For a recent project, I needed a way to add custom post and body classes on a per-post basis. Sure, I could have used a category or tag to style each post, but I hate creating custom categories and tags…

Recently, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the debate over whether it’s better to develop larger plugins that handle many related tasks or smaller, mini-plugins that handle extremely specific tasks. There’s merit to both arguments, but I wanted…

Recently, I needed to build some functionality into a site that disabled the ability to reset the passwords of certain site administrators via the “lost password” form. However, I wanted to leave this option open for other users in case…

I’m currently testing out the My Life theme here on my blog. If you’re a member of Theme Hybrid, you can grab a beta copy of it from the Theme Hybrid forums to play around with it before release.…

If you’re at all familiar with taxonomies in WordPress, you already know how awesome it is to add custom taxonomies to your posts or custom post types. WordPress developers have known this for a while. What many people don’t know…

My first post on Smashing WordPress is up: How to create custom post meta boxes.…

Now that you’ve already learned how to set up a theme, you’ll need to learn how to structure a theme. If you haven’t already done so, you need to read through the earlier posts in this tutorial series to do…

Are you ready to get started on the path to becoming a theme designer? Good. I’ll assume you’ve already read through the introduction post of this series and prepared yourself. If not, go ahead and do that now. In this…

DevPress co-founder, Tung, wrote the most amazing series of tutorials on creating WordPress themes from start to finish in 2007. I want to start this post by giving credit where it’s due. When I first started creating my own WordPress…

An interesting discussion has popped up on WordPress Trac about making it easier for plugins to insert content before/after the post is displayed. Currently, plugins add features to the the_content hook, which is problematic. Some of these things are sharing…

In older versions of WordPress, creating a login form on a page was a complex process for the average site owner. One had to rely on page templates and know how to properly handle forms with PHP. It wasn’t a…

I came across a tutorial the other day on a popular WordPress blog about checking the post type of a post in WordPress. The tutorial used a [broken] custom function for something that already exists in WordPress. Unfortunately, the correction…

One of the things that often frustrates plugin and theme developers is other plugins and themes not properly loading JavaScript in the WordPress admin. The majority of the plugins and themes (especially themes) that load JavaScript load it on every…

One of the coolest things about WordPress 3.2 is its “distraction-free writing” mode. I’ve been eagerly awaiting using this feature on my own sites for months. Unfortunately, WordPress 3.2 also shipped with a font change for the HTML editor to…

The shortcode in WordPress is a neat bit of functionality. It allows you to add captions to images. However, you are not limited to just adding captions to images. You can add them to pretty much anything, and you’ll learn…

DevPress just launched a new photoblogging and social networking theme called Visual. The theme was built off the awesome Hybrid Core theme framework.…

One of the things I’m starting to add to my plugins and themes is custom contextual help text for my settings pages. This is also something I’d love to see more plugin and theme developers start adding to their projects.…