300+ Resources to Help You Become a WordPress Expert

Plugins

Plugins extend the functionality of a standard WP installation. There are thousands of plugins on the WordPress site but finding the best among them can be incredibly time-consuming. The plugins featured here have already been vetted by other bloggers, making it easier to find not only the plugins that do what you want, but those that do it well.

• BuddyPress – A plugin that adds a social networking platform to WordPress MU.
• bbPress – A forum system meant to integrate with WP, created by the makers of WP.
• Wordpress Plugins and Tutorials – A great roundup of categorized plugins, with a few articles and tutorials included at the end.
• Top 10 Characteristics of a Great WordPress Plugin – An excellent guide that should be referred to by anyone developing, or even just using, WP plugins.
• 12 WordPress Plugins for Theme Development – A great list of plugins essential for theme developers.
• Top 35 Plugins of WordPress to Share Your Blog Post – A great roundup of plugins that make it easier for your visitors to share your blog’s content.
• 3 WordPress Plugins to Manage 125×125 Ads – 125-pixel-square ads are a very popular size; here are three plugins to help you manage them.
• 55 Best WordPress Plugins – A roundup from About.com of the plugins every WP user should consider.
• Top WordPress Plugins – A compilation from TheBlogJoint.com of the best WP plugins available.
• 10 Best WordPress Plugins—March 2009 – A recent post covering ten of the best WP plugins, including ThickBox and Lexi.
• 20 Best WordPress Plugins—April 2009 – Another great roundup from AjaxLine of recent WP plugins, including AnyFont and Twitter Widget Pro.
• 13 of the Best WordPress Plugins – A list compiled by David Airey of the best WP plugins, including All in One SEO Pack and cforms II.
• 6 Best Facebook WordPress Plugins – A collection of six plugins for integrating your WordPress blog and your Facebook profile or page.
• 20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress – A collection of great plugins to improve your SEO, compiled by Mashable.
• 30+ Must Have WordPress Plugins – Another roundup of essential WP plugins.
• Best WordPress Plugin for Related Posts? – A review of some of the available related posts plugins and the author’s verdict on which one is best.
• 50 Best WordPress Plugins for Power Blogging – A compilation of some of the best plugins available for WP power users.
• 5 of the Best WordPress Plugins – A fairly in-depth look at five great WP plugins.
• Top WordPress Plugins – A roundup of great plugins, broken down by category and including Advanced Admin Menu and In Series.
• 11 Top WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Have – A list from Yoast of what they consider to be the essential WP plugins.
• Top 8 WordPress Plugins Used by SEO.com – A list of 8 of SEO.com’s preferred WP plugins.
• 70 Best WordPress Plugins to Supercharge Your Blog – A comprehensive list of awesome plugins, including Broken Link Checker and Comment Timeout.
• The Best WordPress Plugins – A short review of some of the best WP plugins out there.
• 9 Best WordPress Plugins – A list of great plugins, including WP Smushit and WP Syntax.
• Best WordPress Plugins—18 Most Downloaded WordPress Plugins Ever – A listing of the most popular WP plugins, including NextGEN Gallery and WP Super Cache.
• 5 Best WordPress Plugins to Shorten URLs – A collection of WP plugins for shortening your URLs.
• Best WordPress Plugins – This post compiles the best WP plugins broken down by category.
• WP Tutorial: Your First WP Plugin – A tutorial for creating your own WP plugins.
• 10 WordPress Plugins Guaranteed to Save You Time – This is a great collection of plugins compiled by Six Revisions to make you a more efficient blogger.
• How to Write a Simple WordPress Plugin – A great tutorial to acquaint you with building WP plugins.
• 40 Exceptional “CMS Enabling” WordPress Plugins – Includes forty plugins to turn WP into a full-featured content management system.
• Contact Form Plugins for WordPress – An overview of some of the contact form plugins available for WP.
• The TTFTitles WordPress Plugin – A plugin to let you swap out your post titles with dynamically-created images.
• TDO Mini Forms – This is one of the coolest plugins for WP out there. It allows non-registered users and/or subscribers to your site to submit their own content (which is kept in draft form until an administrator approves it). It even works with Akismet to help prevent spam posts.
• 30+ Plugins for WordPress Comments – A great roundup of comments-related plugins compiled by Mashable.
• 21 of the Best WordPress Plugins for New Blogs – A collection of plugins focused mostly on front-end features and basic end-user management.
• Top 5 WordPress Plugins that Help Increase Comments – A small roundup of plugins designed to get more visitors to comment.
• Top 30 WordPress Plugins That Are Actually Useful! – An awesome roundup from Speckyboy Design Magazine of incredibly useful plugins, including FireStats and WASABI Related Post.
• 19 Top WordPress Plugins – A great roundup of popular and useful WP plugins, including DISQUS Comment System and Popularity Contest.
• Top 10 WordPress Hidden Gems (Plugins) – An awesome roundup of often-overlooked plugins that do really amazing things, including Front-End Editor and Feed Styler.
• 10 of the Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins to Choose From – A roundup of some of the best contact plugins available.
• Top 11 Comment Plugins to Make Your WordPress Blog More User Friendly – An awesome roundup of comments-related plugins, including the Top Commentators Widget and CommentLuv.
• Top 10 WordPress Gallery Plugins – Ten great plugins for creating and managing image galleries.
• 10 Best Photo and Image WordPress Plugins – A roundup of excellent plugins for handling images, including Shutter Reloaded and SEO Friendly Images.
• Plugins That Make WordPress Into a Company Intranet – Coverage of plugins that make it possible to use WP as a corporate intranet.
• 20 New, Useful and Promising WordPress Plugins – A roundup of twenty great WP plugins, including WP Greet-Box and Post Ideas.
• 10 Mistakes You Could Avoid in WordPress Plugin Development – A must-read article for anyone doing plugin development.
• 16 Excellent WordPress Security Plugins to Secure Your Blog – A great roundup of security-related plugins for WP.
• 31 Useful Twitter Plugins for WordPress to Choose From – An extensive list of plugins for integrating Twitter and WP.
• 6 WordPress Plugins That Help Your Blog’s Maintenance – A great roundup of maintenance-related plugins, including Broken Link Checker and WP Anti-Virus.

