WordPress 5 is available today. The headline feature is the new Gutenberg editor.
This is perhaps the biggest single-day release in the history of open source software. That's no exaggeration. I'm unable to think of any other change that was so significant and was quickly pushed out to over 30% of the web.
So you have everything ready for launch and your site is sitting on your local computer. You're ready to move WordPress to the "real" server and start publishing.
Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how to export and import your data base, and get WordPress running on the new server.
Did you know that every WordPress site can embed posts from every other WordPress site? WordPress sites are oEmbed providers.
Out-of-the-box, your embeddable posts will take on the look and feel of the WordPress core default template. In this blog post, you will learn how to make your embeddables consistent with the look and feel of your own template.
WordPress themes makes it possible to give your users control of many aspects of their site's designs.
One of the most common design features in themes are featured images. Many bloggers love to use large, high-quality images for their posts.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to add featured image support in a custom WordPress theme.
If you have a multilingual website, it's worth thinking about the SEO challenges you'll face.
Most website owners only need to optimize for one language. Simply adding another language doubles the amount of optimization work you need to do. Plus, you need to think about another version of Google, with different competitors and different challenges.
SEO concerns a real with multilingual websites. In this guide, based on advice from the "How to Build Multilingual WordPress Sites" class, we'll focus on key ways you can improve your site's SEO.
Spam is more than an irritation. It can reduce your productivity. Sometimes the spam prevention can be as bad as the spam itself, making your visitors spot similar images, do maths sums or answer questions to prove that they are human.
This can put people off interacting with your website. Fortunately, WordPress has plugins that can handle spam transparently, without creating irritation to either you or your visitors. In this blog post, you will take a look at two of them.
The new Gutenberg editor is due to arrive with WordPress 5.0 on November 27.
We're already starting to see new types of Gutenberg-specific plugin. These aren't old plugins that have a layer of Gutenberg comptability. These are new plugins that are block-first. They're built for the new Gutenberg era.
One of the most popular of these new plugins is Advanced Gutenberg. This plugin provides over 20 new blocks. It's helpful to think of them in two categories:
Elementor and Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) are two of the most popular and powerful plugins in WordPress:
This week, we have a video showing you how to use these two plugins together to create superb sites. Rod shows you how to create an IMDB-style movie review website using Elementor and ACF together.
WordPress is the key technology tool for many companies. They use it for marketing, e-commerce, CRM and 1,001 other tasks. So, it's not surprising that a lot of WordPress users also rely on it for project management.
After all, if you allow customers to pay you on your WordPress site, or raise a support ticket there, why not also collaborate on projects using the same platform.
In this overview, we'll introduce you to 5 of the best WordPress project management plugins. All 5 have free versions available on WordPress.org. You can download them, test them, and see if they're a good fit for you and your projects.
One of our members was creating a landing page in WordPress and needed to hide some elements of his theme. However, those elements couldn't be hidden from the theme or widget settings.
We recommended he use a quick solution that requires a little CSS.
In this post, I'm going to show you how to hide elements on certain pages of your WordPress site.
Normally, disabling a WordPress plugin is very simple and straightforward.
How easy? You can login to your admin area, click the "Plugins" tab and click "Deactivate" next to the plugin.
You can see an example below with Google Analytics.
Yes, WordPress is going to have a new editor called "Gutenberg".
Up until now, the Gutenberg developers made slow and steady progress. Every two weeks, they released a new version. Each Gutenberg update had more features, more polish, and fewers bugs.
But, we knew almost nothing about when Gutenberg would become WordPress.
Now we know. Last week, we got more Gutenberg news than we did in the rest of 2018 combined. We got timetables, roadmaps, and technical breakdowns. We even got tantilizing glimpses into Phases 2, 3 and 4 of the Gutenberg project.
I'm going to give you a short summary of everything Matt and the WordPress team announced.
Many WordPress themes rely on "Excerpts" to show a short summary of your WordPress content.
You'll find an "Excerpts" box on all your WordPress Posts, but you won't find them on Pages. Excerpts on WordPress pages used to be a standard feature, then they were removed in WordPress 3.1.
Fortunately, if you need to use excerpts, it is easy to put the excerpt window back for "Pages". All you need is a single line of code.
When you’re developing plugins, messing up is just part of the process.
There’s a lot of trial and error involved in developing plugins for WordPress. You don't need to beat yourself every time you make an error, but there are some really common mistakes you can avoid.
Read on to find out how to avoid eight of the most common mistakes you'll make when first creating plugins for WordPress.
