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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 Daniel Pataki. Subscribe to the RSS-Feed.
“Mobile Web design.” Unless you’ve been hiding under a bush for the last 18 months, you’ll know that it’s one of the hottest topics in the industry at the moment. Barely a week goes by without new tips being unveiled to help us hone our skills in making websites work as well — and as fast — as possible on mobile devices.
Here are four ways to make your WordPress blog or website mobile-friendly, ranging from the quick and dirty to the complex but potentially very beautiful. As well as outlining the pros and cons of these methods, we’ll include information on plugins that will help without actually doing all the work for you, and we’ll provide some code that you can use for a responsive design.
Read more...In this article, the first in our WordPress “Best of” series, we’ll go over WordPress newspaper themes. We’ll bring you the 30 best WordPress newspaper themes, as well as two news-aggregator themes. We haven't included “news magazine” themes, but we’ll get to those in our upcoming article on magazine-style themes.
The themes are categorized a bit differently than what you may be used to. The line between magazine and newspaper themes is blurry, but we’ve tried to make that distinction. For our purposes, magazine themes look something like Smashing Magazine, whereas newspaper themes look like the Daily Telegraph, New York Times and so on.
Read more...In this article, we take a break from some of the more advanced ways to customize WordPress, and share some super-easy customization techniques for the WordPress Admin area.
If you're just getting started with WordPress, or have been running with default functionality for a while and now want to dig in with some useful and easy ways to customize your WordPress site, a great place to start is the WordPress Admin area, or backend. One of the great things about WordPress is that each part of the backend is easily customized using simple PHP functions.
In this article, you'll learn how to customize the login page with your own logo, add new widgets to the dashboard, add custom content to the admin footer, make it easier to get in and out of the Admin area, and more. When combined, these techniques can improve branding, accessibility, and usability of your WordPress-powered site.
Read more...All over the world people are getting together to talk about WordPress. Developers, designers, bloggers, writers, small-business owners, software engineers, system admins, mobile developers, BuddyPress developers, SEO experts, consultants, people ranging from absolute beginners to WordPress ninjas, and everyone in between.
Pretty much anyone who has anything to do with WordPress is coming to volunteer-organized events called WordCamps.
Read more...If you have created websites or blogs, then you need no introduction to WordPress, one of the most popular content management systems (CMS). WordPress powers millions of websites, for individuals as well as big companies. Why is it so successful?
Apart from its ease of use and the availability of themes and plugins, WordPress can be easily modified to include custom features and functions. Hooks and filters are built into the CMS that allow you to add functionality or strip out something that is not required.
Read more...WordPress shortcodes were introduced in version 2.5 and since then have proved to be one of the most useful features. The average user acting as editor has the ability to publish dynamic content using macros, without the need for programming skills.
When a shortcode is inserted in a WordPress post or page, it is replaced with some other content. In other words, we instruct WordPress to find the macro that is in square brackets ([]) and replace it with the appropriate dynamic content, which is produced by a PHP function.
If you run an online magazine, most of your readers will never go through your archive, even if you design a neat archive page. It’s not you; it’s just that going through archives is not very popular these days. So, how do you actually make readers dig in without forcing them? How do you invite them to (re)read in a way that’s not boring? How do you make your WordPress magazine more interactive?
Call it recycling if you like, but random redirection doesn’t have to be about retreading familiar territory. Through random redirection, you offer readers a chance to hop randomly through your posts and discover content that they somehow missed. The concept really is simple. All you have to do is create a hyperlink — named, say, “Random article” — that when clicked will redirect the reader to a randomly pulled article.
Read more...In a post on her blog last year, WordPress designer, business woman and author, Lisa Sabin Wilson, talked about how thankful she is to be part of the WordPress economy. It's an economy that thousands of people, the world over, are benefiting from (including me!). It is an economy built on free, open source software.
In this article, I'm going to talk to people who are active in the WordPress economy, people from all over the globe. It's amazing to see how even in the past few years the economy around WordPress has grown, and what new, innovative, enterprises it's composed of.
Read more...In a post on her blog last year, WordPress designer, business woman and author Lisa Sabin Wilson, talked about how thankful she is to be part of the WordPress economy. It's an economy that thousands of people, the world over, are benefiting from (including me!). It is an economy built on free, open source software. In this article I'm going to talk to people who are active in the WordPress economy, people from all over the globe. It's amazing to see how even in the past few years the economy around WordPress has grown, and what new, innovative, enterprises it's composed of.
Read more...