/?random which will redirect someone to a random post on your blog, in a StumbleUpon-like fashion.
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Google Syntax Highlighter for WordPress
Easily integrates the Google Syntax Highlighter by Alex Gorbatchev into WordPress. Image below show how codes look like in WordPress with Google Syntax Highlighter.
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Facelift Image Replacement (FLIR) for WordPress
FLIR allows you to convert text and title into images (better display quality) on the fly without hassle. Now this FLIR WordPress plugin make things even easier for bloggers.
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del.icio.us for WordPress
del.icio.us for WordPress displays your latest del.icio.us bookmarks in your WordPress blog.
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Create Your Own PopURLs Within WordPress
Like the way how PopURL display contents? Now you can create similar inside WordPress.
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Exclude certain categories from being displayed
2 ways to hide posts from certain categories to be displayed on the blog. You can either put this code inside the loop
- <?php
- if ( have_posts() ) : query_posts($query_string .’&cat=-1,-2′); while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
- ?>
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : query_posts($query_string .'&cat=-1,-2'); while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
or you can use Advanced Category Excluder.
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Another Date Image Hack
- Create a calendar view of your article post date.
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Styling Individual Posts
Styling one post a little different from the rest with the use of the_ID.
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How To Avoid Duplicate Posts
Duplicated contents are pretty bad and they somehow affects how search engine weights your site. Here’s how you can avoid getting duplicated contents on your blog.
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WordPress ‘Page Redirect‘ template
This template lets you specify a single URL as the page content, then as the page loads, the template automatically redirects the page to this new location, and that includes category or any tag pages you specify.
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Delicious Save Buttons
Add badges that encourage people to bookmark your website or blog
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DesignFloat Buttons, Website & Blog Integration
Give your website or blog visitors the option to submit your stories to Design Float and “Float” them
- <script type=”text/javascript”>submit_url = ‘Your URL Here’;</script><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.designfloat.com/evb/button.php”></script>
<script type="text/javascript">submit_url = 'Your URL Here';</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.designfloat.com/evb/button.php"></script>
- <script type=”text/javascript”>submit_url = ‘Your URL Here’;</script><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.designfloat.com/evb2/button.php”></script>
<script type="text/javascript">submit_url = 'Your URL Here';</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.designfloat.com/evb2/button.php"></script>
Read here for more.
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StumbleUpon Buttons & Tools
Add a Stumble It! button to your site to make it easy for your visitors to submit your content to StumbleUpon.
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Dynamic Highlight Menu
This allows you to theme/style and control the currently selected menu tab in CSS by adding a class=”current” on it.
- <ul id=”nav”>
- <li<?php if ( is_home() || is_category() || is_archive() || is_search() || is_single() || is_date() ) { echo ‘ class=”current”‘; } ?>><a href=”#”>Gallery</a></li>
- <li<?php if ( is_page(‘about’) ) { echo ‘ class=”current”‘; } ?>><a href=”#”>About</a></li>
- <li<?php if ( is_page(‘submit’) ) { echo ‘ class=”current”‘; } ?>><a href=”#”>Submit</a></li>
- </ul>
<ul id="nav"> <li<?php if ( is_home() || is_category() || is_archive() || is_search() || is_single() || is_date() ) { echo ' class="current"'; } ?>><a href="#">Gallery</a></li> <li<?php if ( is_page('about') ) { echo ' class="current"'; } ?>><a href="#">About</a></li> <li<?php if ( is_page('submit') ) { echo ' class="current"'; } ?>><a href="#">Submit</a></li> </ul>
Line 2:
If Home, or Category, or Archive, or Search or Single page is selected, class=”current” will be included in <li>
Line 3,4:
If Page with page slug about or submit is highlighted, class=”current” is added.
If you are looking at putting categories as menu tabs, here’s how to make the menu dynamic:
- <ul id=”nav”>
- <li<?php if ( is_category(‘css’) ) { echo ‘ class=”current”‘; } ?>><a href=”#”>CSS</a></li>
- <li<?php if ( is_category(showcase) ) { echo ‘ class=”current”‘; } ?>><a href=”#”>Showcase</a></li>
- </ul>
<ul id="nav"> <li<?php if ( is_category('css') ) { echo ' class="current"'; } ?>><a href="#">CSS</a></li> <li<?php if ( is_category(showcase) ) { echo ' class="current"'; } ?>><a href="#">Showcase</a></li> </ul>
Line 2,3
If category with category slug of css or showcase, class=”current” is added.
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DZone Buttons
Let your website’s users vote for our links on DZone without leaving your site.
