20 WordPress Tricks to Improve Your Blog
One of the reasons WordPress is so popular is because of its flexibility. Designers, developers, and bloggers have plenty of options. In this post we’ll look at a combination of tutorials for improving a WordPress-based site, and plugins that can provide added functionality that will bring new possibilities.
UPDATE: We recently launched a gallery site that showcases the best blog designs for your inspiration – Blog Design Heroes.
Tutorials:
Build a Featured Posts Section for WordPress
Magazine themes are becoming increasingly popular. There are plenty of quality premium themes available, and also some decent free magazine themes, but you may want to build or customize your own. This tutorial covers the process of coding the index.php file to set up a magazine-style front page with a featured post section.
WordPress Sidebar Turned Apple-Flashy Using jQuery UI
Sidebars are often pretty boring. If you’re looking to improve yours, this tutorial goes through the process of using jQuery that expands and reacts to user actions, similar to the Apple sidebar.
How to Make a Featured Post Carousel for WordPress
This tutorial will show you a different approach to displaying featured content. The technique is fairly simple, and can easily be applied to any blog that wants to give more exposure to certain content. This only requires a few coding changes to get the featured content in the carousel.
Building a Better Blogroll: Dynamic Fun with SimplePie and jQuery
This tutorial from Chris Coyier is not exclusively for WordPress, but this could easily the sidebar for many WordPress users. Blogrolls are common sidebar features, but with this tutorial Chris shows how the traditional blogroll can be taken a step further by bringing in feeds from other sites and blogs using SimplePie and jQuery. This technique is especially useful for those who run multiple blogs or a network.
Dynamic Highlight Menu
Nick La of Web Designer Wall has a post with a number of WordPress hacks, one of them being the dynamic highlight menu. Nick shows his approach for creating the navigation menu at Best Web Gallery that highlights the current location for visitors.
Two-Tiered Conditional Navigation
In this tutorial Darren Hoyt provides the code for creating a WordPress navigation menu that shows both parent pages and the relevant child pages. For sites and blogs that have a lot of content and pages, this trick can help to improve user experience.
WordPress Custom Fields: Laying Text Over Your Lead Graphic
WordPress’s custom fields open up endless possibilities for theme developers and bloggers. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to use custom fields to display an image for a post with text laying on top of it.
“Magazine-Style” Horizontal Dropdown Menu
Jean-Baptiste Jung shows another technique for improving the navigation of a WordPress site. The horizontal dropdown menu uses categories and sub-categories to create a magazine-style nav menu.
Integrate a Slideshow into Your WordPress Theme
Smooth Gallery is a MooTools gallery that can add some sizzle to a website. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to integrate Smooth Gallery with WordPress.
Adding Tabs to Your Blog Sidebar
If you’d like to improve your sidebar by adding some tabbed content/navigation areas, this tutorial covers the process of using Yahoo! TabView in your WordPress sidebar.
Create a “Send This to Twitter” Button
As Twitter continues to increase in popularity, integrating Twitter and WordPress will likely continue to become more common. This post isn’t really a tutorial, but it does give the code that you need to add a “send this to Twitter” link or button to your WordPress blog.
Plugins:
J Post Slider Plugin
With the J Post Slider Plugin gives WordPress users an easy way to add an attractive image slide show that can be controlled from the admin panel.
Lightview for WordPress
Lightview is similar to Lightbox. However, Lightview also works with videos and iframed web pages in addition to photos.
NextGEN Gallery
NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option.
Advanced Category Excluder
Advanced Category Excluder allows WordPress users to easily have CMS-like control over which content appears on the front page, in RSS feeds, archives and more.
Event Calendar 3
With Events Calendar 3 you can manage future events as an online calendar. Display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar.
WP e-Commerce
WP e-Commerce is a highly useful plugin for bloggers or website owners who want to sell products from their site without a lot of work to set up an e-commerce site.
TDO Mini Forms
With TDO Mini Forms you can allow users to submit posts by completing a form. The posts are held in moderation until you choose to publish them.
FV Community News Plugin
Community news sections are popular among design blogs. This plugin will make it easy to accept and publish user submissions. There are a lot of options and control for the site owner or administrator.
Yoast Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumb navigation can be helpful for usability and SEO purposes. This plugin allows you to easily add plugins to your WordPress theme.
For more WordPress-related content, please see:
85 Responses from Readers
Now this is an awesome post! I love it when I see jQuery and WordPress playing nice together.
And seriously, I wish I knew about the “FV Community News” plugin two weeks ago – would have saved me a lot of grief.
Great post! I’m about to redesign my blog and this post would be extremely helpful.
There’s also an article over at Smashing Magazine for 10 Wordpress Hacks.
Thank you for this post.
I have to agree with the first comment, Awesome! Some new stuff that the other wp blogs haven’t listed. Thanks!
