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:
Want to win a one-year subscription to OSTraining?
We're running a competition on YouTube, and entering is dead simple.
Simply click here and visit this video on contact forms in WordPress.
In the comments under that video, answer this question:
What is your favorite WordPress contact form plugin?
Do you use NinjaForms, Gator Forms, Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, Formidable, WP Forms, or something else?
One lucky commenter will be chosen at random to receive a one-year subscription to OSTraining.com. Be sure to like, subscribe and comment.
Out of the box, WordPress offers two different ways to organize Posts; Categories and Tags. The technical names for all these are taxonomies.
"What’s a taxonomy?" you may well ask. It’s simply a way of describing things. On a geography blog, for example, you might have a "Country" taxonomy, which could be filled with country names.
Categories and Tags are more generic terms that you can fill in with specific information for your site.
One of the most common questions we get from WordPress students is,
"How can I tell if a site is built in WordPress?"
It's not possible to answer this question without knowing a few tips and tricks.
If you look at a website there is no way of telling whether or not it is built in WordPress. The design of a site often gives zero clue about the platform it's using.
One great way to improve the design of your WordPress galleries is the JetPack plugin.
Once JetPack is installed, you can enable the "Tiled Galleries" feature. If you have a photo gallery set up, you will now get a "Tiled Mosaic" option for your galleries. This will show your images in a beautiful mosaic layout.
What's the difference between a normal photo gallery and a mosaic photo gallery?
Even if you update your site regularly, you can't guarantee search engines will find your site. Pings can help.
In this video, we talk about WordPress' ability to send out a ping. A ping is an alert to other sites that something has changed on your site.
Search engines like Google use pings to understand when you've added new content. WordPress will send out a ping whenever you update your content. If you need help writing regularly, checkout the PublishPress plugin to help you create great WordPress posts.
This tutorial will show you how to change the site title and tagline on your WordPress site.
The title and tagline are very often shown in the top-left corner of your site's design. They are the first thing that many visitors will see when they arrive at your site, and so it's important to make sure they are correct.
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.
I use Google Maps almost every time I use the house. And, I'm definitely not alone. According to some calculations, Google Maps is the world's most popular phone app in the world.
It's not just apps: millions of websites use Google Maps to show location information.
If you use WordPress, there's now a really easy to add Google Maps to your sites. With the EmbedPress plugin, you can add Google Maps using just a URL. You don't need to be messing around with embed codes that break easily
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.
