Ofcourse posting articles of high quality is the answer to standing in the elite group, but along with quality you also need other things so that your readers could expect really different things in your blog. Then that difference can be as little as the color of the comments.

What is a Hack in WordPress: A way of doing something that involves adding quick-and-dirty bit of code to make a piece of software do what you want, rather than using a prepackaged (and possibly more elegant) solution like a plugin.

Many times you would have come across wordpress blogs and said to yourself “How did he do it?”, “Is that a plugin? If not, how to use it”, “can i do it in my blog?”
For answering all such questions we have compiled here some of the most essential worpress hacks that could make your blogging life easier and help you getting the best out of Wordpress that too without using any plugins.

We have categorized the list into Post Hacks, Comment Hacks, Tags,categories and Archives hacks, Search hacks and Other General Hacks

WordPress Post Hacks

Create Your Own Popular Posts content in the sidebar

Highlighting the most popular posts on your site is a great way to send new visitors to your very best content and win them over.

There are a few different ways you can do this, and quite a few plugins out there to help. But why not base it on the number of comments? If you write a post that makes people talk, it must be a well written post (Most of the time…).

<h2>Popular Posts</h2>
<ul>
<?php $result = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT comment_count,ID,post_title
FROM $wpdb->posts ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0 , 5");
foreach ($result as $post) {
setup_postdata($post);
$postid = $post->ID;
$title = $post->post_title;
$commentcount = $post->comment_count;
if ($commentcount != 0) { ?>
<li><a href="<?php echo get_permalink($postid); ?>" title="<?php echo
$title ?>">
<?php echo $title ?></a> {<?php echo $commentcount ?>}</li>
<?php } } ?>
</ul>

Source

Get the first Image from the Post and display it

Most WordPress users are using custom fields to display thumbs on their blog homepage. It is a good idea, but do you know that with a simple php function, you can grab the first image from the post, and display it. Just read on.

First, paste this function on your functions.php file.

function catch_that_image() {
  global $post, $posts;
  $first_img = '';
  ob_start();
  ob_end_clean();
  $output = preg_match_all('/<img.+src=[\'"]([^\'"]+)[\'"].*>/i',
$post->post_content, $matches);
  $first_img = $matches [1] [0];

  if(empty($first_img)){ //Defines a default image
    $first_img = "/images/default.jpg";
  }
  return $first_img;
}

Once done, you can simply call the function within the loop to display the first image from the post:

<?php echo catch_that_image() ?>

Source

Display Related Posts without using Plugins

Displaying related posts is a very great way to help visitors staying longer on your blog. You can use a plugin, but you also can use tags and a custom code to show related posts. Let’s see how to do!

This code will display related posts based on the current post tag(s). It must be pasted within the loop.

<?php
//for use in the loop, list 5 post titles related to first tag on
//current post
$tags = wp_get_post_tags($post->ID);
if ($tags) {
  echo 'Related Posts';
  $first_tag = $tags[0]->term_id;
  $args=array(
    'tag__in' => array($first_tag),
    'post__not_in' => array($post->ID),
    'showposts'=>5,
    'caller_get_posts'=>1
   );
  $my_query = new WP_Query($args);
  if( $my_query->have_posts() ) {
    while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
      <p><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="
      Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>">
      <?php the_title(); ?></a></p>
      <?php
    endwhile;
  }
}
?>

Source

Automatically insert content after each post

Most blogs automatically displays some text after each post, for exemple to ask readers to subscribe to their rss feed. This text is very often hardcoded. Why not using function.php instead, and be able to keep the text when you’ll switch theme?

To achieve this recipe, simply paste the following code in your functions.php file. By using functions.php, you’ll not have to re-insert this code if you switch themes.

function insertFootNote($content) {
        if(!is_feed() && !is_home()) {
                $content.= "<div class='subscribe'>";
                $content.= "<h4>Enjoyed this article?</h4>";
                $content.= "<p>Subscribe to our  <a href='http://
                feeds2.feedburner.com/WpRecipes'>RSS feed</a>
                and never miss a recipe!</p>";
                $content.= "</div>";
        }
        return $content;
}
add_filter ('the_content', 'insertFootNote');

Source

Make your new posts stands out

Why not giving a special style to the posts published less than 24 hours ago, to let your readers know about the fact they’re new? Here’s a simple code to do it.

