10 Impressive Techniques to Spice up your WordPress Theme

WordPress awesomeness lies in its fact that it can be customized to power any type of site you like! But what happens when you combine the power of javascript with WordPress, the possibilities are infinite. This article will share 10 great practices, examples & Plugins for using the most popular Javascript frameworks out there to spice up your WordPress theme.

1. Implement a Nice & Clean jQuery Sliding Panel in Wordpress 2.7+

Learn how to implement a Nice & CleanSliding Panel in Wordpress 2.7+ using jQuery. If user didn’t log in or register yet, we will show the login and register forms in the sliding panel with a short Welcome Message:

2. jBreadCrumb

jBreadCrumb is a jQuery plugin for displaying breadcrumb navigations in a more flexible & smarter way. The length of a breadcrumb menu may be very long, jBreadCrumb is a great solution for this issue. It creates a collapsible interface that smartly decides the display method according to the amount and length of the elements.

Learn how to create this navigation technique, and display it on our posts, pages and categories archives in your WordPress theme. You can also use this great plugin or this interesting one to automatically create breadcrumbs in your blog.

3. Sliding Boxes and Captions with jQuery

The basic idea of the sliding box animations is very simple. There is a div tag (.boxgrid in my css) that essentially acts as a window where two other items of your choosing “peek” through. From this basic idea we can play around with animations of the sliding element to either show or cover up the viewing area, thus creating the sliding effect. I can see this script works great for a CSS gallery, really interesting.

4. How To Create An Amazing jQuery Style Switcher

Add a nice style switcher using jQuery and PHP. The end result will be an unobtrusive & entirely degradable dynamic style switcher which will be quick and easy to implement.

5. Styling Buttons and Toolbars with the jQuery UI CSS Framework

This tutorial demonstrates how to incorporate the power of jQuery UI CSS framework classes in a custom widget to create and style buttons and toolbars.

Creating a basic button is very simple with the jQuery UI CSS framework and styling it is really easy. All you need to do is add the default “clickable” state by assigning the class ui-state-default. We also want these to have rounded corners, so we added the optional ui-corner-all framework class which adds CSS3 corner-radius properties to all corners without the need for any images or extra markup.

6. MooTools Link Nudging

This tutorial demonstrates how to incorporate the power of jQuery UI CSS framework classes in a custom widget to create and style buttons and toolbars.

Link nudging is the process of adjusting the padding on a link slightly to show a simple, tasteful “jump” when you place your mouse over a link. The effect is magnified when mousing on and off a link quickly.

7. jQuery (mb)Menu 1.5

This is a powerful jQuery component to build easily a multilevel tree menu or a contextual menu (right click) in an intuitive way! You can add as many submenus as you want; if your submenu or menu is not declared in the page, the component’ll get it via ajax calling the template page with the id of the menu you need (the value of “menu” attribute) the ajax page should return a well formatted code as the example below for the menu voices code.

There are many tutorials out there for creating a WordPress drop down menues. You might want to check here and there.

8. Fantastic News Ticker Newsvine-like using Mootools

This tutorial explains how to implement a News Ticker, with news vertical scrolling, using mootools. It’s very simple and quick to implement in your blog. I can see this very useful if you are having a news submission are on your website and want to display your user’s contributed links in a nice and fancy way in your sidebar.

9. Snazzy Archives

Snazzy Archives is a visualization plugin for your WordPress site featuring an unique way to display all your posts. You can select different layouts and special effects. Main features of Snazzy Archives are: Unique visual presentation of blog posts, Will work out of the box with all features, Posts are scanned for images and youtube videos and shown together with number of comments, Different editable layouts (HTML and CSS), Special effects using jQuery and more.

10. J Post Slider

Show your post in fancy jQuery box, rotating images, with show-up text box with post description. Mousover stop the animation, and user can click on post link anytime.