Life Without Plugins

Here are some things I heart doing in WordPress:

Creating new custom post types without a plugin
Creating custom fields (i.e. meta boxes) without a plugin
Creating widgets without a plugin
Editing post types and widgets without a plugin
Importing styles without a plugin

Hmmm.. do we see a pattern emerging? Somewhere in the past month or so I think I may  have made friends with WordPress, because lately, instead of hunting through files for hours looking for one certain variable, I'm able to blow through a "To Do" list and continue to be amazed when my first or second attempt simply works.

And I've decided that I definitely belong to the "less is more" camp when it comes to plugins. Especially since we have multiple users and developers and who knows who doing who knows what on the admin side, keeping plugins like Custom Post Type at a minimum is essential to make sure that changes to the functionality of the site are only done by someone relatively qualified.  As we learned on the current (old) site, even something simple like slug, category, and page names can wreak havoc on something as major as permalinks and redirects. Isn't that the point of WordPress, to make content easy to add and change without having to affect code?

Here are some awesome things I've done recently sans plugin:

• Sort posts alphabetically and by custom field (meta) value
• Create new custom post types loosely based on existing custom post types
• Trick WordPress into not pre-prending the entire blog url to an inputed url (http://www.google.com as opposed to http://www.myblog.com/category/www.google.com)
• Even though the current theme relies on an icon library linked to CSS rules like "content: /e701"; to display sociable icons (instead of using separate icon files), maintain the styles for the icon library while using my own sociable icon not included in the library. Sort of hacky, totally awesome. This took CSS, PHP, Wordpress, and icon library know-how.
• Formatting widgets in the admin side and how they are displayed on the live site.

Needless to say, over the past four months I have become 200% more comfortable and confident with WordPress.  If I had a few extra hours each day, I would start working on my own theme.  However, I don't have a few extra hours, but not that Christmas presents are done (!!!) maybe I can carve a few out.