This is the second video in a new series we're calling "Topher's Testing".
Topher is our WordPress teacher, and he's sitting down to test some really useful new WordPress plugins.
When you watch the videos in this series, you'll learn about a great plugin. You'll also get to see how a professional WordPress developer evaluates and tests new plugins.
This week Topher introduces us to the Simple Custom CSS plugin, which makes it easy to add custom CSS styles to override plugin and theme defaults.
BackUpWordPress is a free and powerful plugin to back up your website automatically.
BackUpWordPress will back up up your entire site including your database and all your files on a schedule that suits you.
In this blog post, we'll show you how to use BackUpWordPress to keep your WordPress site safe.
This is the first video in a new series we're calling "Topher's Testing".
Topher is our WordPress teacher and he's sitting down to test some really useful new WordPress plugins.
Simple Google Maps Short Code is a plugin with a long name. We'll call if SGMSC for short.
Using simple shortcode, SGMSC allows you to add Google Maps to your WordPress content
Developed by Pippin Williamson from http://pippinsplugins.com, SGMC makes is easy to enter addresses and to control the size of the map.
Here's my video introduction to using SGMC:
WordPress 3.8 is due to launch in December.
The biggest change will be a major redesign of the admin area.
At the beginning of this year, Matt Mullenweg and a team of developers started work on a plugin called MP6. We first wrote about MP6 back in May and outlined many of the new features.
MP6 has slowly improved over many months and it's now ready to become part of the WordPress core.
In this exclusive video, I'm going to show what to expect when version 3.8 comes out. How different will WordPress look? Watch and find out ...
404 errors have always been a fact of life for websites.
A 404 is better known as a "page not found" or a "broken URL" error.
There are hundreds of ways to cause a 404 error, from a simple typo to a massive site migration.
Fortunately, there is a WordPress plugin that has the potential to solve nearly all of your 404 errors: Permalink Finder.
WordPress 3.7 was released last week.
In this blog post we'll give you a video introduction to what's new in 3.7.
3.7 was a really quick release in preparation for 3.8, which is secheduled to arrive before the end of this year.
The most important new feature is auto-updates. With auto-updates, WordPress will automatically update itself whenever there is a new security release. The WordPress team are doing this to increase the security of WordPress and make sure that less sites are runnng out-of-date versions.
Hosting is probably the fastest growing segment of the WordPress industry.
There's several large and well-funded options out there, offering hosting that's tuned specifically for WordPress.
A few weeks ago we moved our sites to WPEngine.com, one of the most prominent WordPress hosts.
Here's our warts-and-all review of hosting with WPEngine.
Earlier this year WordPress added a favorite plugin feature.
This feature allows you to create a list of all plugins you really like.
Your favorite plugin list is stored on WordPress.org so that you can access it on all of your sites. You can also view other peoples' favorites.
For WordPress users who have moved beyond the basics, the inflexible content in WP can be frustrating.
Until recently, you could use a Post or a Page or you could do some fairly complex coding to create custom content types. We have a whole class explaining how that's done.
Pods can solve that problem. Pods can make it really easy to create a portfolio, a real estate site, a business directory, without using any code at all.
In this tutorial, we'll show how Pods can turn WordPress into a powerful content management system.
WordPress 3.6 is now in the beta phase and a release is expected shortly.
One of the major new improvements in WordPress 3.6 is an overhaul of the Revisions feature.
WordPress 3.6 makes it much easier to browse, compare and restore revisions. 3.6 brings some very useful improvements for anyone who publishes a large number of posts or works with a large number of writers.
If you want to manage or schedule your revisions, check out the Revisionary plugin.
To test the new revisions, start by creating a new post in WordPress.
WordPress has been around since 2003, and for several years was mostly used to run blogs or personal websites.
Until a few years ago a majority of the websites powered with WordPress were still blogs or small sites, and it may also be true today.
However, ever since the ability for developers to create custom post types was introduced in 2010 with version 3.0, WordPress has been used to power many more types of websites.
We're going to show you 5 ways in which you can use WordPress custom post types.
Sometimes the small improvements can greatly help your productivity.
The Inline Preview plugin is a small improvement that can make your WordPress writing easier.
The basic Preview in WordPress opens up a new tab. The Inline Preview plugin shows you a preview directly where you're writing.
WordPress celebrated it's 10th birthday this week, and it is still changing and evolving.
In a previous blog post, we speculated on what WordPress might look like in future versions.
Now with the arrival of a plugin called MP6, we have a clear idea of what the WordPress admin area will look like later this year.
If you exclude the core plugins, All in One SEO Pack is the most popular WordPress plugin of all time, having been downloaded over 14 million times.
All in One SEO is so popular because it appeals to both beginners and experts.
For beginners, All in One SEO works out of the box with very little configuration needed. Also, as the name implies, it eliminates the need for multiple plugins because it contains many key features such as handling metadata and installing Google Analytics.
For experts, it offers a lot of flexibility for setting up your metadata and integrates smoothly with a wide range of other extensions.
