WooCommerce 2.4 was released in August, and had a really cool codename, "the Helpful Hedgehog."
Why did the WooCommerce team choose that name? Because they focused on making WooCommerce much easier to use.
In particular, the WooCommerce team worked on a brand new onboarding feature. When you install WooCommerce 2.4, you'll now several screens that walk you setting up your store.
This onboarding process really is easy to use and it's one that many plugin developers could emulate.
The Events Calendar Plugin for WordPress is simple to use.
The free version comes with the basic features to manage events in WordPress, including a calendar view to display events to your visitors.
I'm going to show you how to install and start using Events Calendar Plugin.
Food blogs are enormously popular at the moment.
The Simmer plugin is a great option for building a food site in WordPress. Simmer enables you to quickly and easily publish your recipes. You can add ingredients, step-by-step instructions, sub-headings, structured cook times, and a lot more all within a user-friendly drag and drop interface.
The 2 videos below will introduce you to using Simmer. These videos are part of our complete video class, "Build a WordPress Recipe Directory".
The following tutorial will show you how to redirect your WordPress site's domain from non-www to www or vice versa. Redirecting one to the other is useful for SEO.
If you go to https://www.wordpress.org, you'll see the URL changes a bit once you click enter. It goes to the non-www version. In order words, it goes to https://wordpress.org. It's a subtle change and it's usually not noticed by users.
So why have they done this? It's because, technically, the two are different domains but they have the same content. Without the redirect, they end up with duplicate content. With the redirect, they only have one site, so only one set of content.
One of the things I love most about WordPress is that it's easy to use. WordPress has made embeds easy too.
Embeds allow you to add a URL to a post and then watch as WordPress magically pulls in content for you. This works for YouTube videos, Twitter messages, Instagram photos, Slideshare presentations and many other types of content.
Here's a short video tutorial on using embeds in WordPress, plus some pro tips.
Monstroid is a brand new, multipurpose WordPress theme from Template Monster.
It was released with a splash in July this year, and has already managed to gain a lot of attention.
Monstroid costs $79, but today 3 of you have a chance to get Monstroid absolutely free! If you want to be amongst the winners, read on ...
WordPress makes posssible to override many things, but it's not always easy to override language strings.
Sometimes language strings are in the WordPress core and you can override them using plugins.
However, sometimes language strings are included in the theme, and one common example is the "Read More" link for posts.
In this short tutorial, I'm going to show you how to customize the "Read More" link with a few lines of code.
Sometimes you're done with a plugin and it's no longer needed. If that's the case, it should be uninstalled. Unused plugins can add maintenance and security headaches to your site.
This tutorial will show you how to uninstall a WordPress plugin. Let's get started ...
So you'd like to change a username on your site?
Unfortunately, a default installation of WordPress doesn't allow username changes.
When you go to edit a user, the username is greyed out and there's a "Usernames cannot be changed" message beside it.
Your site's getting popular, but with the increased traffic, it seems slower. You picked a fast host, enabled caching, but for some reason, it's still loading slowly. What's causing the performance issue?
The answer is that it's likely an unoptimized WordPress plugin. One slow plugin can slow down the entire site.
This tutorial will introduce you to P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler). With it, you'll be able to see each plugin's performance on the site.
We love the Pods Framework. It's one of the very best ways to create custom fields and content types in WordPress.
So today we're happy to annnounce that we've partnered with the Pods team to make our 11-part video class on Pods available for free.
This series is a great introduction, for those who are new to Pods, and are looking to use Pods without writing any PHP code. These videos cover creating custom post types in Pods, adding fields to the Pods, using Pods Templates and shortcodes to display fields in the content.
Custom Permalinks is a useful plugin when you need to assign a custom path to individual posts, pages, tags or categories. This is very helpful in many situations, such as migrating a site to WordPress or creating custom landing pages.
In this tutorial, I'll show you how easy it is to use the Custom Permalinks plugin.
WordPress makes it easy to embed videos into a post or page.
However, by default, WordPress doesn't provide an option for the width and height of the video.
This tutorial will show you how to change the height and width of your WordPress video embed.
UPDATE: If you want an even easier method, you can also check out the EmbedPress plugin. The link is in the box below ...
NextGEN Gallery is the most popular WordPress gallery plugin.
In fact, with over 12 million downloads, its one of the most popular WordPress plugins of all time.
In this post we're going to show you 3 videos on using NextGEN. These videos will show you how to install NextGEN, set up a gallery and then modify that gallery.
These videos are part of our complete NextGen Gallery class.
Most CRM systems are too complex.
