A lot of tools enable us to distribute a website’s content, but when we need to promptly reach a target group, an email notification system might be the best option. If your website is not frequently updated, you could notify all subscribers each time a post is published. However, if it’s updated frequently or it covers several topics, you could filter subscribers before mailing them.
If you opt for the latter, you could set up a user meta field that stores a bit of information to identify the subscribers to be notified. The same bit of information would label the posts you’re publishing. Depending on the website’s architecture, you could store the metadata in a category, a tag, a custom taxonomy or a custom field. In this article we’ll show you how to let your website’s subscribers decide when they want notifications, and linked to a particular location.
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WordPress does some pretty amazing things out of the box. It handles content management as well as any other open-source solution out there — and better than many commercial solutions. One of the best attributes of WordPress is its ease of use. It’s easy because there’s not a significant amount of bloat with endless bells and whistles that steepen the learning curve.
On the flip side, some might find WordPress a little… well, light. It does a lot, but not quite enough. If you find yourself hacking WordPress to do the things you wish it would do, then the chances are high that this article is for you. WordPress can be easily extended to fit the requirements of a custom data architecture. We’re going to explore the process of registering new data types in a fully compliant manner.
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If I were to ask you what the least used default page type in WordPress is, chances are you’d say the archive template. Or, more likely, you’d probably not even think of the archive template at all — that’s how unpopular it is. The reason is simple. As great as WordPress is, the standard way in which it approaches the archive is far from user-friendly.
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I recently teamed up with Mat Marquis of the Responsive Images Community Group to help integrate responsive images into the WordPress platform. We decided to refactor a plugin that I had built several months ago, hoping that it would lead to a more useable and performant solution.
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Countless algorithms for encrypting data exist in computer science. One of the lesser known and less common encryptions is ROT13, a derivative of the Caesar cypher encryption technique.
In this tutorial, we’ll learn about ROT13 encryption and how it works. We’ll see how text (or strings) can be programmatically encoded in ROT13 using PHP. Finally, we’ll code a WordPress plugin that scans a post for blacklisted words and replaces any in ROT13 encryption.
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Economists have taught us that a lot of choice is not always a good thing. Having many options can lead to “analysis paralysis” and a feeling of being overwhelmed, due to the increased effort required and the level of uncertainty in making the right choice.
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These days you have an awful lot of options for hosting your website, so many that it’s easy to get lost. How much should you pay? Is support important to you, or are you a tinkerer who likes to do your own thing?
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Most WordPress users are familiar with tags and categories and with how to use them to organize their blog posts. If you use custom post types in WordPress, you might need to organize them like categories and tags. Categories and tags are examples of taxonomies, and WordPress allows you to create as many custom taxonomies as you want. These custom taxonomies operate like categories or tags, but are separate.
In this tutorial, we’ll explain custom taxonomies and how to create them. We’ll also go over which template files in a WordPress theme control the archives of built-in and custom taxonomies, and some advanced techniques for customizing the behavior of taxonomy archives.
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Today, WordPress has released the first release candidate (RC) for the upcoming 4.0 version. According to the official version numbering, WordPress 4.0 is no more or less significant than 3.9 was or 4.1 will be. That being said, a new major release is always a cause for excitement! Let’s take a look at the new features the team at WordPress has been working on for us.
Since I’ve always used WordPress in English, it took me a while to realize how important internationalization is. 29% of all WordPress.com installations use a non-English language which is huge and not that far from a quarter of all installations. Version 4.0 makes it much easier to get WordPress to speak your language. In fact, the first installation screen asks you to choose your native tongue. Nice!
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A few months ago, I ran an experiment to see how much faster I could make one of my websites in less than two hours of work. After installing a handful of WordPress plugins and fixing a few simple errors, I had improved the website’s loading speed from 1.61 seconds to 583 milliseconds. That’s a 70.39% improvement, without having made any visual changes to the website.
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