Learning WordPress: Most Useful Tips and Tutorials
Here you can check out the most popular articles related to WordPress that have been published recently on Smashing Magazine.
Quick Overview
- How To Build A Media Site On WordPress (Part 1)
- Better Image Management With WordPress
- Power Tips For Template Developers
- Ten Things Every WordPress Plugin Developer Should Know
- Using HTML5 To Transform WordPress’ TwentyTen Theme
- Lessons Learned From Maintaining A WordPress Plug-In
- 10 Useful WordPress Security Tweaks
- Advanced Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers: Reloaded
- Advanced Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers
- 10 Useful WordPress Coding Techniques
- How To Integrate Facebook With WordPress
- 10 Useful WordPress Hook Hacks
- 10 Handy WordPress Comments Hacks
- 10 Useful WordPress Loop Hacks
- Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers
- Custom Fields Hacks For WordPress
- Custom Fields Hacks For WordPress
- 10 Exceptional WordPress Hacks
- Mastering WordPress Shortcodes
How To Build A Media Site On WordPress (Part 1)
WordPress is amazing. With its growing popularity and continual development, it is becoming the tool of choice for many designers and developers. WordPress projects, though, are pushing well beyond the confines of mere “posts” and “pages”. How do you go about adding and organizing media and all its complexities? With the introduction of WordPress 3.1, several new features were added that make using WordPress to manage media even more practical and in this tutorial, we’re going to dive in and show you how.
In part one, we’re going to setup custom post types and custom taxonomies, without plugins. After that, we’ll build a template to check for and display media attached to custom posts. Then, in part two, we’ll use custom taxonomy templates to organize and relate media (and other types of content).
Better Image Management With WordPress
With the advent of sophisticated and user-friendly content management systems like WordPress, textual content has become increasingly easier to manage. The architecture of these systems aims to deliver a well-formed code foundation; this means that if you are a good writer, then your content will be just as awesome as the structure and quality of the code that runs it.
However, media handling is, by nature, not the greatest. In many cases, images are used merely to make the website look good, not to supplement the content. Little care is usually taken to make these elements as useful as their textual counterparts. They are often tacked on as an afterthought; the owner thinks, “If all of my posts have an image, surely I should find something quickly for this next one as well.”
New WordPress Power Tips For Template Developers And Consultants
It has been a big year for WordPress. If there were still some lingering doubts about its potency as a full-fledged content management system, then the full support for custom taxonomies and custom post types in WordPress 3.0 core should have put them to rest. WordPress 3.1 took those leaps one step further, polishing custom taxonomies with multi-taxonomy query support, polishing custom post types with native template support for archives and feeds, and introducing features (like the “admin bar”) that make it easier to quickly edit and add content from the front end.
In the broader community, we’ve seen incredible plug-in suites such as BuddyPress mature, and even the emergence of independent WordPress-dedicated hosting services, such as page.ly. To celebrate WordPress’s progress, let’s review some new tips that can help template developers and consultants up their game even further.
Ten Things Every WordPress Plugin Developer Should Know
Plugins are a major part of why WordPress powers millions of blogs and websites around the world. The ability to extend WordPress to meet just about any need is a powerful motivator for choosing WordPress over other alternatives. Having written several plugins myself, I’ve come to learn many (but certainly not all) of the ins-and-outs of WordPress plugin development, and this article is a culmination of the things I think every WordPress plugin developer should know. Oh, and keep in mind everything you see here is compatible with WordPress 3.0+.
The first thing you should do when developing a WordPress plugin is to enable debugging, and I suggest leaving it on the entire time you’re writing plugin code. When things go wrong, WordPress raises warnings and error messages, but if you can’t see them then they might as well have not been raised at all. Enabling debugging also turns on WordPress notices, which is important because that’s how you’ll know if you’re using any deprecated functions.
Using HTML5 To Transform WordPress’ TwentyTen Theme
Last year, WordPress launched arguably its biggest update ever: WordPress 3.0. Accompanying this release was the brand new default theme, TwentyTen, and the promise of a new default theme every year. Somewhat surprisingly, TwentyTen declares the HTML5 doctype but doesn’t take advantage of many of the new elements and attributes that HTML5 brings.
Now, HTML5 does many things, but you can’t just add <!doctype html> to the top of a document and get excited that you’re so 2011. Mark-up, as they say, is meaning, and HTML5 brings a whole bunch of meaning to our documents.
