Going to WordCamp Europe just isn’t worth it. There are too many people, the commute is huge (Vancouver to Vienna!) and the whole trip is just way more expensive than it’s actually worth. At least, that’s what I thought when I was initially prodded to go. I’m ashamed to admit I almost didn’t go this year because all of the …
Q&A: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About WordPress Multisite Answered
If you’re a keen follower of this blog, you’ll have noticed my series of posts on WordPress Multisite a few weeks ago. And if you’re learning about Multisite, you may have signed up to my Academy course on the subject. The comments, questions and discussions that the courses and posts have generated have been awesome, to say the least. Dozens of …
8 Completely Free Ways to Steal WPMU DEV’s WordPress SuperPowers
When I started out in WordPress I was broke. Not just broke, broke-ass. Newly married, new baby, $6.57 in the bank, no paycheck coming in and starting a new online business. I needed to start and grow a site. I needed the support of a community. I needed it all at top quality. And I needed it all completely for …
How to Add a Hello Bar to Your WordPress Site (and Why Everyone is Doing It)
Want to boost your conversion rates? That’s what hello bars are all about. Whether you want to add email subscribers, advertise special deals, drive traffic to a landing page, or make a site-wide announcement, hello bars get the job done. What are hello bars? Hello bars, more generically called notification bars, are the bars added to either the top or …
WordPress Development for Intermediate Users: Custom Fields and Metadata
The default Page and Post content types in WordPress are enough for many websites, but if you really want to harness the powers of WordPress as a CMS it’s time to start learning about custom fields and metadata. This is the sixth post in our WordPress Development for Intermediate Users series. This series follows on from our popular WordPress Development …
25 Top-Rated Plugins for Winning the Fight Against WordPress Spam
There’s been a huge explosion in hacking attempts involving spam in recent months, including everything from exploiting XSS, brute force, XML-RPC, CSRF, and DDoS. Unfortunately, spam is a fact of life when you have a WordPress website. Since the CMS is so popular, it naturally attracts an increased number of hacking attempts since there are more sites to infect than …
How to Create Responsive Tables in WordPress That Don’t Suck
HTML tables, once commonly used for webpage layouts, are now a layout headache for many web designers. Tables often work best with fixed widths, which means they can wreak havoc on otherwise pixel-perfect responsive website designs. So what’s a WordPresser to do? The first thing to do with tables is to use them sparingly. Tables should be used for tabular …
How to Safely Change Your Permalink Structure Without Killing Your SERP Rank
Are you feeling stuck with your site’s current permalink structure? Are you terrified of changing it for fear of what Google might think? Fear not. This is a solvable problem. Let’s sort it out. Setting up pretty permalinks is usually one of the first things that happens when a new WordPress website is set up. Hopefully, some forethought goes into …
24 Must-Do Checks Before Launching Your WordPress Website
Website development can often be a lengthy and arduous process, especially if you’re creating it for someone who doesn’t have a clear vision of what they want. That’s why the urge to rush a site launch can be so tempting. While some developers might think, “If I push it live, we can just work out the last remaining kinks afterwards,” …
WordPress Development for Intermediate Users: Queries and Loops
The WordPress loop is a very powerful piece of code. You use it to access the database, find content based on given criteria, and then output that content in whatever way you need to. This is the fifth post in our WordPress Development for Intermediate Users series. This series follows on from our popular WordPress Development for Beginners tutorials, which …