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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.
Many WordPress superpowers come from its flexible data architecture that allows developers to widely customize their installations with custom post types, taxonomies and fields. However, when it comes down to its search, WordPress provides us with only one-field form that often appears inadequate and leads site admins to adopt external search systems, like Google Custom Search, or third-party plugins.
In this article I’ll show you how to provide your WordPress installation with an advanced search system allowing the user to search and retrieve content from a specific custom post type, filtering results by custom taxonomy terms and multiple custom field values.
Read more...An increasingly large number of publicly available APIs provide powerful services to expand the functionality of our applications. WordPress is an incredibly dynamic and flexible CMS that powers everything from small personal blogs to major e-commerce websites and everything in between. Part of what makes WordPress so versatile is its powerful plugin system, which makes it incredibly easy to add functionality.
We will walk through how I made GitHub Pipeline, a plugin that allows you to display data from the GitHub API on WordPress pages using shortcodes. I’ll give specific examples and code snippets, but consider the technique described here a blueprint for how to consume any service API with a plugin. We’ll start from the beginning, but a degree of familiarity with WordPress and plugin development is assumed, and we won’t spend time on beginner topics, like installing WordPress or Composer.
Read more...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...The WordPress platform is a magnet for those who want to take matters into their own hands, who want complete control over their websites and want to be independent in running them. WordPress does make it really easily to completely customize a website. If you have a bit of knowledge of HTMl, CSS and/or PHP, there is nothing you can’t change.
I mean, just compare the default themes, Twenty Fifteen and Twenty Fourteen. Hard to believe they are running on the same platform, isn’t it? Therefore, it is only natural for you to want to adapt the look of your website to fit your vision. I doubt there are many WordPress users out there who don’t constantly think about what to implement next. However, a problem arises.
Read more...Even though hooks in WordPress are amazing and everyone uses them knowingly or unknowingly, I get the impression that some advanced users and especially front-end developers still seem to avoid them. If you feel like you’ve been holding back on hooks, too, then this article will get you started. I am also going to reveal some interesting details to anyone who thinks they are familiar enough with hooks.
You’ll want to read this article especially if you’d like to: understand code snippets with hooks such as those found in forums, extend WordPress, plugins and themes without breaking updates, learn how to avoid common problems, allow others to extend your code.
Read more...While the growing adoption of responsive images cannot be ignored, it can be very difficult to employ the functionality under the constraints of a large CMS like WordPress. Although it is entirely possible to write the feature into your theme on your own, doing so is a challenging and time-consuming endeavour.
Thankfully, with the launch of WordPress 4.4, theme developers and maintainers will find it much easier to introduce responsive image functionality into their themes. In this recent launch, the RICG Responsive Images plugin has been merged into WordPress core, which means that responsive image support now comes as a default part of WordPress. Let's take a look at how the feature works, and how you can use it to get the best support for your WordPress site.
Read more...WordPress 4.4 introduced term meta data which allows you to save meta values for terms in a similar way to post meta data. This is a highly anticipated and logical addition to the WordPress system.
So far, the post and comment meta systems allowed us to add arbitrary data to posts and comments. This can be used to add ratings to comments, indicate your mood while you were writing a post, attach prices to product posts, and various other information you think is relevant to your content. As of the newest version of WordPress, meta data can now be added to terms which allows us to create features like default category thumbnails in a standardized way. This tutorial will show you how you can edit, update and retrieve these meta data for terms.
Read more...I’ve been around the block quite a bit as an SEO specialist, and in my experience website speed has emerged as an increasingly important search engine ranking factor over the last few years. Google, in particular, considers website loading speed to be very important and has made it one of the more important factors in its ranking algorithm.
How does speed affect your rankings? The truth is, as with everything concerning Google, we don’t really know — we cannot isolate that factor alone.
Read more...In WordPress, a navigation menu, a list of categories or pages, and a list of comments all share one common characteristic: They are the visual representation of tree-like data structures. This means that a relationship of superordination and subordination exists among the elements of each data tree.
There will be elements that are parents of other elements and, conversely, elements that are children of other elements. A reply to a comment depends logically on its parent, in the same way that a submenu item depends logically on the root element of the tree (or subtree).
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