Lessons Learned From Maintaining A WordPress Plug-In
Recently I released a WordPress plugin for Google Analytics that adds a tracking code and dozens of various pieces of meta data to blogs. Since the release of version 4, I’ve updated it 6 times, to the point where it’s now at version 4.0.6. In this article I would like to share with you my experiences in maintaining this and other WordPress plug-ins and common good practices that I’ve distilled from that work.
The updates that I released had a couple of purposes, ranging from bug fixes to new features and fixes in documentation. While all of these are nice to talk about, the bug fixes are the ones you’ll learn the most from, so let’s start by going through these.
10 Useful WordPress Security Tweaks
Plugins are a major part of why WordPress powers millions of blogs and websites around the world. The ability to extend WordPress to meet just about any need is a powerful motivator for choosing WordPress over other alternatives. Having written several plugins myself, I’ve come to learn many (but certainly not all) of the ins-and-outs of WordPress plugin development, and this article is a culmination of the things I think every WordPress plugin developer should know. Oh, and keep in mind everything you see here is compatible with WordPress 3.0+.
The first thing you should do when developing a WordPress plugin is to enable debugging, and I suggest leaving it on the entire time you’re writing plugin code. When things go wrong, WordPress raises warnings and error messages, but if you can’t see them then they might as well have not been raised at all. Enabling debugging also turns on WordPress notices, which is important because that’s how you’ll know if you’re using any deprecated functions.
Advanced Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers: Reloaded
Two weeks ago we published the first part of this article, covering multiple column content techniques and associating pages with post content; we discussed how to use the “More”-tag, hide standalone categories from the category list and retain the page layout for post views within a category page. This article presents the second part of the article; it covers customizing basic content administration and adding features to the post and page editor in WordPress. You would like to see more similar articles in the future? Let us know in the comments to this post!
Many template developers have learned the art of making beautiful, highly customized front end templates for WordPress. But the real wizards know how to tailor the WordPress administrative console to create a tailored, customized experience for content managers. The dashboard is the first screen presented to registered visitors when they visit WordPress administration (/wp-admin). Tailoring the dashboard to a client can be the difference between a great first impression and a confused one, particularly if the theme customizes the administrative experience.
Advanced Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers
Two weeks ago we published the first part of this article, covering multiple column content techniques and associating pages with post content; we discussed how to use the “More”-tag, hide standalone categories from the category list and retain the page layout for post views within a category page. This article presents the second part of the article; it covers customizing basic content administration and adding features to the post and page editor in WordPress. You would like to see more similar articles in the future? Let us know in the comments to this post!
Many template developers have learned the art of making beautiful, highly customized front end templates for WordPress. But the real wizards know how to tailor the WordPress administrative console to create a tailored, customized experience for content managers. The dashboard is the first screen presented to registered visitors when they visit WordPress administration (/wp-admin). Tailoring the dashboard to a client can be the difference between a great first impression and a confused one, particularly if the theme customizes the administrative experience.
10 Useful WordPress Coding Techniques
Since last year, the WordPress themes market has grown incredibly. The reason? Great designs, of course, but also a lot of amazing new functionality. Top WordPress developers are always looking to get the most out of WordPress and use all of their knowledge to find ways to make their favorite blogging engine even more powerful.
In this article, we have compiled 10 useful WordPress code snippets, hacks and tips to help you create a WordPress theme that stands out from the crowd.
How To Integrate Facebook With WordPress
Facebook is one of those Web phenomena that impress everyone with numbers. To cite some: about 250 million users are on Facebook, and together they spend more than 5 billion minutes on Facebook… every day. These numbers suggest that we should start thinking about how to use Facebook for blogging or vice versa.
We did some research to find out how the integration of Facebook with WordPress and vice versa works, or — in other words — how you can present your WordPress blog on Facebook or use the functionality of Facebook on your WordPress-powered blog. Both of these can be achieved with a set of WordPress plug-ins, a couple of which we’ll present here in detail.
10 Useful WordPress Hook Hacks
Hooks are very useful in WordPress. They allow you to “hook” a custom function to an existing function, which allows you to modify WordPress’ functionality without editing core files. In this article, we have compiled 10 extremely useful ready-to-use WordPress hooks, along with examples and coding explanations.
What is a hook? To achieve a particular effect on a WordPress blog, you have to modify how WordPress works. Some of these modifications are made to what WordPress developers call “core files,” files required by WordPress to work properly.
