New And Comprehensive Wordpress 2.8 Tutorial and Hack Toolbox

Wordpress just becomes more and more powerful, it’s very hard to keep up with new features. Thankfully there are several very active people behind great blogs, who write very well explained tutorials and premade code snippets to let you learn everything in very easy way. Today I made my exercise to find such sites and articles, which are very new and Wordpress 2.8. compatible. There are really long list with new features, you can check them in first link from Wordpress Codex, so make sure you can keep up!

In summary you’ll find here 37 helpful tutorials, resources and hacks + 11 helpful Wordpress related sites for further reading in long run. Hope you’ll like it!

Brief Informational Articles About Wordpress 2.8 Version

1.Wordpress Codex – Version 2.8

It’s been a while since version 2.8. is released, all new features you can check on their website to get started with.

2.10 Things You Need To Know About WordPress 2.8

3.10 WordPress 2.8 Features To Look Out For

It’s a great achievement for WordPress 2.8 to be released so soon after 2.7. Named ‘Baker’, 2.8 adds plenty of new features, including syntax highlighting for theme/plugin editing, a theme installer, and a great revamped widgets interface and API.

4.Wordpress 2.8 And 10 Things That You Should Know Before/After You Upgrade

Wordpress Plugin And Widget Related Tutorials

5.Handling Plugins Options in WordPress 2.8 with register_setting()

This tutorial shows why new register_setting() way is so good and how to use it effectively.

6.Set Meta Links For WordPress Plugins

Learn how you can expand plugins with useful functions and therefore optimize their usage in updated Wordpress 2.8. version.

7.WordPress Plugin-Path

8.WordPress Plugin Compatibility Checker

Check out which plugins are Wordpress 2.8 version compatible and more.

9.Plugins/Plugin Compatibility with Wordpress 2.8 from Wordpress Codex

Here is a list of plugins that have been tested for compatibility with Version 2.8.

10.Build A WordPress 2.8 Widget With The New Widget API

Tutorial explaining how to create very simple Wordpress 2.8 widget showing main changes.

11.The complete guide to creating widgets in WordPress 2.8

Advanced tutorial by Justin Tadlock, where he will walk you through widget development process with simple example and very well explained breakpoints.

12.Tutorial: WordPress 2.8 Widget API

Yet another great tutorial explaining functions – widget(), update(), and form() and finally how to put them all together.

13.How To Make Your Own WordPress 2.8 Widget

In this tutorial widget which will be created will display upcoming posts (scheduled posts). A lot of sites schedule posts to automatically publish at a specific time, helping them keep a steady flow of articles.

14.New WP_Widget Class In WordPress 2.8

This article is more for developers with added sample code with new class, showing how to use it effectively.

15.Creating Widgets in Wordpress 2.8 with the Widget API

In this tutorial you’ll going to learn how to create a simple multi-instance widget for adding posts your sidebar.

Introduction and Practical Taxonomy Usage

16.Custom taxonomies in WordPress 2.8

Useful tutorial explaining what taxonomy is and how to use it effectively in your own blog. Justin Tadlock also break down the code and explaining how to create custom taxonomy.

17.Using custom taxonomies to create a movie database

Following article will explain how to practically use custom taxonomies, in this case creating a movie database. Excellent tutorial!

Learn Everything about Wordpress Action Hooks

18. An Introduction to WordPress Action Hooks

If you’re going to be doing any level of WordPress development, themes or plugins, you will invariably run into the need to take advantage of the WordPress Action Hook system. In this article you’ll learn what wordpress action hooks are, how those hooks work and finally how to create your own action hooks.

19. Define Your Own WordPress Action Hooks

20. Using Action Hooks in WordPress Child Themes

In this post Ian Stewart will review how to write a PHP function and go over the basic idea of how you can use Action Hooks in your WordPress Theme. He will take a look at a practical example of injecting a Welcome Blurb into your Theme without touching the existing code and also look at how to remove existing content being injected into Theme Hooks.

21. Understanding Action Hooks In Wordpress

On this article you’ll learn how to define your own hooks and trigger them using action hooks.