Tricks, Customizations, and Hacks

The resources featured below involve customizations and hacks you can apply to your WP installation and themes that extend the functionality of WP beyond what plugins and widgets are generally capable of.

• 13 Vital Tips and Hacks to Protect Your WordPress Admin Area – A compilation of security hacks for WP admin.
• Hack Together a User Contributed Link Feed with WordPress Comments – Shows you how to set up a user-generated public link feed by utilizing post comments.
• 5 Great WordPress Hacks – A small roundup of hacks, including sending pages to Twitter and listing all of the authors on your blog.
• Top 10 WordPress Hacks from June ‘09 – A roundup of recent hacks, including listing all hooked WP functions and detecting which browser a visitor is using.
• 9 WordPress Hacks to Encourage User Interactivity – A great collection of hacks for getting your visitors to interact more, including showing the most recent comments and reversing the order of your comments so the newest ones show up first.
• 9 Useful Snippets for Your WordPress Functions – A collection of handy snippets you can add to your functions.php file to add functionality to your blog.
• WordPress Hack: Opening Links in New Windows – A great hack using JavaScript for forcing links to open in new windows.
• 10 Tips to Improve Your WordPress Theme – A great rundown of theme customizations that make your site more user-friendly.
• 10 Most Wanted Category Hacks and Plugins for WordPress – A great rundown of category hacks, including displaying the most recent posts within a specific category and excluding certain categories from being displayed in a loop.
• 10 Awesome .htaccess Hacks for WordPress – A great collection of .htaccess hacks, including removing/category/ from your WP URLs and how to redirect visitors to a maintenance page.
• 10 Killer WordPress Hacks – A roundup of great hacks from Smashing Magazine, including displaying AdSense ads only to search engine visitors and replacing the “next” and “previous” page links with pagination.
• 10 WordPress Tips and Tricks for Your Comment Page – A great roundup of comment tricks, including displaying the total number of comments on your blog and separating comments from trackbacks.
• 15 Killer Hacks for WordPress That Are Extremely Useful – An excellent roundup of useful hacks including displaying random header images on your blog and listing future “upcoming” posts.
• 9 Extremely Useful RSS Tricks and Snippets for WordPress – A great selection of tricks and customizations for RSS feeds, including creating RSS-only posts and excluding a category from your RSS feeds.
• 7 WordPress Customizations – A quick rundown of how to customize your WP installation in multiple ways.
• Define Your Own WordPress Loop Using WP_Query – A great hack to creating your own customized WP loop.
• 10 Useful WordPress Loop Hacks – A roundup from Smashing Magazine of ten excellent WP loop hacks.
• 13 Tags to Delete From Your Theme – A list of tags that are generally unnecessary in a standard WP theme.
• 30+ New Useful WordPress Tricks & Hacks – This post from Hong Kiat shows more than thirty new hacks and tricks to customize your WP installation.
• 40+ Most Wanted WordPress Tricks and Hacks – A roundup of great hacks compiled by Hong Kiat.
• WordPress Theme Hacks – A roundup of a number of simple hacks for making better WP themes.
• 30+ (More) Most Wanted WordPress Tips, Tricks and Hacks – Another roundup from Hong Kiat of great WP customizations.
• 22 Mixed Quality WordPress Hacks – Despite the title, this is actually a roundup of more than twenty high-quality hacks for customizing your WP blog and making it stand out from the crowd.
• 10 Easy Ways to Fix Common WordPress Headaches – A great overview of ways to improve the functionality of your WP installation.

Galleries and Inspiration

If you’re looking for inspiration for your next WP-powered site, look no further than the resources below. Included are design roundups, galleries, and instances of uncommon WP usages.

