Blog Archive

Install WordPress Plugins from a Zip File

I often work with people who are completely new to WordPress, or to using a CMS in general. As a result, I’ve decided to put together a series of short video tutorials covering some of the more basic aspects of WordPress. Today, we learn how to install plugins from a zip file. If there is …read more…

Install WordPress Plugins from the Dashboard

I often work with people who are completely new to WordPress, or to using a CMS in general. As a result, I’ve decided to put together a series of short video tutorials covering some of the more basic aspects of WordPress. Today, we learn how to install plugins. Next time: installing plugins via a .zip …read more…

Create Custom Menus in WordPress Redux

In many themes, a “default menu” of your pages will show up somewhere around the top of your website. Depending on the menu’s functions, you may or may not have any control over how these pages appear and parent pages may not show child pages as a drop-down. A custom menu is just that: a …read more…

Creating Responsive Forms — An Introduction to Mobile Design

People are increasingly accessing the web on a mobile device. In fact, now that Google has begun using mobile-friendliness to rank sites, it’s more important than ever to add mobile stylesheets to websites you design. Because the desktop websites are more complex than mobile websites, it makes sense to design for mobile first, and then design …read more…

Make WordPress Post Formats All They Can Be

There is a movement afoot to remove post formats from the WordPress core. As Morten Rand-Hendriksen writes in this Trac ticket, it appears the feature has largely been left to pasture and implementation across themes is at best spotty and inconsistent. In other words, because so few themes use them, we should get ride of them. …read more…

WordPress Settings API Cheat Sheet

It took me longer than it should have to figure out the WordPress Settings API, largely because there are certain parameter names that must match if things are to work properly. However, after making good use of the Google and studying the WordPress Codex extensively, I finally figured it out. Two really helpful tutorials were: …read more…

DreamObjects Backups

I’ve been with a number of hosts over the years, but I have been with DreamHost the longest. They recently rolled out DreamObjects, which is their version of cloud-based storage. I tried it out (the price was right), but really couldn’t see myself using it, until I discovered the DreamObjects Backup plugin by Ipstenu. In …read more…

Useful WordPress Plugins

One of the great things about WordPress is that it is so easily extensible my means of plugins. Need to add a contact form, but don’t know how to code one? Grab a contact form plugin. Need to add some advertising to your site, but your theme doesn’t offer that option? Grab a plugin. In …read more…

Subversion on Windows: A TortoiseSVN Workflow

Although I like Macs and I love Ubuntu, I spend most of my time in a Windows environment, because most of the people I work with use Windows. I need to see what they see and see it how they see it. So, Windows it is. Windows is not a bad place to do web …read more…

Message Blocks WordPress Plugin

I have just submitted a new plugin to the WordPress plugin repository. It allows you to quickly and easily add message blocks to highlight important information for your readers. It does so by way of two drop-down menus in the TinyMCE toolbar: Since the best way to see how this works is to see the …read more…