To achieve this recipe, edit your index.php file and look for the loop. Replace it with that one:

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
    <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post();
        $currentdate = date('Y-m-d',mktime(0,0,0,date('m'),date('d'),
        date('Y')));
        $postdate = get_the_time('Y-m-d');
        if ($postdate==$currentdate) {
            echo '<div class="post new">';
        } else {
            echo '<div class="post">';
        } ?>
        <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark">
        <?php the_title(); ?></a>
        <?php the_time('j F Y'); ?>
        </div>
    <?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

The above code will add the css class new if the post was published less than 24 hours ago. Then, you just have to modify your stylesheet a bit:

.post{
    /* CSS style for "normal" posts */
}

.post.new {
    /* CSS style for newer posts */
}

Source

Display Author Information For Posts

By using the codes below in your single.php file, you will pull the information from the post author’s profile on your blog and show a bit about them. This is especially useful if you’ve got a lot of authors on your blog.

<div id="author-info">
<div id="author-image">
    	<a href="<?php the_author_meta('user_url'); ?>">
        <?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_meta('user_email'), '80',
        '' ); ?></a></div>
<div id="author-bio">
<h4>Written by < ?php the_author_link(); ?></h4>

< ?php the_author_meta('description'); ?>
</div>
</div>
<!--Author Info-->

Source

WordPress function to display your posts words count

Simply open your functions.php file and paste this function in it:

function wcount(){
    ob_start();
    the_content();
    $content = ob_get_clean();
    return sizeof(explode(" ", $content));
}

Once done, you can call the function within the loop to get the number of words of the current post:

<?php echo wcount(); ?>

Source

Display Sticky Posts in One Area

You can change the number 5 the amount of posts you want to show in your page. You can also display full posts by changing ‘the_excerpt’ value to ‘the_content’.

<?php
$sticky = get_option('sticky_posts');
rsort( $sticky );
$sticky = array_slice( $sticky, 0, 5);
query_posts( array( 'post__in' => $sticky, 'caller_get_posts' => 1 ) );

if (have_posts()) :
while (have_posts()) : the_post();
the_title();
the_excerpt();
endwhile;
endif;

?>

Source

Get posts published between two particular dates

WordPress loop is very powerful, as well as the query_posts() function, which allow you to specify some parameters for the loop to retrieve posts. Though, there’s no built-in function or parameter to get posts between two dates. Let’s solve that.

Open your index.php file and find the loop. Just before the loop starts, paste the following code. Of course, don’t forget to change the dates on line 3 according to your needs.

<?php
function filter_where($where = '') {
$where .= " AND post_date >= '2009-05-01' AND post_date <=
'2009-05-15'";
return $where;
  }
add_filter('posts_where', 'filter_where');
query_posts($query_string);
?>

Source

WordPress Comments Hacks

Automatically refuse spam comments on your WordPress blog

Spam is a nuisance, and you know it. Happilly, WordPress users have Akismet, which help a lot to fight spam. But what about protecting your blog even more? This recipe might help

Paste the following code in your functions.php. Comment that contain any of the words contained within the $bad_comment_content array will be automatically rejected.

Source

Number your comments

Just above this line, initialize a counter variable:

Just after this line, increment the counter:

Now, you just have to echo the $i variable to get the number of the current comment. Paste this code anywhere on your comments loop:

source
Your comments are now numbered!

Batch deleting spam comments on a WordPress blog

delete more than 6000 spam comments that you received on your blog.

First of it all, backup your WordPress database. Then, login to your phpmyadmin, select your WordPress blog database and click on SQL:

Then, insert the following sql command:

source

All non-approved comments will be deleted. But instead of having such trouble next time, you should definitely install Akismet!

