Tag: WordPress (Page 139 of 220)

Articles, tips, and resources for WordPress-based development.

Using Tap WordPress Hosting (and a Giveaway!)

February 3, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to running this blog, I’m not nearly as technical as some of my peers.

In fact, I try to keep the hosting environment has much of a black box as possible. I want to be able to focus on blogging – not tweaking servers, configuring settings, dealing with staging environments, caching, CDNs, and all that normally comes with major projects.

That isn’t to say I don’t do that for the projects on which I work – there’s a time and a place for everything – but my goal for this site is to focus on blogging. To that end, when it comes to hosting, I don’t look for something that offers the greatest feature set with all of the fancy knobs to turn and tweaks to make.

Instead, I look for something that works well, that performs quickly out-of-the-box, that has great support (when needed), that grants me S/FTP access to my files, and then let’s me get on with blogging with minimal hassle.

Tap WordPress Hosting

For the past few months, I’ve been trying out Tap WordPress Hosting and, generally speaking, I’ve been really impressed.

A Limited Feature Set of WordPress Themes

February 2, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the challenges that comes with building WordPress themes is that there’s this disposition that we have to want to make sure that for every option in the backend, we have a corresponding option for the feature in the front end.

For example, does the WordPress dashboard support multi-level menus? Yes. We look at that and think that our themes need to support multi-level menus. Same goes for several other options. But why is that?

WordPress is a content management system and not all content is made the same.

The Timeless WordPress Theme Design

January 28, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

As a disclaimer, this entire post is written purely from the perspective of a developer. I’m not a designer, I’ve never claimed to be, I never will claim to be, and any type of design that I do is usually based around principles and foundations and guidelines that I’ve read and followed elsewhere on the web.

With that said, there’s been interesting conversations around some of the more popular design types as of late – some that are already retired, some that are still around, and some that are still beginning to emerge.

This includes trends such as Skeumorphic Design, Flat Design, and Material Design. And the reason I bring them up is because, at some point or another, we’ve seen these take their place (or beginning to take place) within the context of WordPress themes.

Why I Back Post Status

January 27, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’ve been around the WordPress journalism / blogosphere / whatever-you-want-to-call-it enough, then you’ve likely seen the rise and fall of several news sites. Some of them were great and then went completely dark; others have been slowly going on the up and up.

Right now, I can definitively say that my two favorite journalism sites for WordPress are WP Tavern and Post Status. I’ve gotta give props to the Tavern because they’ve been around for quite a while, and just before we thought they were going to have to close their doors, they ended up receiving corporate backing.

The WordPress Tavern

Good news for us, right? One thing that makes me a little skeptical about that is that it can occasionally influence how stories are written but, to be fair, that doesn’t seem to be the case with The Tavern.

But then this past week, Brian Krogsgard introduced the new premium subscription service for Post Status. I’m a fan and I think this is something that many of us need to think critically about before joining.

How To Find Posts Without Meta Data

January 26, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’ve been working on a very simple plugin lately – more of which I’ll talk about next month – that’s serving as a demo for a larger project that I’ve been working on.

In short, the plugin gives editors the ability to exclude posts from the main index feed of the WordPress blog. This means that the blog post is still accessible via direct URL, but it won’t show up in the main feed of the site.

This is achieved by the following process:

Introduce a meta box into the post editor dashboard
Add a check box that gives the user the ability to check whether or not to exclude the post
Use a hook to exclude those posts form the dashboard

It sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?