WordPress is a very robust, easy to use and feature rich content management system (CMS). Everyone from stay at home bloggers to fortune 500 companies rely on it every day. Just like with most platforms, if it isn’t properly used or optimized it can turn into a big headache very quickly. In this article, Brian Jackson has compiled a list of bad web practices and recommendations on what not to do on your site, based on thousands of hours of customer interactions, support tickets, and troubleshooting he experiences on a daily basis. Picking the right web host is very important. But your decision also goes hand-in-hand with educating yourself on how to best optimize your WordPress site.
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The beauty of Jekyll is in its simplicity. While WordPress can match many of the features of Jekyll, it often comes at the cost of complexity through extra plugins or infrastructure. In this article, Mike Neumegen will take on the role of a web developer building a website for a fictional law firm. WordPress is an obvious choice for a website like this, but is it the only tool we should consider? Let’s look at a completely different way of building a website, using Jekyll.
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With a few additions, WordPress websites can accommodate a responsive image use case known as art direction. Art direction gives us the ability to design with images whose crop or composition changes at certain breakpoints. In this article, Laurie Laforest will show you how to set up a WordPress theme to support art direction in a simple manner. This method relies on WordPress’ standard administration interface as much as possible, and it requires only a single image to be uploaded.
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ProcessWire is a content management system distributed under the Mozilla Public License version 2.0 and MIT License. It is designed to tackle the issues caused by exactly this kind of opinionatedness by being non-opinionated. At its heart, it is based on a few simple core concepts and offers an exceptionally easy-to-use and powerful API to handle content of any kind. ProcessWire is a good fit if you want to develop a JSON REST API, an image-resizing app for employees, a front end for managing millions of products, a web application for displaying the financial results of companies, a simple blog, a website for a big university, or just a simple one-page informational website. Let’s get right into it!
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In this article, Emerson Loustau comprises a collection of code snippets that he uses on almost every WordPress project. What they all have in common is that they limit functionality that is either unnecessary, confusing, or unsafe. Everything that follows can be used on any site, but these tips are especially applicable for professionals making custom themes and plugins for clients. A well-designed WordPress theme should make as many design decisions as possible so the author doesn’t have to.
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Support is a crucial element that determines not only the success of the project, but also how happy everyone will be, me included. Thomas Maier constantly optimized his approach to providing support. In this article, he will share with you what he learned. When you welcome people to the community with a helpful and positive reply, you not only help them fix their issue, but strengthen the community as a whole. After all, the foundation of WordPress is communication.
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SSL is the “S” in HTTPS. It adds a layer of encryption to HTTP that ensures that the recipient is actually who they claim to be and that only authorized recipients can decrypt the message to see its contents. In this article, Emerson Loustau will show you how to upgrade your website to HTTPS to improve your website, protect users and participate in the advancement of the Internet. And it won’t cost you anything!
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The WordPress server stack has had to evolve over the years to keep up with this need for speed, therefore WordPress server stack looks quite different today than it did a few years ago. To better understand it, Carl Alexander is going to explore this new stack in detail. You’ll see how the various pieces fit together to make a WordPress website fast.Today marks a special day for WordPress. Powering many websites (and yes, Smashing Magazine is one of them), it celebrates its 13th birthday today. Happy birthday, dear WordPress! Here’s to many more!
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Anyone who has created a WordPress plugin understands the need to create configurable fields to modify how the plugin works. There are countless uses for configurable options in a plugin, and nearly as many ways to implement said options. You see, WordPress allows plugin authors to create their own markup within their settings pages. As a side effect, settings pages can vary greatly between plugins.
In this article we are going to go over three common ways you can make your plugin configurable. We will start by creating a settings page and create our fields using the default WordPress Settings API. I will then walk you through how to set up your fields with a custom handler. Finally, I will show you how to integrate a great configurable fields plugin Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) into your own plugin.
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In this article, Carlo Daniele will show you how to provide your WordPress installation with an advanced search system allowing the user to search and retrieve content from a specific custom post type, filtering results by custom taxonomy terms and multiple custom field values. He will cover both a theoretical introduction to handling user requests and a concrete application of that theory, particularly, building an advanced search system.
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