As with many others who are now viewing this post, I have been reading various blogs, forums, and discussion groups to learn and improve my WordPress skills. Over the past 12 months I have been on a mission to substitute my use of plugins by adding code to my functions.php file instead.
While I completely agree that plugins are very useful in many situations, my experience proved that in 90% of usage cases although a plugin might exist, actually utilizing it could create unnecessary complications and compatibility issues. Additionally in a great deal of cases such plugins added menus and other admin elements which I don’t want or need.
More often than not I have found that by analyzing the code of plugins I was able to strip out the piece of code I wanted and hard code it into my functions.php. This provided me with the exact functionality I needed without having to include unnecessary elements.
So, the purpose of this post is my attempt to engage you, the reader/admin/developer, to share with me and other here any code bits which you find useful and have added to your theme’s function.php file to extend or enhance WordPress without utilizing a plugin.
When you submit a response here please kindly give each code bit a title, let us know if with what version of WordPress you know its compatible with, include whatever description you feel best describes its function and (if applicable) include a link to the original plugin or source where you found the information.
I am looking forward to all your responses and will of course continually add my own new finds whenever I find them.
Please vote on the question and any answers you find useful by clicking on the up arrow on the left hand side of the question or answer.