We covered All in One SEO back in 2011. Here are 2 new videos tutorials to get started with All in One:
By default, every WordPress site looks the same.
For a variety of reasons, people want to customize the WordPress sites with their own logo or styles.
In this tutorial we're going to show you an example of how to customize WordPress the right way. We're going give you an introduction to using functions and CSS to style your site in a way that's safe from any updates.
WordPress 3.6 is big and exciting.
We haven't been able to say that about recent WordPress releases.
During 2012, WordPress didn't undergo any major changes. There wasn't much new in WordPress 3.4 except easier theme customization. WordPress 3.5 had a midly different new theme, some media improvements and not much else.
In contrast, WordPress 3.6 feels like a big step forward. There's a bold new theme and several useful new features. Overall, WordPress 3.6 provides strong hints of where WordPress is headed in years to come.
Here are 6 great improvements in WordPress 3.6.
Bootstrap says that it "helps nerds do awesome stuff on the web".
That's very true. Bootstrap is an entire framework that was developed by Twitter to allow them to quickly and easily create consistent, good-looking, mobile-friendly designs. It worked so well that it's now become an independent project used across the web.
Bootstrap is so popular that Joomla adopted it entirely. There are also a good number of WordPress designers using Bootstrap.
In this blog post, we evaluate 8 free WordPress themes built on Bootstrap.
WordPress 3.5 is due for release in the first week of December.
A few weeks ago, we talked about 5 changes in WordPress 3.5.
Now that WordPress 3.5 is nearly here, watch this video to see many of the new features in action:
Moving a WordPress site to a new folder is something you may need to do regularly.
The most common reason is that you're launching a new site. In this tutorial, we''ll show potential problems during the move and how to overcome them.
Wysija is a newsletter program that will let you send out newsletters from your WordPress admin.
Wysija is easy to use and allows you to design your newsletter with a drag-and-drop interface. Once it's been set up, Wysija is a perfect solution for automatically sending your new posts to subscribers.
In this tutorial, we'll show you how to create, design and send your first Wysija newsletter.
It's not due out until December, but WordPress 3.5 already has a beta release.
With the exception of a new theme, version 3.5 is primarily focused on removing and improving existing features, rather than adding new ones.
3.5 brings improvements to the media library, theme previews and plugin installer. It also removed the Links feature, which has been around for over a decade.
It should be a simple task: move your blog from the homepage to an inside page. It's often an important part of using your WordPress site as a CMS.
Nonetheless, we often get asked to explain how to do this. Moving your blog is simple, but only once you know how.
Here, in a few short steps, is how to move your blog away from your homepage.
Backing up your site is good.
Automatically backing up your site is better.
Automatically backing up your site to somewhere easy to use like Dropbox.com is the best.
Wordpress Backup to Dropbox is simple plugin that will automatically backup your WordPress site to your Dropbox account. Here's how it works:
Events Manager for WordPress is an excellent event registration plugin.
It has almost all of the features you'll need to organize events via your WordPress site. Features include recurring events, calendars, Google map integration, booking management and more.
WordPress is a very secure and well-coded platform. However, simply because it is so enormously popular, a lot of people try to create hacks and viruses for WordPress sites.
The Wordfence plugin is a great way to keep your WordPress site safe. Wordfence is a free plugin that scans your site for viruses, malware, trojans, malicious links and more.
In this tutorial, we're going to show you how to configure Wordfence, how to identify hacked files and what your options are for repairing them.
Starting in 2010, the WordPress team started to annually release a new, default theme for WordPress sites.
This year they are cutting close to their own deadline. The Twenty Twelve theme narrowly missed inclusion in WordPress 3.4 and so will become the default with the December release of WordPress 3.5.
However, Twenty Twelve has now been released for testers and will soon be released to the general public via the WordPress Theme Directory.
Are you wondering which words attract visitors to your site? Do you want to know why people might be leaving the site? Google Analytics is the first choice, and most popular answer, for these questions.
The biggest stumbling block in the beginning is figuring out how to do the integration and where to place the code that Google Analytics needs. The Google Analytics plugin by Yoast is an easy solution and involves no messing around with the code. Here's how to use the Google Analytics plugin:
NextGEN Gallery is the most popular photo gallery plugin for WordPress, and with over 5 million downloads it is one of the most popular WordPress plugins of any kind.
NextGEN allows you to create beautiful galleries but also comes with powerful features such as bulk image uploads, grouping galleries into albums, and more.
We're going to show you how to get started with this popular and powerful plugin. We'll show you how to uset NextGEN to create a gallery and place it inside a post or page.
If you want to build a paid membership site, then WordPress is a great option for you.
There are many paid membership plugins for WordPress and, in this tutorial, we're going to recommend three.
Any paid membership plugin needs to do two things: create different access levels and collect payment from people who want to access those levels. We've chosen three plugins that do both well.
Jetpack is many plugins in one.
Built by Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com, JetPack offers around a dozen features including comments, statistics, social bookmarks and more.
They only have one plugin you need to pay for at this point. It's easy to see they are planning to add more of those, but the free ones work well and are adequate for a lot of websites.
