Posts contained in the “Using WordPress” category:

WordPress is easy to use and well documented. These tutorials provide a visual guide to some of WordPress’s less common functions and to those which you really need to see in action to fully understand.

Controlling WordPress Post Revisions

If you’re familiar with wiki software such as MediaWiki or DokuWiki, you’re probably aware that most wiki software keeps a copy of every single revision made to a wiki article. If you’re not familiar with that feature, go to any random article on Wikipedia (which runs on MediaWiki), and click on the “View History” tab …read more…

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…

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…

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…

How Many WordPress Plugin Combinations are Possible?

I answered a question on the Graphene Neo Mobile theme about WordPress plugins, which then made me think about math, which then made me do math. Here’s the silly thing: I tweeted about it, forgetting that the forum is a private one. So it’s not very useful. But here’s the original query: Does anyone know …read more…

Create WordPress Shortcodes

In my earlier post about template parameters in MediaWiki, I lamented that WordPress doesn’t have a similar mechanism. Actually it sort of does: it has shortcodes. Shortcodes pretty much do what a MediaWiki template does, in that they allow you to easily add content to a post or page. You can even pass variables, which …read more…

Create a Static Front Page in WordPress — A Visual Guide

Creating a static front page in WordPress is easy, but I often encounter people who have trouble doing it. Perhaps the instructions in the Codex aren’t very visual, or all the talk about theme development on the same page puts them off. In any case, here is a quick, visual guide to creating a static …read more…

Add CSS Classes to Images in WordPress

Not many people realize how easy it is to control the appearance of selected images in WordPress by adding a CSS class to the image, but this is a very powerful tool to control the appearance of your website. For example, WordPress automatically adds a border around all images. Here’s an example: If you want …read more…