Oct 28
WordPress snippets have proved to give quick solutions to improving your blog functionality, flexibility and boosting its performance. The snippets below are some of the common ones you will come across, so make it useful in your projects cos’ if you don’t, I will 
.
How to Remove Menus in WordPress Dashboard
I wanted to build a static site for a client recently and was worried about certain menus in the admin panel distracting the client as they will not be using them on their static website. Thankfully I found this snippet that allows you to remove these menus from the WordPress admin, in short, solved my issue:
function remove_menus() {
global $menu;
$restricted = array(__('Dashboard'), __('Posts'), __('Media'), __('Links'), __('Pages'), __('Appearance'), __('Tools'), __('Users'), __('Settings'), __('Comments'), __('Plugins'));
end ($menu);
while (prev($menu)){
$value = explode(' ',$menu[key($menu)][0]);
if(in_array($value[0] != NULL?$value[0]:"" , $restricted)){unset($menu[key($menu)]);}
}
}
add_action('admin_menu', 'remove_menus');
Source: Hungred, WP Recipes
How To Disable Image Caption in WordPress Post Editor
It has always been annoying to see poups when you hover over images in your WordPress blog. I wish they would just have an option in the Settings screen to disable them nasty popups that reveal the image filename. Anyway thanks to this snippet, we can still remove this totally:
add_filter('disable_captions', create_function('$a','return true;'));
Source: SEOdenver
Detect User From Google
Have you ever wondered how some websites know straight away that you found them through Google? Paste this snippet into your template files, coupled with some CSS and you could get something like this:
if (strpos($_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER], "google") == true) {
echo "Hello Google User!";
}
Source: Filip Stefansson | WPSnippets
Detect Browsers
WordPress has also made it simple for us to detect which browser people access your website on. This snippet will add the relevant browser name as a class to your <body> tag for relevant styling:
add_filter('body_class','browser_body_class');
function browser_body_class($classes) {
global $is_lynx, $is_gecko, $is_IE, $is_opera, $is_NS4, $is_safari, $is_chrome, $is_iphone;
if($is_lynx) $classes[] = 'lynx';
elseif($is_gecko) $classes[] = 'gecko';
elseif($is_opera) $classes[] = 'opera';
elseif($is_NS4) $classes[] = 'ns4';
elseif($is_safari) $classes[] = 'safari';
elseif($is_chrome) $classes[] = 'chrome';
elseif($is_IE) $classes[] = 'ie';
else $classes[] = 'unknown';
if($is_iphone) $classes[] = 'iphone';
return $classes;
}
Result:
<body class="home blog logged-in safari">
Source: Nathan Rice
How To Disable, Limit and Delete Remaining Post Revisions in WordPress and Reduce Database Size
Disabling WordPress’ Post Revision is as simple as pasting the below snippet into your wp-config.php file at the root of your WordPress Install. To limit the amount of revisions is as simple as replacing ‘false’ with a number of how many revisions you want created:
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);
To delete remaining revisions in your database, simple run this command at the SQL tab of your phpMyAdmin page:
DELETE a,b,c FROM wp_posts a LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships b ON (a.ID = b.object_id) LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta c ON (a.ID = c.post_id) WHERE a.post_type = 'revision';
Source: WPBeginner, Ashfame
Edit WordPress’ ‘Help’ Dropdown Section
At the top right of your WordPress admin screen is a hanging tab with the option dropdown ‘Screen Options’ or ‘Help’ or both. You can use this to insert custom information, where its for your client or donations or whoever you feel you wanna shout out to.
add_action('load-page-new.php','add_custom_help_page');
add_action('load-page.php','add_custom_help_page');
function add_custom_help_page() {
//the contextual help filter
add_filter('contextual_help','custom_page_help');
}
function custom_page_help($help) {
//keep the existing help copy
echo $help;
//add some new copy
echo "<h5>Custom Features</h5>";
echo "<p>Content placed above the more divider will appear in column 1. Content placed below the divider will appear in column 2.</p>";
}
Source: Smashing Magazine
Add A Dashboard Widget
Display some information to whoever logs into the main screen.
<?php
function your_dashboard_widget() {
?>
<h3>Hello WordPress user!</h3>
<p>Fill this with HTML or PHP.</p>
<?php
};
function add_your_dashboard_widget() {
wp_add_dashboard_widget( 'your_dashboard_widget', __( 'Widget Title!' ), 'your_dashboard_widget' );
}
add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'add_your_dashboard_widget' );
?>
Source: Filip Stefansson | WPSnippets
Disable Dashboard Widgets
Do the opposite of the above:
function remove_dashboard_widgets() {
global $wp_meta_boxes;
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_plugins']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_recent_comments']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_primary']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_incoming_links']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_right_now']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_secondary']);
}
add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'remove_dashboard_widgets' );
Source: Filip Stefansson | WPSnippets
How to Add Custom Post Types to your Main WordPress RSS Feed
By default the WordPress RSS Feed works only for the ‘post‘ post type. Using this, you can add more:
function myfeed_request($qv) {
if (isset($qv['feed']))
$qv['post_type'] = get_post_types();
return $qv;
}
add_filter('request', 'myfeed_request');
By default, this selects all the post types you have on your website. To be selective with this, use the code below and edit the array:
function myfeed_request($qv) {
if (isset($qv['feed']) && !isset($qv['post_type']))
$qv['post_type'] = array('post', 'story', 'books', 'movies');
return $qv;
}
add_filter('request', 'myfeed_request');
Source: WPBeginner
Add a jQuery prettyPhoto functionality to WordPress’ gallery shortcode
The WordPress gallery shortcode does a good job in its ouput, except it does not allow you to specify any lighbox functionality except you have a plugin. This simple technique by Utkarsh Kukreti adds a ‘rel’ attribute to the image link, allowing you to specify the lightbox effect you want, in this example the prettyPhoto jQuery lightbox clone is used:
add_filter( 'wp_get_attachment_link', 'gallery_prettyPhoto');
function gallery_prettyPhoto ($content) {
// add checks if you want to add prettyPhoto on certain places (archives etc).
return str_replace("<a", "<a rel='prettyPhoto'", $content);
}
In effect, a HTML attribute rel=”prettyPhoto” has been added here to activate the prettyPhoto jQuery lightbox clone.
Source: WPQuestions
4 Comments to “10 WordPress Snippets to improve your blog Functionality, Flexibility and Performance”
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December 1st, 2010 at 9:40 am
nice round up! heads up on the detect browser you’ve got a typo instead of ask you put ass, might want to change that one. bookmarked!
December 1st, 2010 at 9:56 am
@sanji
Thanks sanji. I’ve changed it now. Good eye for detail.
May 19th, 2011 at 6:04 am
Can you please expand a bit on the last one?
What is “prettyPhoto jQuery lightbox clone”? That sounds like a plugin. I thought the idea behind the function is to avoid using a plugin for getting lightbox effect to images in gallery?
May 30th, 2011 at 12:18 pm
@Sridhar Katakam
PrettyPhoto is a lightbox style plugin based on jQuery. The idea behind this function in particular was to place the rel=”prettyPhoto” trigger in the anchor element to allow the user to activate the plugin. This is for anyone looking for an alternative solution to use.