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.
Many WordPress contact forms allow you to embed the form into a post or a page.
The Gator Forms plugin is a little different. It provides you with a floating tab so that visitors can easily access the contact form no matter what page they're on.
Here's how to use Gator Forms to show your contact form inside a tab.
You probably know that WordPress makes it easy to embed social media in Posts and Pages.
But did you know that you can easily embed snippets from WordPress posts and WooCommerce products in other content, using just a URL?
Here's an overview of how WordPress allows you to share posts on other sites (and even your own site).
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.
