10 WordPress Hacks

In my recent surge of interest in WordPress plugins I’ve stumbled on a lot of interesting things. Today instead of plugins, it’s a list of 10 WordPress hacks, from themeflash.com, to add some pretty cool features without needing a plugin.

They’re a little trickier than plugins to implement but can be well worth the final effect.

Hacks in the list include:

Create TinyURLs On The Fly
List Upcoming Posts
Create A Maintenance Page For Your WordPress Blog
Display Related Posts Without A Plug-In
Resize Images On The Fly
And 5 more…

They include detailed explanations of how to add the hacks that’s easy enough for anyone to follow, and none of them take more than a minute or so to setup (most will likely take just a few seconds).

WordPress Custom Field Tricks and Tips

Smashing Magazine has put up a list of different things that you can do to extend your WordPress blog, and how it functions through custom fields. I’ve heard that this is going to get easier to use in future versions of WordPress, but for now, this should inspire some great additions to your blog.

In this article, we’ve compiled a list of 10 useful things that you can do with custom fields in WordPress. Among them are setting expiration time for posts, defining how blog posts are displayed on the front page, displaying your mood or music, embedding custom CSS styles, disabling search engine indexing for individual posts, inserting a “Digg this” button only when you need it and, of course, displaying thumbnails next to your posts

I can’t really think of anything that’d require expiring blog posts, but the others are very helpful. Check out the whole article on Smashing Magazine, and let me know what you think was most helpful.

Mastering WordPress Theme Hacks and Techniques

Over on Noupe there is a great post that goes over some of the millions of ways you can effect major changes on your WordPress theme. Some are difficult, others are very easy, and almost all of them are powerful to bloggers looking to add customizations to their blogs.

It includes links to dozens of tutorials from all the great sites on the web that cover WordPress, and can help you answer some of those questions you’ve been interested in finding out more about. Covering things like the loop, conditional tags, post excerpts, and dozens of other things, the guide is a great starting point to those looking to dive deep into theme customization in WordPress.

This is the first article in the four-part series, “Powerful guide to master Your WordPress”. Throughout this article, we’ll be focus on many WordPress Theme hacks, ideas, tips and useful tutorials you need to have ready in hand when developing WordPress websites.

Check it out on Noupe.

Mastering WordPress Shortcodes

Shortcodes are a nice way of doing complex things within a post, without having to push PHP code through ExecPHP or one of those other plugins. Many plugins already make use of short codes allowing you to easily insert information into your posts.

Smashing Magazine has done a great job of explaining WordPress Shortcodes, how you can take advantage of them, and even write your own.

Introduced in WordPress 2.5, shortcodes are powerful but still yet quite unknown WordPress functions. Imagine you could just type “adsense” to display an AdSense ad or “post_count” to instantly find out the number of posts on your blog.

WordPress shortcodes can do this and more and will definitely make your blogging life easier. In this article, we’ll show you how to create and use shortcodes, as well as provide killer ready-to-use WordPress shortcodes that will enhance your blogging experience.

Of course you can go too overboard with these sorts of things, so I recommend limiting your shortcodes to less than five items, but it can be a great way to speed up what could be otherwise monotonous work when blogging.

Adding TinyMCE Editor to the Prologue Theme

Love the Prologue theme, but not the minimalist post box it includes? Raj Dash onPerformancing has heard your cries and gone ahead and created a tutorial on adding the TinyMCE editor to the theme.

Twitter-like microbloggging functionality. But out of the box, the theme has a very plain edit area (see image below), and adding links, images, etc., is tedious.

Fortunately, there’s a really easy fix to this problem: TinyMCE editor. TinyMCE is a Javascript-based freeware editor. If you have a recent version of WordPress, it’s the default “visual” editor that you get in the admin panel. Thanks to its easy integration features, we can use this as a replacement to the default HTML message editor in the Prologue theme. And you won’t believe how incredibly easy it is to hack it. I think it took me about 2 minutes, not including download and installation. I’m actually surprised that Automattic didn’t do it themselves.

Definitely worth checking out if you want to add features and functions for users that aren’t familiar with HTML.