This extended category features quality articles about developing clean, smart and fast websites with WordPress. The articles are intermediate level, with an emphasis on practical, hands-on discussions related to WordPress. Curated by Jeff Starr. Subscribe to the RSS-Feed.
Popular tags in this category: Essentials, Techniques, Hacks, Templates, PHP, Themes, Plugins, Resources.
In this article, we’ll look at writing documentation for a WordPress plugin, theme or product. Most of the information can be applied to documentation for other software types, but we’ll look at some WordPress-specific aspects. In my experience, the quality of documentation in WordPress plugins and themes varies widely.
From poorly documented plugins with one-line readmes to products with user guides, developer APIs and in-depth screencasts, you’ll find every type of documentation in the WordPress ecosystem. Many plugins and themes are built by developers who don’t have the time to write documentation or don’t have the money to pay a technical writer.
Read more...Let’s see what we got: WordPress as this flexible, easy to use Open-Source blogging and CMS system. More and more mobile devices flooding the market every day and being extremely popular. Plus the need of more beautiful designed and coded WordPress themes for users to choose from that will work well across all these different devices. So what are we waiting for? Let's get to work!
At first the idea of designing and developing a fully responsive, mobile-ready WordPress theme can be a bit overwhelming and you might think: How am I going to handle the responsive design with all this flexible content a WordPress theme has? What do I have to consider when designing for touch devices? And do I really have to get rid of drop down menus and other hover elements on mobile devices?
Read more...There are different ways to make your website faster: specialized plugins to cache entire rendered HTML pages, plugins to cache all SQL queries and data objects, plugins to minimize JavaScript and CSS files and even some server-side solutions.
But even if you use such plugins, using internal caching methods for objects and database results is a good development practice, so that your plugin doesn't depend on which cache plugins the end user has. Your plugin needs to be fast on its own, not depending on other plugins to do the dirty work. And if you think you need to write your own cache handling code, you are wrong. WordPress comes with everything you need to quickly implement varying degrees of data caching. Just identify the parts of your code to benefit from optimization, and choose a type of caching.
Read more...WordPress businesses are springing up all of the time. Some of them succeed, some of them fail, and some of them go global. Last month, I wrote a post on Smashing Magazine about the thriving WordPress economy. Later this year, the PressNomics conference will bring together some influential people and companies to discuss WordPress and business. But what if you’re just starting out? What if you’re taking your first steps with a WordPress business? Where do you go for advice?
I’ve gotten in touch with a bunch of people running WordPress businesses to ask what advice they would give. I wanted to know what key pieces of wisdom entrepreneurs would pass on to people just starting out. On top of their input, I’ve thrown in a few of my own pieces of advice gleaned from working closely with so many WordPress businesses.
Read more...The absolute best thing about WordPress is how flexible it is. Don't like it? Change the theme. Need added functionality? There is probably a plugin you can download or buy. If not, built it yourself! You can change pretty much everything about WordPress. In this article I'm going to go over some easy ways to customize WordPress that you may not know about.
Learn how to add image sizes, change sidebar markup, modify pre-published content, customize the author's comment box, and much more. This concise guide shows you how to customize default WordPress functionality with any or all of these techniques.
Read more...With WordPress 3.4 set to arrive this week, it's a great time to familiarize ourselves with the new features and additions. The new version of WordPress brings many improvements, including custom backgrounds and headers, a live theme-customizer, revamped XML-RPC, better support for internationalization, and many bug fixes and enhancements. Let's dive in and see what WordPress 3.4 has in store!
When WordPress added featured images as a core feature in 2.9, a new function was added — add_theme_support. It was (and is) obvious that this is a precursor of things to come: the standardization of theme features. Since its introduction, add_theme_support handles post-formats, automatic feed-links, and now in version 3.4, custom backgrounds and headers will be added to the list.
This article will guide you through the process of creating a front-end page in WordPress that lists your authors. We’ll discuss why you would want to do this, we’ll introduce the WP_User_Query class, and then we’ll put it it all together.
At its core, WordPress is a rock-solid publishing platform. With a beautiful and easy to use interface, and support for custom post types and post formats, publishers have the flexibility to do what they do best: write content. However, WordPress is lacking in social interaction between content authors and readers.
Read more...WordPress has a fairly straightforward registration system. To register, you only need to submit a user name and your email address. A password is then emailed to you and you can log in. This registration process can actually be made quicker by enabling visitors to sign up and log in using social media services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
A few months ago, in the comments area of my article “How to Integrate Facebook, Twitter and Google+ in WordPress,” a Smashing Magazine reader asked how this could be achieved. I am pleased to look at this issue for you all today. We’ll look at three WordPress plugin solutions that let you quickly add social-media registration functionality to your website, and we’ll look at the strengths and weaknesses of each.
Read more...In this article, the first in our WordPress “Best of” series, we’ll go over WordPress newspaper themes. We’ll bring you the 30 best WordPress newspaper themes, as well as two news-aggregator themes. We haven't included “news magazine” themes, but we’ll get to those in our upcoming article on magazine-style themes.
The themes are categorized a bit differently than what you may be used to. The line between magazine and newspaper themes is blurry, but we’ve tried to make that distinction. For our purposes, magazine themes look something like Smashing Magazine, whereas newspaper themes look like the Daily Telegraph, New York Times and so on.
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Opportunity: WellnessFX, a fast-growing health 2.0 company based in The Mission District in San Francisco, is looking for an engineer with skills in front-end…
YAGER is currently seeking a talented and experienced Game Systems Designer to join our pre-production team of yet unannounced title. Join us in shaping the direction…
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