Awesome post! You covered how to solve a few problems I’ve been dealing with. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
This is indeed a very good post. Thank you for some really helpful research.
It’s #delicious.
Marvellous and very timely collection. Thank you.
Considered and concise post – will have to look into some of this myself. Thanks!
This is a good post, but kind of goes here and there. You should make the tricks toward a certain type of site. However, as said, very good. The list could be larger though as there are a lot of great tricks. I noticed, a couple of those are adopted and redone from old b2 tutorials with WP today in mind. No surprise.
Thanks for sharing this.
WordPress Custom Fields: Laying Text Over Your Lead Graphic
is garbage, you should delete it, as to not waste peoples time with an old, horrible and incorrect tutorial.
Great selection. I hadn’t seen a couple of these before. Should come in handy for a few projects I’ve got planned. Thanks.
Nile,
I agree, it could be focused better. Sorry about that, but I hope the content is still useful.
Sweet – extremely helpful post, thanks for sharing.
Anthony
I did not know that about custom fields, so I like the tutorial for the laying of text over your lead graphic. Too cool. Thanks for taking the time to put this together.
Very nice list. I’ve been looking for a suitable slideshow tool for a while. Thank you
I love this list of tutorials. Bookmarked it so I can make use of some of these. Thanks
Really helpful.
Thanks for sharing
This is a highly helpful post. Much appreciated!
Quite useful post
Indeed a wonderful blog post that lists out some really awesome tricks that surely improve the Wordpress installations. No wonder everyone was tweeting about it.
This one really helpfull, thanks
i’m going to try some of these in my blog
“…to lure a reader in…” It’s funny that we have to bait our readers. Great post, you’ve offered us some great suggestions. Thank you.
Really useful tips…Thanks for not repeating the same info many blogs produce
Hi and thanks for the tips. Been looking for this info, maybe you can help. (I’m a techno-kindergartner)
Do you know if there’s a way to add an opt-in box to free wordpress.com?
Thanks, Val
Hi Val,
I’m sorry, but I have no experience with the free wordpress.com system. I always use the hosted version. I’m not really sure of the limitations of the free version.
Thanks! This is really helpful..
Maybe I’ll start incorporating jquery with my wordpress.
Nice collection. I didn’t knew all of them. Thanks for sharing!
Another great post. Thanks for more ideas to add to the kit bag!
hey..
thanx for the these
a great list.. The themes look great ,,
I love all the great information. I keep learning more about all the things you can do with wordpress.
Thanks,
Paul
This is a great post, im new to blogging but enjoying learning about Wordpress and what i can with it.
Thanks for the article!
good article, I learn it… thanks
Some useful tips here that I was actually searching an answer for, so thanks! It’s very useful seeing as I’m a WP newbie.
Keep up the good work.
Wonderful post and some really great tips! Found via twitter, subscribed, thanks so much
Great post Thanks!!!
One of the best that I have seen so far. The list could be larger though as there are a lot of great tricks.
Very inforrmative,\e-commerce plugin is very useful i like that..
The list could be larger though as there are a lot of great tricks.
Great job on the theme.
Sajid,
You’re right it could be larger, but you could say that even if there were 100 items on the list.
Great a post thank u very very
Great themes and tricks which help us lot….Thanksss
Now Make Word-press Theme Online at my Website ..check it.
Thanks for the collection, i am just trying to figure out which one i am going to use first.
Jamie Crager
http://twitter.com/CragerInc
Nice, Steven, tx .. jQuery humdingers.
Plugins .. would add Sniplets and HeadSpace2 and, if I may be so bold? .. don’t forget security, here’s the 101 ..
http://www.guvnr.com/web/blogging/10-tips-to-make-wordpress-hack-proof/
Twitter is really a great invention, but I think blogging is even more important to create some traffic. But I can use some of the tips.
Hi,
This is very useful.
Can you post an articles on TDO Mini Forms.
I searched a lot but there is not a single article which will show how to use TDO Mini Forms for creating a custom data entry page by which people can fill the data.
Everyone will like that.
ProWebGuru,
Here is a tutorial for using TDO Mini Forms that may help you.
Thanks for your help
I followed that tutorial but i m facing a problem in that.
Whenever i am submitting any link then title will be inserted as date.
And while showing that on sidebar, it is showing title as date.
ProWebGuru,
I didn’t write that tutorial and I don’t remember the details so you would have to ask the author.
thank you for sharing this, i guess more work awaits … to improve my blog
Great article and information and since I am just starting my own blog it your tips will come handy
Great article! At all the Highlighted Menue is exactly what i searched for!
Thank you so much I got understand more about TDO.
wow! what a great post.
tons of useful tips i can use on my newly setup blog.
thanks again for sharing.
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