Smashing Magazine ~ we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.
Smashing Magazine we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.

  • 10 Useful WordPress Loop Hacks

    By Jean-Baptiste Jung, June 10th, 2009 in Developer's Toolbox | 91 Comments

    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.

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    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.

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  • Custom Fields Hacks For WordPress

    By Jean-Baptiste Jung, May 13th, 2009 in How-To | 109 Comments

    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.

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    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

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  • 10 Exceptional WordPress Hacks

    By Jean-Baptiste Jung, April 15th, 2009 in Developer's Toolbox | 154 Comments

    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.

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    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.

    You may be interested in the following related posts:

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  • 15 Useful Twitter Hacks and Plug-Ins For WordPress

    By Jean-Baptiste Jung, March 4th, 2009 in How-To | 130 Comments

    Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has grown to create what most people would call a social media revolution. By the very nature of the short messages it hosts, Twitter is a wonderful marketing and promotion tool that no serious blogger can ignore.

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    In this article, we have compiled 15 most useful Twitter plug-ins, hacks and tips for WordPress to help you get the most out of Twitter in your WordPress blog.

    WordPress plug-ins are good, but if you have 50 different plug-ins active on your blog, you should obviously expect longer loading times and even some inconvenience. This is why we love hacks! First let’s dive deep into WordPress and see what hacks can do to enhance our blogging experience. In the second part of this article, we will also show you some useful Twitter plug-ins for your WordPress blog.

    You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

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  • 10 Killer WordPress Hacks

    By Jean-Baptiste Jung, January 7th, 2009 in How-To | 249 Comments

    2008 was a very good year for the WordPress community. The software was updated numerous times, leading to the recent release of version 2.7, and many new blogs dedicated to WordPress were created. Of course, tons of new hacks were discovered, which helped lots of bloggers enhance their blogs.

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    In this article, we'll show you 10 new useful killer WordPress hacks to unleash the power of your favorite blogging engine. Each hack has an accompanying explanation, so you'll not only unleash the power of WordPress but also understand how it works.

    You may be interested in the following related articles as well:

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  • 8 Useful WordPress SQL Hacks

    By Jean-Baptiste Jung, December 18th, 2008 in How-To | 130 Comments

    Over the past 10 years, the MySQL database has become incredibly popular on the Web. Every WordPress blog is driven by a MySQL database, which contains the blog's posts, settings, comments and much more.

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    While plug-ins and even coding hacks can solve some problems and achieve some tasks, sometimes you don't have any other choice than to execute SQL commands in phpMyAdmin or directly to the database via SSH. Let’s take a look at 8 useful SQL hacks for WordPress. Each section of this post presents a problem, suggests a solution and provides an explanation to help you understand the solution.

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  • 10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks For WordPress

    By Jean-Baptiste Jung, December 2nd, 2008 in Developer's Toolbox | 214 Comments

    RSS is one of those technologies that are extremely simple yet extremely powerful. Currently, RSS is the de facto standard for blog syndication, and it is used widely in both personal and corporate settings; for example, in blogs. And because a large percentage of these blogs run on WordPress, we'll cover in this post some (hopefully) relatively unknown but useful RSS-related tricks and hacks that will help you use RSS in a more effective way — and without unnecessary and chunky WordPress plug-ins.

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    Let's take a look at 10 useful, yet rather unknown RSS-tricks for WordPress. Each section of the article presents a problem, suggests a solution and provides you with an explanation of the solution, so that you can not just solve some of your RSS-related problems but also understand what you are actually doing. Thus, you can make sure your WordPress theme remains under your control and is not bloated with some obscure source code.

    Read more...



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