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Hallo, my name is Daniel :) I build plugins, themes and apps - then proceed to write or talk about them. I'm the editor for the WordPress section here on Smashing Magazine and I contribute to various other online sites. When not coding or writing you'll find me playing board games or running with my dog. Drop me a line on Twitter or visit my personal website.
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Earlier this year, WordPress passed the 24% mark, running almost a quarter of all websites — and for good reason. It has a loyal user base and scores of dedicated developers who bring better features to the system year round.
This article is for those of you who either are new to WordPress or are regular users who want to learn about the best way to run a WordPress website. We’ll be learning about working with domains, installing WordPress, managing content and using great plugins and themes to secure our website and make our content shine.
Read more...Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) is a free WordPress plugin that replaces the regular custom fields interface in WordPress with something far more powerful, offering a user-friendly interface for complex fields like location maps, date pickers and more.
In this article I'll show you how you can extend ACF by adding your own controls to tailor the experience to your needs.
Read more...Prototyping is one of the best things that can happen within a project, yet it is extremely underutilized. Prototyping makes a project better suited to users, elevates user experience, increases the quality of your final code, and keeps clients happy.
The problem is that developers often see prototyping as a waste of time, since high-quality prototypes take considerable effort to make. I want to show you that by using WordPress, highly interactive prototypes with great visuals are not at all that difficult to make.
Read more...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!
Read more...Have you ever created a custom post type and then found that only the titles and dates of your posts are displayed in the admin lists? While WordPress will add taxonomies for you, that’s the most it can do. Adding relevant at-a-glance information is easy; in this article, we’ll look how to modify admin post lists with WordPress.
To make sure we’re on the same page, an admin list is the table of posts shown in the admin section when you click on “Posts,” “Pages” or another custom post type. Before we delve in, it is worth noting that admin tables are created using the WP_List_Table class. Jeremy Desvaux de Marigny has written a great article on native admin tables that explains how to make these from scratch.
I’ve been working with WordPress since the dawn of time, and even though I peek at the source code regularly, I still discover new tips and tricks. I’ve compiled my own list of 21 techniques that are handy, clever, fun or best practices rarely followed. I hope everyone finds something new in the list!
Using the great wp_enqueue_script() and wp_enqueue_style(), you can include styles and scripts easily with dependency management. But did you know that WordPress has a lot of scripts already built in?
Twitter needs no introduction. It has become the way to reach audiences for some people and companies and a place to hang out for others. Placing a Twitter feed on one’s website has almost become compulsory.
Embedding a feed isn’t all that difficult if you are comfortable with Twitter’s default widget, but making your own will enable you to blend it into your website seamlessly.
Read more...Whether you offer free or premium themes, testing should be a major part of your development process. By planning in advance, you can foster a development environment that deters some bugs by design and that helps you prevent others.
The aim of this article is to share some of the tricks I use personally during and after development to achieve a bug-free product. This article is split into three distinct sections Setting up, Development phase and Final testing. This should give you a good overview of what you can do over the course of the development cycle.
Read more...If you've been around WordPress for a while you know how difficult it used to be to create post lists based on complex criteria while also conforming to WordPress standards. Over the course of a few years the platform has come a long way. By utilising the power of the WP_Query class, we can lists posts in any way we want.
The WP_Query class is one of the most important parts of the WordPress codebase. Among other things, it determines the query you need on any given page and pulls posts accordingly.
The shortcode ability of WordPress is extremely underrated. It enables the end user to create intricate elements with a few keystrokes while also modularizing editing tasks. In a new theme we're developing, I decided to look into adding widgets anywhere with shortcodes and it turns out that it isn't that difficult.
This tutorial is for experienced WordPress users; we will be looking at the widgets object and shortcodes without delving into too much detail about how and why they work. If you are looking for more information, I suggest reading Mastering WordPress Shortcodes and the Widgets API article in the Codex.
Read more...WordPress has been gaining a foothold in the general CMS game for a few years now but the real breakthrough was the custom post type mechanism which allows for the creation of a wide variety of content. Let's take a look at how this came to be and all the options that this great functionality offers.
In practice, custom post types have been around for a long time, more specifically since February 17, 2005, when WordPress 1.5 added support for static pages, creating the post_type database field. The wp_insert_post() function has been around since WordPress 1.0, so when the post_type field was implemented in 1.5, you could simply set the post_type value when inserting a post.
Roles have been an integral part of WordPress for quite some time now — many functions associated with managing them have been in place since version 2.0.0. Despite this longevity, they are rarely utilized which is a shame since they allow for the easy setup of custom user types (and also have the ability to micro-manage them). In this article, you'll learn everything you need to utilize user roles in WordPress and make the most of this incredible built-in functionality.
New roles usually come hand-in-hand with new capabilities. Usually, we first create a set of new capabilities, which are held by the admin (and a new role, as well). Let’s look at an example. If you have a large website, chances are you have a marketing team. This team doesn’t need to be able to edit and publish posts, but they do need access to advertising stats, trending search topics, etc. Perhaps it would also be beneficial to allow them to manage categories and comments for SEO purposes and customer satisfaction, respectively.
Read more...