Highlight author comments in WordPress

This is useful to make the author comments pop in the comment section, so the readers find the answers to their questions quicker. It can also avoid people pretending they are the author by commenting with his name.

To style the author’s comments differently, you should open the comments.php template file and look for this piece of code (or something looking like it).

Replace it by this one.

Then you can style it in your stylesheet with something like this.

source

Alternating Colors For Comments

You might want to have alternating row colors for your comments, to make a clearer separation. Alternating rows make it easier to distinguish different comments. Doing this is relatively very easy.

Open your theme css file, and paste this at the bottom:

At the VERY top of comments.php file, put this on a line of it’s own.

Now scroll down to find this part of the code

Now replace the above by

source

Displaying Recent Comments

Recent comments are very helpful for readers to comment on any topic about any ongoing discussion. To display your most recent comments, you will have to modify your functions.php file from the theme folder. If the functions.php file is not present, make a new text file, name it functions.php and add it to your theme folder. Add the following code to it and save the file.

Now, wherever you want to show the list of recent comments, just add this code.

source

How to Separate WordPress Comments and Trackbacks

Trackbacks are the messages displayed in the comments list whenever another blog links back to one of your posts. If you use trackbacks on your blog, it is best if they are not mixed with the comments. The comments are a conversation between real people. Having machine-generated links in the middle of that will only serve to disrupt the conversations.

In order to separate the comments and trackbacks, you just need to follow these steps.

Open comments.php, and search for the following line

After it, paste the following

Now look for

And before it, paste

Now your list of comments will continue to display as normal, but without any trackbacks or pingbacks. Now we will add a second comments loop for the trackbacks.

Look for the following line

And before it, paste this: (The “Trackbacks” title line can be deleted if you don’t want a heading to be shown)

source

Wordpress Tags,Categories and Archives Hacks

Find WordPress category ID

Some themes requires that you fill a form field with a category ID. It may be easy to find a category ID if you’re an advanced WordPres user, but what about beginners? Here’s a very simple manner to find any category ID.

Once you’re logged in your WordPress dashboard, go to Manage and then in Categories.
Simply put your mouse cursor on the “edit” link related to the category you want to know the ID and look on your browser’s status bar: As you can see on the screenshot below, 1 is the id of the category.

Display Certain Categories in a Menu

In many cases, users only want to display certain categories in their navigation menu at the top of the page. There are limited spots, that can only be filled by top categories, but if you use the default wp_list_categories code, it will show all categories. This is why this hack below comes in very handy when you want to create a navigation menu and only display certain categories.

Source
Note, you can also change the ‘include’ text to ‘exclude’ and show all categories and exclude those that you don’t want displayed. The numbers displayed in the code are the category IDs. Remember since WordPress shows categories in a list format, you will need to edit the CSS in order to make it work.

Display Tags In A Dropdown Menu

I never liked tag clouds, for the simple reason that most of the time, they’re aren’t readable properly. Here is the solution to this problem: Displaying tags in a dropdown menu.

The first thing to do is to create the function. Paste the following code to your functions.php file:

Once done, you can use the function to get your dropdown menu of tags. Just open the file where you want the list to be displayed (Most of the time it is sidebar.php) and paste the following code:

source

Display Categories in a drop down Menu

To add a good looking drop down that will list all your existing categories, insert the following code in your blog template. You can do it either in your sidebar.php file or anywhere in the index.php. This is the code :-

source

Display Archives in a drop down Menu

Just like in categories, you can have your monthly archives listed in a drop down. Add the following code to your template files :-

source

Exclude Categories From Search

If for some reason, you’d like to exclude some categories from searches, you have to tweak WordPress a bit because there’s no built-in solution to this problem. Happilly, here’s a code to do that job!

To achieve this recipe, replace the categories IDs on line 3 and paste the following code on your search.php template:

source
You are done!!!!!!!

