Donkey work is really the last thing I want to be doing. Piddly tasks that could have been avoided with a little thought and perspective. In this DigWP tutorial, I explain how I worked my way away from becoming a donkey with a dozen child themes to manage and maintain, with just a little knowledge of a native WordPress function.

See those crazy characters in the title of this post? Now see how they don't appear in the post's URL? That's one of the finer details of the WordPress 3.3 update: smarter permalink slugs.

When the Admin Bar hit the streets in WordPress 3.1, people seemed to either love it or hate it. And rightly so, it was a significant change in the appearance of the WP Admin area, and if not disabled in your User Profile, the front-end of your site as well. Many tips, tricks and plugins for customizing the Admin Bar began appearing around the Web. And then just as the dust began to settle, BAM — the "Admin Bar" transforms into the "Toolbar" with the WP 3.3 update.

A cool trick you can do with WordPress is display information directly from your theme's style.css stylesheet. I recently used this on a site where the theme's version number is used throughout the template to keep things current and consistent.

Everyone loves a good comment. Readers benefit from the shared information and authors appreciate the conversation and feedback. But you gotta keep the spam out. Akismet and other anti-spam plugins do an excellent job of automating the process, but it's a good idea to watch out for false positives: legitimate comments marked as spam. Rescuing ham comments from the spam pile promotes healthy comment threads and improves the quality and reputation of your site. In this DiW post, we explain how WordPress & Akismet deal with spam, discuss anti-spam strategy, and share some ham-saving tips and tricks.

As a popular WordPress resource, we get quite a few requests for 1-to-1 WordPress support, but unfortunately don't have the resources to help everyone directly. We would love to help everyone out with specific questions and technical support, but really it's just a matter of time that's required for our own work, etc. So as you might suspect, we frequently see emails like look like this:

WordPress does an excellent job of keeping track of what's happening with the loop, but once you start customizing parameters and setting up multiple loops, it's a good idea to explicitly reset them using one of three WordPress template tags. In this DigWP post, we'll explore each of these three loop-reset techniques to get a better understanding of when and how to use them in your WordPress themes.

Here's the really short version:

I used /%postname%/ as my permalink structure on CSS-Tricks for a long time. I have lots of Pages. My site went down. I changed my permalink structure to begin with a number. Now it's fine.

Tiny little fun idea by Dave Rupert.

It sucks, but a lot of plugins require certain directories to be set at CHMOD 777 for its file permissions. Of course, you should not use any plugin that requires 777 directories, but if you absolutely must, you can help protect the folder by adding a thin slice of htaccess. This works great for any directory requiring "loose-ish" permissions (i.e., anything greater than 755), and may also be useful for other key folders as well.

According to our latest poll, so far the votes are pretty much split on whether people love, hate, or don't care about WordPress' new Admin Bar. Over time, it looks like "Hate it" has started to pull ahead, but it doesn't matter because the Admin Bar Toolbar is here to stay, regardless of opinion. Already there are many awesome ways to make it do virtually whatever you want. So that's the deal, and in this DigWP post, we round up a ton of tips, tricks, and plugins for ultimately mastering the WordPress Admin Bar.

Ahh yeah, WordPress just rolled out another update to version 3.1.1. If you're able to upgrade via the Admin, updating your site(s) should be a piece of cake: just log in, click a few buttons, wait a few minutes, and done. The convenience of automatically updating the WordPress core, plugins, and themes is awesome, but things can go wrong once in awhile and auto-updates can fail.

If this happens, getting back on track is a bit tricky, so here's a quick guide to help restore site functionality and ensure a proper WordPress update.

Quick WordPress tip for you today! A reader recently asked about displaying the total number of blogroll bookmarks on their site. This sounds simple enough but not everyone meddles with code these days, so here is a nice PHP snippet that will do the job. You can add this code anywhere in your theme template (wherever you want to display the total number of Blogroll links).

Shortcodes are WordPress' way of creating shortcuts for code snippets, strings of text, or anything else that you need to display on your site. So this means that you can save time by replacing your most commonly typed words and phrases with WordPress shortcodes. For example, if you are frequently typing your blog’s URL, you could place the following code your theme’s functions.php: