Ever wanted to do something in WordPress but just wasn’t sure how? In my experience this happens quite often, mostly with people new to WordPress. But, even the experts run into trouble sometimes. Today I thought I’d start a series of posts which will aim to explain how to do certain things in WordPress. Hopefully this will cover anything from quick tips and simple little functions, all the way up to more complex custom code and the like. So, stick around and you just might learn something. 😉 I think I’ll kick off the series with a couple simple ones… Why isn’t this plugin working with my theme? This is probably one of the most common issues I read about regarding WordPress. Sometimes even more experienced WPers can get this one wrong. Now, I’m not saying this is the solution to all problems between plugins and themes. Its just that […]
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WordPress rocks! (Most of the time…) Sometimes though it can make you want to pull your hair out. Today I want to talk about that. Those times when you wish you could take a machete to it. I’ve had my share of such situations several times in the past. Now, I don’t mean plugins, or themes, or anything external like that. I mean the core of WordPress itself. Sometimes it seems WordPress just comes up short. It can be anything from a simple little inconvenience to a total show-stopper. I think hearing peoples gripes about WordPress would be a nice contrast to the almost constant good things you hear about it. It might also help to get more attention on the issues. Don’t forget that someone may come across this post, read a gripe, and possibly provide a solution. We can all help each other! So, lets get it started… One […]
[Continue Reading...]We continue our Best-Of Series today with download managers. Or, plugins for WordPress that will allow you to provide various files to your website visitors for download. Over the years I’ve gone through many. Everyone will have a different preference but, here is a list of my top plugins for managing downloads with WordPress… Drain Hole I’ve been using Drain Hole on my personal site to serve up my files for a couple years now. So far it is the best download manager plugin I’ve been able to find. It does everything it advertises and does it well. I’ve not yet had any issues with this plugin. I highly recommend it! WP-DownloadManager Before I found Drain Hole I used WP-DownloadManager exclusively. It did what I wanted and didn’t seem to have many problems. It has the features most would expect in such a plugin. It also has some you might […]
[Continue Reading...]Here’s a quick one: If you had access to a desktop application that could connect to your WordPress site and allow you to manage it, like the web-based control panel currently allows, would you use it? Would You Use a WordPress Desktop Application?(answers) If you choose “depends”, let me know why in the comments. Also, feel free to put in your opinions no matter what you choose. What would such an application need to be able to do? Everything the web-based app can do? Just a subset of the features? What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!
[Continue Reading...]As a plugin developer I find the hardest part of the process to be coming up with new ideas that I can turn into a plugin. Sure, there are tons of places out there that list lots of ideas but, I’ve found that it’s hard to find a good idea that will actually make a useful plugin which will appeal to a large audience. Most ideas that are out there floating around are very specific and some would only be useful to only a very select few. I’ve been searching non-stop for the better part of a month now and have yet to come across an idea that would actually be very useful and also feasible. I want something that I can complete in a decent amount of time and would also leave room for lots of improvement. So, today I’m here to ask you, the user, what you want. […]
[Continue Reading...]Over the years I’ve tried pretty much every contact form plugin available for WordPress. Some were pretty bad, some were almost there, and a select few really shined. Today I’m going to list those few that really do the contact form job right. Lets begin… Contact Me Widget I really love the Contact Me Widget. I think this plugin takes the simple contact form to a whole new level. Not only does it have a contact form but also an IM function and a place to put all your other contact info. All in one neat little package. Do note though that this plugin relies on the ContactMeButton.com service. So, you may not want to depend on it as the sole option for your visitors to get in contact with you. If the ContactMeButton site were to go down or something, well… I’m sure you can imagine plenty of horrible […]
[Continue Reading...]When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, there are a slew of options out there. Some good and some not so good. But today I want to talk about the best options out there for WordPress. There are many. But I’m going to try to sift through the cruft to find the truly great tools that are available. Here we go… All In One SEO Pack I suppose the most obvious plugin is the All In One SEO Pack. According to statistics it is the most popular plugin in the whole WordPress Extend repository. It has a robust feature set. Of all the SEO-related WordPress plugins I have tried it is, in my opinion, the best there currently is. The plugin allows you to optimize various things in WordPress for search engines including your site title, your keywords, page titles, and much more. One of the features I like the […]
[Continue Reading...]Social Bookmarking; we’re all guilty of it these days. But where does WordPress fit into it? If you’ve done any amount of WordPress plugin browsing within the last few years you’ve undoubtedly come across at least one or two so-called social bookmarking plugins. You can find them on an increasingly large amount of websites all across the web. Today I want to talk about the best of the best. The best plugins I’ve found for social bookmarking with WordPress. Sociable I chose Sociable as my #1 social bookmarking plugin because of its utter simplicity and easy control over the look and feel of the overall output. Most social bookmarking plugins I’ve come across have a pre-defined way of outputting the bookmarking links that is not as easy to control. In fact, more and more plugins of this type are moving to a drop-down format with complicated CSS. I love Sociable […]
[Continue Reading...]DISCLAIMER: This post is in no way intended to promote HTML over XHTML or vice-versa. This is simply a solution to a problem for those who may find it useful. Anyone who has used WordPress for any decent length of time probably knows that everything it outputs is in XHTML format. For those who prefer this, that’s just fine. However, for those of us out there that prefer to use HTML instead, we’re pretty much out of luck when it comes to WordPress. As it stands now, there is no easy way to make WordPress output in HTML format. But today I hope to help those people with this simple function I found around the web. First, the code: function HTMLify($buffer) { $xhtml = array(‘/XHTML 1.0 Transitional|XHTML 1.0 Strict|XHTML 1.0 Frameset|XHTML 1.1|XHTML Basic 1.0|XHTML Basic 1.1/’, ‘/xhtml1\/DTD\/xhtml1-transitional.dtd|xhtml1\/DTD\/xhtml1-strict.dtd|xhtml11\/DTD\/xhtml11.dtd|xhtml-basic\/xhtml-basic10.dtd|xhtml-basic\/xhtml-basic11.dtd/’, ‘/\/>/’, ‘/\/\s+>/’, ‘/xmlns=”http:\/\/www.w3.org\/1999\/xhtml”/’, ‘/\s+xmlns=”http:\/\/www.w3.org\/1999\/xhtml”/’, ‘/\s+xml:lang=”(.*)”\s+lang=”(.*)”/’, ‘/\s+>/’); $html = array(‘HTML 4.01’, ‘html4/strict.dtd’, ‘>’, ‘>’, […]
[Continue Reading...]About the Author
- James Dimick
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