Hello, I’m Daniel and I make things for the web. I’m the CTO at Kinsta and I write for a number of amazing publications like Smashing Magazine and WPMU DEV. In my spare time you’ll find me playing board games or planning the next amazing office game like the not-at-all-destructive Megaball.
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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Today, we’ll delve into the gaping maw of knowledge that is the standards and practices of WordPress coding. By the end of this article, you should be familiar with the guidelines and the underlying approach. With some practice, you will be able to adhere to the rules and make educated guesses about the less regulated corners of the specifications.
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If you’ve ever tried working with, coding for or just thinking about anything to do with events, you know they are a total nightmare in every possible way.
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Please notice that this article doesn’t provide production code to use in your live websites. Make sure to read the full article and study more on PHP security before using the code listed in this article.
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Security has become a foremost concern on the Web in the past few years. Hackers have always been around, but with the increase in computer literacy and the ease of access to virtually any data, the problem has increased exponentially. It is now rare for a new website to not get comment spam within days of its release, even if it is not promoted at all.
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Whatever type of website you operate, its success will probably hinge on your interaction with your audience. If executed well, one of the most effective tools can be a simple email.
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In the last few years AJAX has creeped into websites and has slowly become THE way to create dynamic, user friendly and responsive websites. AJAX is the technology that lets you update the contents of a page without actually having to reload it in a browser. For example, Google Docs utilizes this technology when saving your work every few minutes. This article has been reviewed and updated on July 14, 2017.
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If you’re into WordPress development, you can’t ignore hooks for long before you have to delve into them head on. Modifying WordPress core files is a big no-no, so whenever you want to change existing functionality or create new functionality, you will have to turn to hooks.
In this article, I would like to dispel some of the confusion around hooks, because not only are they the way to code in WordPress, but they also teach us a great design pattern for development in general. Explaining this in depth will take a bit of time, but bear with me: by the end, you’ll be able to jumble hooks around like a pro.
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WordPress plugins are PHP scripts that alter your website. The changes could be anything from the simplest tweak in the header to a more drastic makeover.
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In this article, Daniel Pataki will explain how to get started with the $wpdb class, how to retrieve data from your WordPress database and how to run more advanced queries which are tailored to your particular needs, in order to update or delete something in the database, and generally make your website more efficient.
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With the advent of sophisticated and user-friendly content management systems like WordPress, textual content has become increasingly easier to manage. The architecture of these systems aims to deliver a well-formed code foundation; this means that if you are a good writer, then your content will be just as awesome as the structure and quality of the code that runs it.
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