WPML is the most popular plugin for multi-lingual WordPress sites.
WPML is an acronym for "WordPress Multilingual" and the plugin is installed on nearly a million sites.
In this tutorial, you'll see 6 videos that introduce you to WPML and show you how to configure it correctly.
My client has asked me to build a WordPress plugin for them. Help! How do I learn to build WordPress plugins?
That's a common question we get from people who join OSTraining for the first time. They want to know about the skills they will need, and what kind of classes they should take.
I'm going to show you the skills needed for WordPress plugin development. I'll also give you links to start learning those skills.
One of our customers recently asked us how to set up a multilingual WordPress site to manually translate it. The Polylang plugin does just that.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the Polylang plugin to create a multilingual WordPress site from scratch.
You write great content and want to build up an audience of people who read your blog regularly. In this situation, there's no better way to keep your audience up-to-date than by email.
Here's how you automatically notify users whenever you write a new post. We're going to use the free features of the PublishPress plugin.
How do I get started with theme design?
That's a common question we get from people who join OSTraining for the first time. They want to know about the skills they will need, and what kind of classes they should take.
Here's an overview of everything you need to get started with WordPress theme design.
The new Gutenberg editor is nearly here and the WordPress landscape is about to change in a big way.
Many plugins are themes are going to be impacted. In particular, people are curious how page-builder plugins such as Beaver Builder and Visual Composer will respond. The answer, looking at BoldGrid, another popular plugin in the same niche, is to do more. BoldGrid doesn't just build pages, it builds complete websites. It allows you to build an entire WordPress website without any code and in a ridiculously short amount of time.
BoldGrid provides layouts, themes, an SEO plugin and more. It also has developer-friendly tools such as Staging plugin and a Backup plugin. All-in-all, it offers far more than BoldGrid will ever offer. It's a website builder, rather than a page builder.
WordPress is one of the simplest and versatile content management systems. Any beginner can quickly build a professional website with it.
It offers basic security out of the box to get you started. It also allows you to harden your site security.
In this post, you will learn 10 tips to easily enhance the security of your WordPress website even if you are a beginner.
So your WordPress website offers good content to your visitors. And it offers an amazing user-experience. And it's safe and secure!
But it all will be in vain if your site keeps suffering from downtime.
In this blog post, I will discuss possible reasons for WordPress downtime and ways to monitor incidents.
Gator Forms is our favorite WordPress forms plugin.
One of the reasons we like it so much is that it has a wide range of display options. Gator Forms doesn't require you to put your form inside a Post or a Page. You can show your forms in pop-ups, tabs, accordions, lightboxes and other effects.
In this guide, I'm going to show how you to create a form that automatically opens and closes for visitors.
Gator Forms is our favorite WordPress forms plugin.
One of the reasons we like it so much is that it has a wide range of pop-ups and buttons you can use to make your forms more visible.
Gator Forms doesn't require you to put your form inside a Post or a Page. You can show it around the outside of your site too.
One very popular WordPress beginner question is "How do I create a contact form in WordPress?".
When you search for a contact form plugin in the WordPress directory, you get over 258 pages of entries returned.
So, the real question isn't so much "How do I create a contact form in WordPress?" but "Which plugin do I use?".
We have some recommendations for you:
Some websites make it really hard to contact them. The "Contact Us" page is hidden in the footer. The social media icons, if there any, lead to accounts where no-one ever replies.
Why not make it as easy as possible to contact you?!?
One good idea is to place a "Contact Us" in your menu. As soon as people click on it, they'll get a pop-up box with a contact form. Your visitors don't even need to visit a different page. That's as easy as it gets.
When you build multilingual websites you will probably come across two keywords, "Internationalization" and "Localization".
These are complicated words for fairly straightforward ideas. In this guide, I'll explain what Internationalization and Localization are, and what you need to understand about them when building your multilingual site.
If you're building a multilingual WordPress site, there are four things you need to find translations for:
In a previous tutorial, we took a look at how to find a multilingual theme. In this guide, we're going to take a look at how to find multilingual plugins. Not every plugin has been translated or is capable of being translated.
Do you accept guest blog posts on your WordPress site?
It's a great way to drive traffic to your site, improve your SEO, and create connections with other bloggers.
However, by default, everyone who writes on your WordPress site has to have a user account. So to accept a guest author post, you need to create a user account that the author may never use.
If you're building a multilingual WordPress site, you need a multilingual WordPress theme.
You don't necessarily need a theme that has been translated, but you do need a theme that can be translated.
Let me show you how you can find a translatable theme.
