This tutorial will show you how to install a WordPress theme. This guide is intended for absolute WordPress beginners and those wanting to make sure they did it right.
The first half of this guide will talk about free themes from WordPress.org. Scroll down the page for a guide to installing commercial themes.
Microdata makes it possible for search engines to understand important details about your site's content.
We talked about WordPress microdata in a previous blog post. However, this time we will go more specific and show you how to add Products microdata to your WordPress pages without using a plugin.
This is very useful to promote the value of the products you sell through a WordPress site. Let's start...
WordPress has a ton of hooks and methods to check specific tasks. These are very useful when developing plugins and themes.
In this post I'll show you how to use the is_plugin_active() method to check if another plugin is installed and activated.
WooCommerce is the most popular way to build an online store. Square is the most popular way to build a point-of-sale solution in many countries. Why not bring the two together?
That's the idea behind the new Square for WooCommerce plugin. This was the most popular requested feature by WooCommerce customers.
Here's an overview of how the Square integration works with WooCommerce. If you enjoy this tutorial, check out WooCommerce Explained, the comprehensive (and best-selling) introduction to WooCommerce.
WordPress 4.6 is here and it's time to update.
This version has a ton of developer-focused changes, and you can find those in the Field Guide to 4.6.
However, what new features will users see in WordPress 4.6? There are 3 new features that users will notice, and we'll explain each one.
WordPress' Gravity Forms plugin allows you to have certain forms appear, based on conditions being met.
However, when a form is complex, it's not always intuitive how to set up the conditional logic.
This tutorial will show you how and we'll use an example. Let's get started.
We always recommend uninstalling WordPress themes that you aren't using. Themes can have security holes, and your site will be safer with fewer installed themes.
However, uninstalling a theme in WordPress should be simple, but it's harder than you might think. The setting to delete a theme is well hidden.
This tutorial will show you how to uninstall a WordPress theme.
One of our members at OSTraining set up an ecommerce site using Easy Digital Downloads. She wanted to create a widget to show the store's categories to visitors. However, she could only get the top level categories to display.
In this tutorial, we'll show you how to create a widget that can show any number or level of WordPress categories.
One of our OSTraining members was having an issue with shortcodes in widgets, so we created a tutorial for her.
By default, WordPress allows you to run shortcodes in many different places. You can use shortcodes in the text area of Posts and Pages. You can use shortcodes in WordPress emails.
However, by default, WordPress doesn't execute shortcodes inside the default text widget. This tutorial will show you an easy way to get shortcodes working in widgets.
Adding your email address to your site is helpful to your users. But, it also makes it available to spammers. Spammers can use scripts that visit websites and harvest the email addresses that are publicly available. This is called scraping.
This tutorial will show you a great way to mitigate scraping.
One of our members asked for a way to reorder his WordPress posts.
Luckily, with Simple Custom Post Order plugin this task is a piece of cake. Let's start...
It keeps surprising me whenever I hear this question by a potential customer.
Am I too old to learn WordPress?
Too old? You're never too old. If others can do it, you can do it too.
Sidebars allow you display widgets inside your theme.
And yes, despite the name, you can use "sidebars" to display widgets anywhere you want.
By default, themes come with at least one sidebar.
In this post, I'm going share with you a quick way to add a custom sidebar to your WordPress theme.
WordPress is much more than a blogging platform. Even though that used to be its original purpose, with time WordPress has evolved to offer many more features.
In this post, I'll recommend 3 free WordPress themes to make your blog stand out.
WordPress does provide a default comments system. However, many people find the default comments to be limited and hard to manage.
I've seen a lot of WordPress sites move to Facebook comments so that they can provide a better alternative.
In this post, I'm going to show you how to run Facebook comments on your WordPress site.
"Have you tried restarting it?" is the age-old wisdom of the IT world.
In this troubleshooting guide, I'll show you some simple steps to reset the WordPress core files and database.
This week an OSTraining member had a question: "How do I show a WordPress widget on one page, but disable it on other pages?
Our answer was Dynamic Widgets, a useful plugin that will provide control over where widgets are displayed based on several settings, including pages, URLs, categories, and user roles.
Continue reading this post to discover how easy it is to control your WordPress widgets by using Dynamic Widgets.
One OSTraining member is really enjoying Calypso, the new desktop blogging app from WordPress.com.
They wanted to know if it was possible to allow multiple team members to use Calypso on the same site.
Yes, that's definitely possible although it requires some configuration. Here's how to make it work:
Font Awesome is the most popular way to add font icons to your website.
The AGP Font Awesome plugin makes it easy to insert icons into WordPress posts and pages. It also allows to add icons to menu items.
In this post, I'll tell you how to add icons to your menus.
One OSTraining member was investigating ways to monetize their site and asked us about WordAds, the WordPress-based advertising program from Automattic.
They were curious about how WordAds works and how it compares to Google's Adsense offering. It probably doesn't help that the name is confusingly similar to Google's AdWords program.
Here's our introduction to WordAds and whether it's worth testing on your site.
One of the strongest features in WordPress is media management.
The WordPress core makes it really easy to create advanced functionality with images and also multimedia.
In this video tutorial, Topher shows you how to create multimedia playlists using only the WordPress core. You can use it for both videos and audio files, although in this example we're going to use mp3 files to create a musical playlist.
In some situations, you may need to add custom Javascript to your site. Normally, this would involve modifying your theme files.
However, there is a less intrusive alternative. "Header and Footer Scripts" is a plugin to add custom JavaScript to WordPress without modifying your theme.
In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how this useful plugin works.
In this video, we're going to take a look at WordPress template tags.
If you're a PHP developer, you'll recognize that template tags are simply functions. They are used to either do something or return something inside your WordPress template files.
WordPress template tags are often clearly and simply named. For example, here's the tag used to display the author of the current post or page:
By sharing positive comments from customers, testimonials are a nice way to promote your online business.
Testimonial Rotator is a plugin to manage and display testimonials in WordPress.
In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to create and display testimonials in your site.
One of our Pro members was wondering if he'd lose search engine ranking after he switched his permalinks settings.
This tutorial will show you how to redirect the old permalinks to the new ones, so that you don't get 404 errors. You'll maintain your search engine rankings, as well as keep users happy.
Sometimes you discover a plugin and wonder how you ever survived without it.
For me, that's true for the "What Template Am I Using?" plugin. This is like Firebug, but specifically for your WordPress site. It's incredibly useful for theme developers. The plugin shows you the current template file you're using, plus any additional files being called such as header.php or footer.php. Oh, and it shows lots of additional information as well.
Giving back to WordPress is something that’s widely encouraged.
Matt Mullenweg famously suggested that companies making money from WordPress should give 5% of each employee’s time back.
One of our users asked for a way to include Vk.com sharing buttons in their WordPress site.
VK is a large European social network with more than a 100 million active users.
This is certainly possible to do by using the Jetpack plugin.
In this post, I'm going to show you how to add a VK sharing button to WordPress.
Sometimes you forget your WordPress admin password. Don't worry - it happens to all of us.
This tutorial will show you two easy ways to reset your WordPress password so that you can get back to work.
WordPress is an open source and community supported project. Thousands of volunteers help keep it running smoothly. You too can volunteer and help.
You can contribute to WordPress' development without any coding knowledge. You can help by testing beta versions of the WordPress core and also WordPress plugins.