• 160 Unique WordPress Themes – An awesome roundup of 160 unique WP designs.
• 11 Non-Traditional Uses of WordPress – A great roundup of some unique WP implementations and the tools used to create them.
• WPLuxe – A great WP gallery that also includes a blog with WP news and resources.
• 45 Beautiful and Creative (WordPress) Designs – A roundup of beautiful WP designs compiled by Six Revisions.
• 15 Creative WordPress Header Designs – A small roundup of beautiful WP headers.
• 15 Impressive and Beautiful Uses of WordPress – A collection of 15 sites using WordPress in elegant and innovative ways.
• Best WordPress Sites – A gallery of excellent WP-powered sites compiled by N.Design Studio.
• 60+ Unusual WP Blog Designs – A great roundup post from Noupe of unique WP designs.
• 30 Untypical WordPress Sites – A great roundup of 30 unique WP sites.
• WordPress Showcase – The official WP showcase blog/gallery.
• WP Inspiration – An amazing gallery showcasing only WP-powered sites.
• CSSBloom – This gallery includes a WP tag with a great collection of unique designs.
• CSS Glance – Another gallery with a WP tag that includes hundreds of WP designs.
• We Love WP – A great gallery dedicated to beautiful WP designs.
• Sites—WP Candy – A WP gallery from the WP Candy blog.
• LoopPress – A WP gallery that lets you rate and comment on designs.
• WPCube – Another dedicated WP gallery.
• Unmatched Style – The WP category on Unmatched Style includes a few dozen WP designs.
• Best CSS Gallery – Their WordPress tag includes more than a dozen WP designs.
• Gallerific – Another general-purpose gallery that has a WP tag and features some great designs.

Blogs, Articles and Other Resources

This is where you’ll find everything else WP-related that didn’t quite fit into the categories above. There are articles about WP-specific topics, blogs by and for WordPress designers and developers, and cheat sheets and other resources to make your WP development easier and more efficient.

• Adii Rockstar – The blog of “WP Rockstar” and theme developer Adii, covering blogging, development, and themes, among other topics.
• Brian Gardner – The personal blog of WP theme designer Brian Gardener.
• WordPress Tavern – A blog that covers WP news, plugins, themes, and even BuddyPress.
• instantShift – InstantShift’s WordPress category has tons of great tutorials, tips, and other information on WP.
• StylizedWeb – StylizedWeb has a great WP category with tutorials, reviews, plugins, theme roundups, free themes, and more.
• Weblog Tools Collection – A WP blog that covers mostly plugin news and releases.
• WordPress Blog – The official WP blog.
• WordPress.com Just Another WordPress Weblog – The official Wordpress.com blog.
• WPCandy – A blog that covers themes, plugins, tutorials, and more.
• WordPress Publisher Blog – A blog from Automattic aimed at publishers using WordPress.
• Hong Kiat – Hong Kiat’s WordPress category has pages of great content, including hacks, tutorials, giveaways, and roundups (some of which are mentioned above).
• 155 WordPress Resources, Tutorials, Plugins, Themes, AJAX, Podcasting…WP Monster List – A huge roundup of resources from Speckyboy Design Magazine.
• The Advanced WordPress Help Sheet – A PDF WP cheat sheet.
• WordPress.tv – View videos about all things WP.
• Nathan Rice – Nathan Rice writes about WP theme design and blogging.
• WpRecipes.com – A blog covering WP tutorials and tips.
• Wpazo – A blog covering the best WP news, resources, and updates every day.
• WP Engineer – A blog for WP developers.
• ThemeShaper – The blog from the developers of the Thematic framework.
• WordPress Weekly – A weekly podcast dedicated to WP from TalkShoe.
• Darren Hoyt – Darren Hoyt’s WP archive category has tons of great resources and new articles are added most months.
• WordPress Theme Development Check List—PDF Version – A PDF checklist for WP theme development.
• Justin Tadlock – Blogs about WP plugins, tutorials, and news.
• Plugins – A podcast dedicated to WP plugins.
• WordCast – A WordPress podcast with more than 60 episodes already published.
• 50+ Cheat Sheets for Building WordPress Themes and Plugins – A huge roundup of cheat sheets and references for theme and plugin developers.
• WP Topics – An aggregation of the content of some of the most popular blogs about WP out there.
• Pro Blog Design – Pro Blog Design’s WordPress tag has tons of articles and resources related to WP design and customization.
• Top WordPress 2.7 Tips, Hacks, Plugins and Resources – While this roundup is specific to WP 2.7, much of the resources and information it includes also applies to 2.8.
• 100+ Killer WordPress Resources – A huge collection of varied WP resources compiled by Steffan Antonas.
• WordPress Daddy – A great blog with regular posts on plugins, customizations and hacks.
• WPDesigner.com – A great blog with a huge archive of WP-related content.
• wpGuy – A blog dedicated to WP that also features themes and plugins.
• Lorelle on WordPress – An exceptional WP blog that covers tons or WP news, tips and advice, as well as general blogging info.
• 15 Resources for Setting Up an E-Commerce Site with WordPress – A great roundup of plugins, themes, and tutorials for creating an e-commerce site with WP.
• The Autopsy of WordPress as CMS with 25 Great WP Plugins and Designs – A great article on using WP as a CMS, along with plugins that make it possible.