Platforms like Salesforce can be enormously complex and have a step learning curve. CiviCRM is a very popular open source CRM, but it's as complex as many proprietary solutions.
Some CiviCRM developers have now teamed up with the goal of creating a simpler CRM. They've released a WordPress plugin called UkuuPeople.
WordPress themes used to have specific focuses. You could find themes for restaurants, schools, corporate sites or for even more narrow niches.
However, in recent years we've seen a shift towards multipurpose themes, led in particular by authors at Themeforest.net. These multipurpose themes come with 1000's of features that enable them to cover a wide range of businesses and topics.
Some of the themes have so many features that I refer to them as a "Theme CMS". It's almost like installing a second CMS on top of WordPress.
JetPack is an official plugin from Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com.
JetPack offers tons of useful features, from security protection and comments to social sharing and improved photo galleries.
One of the most useful features is Statistics. Without leaving your site, and without creating additional accounts elsewhere, you can get really detailed information on your site's visitors.
Here's how you can use JetPack statistics ...
The official WordPress 4.3 is still a month away, but this release has already been far more high-profile that most.
Since the new admin design in December 2013, most WordPress releases have focused on iterative improvements.
However, this upcoming release will probably be remembered as a turning point. WordPress 4.3 makes it very clear the future of WordPress for non-technical users is the Customizer.
Adding social sharing buttons to your WordPress site is very easy with the AddThis Sharing Buttons plugin. It takes only a minute to install and setup.
In this tutorial we will show you how to use this plugin.
Google Fonts is a wonderful tool to help you customize your site. You can choose from about 700 different fonts to improve the design of your site.
Normally the process of adding Google Fonts to your site isn't easy, because you have to modify your theme's files. However, a plugin called Easy Google Fonts make it simply to add this feature to almost any theme.
GenerateWP.com is a wonderful tool for WordPress developers.
GenerateWP can automatically create code for your WordPress project. You can use GenerateWP to build post types, taxonomies, shortcodes, menus and much more.
Unlike many automatic code generators, GenerateWP produces high quality code that meets WordPress coding standards.
In the video below, Topher uses GenerateWP to create a custom content type called "Rooms", without needing to write a line of code.
This video is part of our 2-part series on building a Bed and Breakfast website with WordPress.
If so, you need the Redirection plugin for WordPress.
Redirection can manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and tidy up any loose ends your site has with permalinks.
Here are 3 videos to get anyone started with the Redirection plugin:
When I was 15 the internet didn't exist as far as ordinary members of the public were concerned.
Devesh Sharma, on the other hand, was launching online business at the age of 15. Fast forward several years and Devesh is a full time bloggerr, based out of India, and running a popular WordPress resource site called WPKube.
Creating tables, especially ones that look nice, can be difficult for beginners.
This tutorial will show you how to easily create tables in WordPress. Plus, they'll look great!
Let's get started.
This week we've rolled out an update for the OSToolbar for WordPress.
If you haven't used it, OSToolbar allows you to provide our training videos to your clients.
OSToolbar is currently available for both WordPress and Joomla and we're considering a Drupal version.
For WordPress, users OSToolbar is a free plugin that you can install directly from the Plugins area of your clients' WordPress sites.
I've been asked to give a talk about building membership sites with WordPress.
Membership sites is a topic I could talk on for hours, but WordCamp sessions are short and attendees minutes want very practical, hands-on guide.
So, to keep things as simple as possible, I'm going to recommend one plugin and one payment gateway.
I recommend building your membership sites with Paid Memberships Pro and Stripe.
Wow. There was huge news this week that impacted both WordPress and e-commerce in general.
Automattic (the parent company of WordPress.com) purchased WooCommerce for over $30 million.
As Magento continues to struggle, there's room for a new dominant player in e-commerce and Matt Mullenwegg seems determined that WordPress will become the new king.
If you run a WordPress site, I hope you weren't on vacation over the last week.
The last part of April has been the strangest, busiest week anyone can remember in WordPress. Here's a quick recap:
One of the major features in WordPress 4.2 is emoji support.
The inclusion of emoji did not go down well with everyone. Here are some sample Twitter responses:
Even the WordPress 4.2 intro video doesn't seem to take emoji very seriously:
"Tell the world about your love for ice cream, kittens, or even jazz. All without using a single word."
There are over 37,000 plugins on WordPress.org.
That means it must be really easy to get your new plugin published on WordPress.org, right?
Wrong. It's not the most intuitive system. WordPress.org has some quirks you need to learn and hoops you'll need to jump through.
In these seven video, Topher gives you an overview of exactly what you need to do go publish your plugin on WordPress.org.
