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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 Marcus Couch. Subscribe to the RSS-Feed.
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...Multisite is a powerful new feature that arrived with the release of WordPress 3.0. It allows website managers to host multiple independent websites with a single installation of WordPress. Although each “website” in a network is independent, there are many ways to share settings, code and content throughout the entire network.
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been developing themes and plugins for a WordPress Multisite-powered content network. During that time I’ve learned many powerful tips and tricks unique to Multisite. This guide will introduce you to a few Multisite-specific functions, along with real-world programming examples that you can begin using today. Hopefully, it will open your eyes to a few of the new possibilities available in Multisite.
Read more...Forums have been around forever, so it should come as no surprise that several plugins for the popular publishing platform WordPress provide this feature, as well as support for integrating other forum software. One project, however, has a special place in the WordPress community, and that is bbPress. This is the software created by WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg, as a lightweight system for the Wordpress.org support forums. In true open-source fashion, the bbPress project was born (at bbpress.org, of course) as a lightweight standalone alternative for forums.
The problem is that the project never really kept up the pace; and while the WordPress community wanted to use it, and bbPress saw some promising spurts of development, it never really caught up to the alternatives. Most of us who needed a forum went either with a plugin alternative that integrated perfectly or with forum software such as Vanilla.
Read more...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.
This increase in naughty behavior, however, has spurred developers to write better code, and framework vendors have implemented many functions to help coders in their battle against the dark side.
Read more...Creating WordPress tutorials is a fantastic way to help build the WordPress community and to increase your Web traffic. That’s no secret. Just Google “wordpress tutorial” and you’ll see hundreds of results. The complete novice will find scores of well-written tutorials clearly demonstrating the basics of the WordPress dashboard and of activating the default template, in simple jargon-free language.
Unfortunately, after the first few “Hello World!” tutorials, they are in for a bit of a learning curve. Suddenly, the guides start to skip a lot of details, assuming that the reader “already knows this stuff.” Others are simply written exclusively for advanced WordPress users. So, where does a new developer go after square one?
Read more...WordPress list tables are a very common element of the WordPress admin interface but creating one of those tables is not really an intuitive thing to do when you haven’t done it before. In this article, we’ll see how to generate some native admin tables the right way.
In this article, we’ll see how WordPress provides functionality that can be used to generate native admin tables. We’ll look at a typical WordPress table and its different components and show how to implement it the right way.
Read more...When I took my first steps into the WordPress theme arena, I didn’t know much about it. I wandered blindly into the business, not knowing whether I was doing things correctly. Over time, through trial and error and making rookie mistakes, I learned some valuable lessons and gained important insights. To save you from going down the same winding path, I’ll share some of the important takeaways that I’ve learned so far, like how to gain a solid user base, what to include in your themes and, most importantly, what to leave out.
You could build the best WordPress theme in the world, but it won’t matter unless people know about it and use it. One of the smartest things I did when starting my theme business was to release a free theme. It took a while for it to gain traction, but things took off once it got some attention from being featured on other websites. Consumers are willing to download a free theme from the new kid on the block and try it out because hardly any financial risk is involved.
Read more...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. WordPress users are in luck, since WordPress already has easy-to-use and extendable functions to give you a lot of power and flexibility in handling your website’s emails.
In order to create our own system, we will be doing four things. First, we will create a nice email template to use. We will then modify the mailer function so that it uses our new custom template. We will then modify the actual text of some of the built-in emails. Then we will proceed to hook our own emails into different events in order to send some custom emails. Let’s get started!
Read more...Using tabs in a user interface can help you better organize content, so it’s only natural that WordPress themes that have a lot of options would benefit from tabs on their settings page. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a tabbed settings page, and you’ll get to download a WordPress theme that implements the code.
To get a quick grasp of the tabs we’ll be creating, go to Appearance/Themes in the WordPress admin area. You will find two tabs there: “Manage Themes” and “Install Themes.” When you click on one, the content changes and the tab’s title is highlighted.
In this post we release yet another freebie: the Balita WordPress theme, a theme dedicated to shops that sell products for children. The theme was designed by Tokokoo and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. As usual, the theme is absolutely free to use for both private and commerical projects.
Not many theme providers have produced e-commerce themes for baby and toddler products. For you who have been working in this particular market niche for some time or are about to start, this Balita e-commerce theme is a great opportunity for you. Using such bright and cheerful pantone colors that suit this clothes department (baby/toddler products), this Balita e-commerce theme will surely attract more and more customers to your online store.
Read more...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.
While there are a number of ways to use AJAX in Wordpress = and all are correct in the loose sense of the word - there is a method which you should be using since WordPress supports it, it is future proof, very logical, and gives you numerous options right out of the box.
Read more...