10 Plugin Replacing Tutorials for WordPress
Sometimes we asked ourselves, do we really need to use plugins for the most common and basic tasks, like installing Analytics or re-directing our feed to Feedbuner? For pagination, contact forms or even a content slider? Well, only you can answer that, but there are better and in some cases simpler solutions, as we will show you some tips and snippets in this article.
Here are some WordPress plugin equivalents using PHP & jQuery!
1. WordPress & jQuery Contact Form without a Plugin
There are many contact form plugins, most are over bloated with an endless list of features and addons. Wouldn’t it be nice to just have a basic contact form and be given control over the markup?
With this tutorial you will create a custom page template with a contact form and finally, adding a little jQuery to improve the form.
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2. WordPress Post Pagination without a Plugin
Using a plugin for post pagination may be a little bit of overkill since you really only need to add a few lines of PHP and CSS to your theme, and this easy to follow tutorial will walk you through the process.
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3. Featured Post Section in WP (And Get Pagination to Work)
A common trend with WordPress themes is to have featured post box on the homepage, sort of like a kind of like a post that stays there till you replace it with another featured post. This tutorial will show you how to build your own featured post section and you can also download the sample php files.
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4. Popular Posts Page without a Plugin
There are many different ways you can do this, and quite a few plugins that can help as well. This tutorial will show you how to build a popular posts page based on the number of comments from each post. As well as showing you how to create a popular post page, this tutorial will also show you how to create a popular posts widget for the sidebar.
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5. Add Social Bookmarks to your WordPress Theme
In this short tutorial, you’ll learn how to add buttons to our WordPress theme that will allow visitors to easily submit the current article to social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter and Facebook, all without a plugin.
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6. Random Posts without a Plugin
If your WordPress blog uses a home page or a landing page of some kind it can be pretty useful generating a random post that will hopefully grab your visitor’s attention. This short tutorial will show you exactly how to do it.
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7. WordPress Breadcrumbs without a Plugin
There are, of course, a number of ready-made plugins for creating WordPress breadcrumbs, but if you prefer to use short code snippets, this tutorial will point you in the right direction.
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8. Automatic WordPress Thumbnail without Custom Field or Plugin
A lot of blogs effectively show thumbnails on the front page or archives, accompanied by the title and excerpt, they do tend to bring more life to the content.
The only problem though is that using custom fields can be complicated and time-wasting. This post will show you how to make your theme generate thumbnails automatically, based on your post’s first image.
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9. Related Posts without a Plugin (Basic Method)
Displaying related posts is a very great way to get visitors to stay longer on your blog. You could use a plugin, but to make things even easier you could use this snippet.
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10. Related Posts with Thumbnail without a Plugin (Advanced)
This code snippet does not simply display a list of links, but builds a list of images (thumbnails) instead.
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