Launch Your Website and Learn WordPress Along the Way
December 6th , 2010
Over the past year, I’ve had some great experiences working with friends who were messing around with WordPress, but just needed me to help them get everything configured and customized. These weren’t folks who needed a highly customized website solution, but folks who needed their sites to fool people into thinking that they cost a fortune to build.
The How
Since these were people who were open to getting their hands dirty with a little simple technology, we had a great time working together either via Skype or in person updating the site together, changing a color here, adding an image there, adding a page here, changing the text there, etc. Since WordPress makes it so easy to get a website live, we could just play around and have fun with it until we ended up with what my friends wanted to see, all the while cracking silly jokes about all sorts of sundry (but family-friendly, of course) topics.
Category : Blog & News and Updates & Personal Gossip & WordPress
Beginner’s Guide: Creating a WordPress Plugin
September 21st , 2010
The ability to create WordPress plugins is a highly coveted skill which only a relatively small proportion of developers out there are actually capable of. Here’s a quick guide geared towards the absolute beginner to get you started on adding this highly valued asset to your skillset.
Create a Home for your Plugin
- Go to your wp-content/plugins folder, and create a new directory with the name of your plugin. For our purposes, let’s call the plugin as well as the directory it lives in “Hello Hello.”
- Inside this new directory, create a single PHP file which will contain the code for your plugin. For our purposes, we’ll call it “Hello-Hello.php.”
Quick Tips & Tidbits from WordCamp LA 2010
September 13th , 2010
To quote from the WordCamp LA web site:
WordCamp is a conference type of event that focuses squarely on everything WordPress. Everyone from casual end users all the way up to core developers show up to these events. These events are usually highlighted by speeches or keynotes by various people.
Category : 2-Minute Tips & Blog & Cool Tools & WordPress
Solutions to W3 Total Cache + FaceBook Share Conflict
September 5th , 2010
The setting that needs to be changed in order for both plugins to live in harmony
While working on a client site which used both the W3 Total Cache plugin as well as the Facebook Share plugin, I came across a bug where the Facebook Share icon that was to be placed at the top and bottom of each blog post was disappearing, only to be replaced by a “Share” link that linked to nowhere.
Category : 2-Minute Tips & Blog & WordPress
Easy Page-Specific WordPress Sidebars
August 29th , 2010
In yet another step to make WordPress function more like a CMS than a simple blog, there is a recently updated plugin that I think is worth noting.
By default, the WordPress sidebar remains identical on every single page of your web site. However, sometimes we need to be able to have a specific sidebars for different pages. For example, maybe you have a “Products” page that needs testimonials along the sidebar while your “About Us” page sidebar needs to display a listing of awards.
Category : Blog & Cool Tools & WordPress
Review of Easy E-Commerce Solution, Wazala
August 22nd , 2010
Wazala is a great new e-commerce solution that can work with any web site and is designed to make setting up an online store a simple copy, paste, point, and click operation.
In experimenting with Wazala in conjunction with a WordPress website, sadly, at the time of this blog posting, the WordPress plugin simply did not work for me, and I had to refer to the inaccurate instructions on Wazala’s web site to get the thing working (long story short, you need to paste a bit of code directly before the </head> tage of your site.)
However, once you get the code into your header, then it’s smooth sailing without another lick of code necessary to get your store up and running.
Category : Blog & Cool Tools & Reviews & WordPress
Solution to NextGen Gallery Slideshow CDN Conflict
July 30th , 2010
Here’s a special quick post this week to solve a problem I’ve been seeing around the web, but with no solution.
I was recently working on a high-traffic site that that uses using the W3 Total Cache plugin in conjunction with an Akamai CDN. This is a great way to optimize site performance and stability, but I did run into the unfortunate side effect of the NextGen Gallery plugin’s slideshow ceasing to work as soon as the CDN was integrated.
Thanks to my favorite WordPress hosting guru Willie Jackson, there is now a solution.
Category : 2-Minute Tips & Blog & WordPress
What I Learned About WordPress Last Week #1
May 2nd , 2010
Inspired by the supa-talented Portland-based designer Deb Pang Davis‘s recent blog post What I Learned this Week #19 2010, I’ve decided to follow suit with my own list of things I learned, last week, but just about WordPress (otherwise we’d be here all month, as I obviously know very little and each week is a completely new adventure in all areas of my life).
Category : Blog & Cool Tools & News and Updates & WordPress
Good Times at WordCamp OC
April 25th , 2010
The WordPress community is notorious for being totally cool and supportive of any and all who use WordPress and are looking to improve their skills as well as the reach of the online efforts. This past weekend’s WordCamp in Orange County (California, not New Jersey with all due respect…) most certainly embodied that spirit with 145 friendly and impassioned fellow WordPressers participating in the event.
In addition to the great instruction, included in the dirt-cheap price of $40 was a t-shirt and an awesome Hawaiian BBQ catered lunch.
Pictorial Guide to Popular WordPress Sidebar Widgets
April 18th , 2010
I thought I’d provide a pictorial list of the most popular and common WordPress widgets. This chart can be used in the following ways:
- Non-Designers and WordPress Newbies – Because you, or the designer you’ve hired have gotta put something in your sidebar, this guide will remove all of the guesswork from the process and give you a visual image of what each widget will actually contain and how it will add to your site’s functionality.
- Web Designers Working with a Client – You may have already accounted for the sidebar content in your design mockup, but in case you’d like to give your client the opportunity to decide which widgets they’d like to use based on their particular goals for the site, a guide like this can save you hours of email and telephone back-and-forth explaining and finally finalizing this absolutely crucial part of the design and development process.
Of course, this list represents just a teeny-tiny micro-fraction of the possibilities for WordPress sidebar widgets, as the total number of available WordPress plugins goes well into the thousands. This is simply meant to be a basic starting point.
Category : Blog & Cool Tools & WordPress