10 Handy WordPress Comments Hacks
Comments sections are neglected on many blogs. That is definitely a bad thing, because comments represent interaction between you and your readers. In this article, we’ll have a look at 10 great tips and hacks to enhance your blog’s comments section and give it the quality it deserves.
Add Action Links To Comments. Whether or not you allow readers to add comments without having to be approved, you will often need to edit, delete or mark certain comments as spam. By default, WordPress shows the “Edit” link on comments (using the edit_comment_link() function) but not “Delete” or “Spam” links. Let’s add them.
10 Useful WordPress Loop Hacks
The loop is a very important aspect of WordPress blogs. In fact, the loop is what allows you to get posts from your WordPress database and print them on the screen. A set of useful and user-friendly functions, the loop is incredibly powerful. With it, you can get a single post, a list of posts ordered by date, title or category, a list of posts written by a specific author and much more.
In this article, we’ll show you 10 useful things you can do with the WordPress loop to make your blog even more powerful than it is right now.
The problem. The loop and the query_posts() WordPress function allow you to easily retrieve a list of posts published in a specific week or month. Unfortunately, getting posts published between, for example, March 17 and May 3 isn’t that easy. Let’s solve this problem.
Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers
With its latest releases, WordPress has extended its potential well beyond blogging, moving toward an advanced, robust and very powerful content management solution. By default, WordPress delivers a very lightweight, minimal system that offers only basic functionalities. But where the WordPress core falls short, there are a wealth of plug-ins that extend its limitations.
Plug-ins often offer simple solutions, but they are not always elegant solutions: in particular, they can add a noticable overhead, e.g. if they offer more functionality than needed. In fact, some general and frequently needed WordPress-functionalities can be added to the engine without bloated plugins, using the software itself.
This article presents 8 tips for WordPress template developers that address common CMS implementation challenges, with little to no plug-in dependence. These examples are written for WordPress 2.7+ and should also work in the latest WordPress-version.
Custom Fields Hacks For WordPress
In our previous articles on WordPress hacks, we discussed the incredible flexibility of WordPress, which is one of the biggest reasons for its popularity among bloggers worldwide. Custom fields in particular, which let users create variables and add custom values to them, are one of the reasons for WordPress’ flexibility.
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
10 Exceptional WordPress Hacks
One of the reasons people love WordPress so much is its great flexibility. You can change the software’s appearance with themes. You can enhance its functionality with plug-ins. And, last but not least, you can totally unleash WordPress’ power with hacks.
Today, let’s do it again with 10 new and totally killer WordPress hacks to make your blog stand out from the crowd. As usual, we won’t just list the hacks alone. In each entry, you’ll find an explanation of the code as well as the kinds of problems that the hack solves.
The problem. Because Twitter has become a social media revolution, many bloggers and Twitter users enjoy sharing blog posts they have found and liked on Twitter. However, manually creating a TinyURL before tweeting can get a little tedious. As you probably know, Twitter can bring a lot of traffic to your blog, so it is in your interest to consistently provide short URLs to your readers.
Mastering WordPress Shortcodes
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.
Using shortcodes is very easy. To use one, create a new post (or edit an existing one), switch the editor to HTML mode and type a shortcode in brackets, such as [showcase]. It is also possible to use attributes with shortcodes. A shortcode with attributes would look something like [showcase id="5"]. Shortcodes can also embed content, as shown here: [url href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com"]Smashing Magazine[/url]. Shortcodes are handled by a set of functions introduced in WordPress 2.5 called the Shortcode API. When a post is saved, its content is parsed, and the shortcode API automatically transforms the shortcodes to perform the function they’re intended to perform.
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I agree, using my iPad I’m unable to click on any of these links.. :(
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Roel Yap
October 3rd, 2011 10:07 pmexcellent job..thanks for sharing
Daoopp
October 13th, 2011 8:57 pmThat is a good start for WordPress.
davide sanchioni
January 13th, 2012 9:11 amall links in this page appear to be broken :(
Calum Henderson
January 15th, 2012 12:46 amI agree, using my iPad I’m unable to click on any of these links.. :(
Grace Walker
February 24th, 2012 3:02 pmYour article makes me understand the topic very well, thanks for the effort of sharing this. It is a good one. Thumbs up for you!
Miguel Stevens
February 28th, 2012 6:28 pmHi! I made a very clear series of tutorials on how to start by installing Xampp for local WordPress use, and completely stripping down wordpress, and starting from a blank empty folder.
Enjoy!