WordPress is used by bloggers, which isn’t surprising being that it was originally a blogging platform. Although it has become much more than that, it still functions as a blogging tool for many. For those bloggers out there, I will now dissect SINGLE.PHP, the template that displays a single post. This is part of series of articles centered around dissecting the different components of WordPress. If you were able to understand, and make sense of, my discussion on PAGE.PHP, you’ll find SINGLE.PHP to be quite simple. It features the “loop,” navigational elements, the comments template (which I will also review here), […]
Dissecting WordPress: page.php
This is the 3rd in a series of articles discussing the different pieces of WordPress. We’ve already discussed the header.php and the footer.php—but they are only part of the picture. What happens between the two files is the actual content on your WordPress site and pages, and we will now delve into templates: where the header, footer, and content areas are put together. What’s displayed to the end user in their browser is directed by the “template file” being used. WordPress has a hierarchy that determines which template file is used in specific situations, and although it may initially seem confusing, there […]
Dissecting WordPress: Customizing header.php
This is the second in a series of articles on the parts and pieces of WordPress, and how they go together. As I said in my introductory article, I came to WordPress from a background of hard-coding my own HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. Learning the basics of WordPress—and CMS more broadly–took me a great deal of time. I learned how to store post and page information in a database, and then extract that information to build pages “on the fly” using templates–which results the WordPress page seen by the end user. This page has a header, footer, perhaps a sidebar […]
Dissecting WordPress: Customizing footer.php
My journey to WordPress began by learning basic HTML, laboriously typed out in Notepad. Over the years I added CSS, then some JavaScript, to gain a bit of interaction with website viewers. File “includes” for reusable page elements like a header and footer, or a menu, made building websites a bit more streamlined—though I still did a lot of hand-coding—and I was comfortable with it. I knew of the existence of WordPress, and CMS systems, and eventually the day came when I sat down and committed to learning WordPress so I could turn over sites to clients and they could […]
Backup Plugins for WordPress
It seems just a few days ago I was updating client sites to WordPress 3.6, then 3.6.1 … 3.7, and 3.7.1, now 3.8 … and with the newer versions comes automatic security and bug fix updates that can happen at any time. This is progress, and this is good! However, without reliable backups, any update can prove to be disastrous if there are code conflicts with themes or plugins. Note: if you are hosting on WP Engine (which I happen to be)—or another hosting company that offers automatic site backups—then you have no need for backup plugins. You have daily backups to […]
Table Plugins for WordPress
A “table” can be defined as: A systematic arrangement of data usually in rows and columns for ready reference. – Merriam Webster Tables once were (and still are, at times) a layout tool for websites. Better ways are available for designing and implementing page layout, but tables are still useful for displaying data in an organized and logical way. Creating and formatting tables from scratch does take some basic HTML and CSS knowledge, so naturally, plugins have been developed for WordPress that eliminate the need to “know” code, and yet still produce elegant table displays. In this article, I will be […]
Designing Responsively
How many websites have you viewed on a desktop or laptop computer lately? How many websites have you viewed on your smartphone or tablet in the same period of time? The statistics on several sites I manage show that an average of about 50% of the visitors are using tablets or smartphones, and some sites are higher than that! The more important question is: how satisfied were you with the version served up on the mobile device? Much has been written lately about making websites “responsive” to the device(s) being used to view the site, but what does that mean, […]
WordPress Multisite Case Study
From the WordPress Codex: A multisite network is a collection of sites that all share the same WordPress installation. They can also share plugins and themes. The individual sites in the network are virtual sites in the sense that they do not have their own directories on your server, although they do have separate directories for media uploads within the shared installation, and they do have separate tables in the database. About a year ago, I was approached by a client who owns three restaurant franchises in three different cities. The parent company has a website, and the franchisees are […]
Widget UI Refresh for WordPress Core
Hold onto your hats, a key component of WordPress is getting a makeover! The goal is to have it included as part of the 3.8 release tentatively scheduled for December, 2013. The target? Widget management, and the widget user interface—introducing a whole new way of working with widgets. Have you ever been frustrated by the current setup, dragging and dropping widgets to the sidebar, possibly scrolling and “dropping” a widget in the process? Have you learned workarounds to make widgets behave the way you want them to, or added plugins for conditional placement? Maybe you haven’t given widgets much thought […]
Updating Client Sites to WordPress 3.6
I am a freelance website designer/developer, and a WordPress developer and end user. While I have not written any plugins or designed any themes from the ground up, I have modified and tweaked some to my liking. I feel fairly comfortable and confident editing the code in the WordPress functions.php, template files, and plugin files to make them behave the way I’d like. Most of the sites I work on are for small businesses and local organizations. Not only do I create the initial design and build the website, I also do the routine maintenance and updating. The websites are […]
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