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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.
A lot of tools enable us to distribute a website’s content, but when we need to promptly reach a target group, an email notification system might be the best option. If your website is not frequently updated, you could notify all subscribers each time a post is published. However, if it’s updated frequently or it covers several topics, you could filter subscribers before mailing them.
If you opt for the latter, you could set up a user meta field that stores a bit of information to identify the subscribers to be notified. The same bit of information would label the posts you’re publishing. Depending on the website’s architecture, you could store the metadata in a category, a tag, a custom taxonomy or a custom field. In this article we’ll show you how to let your website’s subscribers decide when they want notifications, and linked to a particular location.
Read more...WordPress does some pretty amazing things out of the box. It handles content management as well as any other open-source solution out there — and better than many commercial solutions. One of the best attributes of WordPress is its ease of use. It’s easy because there’s not a significant amount of bloat with endless bells and whistles that steepen the learning curve.
On the flip side, some might find WordPress a little… well, light. It does a lot, but not quite enough. If you find yourself hacking WordPress to do the things you wish it would do, then the chances are high that this article is for you. WordPress can be easily extended to fit the requirements of a custom data architecture. We’re going to explore the process of registering new data types in a fully compliant manner.
Read more...If I were to ask you what the least used default page type in WordPress is, chances are you’d say the archive template. Or, more likely, you’d probably not even think of the archive template at all — that’s how unpopular it is. The reason is simple. As great as WordPress is, the standard way in which it approaches the archive is far from user-friendly.
Let’s fix that today! Let’s build an archive page for WordPress that’s actually useful. The best part is that you will be able to use it with any modern WordPress theme installed on your website at the moment.
Read more...I recently teamed up with Mat Marquis of the Responsive Images Community Group to help integrate responsive images into the WordPress platform. We decided to refactor a plugin that I had built several months ago, hoping that it would lead to a more useable and performant solution.
After months of pull requests, conversations on Slack and help from WordPress’ core team, we’re finally ready to share what we’ve been working on. You can download and install RICG Responsive Images from WordPress’ plugin directory, while keeping track of our development progress on GitHub.
Read more...Countless algorithms for encrypting data exist in computer science. One of the lesser known and less common encryptions is ROT13, a derivative of the Caesar cypher encryption technique.
In this tutorial, we’ll learn about ROT13 encryption and how it works. We’ll see how text (or strings) can be programmatically encoded in ROT13 using PHP. Finally, we’ll code a WordPress plugin that scans a post for blacklisted words and replaces any in ROT13 encryption.
Read more...Economists have taught us that a lot of choice is not always a good thing. Having many options can lead to “analysis paralysis” and a feeling of being overwhelmed, due to the increased effort required and the level of uncertainty in making the right choice.
With a nearly unlimited pool of WordPress themes to choose from, it becomes so easy to feel overwhelmed and resort to inaction or choosing a low-quality theme. In cases where you have a lot of options, it pays to know exactly what you need. [Content Care Nov/02/2016]
Read more...These days you have an awful lot of options for hosting your website, so many that it’s easy to get lost. How much should you pay? Is support important to you, or are you a tinkerer who likes to do your own thing?
Put in different terms, are you a master chef who can cook a delicious meal with the right assortment of ingredients, or would you rather go to a nice restaurant and just sit back and enjoy the experience?
Let’s dive in.
Read more...Most WordPress users are familiar with tags and categories and with how to use them to organize their blog posts. If you use custom post types in WordPress, you might need to organize them like categories and tags. Categories and tags are examples of taxonomies, and WordPress allows you to create as many custom taxonomies as you want. These custom taxonomies operate like categories or tags, but are separate.
In this tutorial, we’ll explain custom taxonomies and how to create them. We’ll also go over which template files in a WordPress theme control the archives of built-in and custom taxonomies, and some advanced techniques for customizing the behavior of taxonomy archives.
Read more...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!
Read more...A few months ago, I ran an experiment to see how much faster I could make one of my websites in less than two hours of work. After installing a handful of WordPress plugins and fixing a few simple errors, I had improved the website’s loading speed from 1.61 seconds to 583 milliseconds. That’s a 70.39% improvement, without having made any visual changes to the website.
According to a 2009 Akamai study, 47% of visitors expect a page to load in under 2 seconds, and 57% of visitors will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Since this study, no shortage of case studies have confirmed that loading time affects sales.
Read more...“Danger: malware ahead!” and “This website may harm your computer” are the two sentences that I hate most and that I don’t want any of my clients to see when they open their website. If you have seen any of them on your own website, then I’ll bet you still remember your panic attack and how you struggled to get your website up and running ASAP.
Many great articles show how to prevent a website from being hacked. Unfortunately, unless you take it offline, your website is not and will never be completely unhackable. Don’t get me wrong, you still need to take preventive measures and regularly improve your website’s security; however, responding accordingly if your website does get hacked is equally important. In this article, we’ll provide a simple seven-step disaster-recovery plan for WordPress, which you can follow in case of an emergency. We’ll illustrate it with a real hack and specific commands that you can use when analyzing and cleaning the website.
Read more...When people talk about WordPress security, file permissions and ownership are usually the last thing on their minds. Installing security plugins is a good practice and a must for every WordPress website. However, if your file-system permissions aren’t set up correctly, most of your security measures could be easily bypassed by intruders.
Permissions and ownership are quite important in WordPress installations. Setting these up properly on your Web server should be the first thing you do after installing WordPress. Having the wrong set of permissions could cause fatal errors that stop your website dead. Wrong permissions can also compromise your website and make it prone to attacks.
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