Magento and WooCommerce are both huge players in online selling.
When you're deciding on an online sales channel, how do you choose between these two titans of ecommerce?
Both have their advantages and disadvantages, so let's take a look and compare them.
WordPress makes adding videos easy. However, many WordPress users don't realize that they can make their videos more attractive.
In particular, it often helps to add a preview image to your videos. An eye-catching preview image can really draw attention to your video. If you allow the preview image be chosen automatically, you can often end up with a snapshot taken at a bad moment in the video.
Please note, this will only work with videos that you have directly uploaded and stored in WordPress. This won't work with WordPress YouTube, WordPress Vimeo, or WordPress Wistia videos.
This tutorial will show you how to add a custom preview image to your WordPress videos.
Did you know that WordPress offer the ability to password-protect the posts that you write?
This feature doesn't require a plugin and is a core feature of WordPress.
In this short, I'm going to show you how to create protected posts. Each WordPress post will need it's own password, so this won't work for protecting a whole site.
If you really care about your WordPress content, you know that it's a constant struggle to maintain high standards.
It's not easy to create consistent, high-quality posts. Without a careful approach, you'll find your site has a different approach from post to post, and you'll soon end up with lots of messy content.
One solution is a WordPress checklist plugin. These plugins enable you to decide the requirement for each post before you publish.
We downloaded and tested all the checklist plugins for WordPress. Here's our review of all four WordPress checklist plugins ...
Does your WordPress site show a message similar to this?
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 19456 bytes) in wp-admin/includes/theme.php on line 81
If your answer is "yes", this tutorial is for you.
We've helped several of our students with similar issues so we decided to write a tutorial to hopefully help someone else out as well.
Before starting to read this guide, it's worth understanding what PHP errors are in WordPress.
If you’re looking to translate and display your website in different languages, whether it’s to increase your audience or to reach more customers, you should be very interested in Weglot plugin.
It is a WordPress multilingual plugin. It enables you to translate and manage your translations. With this plugin, you can deploy and display your translated pages extremely efficiently.
In this blog post, you will learn how to quickly set it up. You will also take a look at how to enjoy multi-lingual features Weglot Translate offers to you.
Child themes are the best way to modify WordPress themes. With a child theme, you can add custom CSS styles and keep the original theme intact in case it needs to be updated in the future.
However, child themes aren't always easy to create. In this post, you will learn how to generate them with just a few clicks, using the Child Theme Configurator plugin.
Multisites allow you run multiple websites from just one WordPress installation. Each website can have different users, different themes and different plugins.
This is possible because the old WPMU (WordPress Multi-User) project was merged into the main WordPress system. This is the same codebase that allows WordPress.com to run millions of sites, so you can be sure it works well.
In order to set this up, you will need access to your files so that you can edit them. This tutorial will show you how. When you've finished, click here to read Part 2 of this tutorial: Managing WordPress Multisites
Last week one of our customers asked how to enable their WordPress site visitors to subscribe to comments.
By default, WordPress doesn't offer such configuration. In this tutorial, you will learn how to do the job with the "Subscribe to Comments Reloaded" plugin.
While the default WordPress editor is easy to use, it has limitations. It can cause frustration if you want to create flexible page layouts.
An alternative that can help is the five-star rated Fusion Page Builder plugin. With this plugin, you can create complex and responsive pages. Your pages may have a variety of different content types, as well as WordPress widgets.
In this blog post, I will walk you through how to use Fusion.
Way back in 2014 Google made a push towards the use of HTTPS and SSL. Since then we all know that we need to check for the little lock on the address bar before we enter personal information. Right? But what does it mean for your website?
Learn in this post how to make sure your WordPress site complies with Google Security Guidelines.
PublishPress is a really useful WordPress plugin that our team have been working on as a side project.
The plugin is designed for any WordPress site with multiple team members. We developed it to help keep ourselves organized on a busy site with lots of writers creating lots of content. The slogan of the plugin is "WordPress for Teams".
The main feature is a big editorial calendar. You can create, reschedule and plan content from a single screen.
By default, when the SEF URLs are enabled in WordPress, the category links include the word “category” just before the category slug.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to easily remove “category” from your URLs in WordPress by using the “Remove Category URL” plugin.
Co-Authors Plus is an old and popular WordPress plugin.
By default, WordPress allows you to choose a single author for content. Co-Authors Plus was a solution to this, because it allowed you to assign multiple authors to one content item.
However, Co-Authors Plus has only had a small number of updates in the last few years. Also, it can be hard to use because it requires you to edit your template files.
The Multiple Authors add-on for PublishPress is a fork of Co-Authors Plus that's worth checking out.
We reviewed the main PublishPress plugin, which is a really good editorial calendar. Multiple Authors is an extra feature for that main plugin.
The general rule for building forms is that you should have as few fields as possible, as too many fields can lead to a drop in conversions. But you also have to avoid creating a form that doesn’t gather the information you need. This is where the conditional logic in WordPress form builders is so great -- your form can tailor itself to the exact needs of the person filling out the form.
