Smashing WordPress: Beyond The Blog

Chapter 13. EXTRA FUNCTIONALITY

You can do a ton of things with WordPress, usually in myriad ways. This chapter is all about showing off some of the functionality you may consider using in a project or on a site of yours, so that you have a decent starting point. Since every site is different, your solution may very well differ a lot from the ideas presented here.

Each element described is also discussed with regard to when it is a good idea to use the technique, and w hen you should forget about it. Between the plugin expandability and the various features you can put in your theme, there are a lot of options and it is way too easy to clutter a site with things it just doesn't need. You should question every addition, even if it is hard to resist adding some cool features sometimes.

Tabbed Boxes

Tabbed boxes are a great way to save some of that all-important screen real estate. On blogs and somewhat dynamic and living sites, tabbed boxes can be used to show off popular posts, recently commented posts, and other similar things that can be grouped together in a natural way. The key is to make sure that the tabbed content that isn't shown by default doesn't always have to be visible. In fact, that's the key thing with tabbed boxes right there: make sure you don't hide something crucial in a tab.

Technically, tabbed boxes aren't very hard to create or manage. Some of them may not even look like boxes with tabs on them; it is more a type of functionality than anything else.

Smart Usage