When it comes to adding extra functionality to a Wordpress blog, Wordpress users typically go and search for a plugin that might suit their needs. There are often plugins created for basic extended functionality, but what happens when you can’t find the perfect plugin for your needs? It might be easier to just create the plugin yourself.

You create the perfect site in Photoshop using the latest trends. Half of your backgrounds contain a nice 50% opacity to simulate depth. The only problem comes from that darn old IE6, and how it decides to display a nasty gray background. You try to search the web for a solution, but there are dozens of choices. How do you know which methods are the best?

This tutorial will guide you through every step of building a simple, widgetized WordPress plugin with settings.

It’s becoming more and more common for blogs to feature certain posts at the top of the page. In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to implement this in WordPress. We’ll be using the default theme, Kubrik, as our base theme, but it should be adaptable to most themes with some modification. There’s very little code and featuring posts is simple.

Creating a WordPress Theme, The Homepage Following on from the recent article on “PSD to HTML”, this tutorial will look at taking a HTML/CSS template and turning it into a functioning WordPress theme. There is so much you can do when creating your own theme we couldn’t nearly cover it all. So, we’re going to look at how themes are structured, creation of the core files and splitting up that index.html file.

An often-used feature on WordPress blogs is the ability to style comments made by the post’s author differently from the others – helping replies to stand out. Here, we will edit the default WordPress to add some subtle styling to author comments.

WP_Query is a powerful tool to control what comes out of your loop. Learn how to use it by making a 3 columned newspaper theme that has all your main blog posts in the main column, and off to the side a set of posts with a certain category. Using the 960 CSS framework for the basic layout and reset of our theme.

I noticed some requests on how-to implement sIFR3 into your website – or in combination with WordPress. In this tutorial i will demonstrate where to download sIFR3 and how to install it onto your website or in this case, a WordPress theme.