WordPress is a great blogging platform, one of the reasons being the immense community support. It is this community that develops plugins and hacks for WordPress and makes life easier for everyone. In this post, I have compiled 10 of my favorite WordPress hacks. Some of these posts linked to have multiple hacks available, so make sure to check out the other hacks in the page too.
Split category list
BlogohBlog’s post has, among others, a hack to split category list. This is useful when the list is displayed in a sidebar (and you want to save space).
Also see the hack to show your most commented posts in sidebar.
Author bio
Multi-author blogs will find the author bio hack useful. Once the basic code is in place, you can use CSS to style it up.
Exclude ads on specific posts
Many ad management plugins offer this functionality, but if you have hardcoded ads into your theme, you can use the “Hiding ads in posts” hack (instead of switching to a plugin just for this functionality.
Membership directory
WPDesigner has a useful tutorial on creating a few theme files and using plugins to turn WP into a membership directory.
FLIR plugin
23Systems’ free FLIR plugin replaces headings with custom fonts using FLIR technique.
Breadcrumbs plugin
mTekk has a WordPress plugin for breadcrumb navigation.
FeedBurner feedcount PHP code
Hongkiat has the updated PHP code required to display Feedburner feedcount in text (works for any system using PHP). If you have been frustrated by problems with Feedcount plugin, this is a worthy alternative. Note that it requires PHP 5.
Login form overlay
Pro Blog Design features a tutorial on making a login form overlay using a mod of Lightbox.
Automatic Stats plugin
Automatic Blog Stats is a WordPress plugin that gives you shortcodes to embed anywhere in your post and display stats. Most of the common stats like FeedBurner feedcount, post and comment stats, Alexa, Pagerank, Technorati authority and Google/Yahoo/Delicious backlinks count are available.
Twitter bar, random stats
Paul Stamatiou has code snippets required to pull in Twitter status to, and list random stats on your blog, and.
Of course, this is just the tip of the ice berg – there are lots of other useful hacks. Suggest your favorites in comments.
Nice list – stumbled!
Very good work. Loved it.
A very good list of hacks i must say. Will be bookmarking it. Thanks for the work Sumesh
Thanks for your comments, everyone. I’ll be posting a couple of WP hack roundups soon – 10 is certainly too few a number for likeable hacks