CategoryWordPress

January 21, 2016 — WordPress does make it really easily to completely customize a website. Unfortunately, any modifications made to a theme will be lost once the theme is updated by the developer — which is also bad for security. A much better idea is to use a child theme. This allows you to make any number of changes to a website without touching any of the original theme files. In this article, Nick Schäferhoff will take a detailed look at what WordPress child themes are, how to create them and how to use them to customize your website — the right way. Read more…

January 5, 2016 — Whenever you want to change existing or create new functionality in WordPress theme and development, you will have to turn to hooks. Learning hooks is like studying law: you don’t need to know all of the statements and paragraphs, but simply where to find them. In this article, Thomas Maier will show you how to avoid common problems, how to allow others to extend your code, and all you need to setup Hook Routines and get ready to have a better experience developing for Wordpress. Read more…

December 24, 2015 — Employing the functionality under the constraints of a large CMS like WordPress, can be very difficult to do, since the growing adoption of responsive images cannot be ignored. 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 article, Tim Evko will 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…

December 9, 2015 — Term meta data allows you to save meta values for terms in a similar way to post meta data. 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. Thomas Maier knows many projects that already save meta information for custom taxonomies. A lot of them are probably going to update and use the new meta data logic once WordPress 4.4 is widely used. In this tutorial, Thomas will show you how you can edit, update and retrieve these meta data for terms. Read more…

November 10, 2015 — When we shop for a theme, do we get what’s on the tin? Some themes aren’t as fast as what is advertised on the demo websites. When running small tests on themes for other CMS’, like Joomla, Philip Blomsterberg had the same findings. The theme he started out with seemed very good, offering speeds that were quite good, especially for a news website or portal. He tested the theme with demo content; however, regardless of how hard he tried, speeds and scores never reached those on the vendor’s website. This led him to believe that theme vendors sometimes set up demos to make their websites appear faster than they really are. Read more…

October 14, 2015 — Starting with version 2.1, WordPress provides the Walker abstract class, with the specific function of traversing these tree-like data structures. But an abstract class does not produce any output by itself. It has to be extended with a concrete child class that builds the HTML bricks for specific lists of items. In this article, Carlo Daniele will explore some of the most common uses of the Walker class. Note, however, that the following examples do not cover all possible applications and alternative ways to take advantage of the class. But you’ll discover more just by making use of your imagination and your skills as a programmer. Read more…

September 24, 2015 — 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. In this tutorial, Konstantinos Kouratoras will describe the benefits of using and extending WP-CLI, and he will present several advanced commands to make your life easier when working with WordPress. Read more…

September 5, 2015 — Creating your own field is actually a pretty simple matter. In this article Daniel Pataki will show you how you can extend ACF by adding your own controls to tailor the experience to your needs. If you want to add elaborate JavaScript to make things as user-friendly as possible, that’s all up to you – ACF supports it nicely. You can use a bunch of methods to play around with values and fields and much more. Browse through the template file for more information. Read more…

August 11, 2015 — In this tutorial, Matthew Ray will show you how to set up a GitHub repository to push updates to your plugin, wherever it resides. 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. After reading this, you should be able to update your plugin by clicking the “Update now” button on the plugins page! Read more…

June 26, 2015 — 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. In this article, Daniel Pataki will show you that by using WordPress, highly interactive prototypes with great visuals are not at all that difficult to make. While all this seems complex, beginners should be able to follow along easily, including the “create your own server” section, which is a cinch! Read more…