Exclude Categories from your RSS Feed

Depending to your blog structure, it may be interesting to exclude some categories from your rss feeds. If you always wanted to find a clean way to do it, I’m pretty sure this recipe will make you happy.

Before starting to code, you’ll have to know the numeric ID of the categories you want to exclude. If you don’t know how to get the ID of a particular category, just read the first post in the category “Wordpress Tags,Categories and Archives Hacks”.

Once you have the ID of the categories you want to exclude from your rss feed, open the functions.php file from your theme. If your theme doesn’t have a functions.php file, create one.

Paste the following code in it:

source

Display your categories in two columns

The stadard wp_list_categories() functions echoes a list of all your categories. Let’s see how we can easily force the display of categories on two columns.

Simply paste the following piece of code where you’d like your categories to be displayed

source
Then, just save the file, and enjoy!

Wordpress Search Hacks

Display the number of results in WordPress search

WordPress users know it: Search is definitely one of WordPress weak point. Today, let’s see how to get the number of results the search returned, and display it (proudly!) on our blog.

Open your search template file, search.php. In it, search for the following:

Now replace this with:

That’s all, you’re done!

Highlight the Search Terms in Results

When you search on Google or any other major search engine, the words you searched for are highlighted in the results to make it easier for you to scan. We can do the same with your search results page.

In search.php, search for the following:

This is the code for showing the title of each of the results. In the default theme, it will be wrapped up in a line like this:

Now, replace the part with:

Finally, before this line, paste the following:

source

Make your WordPress Search Results Unlimited

Sometimes you may not want your search results to be limited by the confines of the standard WordPress Loop. This is a quick code hack to allow a search to return unlimited results, altering the standard WordPress Loop by using a custom query. You can do this in a few different ways. If you have a search template, in search.php you can simple add the following line of code above your Loop.

Find:

Add:

source

Other General Wordpress Hacks

Add Social Bookmarking Buttons in your Wordpress Blog without plugins

Display your Feedburner count in full text

Are you using feedburner? Probably yes, just as a lot of bloggers do. If you don’t like the chicklet dedicated to display your feedburner count, just read this recipe which is a new method to get your feedburner count in text mode.

To display your feedburner count in full text on your WordPress blog, simply paste the following on any of your theme file, for exemple sidebar.php:

source

Display the total number of your Twitter followers on your WordPress blog

If you’re on Twitter, you probably display the number of your followers on your blog, using the chicklet from TwitterCounter.com. Today, I’m going to show you how to display your followers in full text mode.

The first thing to do is to paste the following php functions on the functions.php file from your WordPress blog theme:

Then, simply paste the following anywhere on your theme files. Just replace our username with yours.

source

Manually reset your WordPress password

What to do if you lost your WordPress password? The easier is to use PhpMyAdmin and execute a simple SQL query to update it. Here’s how to proceed.

To achieve this recipe, login to your PhpMyAdmin, select your WordPress database and click on the “SQL” button to open the SQL query window.

Then, paste the following code in the window textarea. Don’t forget to modify the password and username before executing it. Also, make sure you have a backup of your database before executing any SQL queries to your database.

source

Automatically provide tinyurls for your WordPress blog posts

Are you on Twitter? I am. This service make an intensive use of tinyurls in order to reduce the size of urls. Why not provide automatically provide a tinyurl to your readers so they can use it on Tweeter?

To achieve this recipe, simply open your functions.php file and paste the following code

On your single.php file, paste the following within the loop:

source

Display today’s date on your WordPress blog

Many blogs displays the current date on their blog header. It looks profesional, and it is also useful, especially if your blog posts are dated. Here is a very easy way to add today’s date on your WordPress blog.

Open your header.php file (or any other file) and paste the following code:

source

Display page loading time + number of queries

Do you ever asked yourself how long it took for your page to load, or how many sql queries were executed? If yes, here is a simple code to insert on your template.