Other

22.WordPress 2.8 and the body_class() Function

Learn what’s so significant with this function and how this opens up the ability to change the look of nearly everything with CSS only.

23.Loading JavaScript In Footer In WordPress 2.8

In this tutorial Lesterchan will demonstrate how to load JavaScript in the theme’s footer in WordPress 2.8 Nightly using his WP-Polls as an example.

24.Displaying Author Meta Information in Wordpress 2.8

In this quick tutorial, you will look at some potential uses for the recently overhauled Author Meta template tag.

25.Display Random Posts from Specific Tags or Categories

26. Display a Random Post (with AJAX Refresh)

27. How to Remove the WordPress Version Number (The Right Way)

Don’t display your WordPress version number publicly. Many WordPress developers often display the WordPress version in the source code. But having this information publicly available makes it easy for attackers to exploit known vulnerabilities on a particular WordPress version.

28.9 Ways to Set Dynamic Body IDs via PHP and WordPress

29.Related Posts on Category

Useful function, which is listing related posts based on the category ID. It is better possibility reader will be interested in related posts which are in the same category than anything else.

30.Escaping API updates for WordPress 2.8

The WordPress escaping API functions have been updated. Escaping is a way of using untrusted text that “neuters” anything that could do damage. Escaping is used in WordPress to avoid SQL injection and cross-site scripting/script injection (XSS), among other things.

31.Disable Syntax Highlighting in WordPress 2.8

32.The Ultimate Wordpress 2.8 Optimization Guide

This comprehensive article focus on optimising Wordpress, a popular free open source blogging platform that runs on PHP.

33.Tag descriptions in WordPress 2.8

34.Display Thumbnails For Related Posts in Wordpress

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to increase pageviews by adding thumbnails to related posts using the popular YARPP plugin and Wordpress custom fields.

New Wordpress Hacks

35.Top 10 WordPress hacks from June ‘09

36.10 incredibly cool WordPress shortcodes

Introduced in WordPress 2.5, shortcodes are a very easy way to display lot of things on your blog posts by inserting a very simple code. In this article, you’ll find 10 incredible things shortcodes can do.

37.Wordpress Codex – 2.8 Problems and Solutions (FAQ)

If you have any questions, problems consider checking out Wordpress support forum covering installation and upgrading problems.

Further Reading – Helpful Wordpress Related Sites In Long Run

Actually there could be find a lot more such great tutorials, hacks, but I tried to include here most important and helpful ones in my opinion. For further reading I also listed below several very good blogs which are totally dedicated to Wordpress or write very helpful articles about Wordpress pretty often. If you are Wordpress developer, I strongly recommend to subscribe to these blogs or at least keep eye on them. I am sure in future these blogs will keep delivering amazing tutorials, tips and tricks about Wordpress new versions and everything Wordpress related.

1.WpEngineer

I just cannot stop to enjoy regular and extremely helpful posts WpEngineer editors are releasing.

2.Justin Tadlock – Life, Blogging, Wordpress

I must admire I really love Justin’s Hybrid framework, very well explained tutorials and most important – everything is explained in very easy-to-understand way. Big fan.

3.EpicAlex

4.Perishable Press

5.Digging Into Wordpress

DiggingIntoWordPress.com is the blog home for the upcoming book of the same name by Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr. Books and blogs are the perfect compliment to each other when it comes to learning web technologies. The blog is there for search ability, quick tips, and copy and paste-able code. The book is there for offline reference and that essential full-attention first read through when your brain is ready to soak in a ton of new information. Digging Into WordPress brings you the best of both worlds.

6.Net-Tuts Wordpress Tutorial Section

7.CatsWhoCode

8.BuildInternet Tutorial Section

Here you’ll find wordpress related tutorials pretty often – great resource!

9.CSS-Tricks

Just type in search tag “wordpress” and you’ll get a nice list of Wordpress related tutorials.

10.WpCrowd

11.WpScoop

And again I feature WpScoop – Wordpress social news and bookmarking site totally dedicated to collect the best Wordpress related stuff possible.

I am sure there are many good Wordpress tutorial sites I missed – if you know some more feel free to share them on comments section, I will add them to list!