WordPress Tutorials

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.

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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.

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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:

• April 20: Dozens of plugins release new versions to fix a major security hole (link).
• April 21: WordPress 4.1.2 released to fix the security hole fixed in plugins the previous day (link)
• April 23: WordPress 4.2 released (link)
• April 24: WordPress 4.1.3 released to fix a bug in 4.1.3 (link)
• April 27: WordPress 4.2.1 released to fix another major security hole (link)

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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:

• "Emoji support in WordPress core is the stupidest thing ever."
• “improved emoji support”. WordPress 4.2 sounds scintillating."
• "Why do I feel like the upcoming WordPress emoji feature is a little 1999. Really guys?"

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."

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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.

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Last May I noticed an announcement from a friend of mine that his company, The Theme Foundry, had released a new WordPress theme, called Make. I didn't give it much thought at the time. Most of the sites I build have custom designs, and I usually start with something like Underscores, or no theme at all. Then last fall I decided to switch my own blog to WordPress, and needed a theme, and didn't have a design. I tried out Make, and quickly fell in love.

Before I get too far into this, I'd like to point out that Make has 2 URLs you should check out. The free version of Make is in the WordPress.org theme respository. There's also Make Plus at The Theme Foundry's web site. Make Plus is actually a plugin that greatly extends the Make theme, and costs $99. It adds lots of functionality and comes with support, which is great.

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Recently I needed to accomplish a specific chore for my job. I needed to make a meta box in the WordPress admin.

The image below shows an example of a simple meta box. In WordPress, in the admin area, any box that holds a part of the User Interface is called a meta box.

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Server side site caching has long been a passion of mine. The speed increase for the end user combined with the lowered server resource needs simply make it a no-brainer. You need to be caching your site on the server.

Until last week I’d only worked with free plugins for caching, and been pretty pleased with my favorite, WP Super Cache. Recently however, I’ve been seeing a lot of press about WP Rocket, a plugin that costs $39. It came out about a year ago, we wrote about it back then, and I’ve kept my eye on it to see if it gets any traction. I

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In June of 2010 WordPress 3.0 introduced Custom Post Types, and thereby changed WordPress from a blog platform to a Content Management System.

The power and flexibility of Custom Post Types has played a strong role in getting WordPress to the place where it powers nearly 25% of the web.

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I recently got to test drive DesktopServer from ServerPress, both the free and the premium version.

This app has a very nice interface for installing first XAMPP so you can have a local server environment, but then also for immediately installing WordPress inside it. It also does a wonderful job of managing your own computer’s hosts file, so you can invent domain names like www.my-cool-web-site.dev.

I’ve had some experience with Varying Vagrant Vagrants for local development environments, so I’m no stranger to the theory, but DesktopServer made everything much MUCH simpler. There’s a simple installer for both Windows and OS X, and a very simple interface for setting up WordPress right after that.

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I first used BackupBuddy about 4 years ago. At the time I was using it as a migration tool because it had excellent built-in search and replace tools. Over the years I’ve kept my eye on the plugin and watched it grow from a rudimentary backup plugin to an extremely powerful tool that integrates with a variety of other plugins.

I’ve actually been using BackWPup on my own site for some months now, and it got me thinking that I should review other options, so I recently did tutorial series on both BackWPup and BackupBuddy.

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In a previous post I wrote about how to send email with PHP using WordPress' wp_mail() function.

Before you send that email though, there are a variety of ways you can ensure the security of your content.

Let's take a look at some ways in which you can use WordPress functions to sanitize and protect your data.

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Sometimes the process of assembling all the pieces of a WordPress post can be a little confusing.  Part of that process is dealing with the image library, particularly the Featured Image. 

To associate a featured image you have to click a link which brings up the Media Library.  Then you click another to add media to the library.  Then you browse your computer to find it. 

Then you do more steps, and the process is longer than it needs to be.

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PHP has a built-in function called mail() that allows you to send email.  The advantage of mail() is that it’s very easy to use.  The disadvantage is that it’s also very easy to use improperly, allowing spammers to send rafts of email through your site.

Because of this, there’ve been many wrappers and libraries written to help prevent that abuse.  Most CMSs have their own built in methods, we’re going to take a look at WordPress’ in this post.

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This week, one OSTraining member asked us whether it was possible to improve the login experience in WordPress.

The member wondered if they could make their login process easier to use in two ways:

1. Integrate a login page with their WordPress theme, rather than the wp-admin screen.
2. Redirect the user to another page they were reading before, rather than the WordPress dashboard.

Fortunately, there are 2 plugins that helps to achieve this customization in just a minute.

In this tutorial, I'll show you which plugins to use for this process.

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