If you’re looking for a powerful and free conditional logic from a WordPress form builder plugin, Caldera Forms is a great choice. Caldera Forms has a page builder-like drag-and-drop interface and an intuitive conditional logic system. As a free alternative to Gravity Forms and Ninja Forms, Caldera Forms conditional logic is a free feature.
Unlike Joomla or Drupal, WordPress doesn't have a default contact form. However, there are many good options to choose from. We recommend a plugin called Gator Forms.
The Gator Forms plugin allows you to embed forms of all types in your WordPress site.
It has a lot of configuration options to build and display highly customizable forms and a great variety of styles to adapt each form to the look of your website.
In this tutorial, we’re going to cover the installation and basic usage of this plugin.
The single most important file in your entire WordPress Installation is wp-config.php.
Your WordPress website is made up of two elements: a WordPress database, and your WordPress files.
wp-config.php is the one element that links the database and files together.
In this tutorial, we're going to cover:
We teach many different types of software. No matter what we teach, students often arrive with ideas about the sofware.
Our job is to convince them they're wrong. Some people believe Drupal is too difficult. Many people believe WordPress is just for blogs.
In this tutorial, I'm going to show you that WordPress can be used to build an ordinary website with static pages.
In this tutorial, we'll show you how to place Print This Post buttons into WordPress posts and pages. The main reason you'd want to do this is to extend a courtesy to your readers. Many of them still print things they read online and you don't want them to waste that expensive printer ink just to print your logo and theme as well as the post.
Without this solution, you'd likely need to create a separate CSS file with styles specifically for the printed page. Fortunately, the WP-Print plugin makes this much easier. It will automatically create a printer-friendly version of each post or page.
Have you heard people complain that Windows computers get more viruses than Apple computers? There are many reasons for that. One of the most common is that there are just so many more Windows computers out there. That's why they make a much more inviting target.
The same is true with WordPress sites. More than 25% of all websites run on WordPress. Hence, they are a very attractive target for malicious users. It's common for WordPress beginners to end up with hundreds of spam comments on their posts.
The solution? Akismet.com. They provide a great spam-blocking service. You'll need it because around 83% of all comments are spam.
Every website needs a sitemap, but it might not be for the reasons you expect.
Sitemaps do not improve your ranking in search engines. However, they do make sure more of your site's pages get indexed. They also make sure those pages get indexed more quickly. This article presents evidence that the difference is astounding:
I'm going to show you how to add a dynamic sitemap to your WordPress website.
This tutorial will show you how to migrate a Joomla site to WordPress.
We're going to do this with an out-of-the-box Joomla site with demo content and a brand-new WordPress site.
There are two things to note before we start:
Have you heard about the WordPress plugin that seems to do nothing, but is installed on over 100,000 sites?
CMB2 is one of the most popular plugins in WordPress. We feature CMB2 heavily in the new class, "How to Develop WordPress Plugins".
However, you would never realize how important CMB2 just by installing it from WordPress.org. When you install CMB2, it is invisible - your site will not change in any way.
CMB2 is short for "Custom Metaboxes", but that name probably doesn't help if you're new to WordPress development.
All-in-all, I think it's time for some explanations ...
PublishPress is a must have WordPress plugin if your blog has multiple contributors. It features several tools that will help you improve your blogging workflow.
Learn in this blog post how to create custom statuses for your WordPress blog posts. This allows you to go beyond the basic post statuses provided in WordPress.
Are you a WordPress beginner and want to test WordPress themes and plugins?
Last month, the team behind WP All Import launched a site called poopy.life, which allows you to create free WordPress sandboxes.
Yes, that's really the name.
No, I don't know why they called it that.
Yes, it does work really well.
Although WordPress is quite intuitive in most cases, there are some things that are not as obvious, such as:
"Where do you find the the page ID in WordPress?"
This is especially useful if you're trying to exclude by Page ID certain pages that appear in the Pages Widget.
This tutorial will show you how to quickly find the hidden Page ID or Post ID in WordPress.
One common problem facing WordPress users is the amount of spam comments.
There are some spam-fighting tools such as Akismet and Mollom, but some of users prefer to turn off comments entirely.
One of our students wanted to disable WordPress comments, so we created this step-by-step tutorial for him.
Want to win a one-year subscription to OSTraining?
We're running a competition on YouTube. To enter, visit this YouTube video and post in comments:
Forms plugins are the swiss-army knives of WordPress.
A single WordPress site often uses multiple different types of form, including contact forms, registration forms, payment forms, newsletter sign-up forms, feedback forms, and many others.
A search for forms on the WordPress plugin directory produces over 1,000 different plugins.
How can you choose between all the options? It takes time, but fortunately, many of these plugins have free versions.
Want to win a one-year subscription to OSTraining?
We're running a competition on YouTube. To enter, visit this YouTube video and post in the comments:
