Easily Customize WordPress’ Default Functionality

The absolute best thing about WordPress is how flexible it is. Don’t like the theme? Just change it. Need added functionality? There is probably a plugin you can download or buy. If not, build it yourself! You can change pretty much anything about WordPress. In this article, we’ll go over some easy ways to customize WordPress that you might not know about.

Change The Default Source Of jQuery

Another great thing about WordPress is that it comes locked and loaded with all kinds of JavaScript libraries, including jQuery. It also gives you the power to change the source of those libraries according to your needs. Let’s say we want to relieve our server of some stress by switching WordPress’ version of jQuery for a hosted solution (or CDN version). We can very easily change the source of jQuery with this function:

function add_scripts() { wp_deregister_script( 'jquery' ); wp_register_script( 'jquery', 'http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.1.min.js'); wp_enqueue_script( 'jquery' ); } add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'add_scripts');

Three things are going on here. First, we’re using wp_deregister_script() to tell WordPress to forget about the version of jQuery currently being used. We then use wp_register_script() to re-register jQuery (as the script name), using jQuery’s own CDN version. Finally, we use wp_enqueue_script() to add jQuery to our theme or plugin. One thing to note here is that we’re using add_action(), not add_filter(), to add our scripts. Because we’re not making any changes to the content, but instead relying on WordPress to do something in order for our scripts to load, we use an action hook, not a filter hook. Read about both in the WordPress Codex.