You know, we use ad-blockers as well. We gotta keep those servers running though. Did you know that we publish useful books and run friendly conferences — crafted for pros like yourself? E.g. our upcoming SmashingConf Barcelona, dedicated to smart front-end techniques and design patterns.
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.
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).
Read more...The command-line interface has always been popular in the world of developers, because it provides tools that boost productivity and speed up the development process. At first sight, it might seem hard to believe that using the command line to perform certain tasks is getting easier than using a graphical interface. The purpose of this article is to clear up your doubts about that, at least concerning WordPress tasks.
WordPress provides a graphical user interface for every administrative task, and this has helped to make it the most popular content management system on the web. But in terms of productivity, working with the command line enables you to accomplish many such tasks more efficiently and quickly.
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...If you've worked with WordPress for a while, you may have tried your hand at writing a plugin. Many developers will start creating plugins to enhance a custom theme or to modularize their code. Eventually, though, you may want to distribute your plugin to a wider audience.
While you always have the option to use the WordPress Subversion repository, there may be instances where you prefer to host a plugin yourself. Perhaps you are offering your users a premium plugin. Maybe you need a way to keep your client's code in sync across multiple sites. It could simply be that you want to use a Git workflow instead of Subversion. Whatever the reason, this tutorial will show you how to set up a GitHub repository to push updates to your plugin, wherever it resides.
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...I like to think of WordPress as the gateway drug of web development. Many people who get started using the platform are initially merely looking for a comfortable (and free) way to create a simple website. Some Googling and consultation of the WordPress Codex later, it's done and that should be it. Kind of like "I'm just going to try it once."
However, a good chunk of users don't stop there. Instead, they get hooked. Come up with more ideas. Experiment. Try out new plugins. Discover Firebug. Boom. Soon there is no turning back. Does that sound like your story? As a WordPress user it is only natural to want more and more control over your website. To crave custom design, custom functionality, custom everything.
Read more...Building and maintaining a WordPress plugin can be a daunting task. The bigger the codebase, the harder it is to keep track of all the working parts and their relationship to one another. And you can add to that the limitations imposed by working in an antiquated version of PHP, 5.2.
In this article we will explore an alternative way of developing WordPress plugins, using the lessons learned from the greater PHP community, the world outside WordPress. We will walk through the steps of creating a plugin and investigate the use of autoloading and a plugin container.
Read more...