- <script type=”text/javascript”>var dzone_url = ‘[url]’;</script><script type=”text/javascript”>var dzone_title = ‘[title]’;</script><script type=”text/javascript”>var dzone_blurb = ‘[description]’;</script><script type=”text/javascript”>var dzone_style = ‘1’;</script><script language=”javascript” src=”http://widgets.dzone.com/widgets/zoneit.js”></script>
<script type="text/javascript">var dzone_url = '[url]';</script><script type="text/javascript">var dzone_title = '[title]';</script><script type="text/javascript">var dzone_blurb = '[description]';</script><script type="text/javascript">var dzone_style = '1';</script><script language="javascript" src="http://widgets.dzone.com/widgets/zoneit.js"></script>
- <script type=”text/javascript”>var dzone_url = ‘[url]’;</script><script type=”text/javascript”>var dzone_title = ‘[title]’;</script><script type=”text/javascript”>var dzone_blurb = ‘[description]’;</script><script type=”text/javascript”>var dzone_style = ‘2’;</script><script language=”javascript” src=”http://widgets.dzone.com/widgets/zoneit.js”></script>
<script type="text/javascript">var dzone_url = '[url]';</script><script type="text/javascript">var dzone_title = '[title]';</script><script type="text/javascript">var dzone_blurb = '[description]';</script><script type="text/javascript">var dzone_style = '2';</script><script language="javascript" src="http://widgets.dzone.com/widgets/zoneit.js"></script>
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Reddit Buttons
Similar to the rest, place a reddit button on your site to promote blog post.
- <script type=’text/javascript’>reddit_url='[URL]'</script><script type=’text/javascript’>reddit_title='[TITLE]'</script><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.reddit.com/button.js?t=1″></script>
<script type='text/javascript'>reddit_url='[URL]'</script><script type='text/javascript'>reddit_title='[TITLE]'</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.reddit.com/button.js?t=1"></script>
- <script type=’text/javascript’>reddit_url='[URL]'</script><script type=’text/javascript’>reddit_title='[TITLE]'</script><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.reddit.com/button.js?t=2″></script>
<script type='text/javascript'>reddit_url='[URL]'</script><script type='text/javascript'>reddit_title='[TITLE]'</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.reddit.com/button.js?t=2"></script>
- <script type=’text/javascript’>reddit_url='[URL]'</script><script type=’text/javascript’>reddit_title='[TITLE]'</script><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.reddit.com/button.js?t=3″></script>
<script type='text/javascript'>reddit_url='[URL]'</script><script type='text/javascript'>reddit_title='[TITLE]'</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.reddit.com/button.js?t=3"></script>
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Archive that works
Noura of Noupe.com shows various ways you can style your WordPress Archive page. Techniques and guides includes:
- Listing all Posts
- Display monthly or Yearly Archive
- Archives Ordered By Category
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Add Breadcrumbs to Your WordPress Blog
Breadcrumb trails are a good supplementary navigation system that aid in site usability. This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme.
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Landing Sites / Pages
When visitors is referred to your site from a search engine, they are definitely looking for something specific – often they just roughly check the page they land on and then closes the window if what they are looking for isn’t there. Why not help them by showing them related posts to their search on your blog?
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WordPress Exploit Scanner
This WordPress plugin searches the files on your site for a few known strings sometimes used by hackers, and lists them with code fragments taken from the files. It also makes a few checks of the database, looking at the active_plugins blog option, the comments table, and the posts table.
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Buy Me a Beer
Allows your readers to donate money to you via PayPal. Not something new, but worth knowing.
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Display Feedburner Subscriber Count In Text
How to display feedburner subscriber count in text instead of using chiklets.
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Notifixious – Notify Users via IM
This plugin allows you to notify your readers on their Instant Messaging (AIM, MSN, GTalk, ICQ…), Email or SMS when you publish new posts.
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Installing Xampp and WordPress
Guide to setup Xampp and run WordPress locally on your machine. You can also install plugins, upgrade to the latest nightly and virtually anything else confident in the knowledge that if it goes wrong, there is no impact on your actual site.
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Create an Ajax-based Auto-completing Search Field
Why not helping your visitors to find what they’re looking for on your blog, by using a cool auto-completion on your search field?
More Resources
- WordPress Theme Hacks | Web Designer Wall
- 4 Simple Ways To Speed Up WordPress | WPCandy
- Reset your lost WordPress administrator password | village-idiot
- Optimize Your WordPress Title | hackwordpress.com
- Huge Compilation of WordPress Code | hackwordpress.com
- Backing Up WordPress | Lorelle
- Buttons, Bows and Badges for Your Blog | Lorelle
- Optimizing WordPress and LAMP to survive the Digg effect | vallery.net
- 5 Golden Tips For WordPress Performance Optimization | taragana