Nothing hard here. Simply paste the following code on your footer.php file

source

Hide WordPress version

In order to secure your blog, is it a good thing to hide the meta version appearing within the and html tag of your blog. Since WP 2.5, the version is inserted automatically, and can’t be removed as easily at before. Except if you use that hack !

This hack isn’t hard to do at all. Just open the functions.php file from your theme and add the following line of code:

Am I missing Something??

Passing 1z0-046 exam is not difficult if you have accurate resources. Just go through the braindumps and pass your 642-902 in first attempt guaranteed.

Related posts:

1. Most Essential WordPress Plugins Every Blogger Must Know
2. Add Social Bookmarking Buttons in your Wordpress Blog without plugins
3. New features in Wordpress 2.9

Yes, Plugins are important because of their functionality but if there are alternatives to plugins then why not use them to get your work done. Using Manual code to replace wordpress plugin is a much better way.

In this post I will be highlighting the manual codes that we can use to create share buttons for Retweet, Digg, Buzz, DesignFloat, StumbleUpon, FShare, Delicious, DZone, Reddit, Technoraiti.

How to use

Retweet Counter

Add a retweet counter on your posts with Tweetmeme

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/
button.js"></script>

Source

The Digg Button

<a class="DiggThisButton"> ('<img src="http://digg.com/img/diggThis.png"
height="80" width="52" alt="DiggThis" />')</a>
<script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>

Source

StumbleUpon

<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>
&title=<?php the_title(); ?>"><img src="http://cdn.stumble-upon.com/
images/32x32_su_solid.gif" alt="StumbleUpon.com"/></a>

Source

Delicious

<img src="http://static.delicious.com/img/delicious.small.gif"
height="10" width="10" alt="Delicious" />
<a href="http://delicious.com/save" onclick="window.open('http://
delicious.com/save?v=5&noui&jump=close&url='+encodeURIComponent('<?php
the_permalink() ?>')+'&title='+encodeURIComponent('<?php the_title() ?>
'),'delicious', 'toolbar=no,width=550,height=550'); return false;">
Bookmark this on Delicious</a>

Source

DZone

<script language="javascript" src="http://widgets.dzone.com/links/
widgets/zoneit.js"></script>

Source

DesignFloat

For use with Wordpress powered blogs, replace “Your URL Here” with <?php the_permalink() ?>

<script type="text/javascript">submit_url = 'Your URL Here';</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.designfloat.com/evb2/
button.php"></script>

Source

fShare

<a name="fb_share" type="box_count" href="http://www.facebook.com/
sharer.php">Share</a><script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php
/js/FB.Share" type="text/javascript"></script>

Source

Mixx

<a href="http://www.mixx.com/" onclick="window.location='http://
www.mixx.com/submit?page_url='+window.location; return false;"><img
src="http://www.mixx.com/images/buttons/mixx-button4.png" alt=
"Add to Mixx!" border="0" /></a>

Source

Reddit

<a href="http://www.reddit.com/submit" onclick="window.location = '
http://www.reddit.com/submit?url=' +encodeURIComponent(window.location);
return false"> <img src="http://www.reddit.com/static/spreddit1.gif"
alt="submit to reddit" border="0" /> </a>

Source

Technorati

<a href="http://technorati.com/faves?sub=addfavbtn&add=http://
nameofmyblog.wordpress.com"><img src="http://static.technorati.com/
pix/fave/tech-fav-1.png" alt="Add to Technorati Favorites" /></a>

change “nameofmyblog” with the actual name of your blog.

Source

Buzz

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://d.yimg.com/ds/badge2.in.js"
badgetype="logo">ARTICLEURL</script>

Source

New Additions

Blog Engage

<script type="text/javascript">submit_url = "<?php the_permalink();
?>";</script><script src="http://blogengage.com/evb/button.php">
</script>

Source

If there are any other additions please suggest we would do the needful.

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2. 80+ Promotional Websites to Promote your Blog Articles
3. Most Essential WordPress Plugins Every Blogger Must Know

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