My friend Kemar turned me on to this list of jQuery plugins maintained by Marc Grabanski self-proclaimed "Jack of all trades in Web development." He took it upon himself to go through the jQuery plugins repository, and he picked out what he felt was noteworthy or most useful in his eyes. It’s a pretty good list and he’s got plenty of other stuff going on over on his custom-built blog, including this old post on how he built it, be sure to check it out.
Useful wordpress comment plugins
Recently, I was looking into spicing up my comments section with plug-ins. I was inspired by the folks over at inkrebels.com and these posts in particular, “20 typical mistakes made by new bloggers and 8 types of posts that get maximum comments. I started looking for ways to make this blog more comment-friendly. I also saw that some blogs were including links to a commenter’s recent post if it could be accessed through their WordPress.com i.d. or another reputable service. That lead me to the commentluv plug-in. Also check out 33 WordPress Plugins To Power Up Your Comment Section from 1stwebdesigner.com.
Using WordPress custom fields to customize display
Jeff Star over at Perishablepress.com produced a great tutorial using a custom image gallery as an example of how to use custom fields. This helped me visualize how to approach my bookmarks section of this blog. This tutorial combined with a trip over to the WordPress Codex section on custom fields, this entry from Smashing Magazine on Custom Fields Hacks For WordPress, and Steve Taylor’s post called Control your own WordPress custom fields should help you figure out this issue.
Excluding categories from your RSS feed
If you’re customizing WordPress, sometimes you’ll run into a case where you want to exclude a category from your RSS feed. For example – if you want to single out that category into it’s own feed and hide it from the main feed. Jaypee Habaradas over at Jaypeeonline.net has a simple tutorial that walks you through it. A quick read of the WordPress codex on WordPress RSS feeds and Vandelay design’s more recent post on category hacks, you’ll pretty much have a handle on the topic.
Custom single.php templates for WordPress post categories
Over at NathanRice.net Nathan covers different methods you can use to accomplish utilizing alternate customized single.php templates for WordPress post categories, including a plugin he developed. There’s no native way to present different categories of posts in a special way (only pages), except perhaps hacking the posts query, or doing show/hide with CSS or jQuery. This page offers some easy to implement solutions.