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.
A few weeks ago I wrote about how you can put together a great readme.txt for the WordPress plugin directory. In addition to using a WordPress readme as a tool to help out your users, you can use it to promote your commercial products and services.
While commercial theme developers are already promoted on WordPress.org, this promotion isn’t extended to commercial plugin developers. But restrictions often lead to creativity, and developers have had to get a bit creative in figuring out how to monetize the WordPress repository. API keys, complementary plugins and lite versions are just a few of the ways that plugin developers are exploiting the WordPress plugin directory for commercial benefit.
Read more...WordPress 3 introduced custom taxonomies as a core feature. The following release of 3.1 included many features to enhance the support for custom taxonomies. Better import/export handling, advanced queries with tax_query, hierarchical support, body classes and a bunch of wonderful functions to play with are all part of the package.
Let's take an in depth look at how you can create your own custom taxonomies in WordPress, including a few advanced development examples that you can begin using in your WordPress themes and plugins today.
Read more...A very important part of WordPress theme development is preparing it so that users from every corner of the planet can translate its messages to any language. This article covers the basics of internationalization, the process of designing a theme in a way that the end user can adapt it to various languages without source code changes, and localization, the process of translating text messages into a specific language. Expanding our theme’s users range is a big deal and WordPress provides a simple way to do that.
The Globe (photo credit: somegeekintn - used under Creative Commons license)
Every day I work with WordPress in one way or another. My Twitter feed is full of WordPress types, and I’m a regular at my local WordPress meetup. I’m a WordPress fan. The developer across the hall from me works with Joomla. His Twitter feed is full of Joomla types, and he uses the CMS every day. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he attends the local Joomla user group. He’s a Joomla fan.
The White House hosts a number of Web developers who use Drupal every day. Their Twitter feeds are probably full of Drupal types, and some may well attend the Washington DC Drupal meetup. They are Drupal fans.
Read more...There is no doubt that WordPress is the best content management system (CMS) for your website. Sure, countless CMS’ are available, ranging from open-source to paid, and you’ll hear evangelists on all sides swearing that their choice is the best. But Drupal, Joomla or any other CMS doesn’t hold a candle to WordPress for its ease of use, security and reliability.
It’s no wonder that Web developers have built over 50 million websites on its sturdy back, or that so many designers would never dream of using anything else. For the sake of this article, let’s agree that WordPress is the way to go, no looking back. With that established, let’s lay out a 15-step checklist to help you create the perfect WordPress website.
Read more...The beauty of WordPress is in how easy it is to adapt for different tasks. One can extend it with just a couple of lines of code. In this post, we’ll review 10 shortcode snippets that will tweak and optimize your WordPress theme. You can add all of these code snippets to the functions.php file in your WordPress theme.
One thing that can go wrong in WordPress magazine themes is when users include too many words before the more tag. Sure, they could handcraft the excerpt in the dedicated field, but on a website that has hundreds of posts and on which the text above the more tag has always been used as the excerpt, going back to create excerpts for all of those posts by hand would be cumbersome. In this case, we can limit the number of words shown in the excerpt by using the code displayed below.
Computing is full of buzzwords, “cloud computing” being the latest one. But unlike most trends that fizzle out after the initial surge, cloud computing is here to stay. This article goes over Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service and guides you to implementing a WordPress plugin that backs up your WordPress database to Amazon’s S3 cloud. Note that this is not a tutorial on creating a WordPress plugin from scratch, so some familiarity with plugin development is assumed.
The reason for using Amazon S3 to store important data follows from the “3-2-1” backup rule, coined by Peter Krogh. According to the 3-2-1 rule, you would keep three copies of any critical data: the original data, a backup copy on removable media, and a second backup at an off-site location (in our case, Amazon’s S3 cloud).
Read more...According to W3Techs, almost 55% of the 1 million most visited websites that are run on a content management system (CMS) are run on WordPress. WordPress is a darn fine CMS and is stable and easy to use, but so are Joomla and Drupal. So, why does WordPress have the lion’s share of the top 1 million websites?
This article does not set out to prove that one CMS is “better” than another. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and dozens of other platforms are mature, stable, great CMS’ that can do a fantastic job in most cases.
Read more...If you’re a plugin developer and you just love to write code, then writing a readme.txt file for a plugin in WordPress’ repository might be your idea of hell. When you’ve written all of that lovely code, why must you spend time writing about how to use it?
Unfortunately, some plugin developers view writing a readme.txt file as the least important part of their job. So, we end up with things like the following.
Read more...
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