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9 Ways to Monetize Your WordPress Site (Including Plugins!)

Author

Nick Schäferhoff

Filed Under

Featured

Published

June 28, 2016

2 Comments

Creating and owning a website has never been easier. Thanks to WordPress and other free content management systems like Joomla and Drupal, anyone can start their own site in mere minutes. However, just having a website is usually not the end goal. Most website owners want to earn money with it in one form or another. That’s not an impossible dream. Plenty of people make a living with WordPress websites. Yet, while the goal clear, the means often aren’t. How do you monetize a WordPress site? How can you create a full-time income from a web entity? In this article, […]

Developing a REST API App – Part 1: Getting Started

Author

Tom Ewer

Filed Under

Featured

Published

June 27, 2016

1 Comment

Excitement over the REST API has been building for what seems like an eternity, but we’re still pretty much at the starting gate in terms of what it’s actually going to mean for site owners and developers once it finally lands. Though I’ve written extensively about the potential implications of the REST API, I’ve been holding back on actually diving in and getting my hands dirty to date. With the REST API finally taxiing on the runway, now seemed a great time to grasp that nettle and really start digging into detail. Over the course of this series, I’ll be […]

The Case For WordPress

Author

Brenda Barron

Filed Under

Beginners, Featured

Published

June 24, 2016

No Comments

These days, site owners have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to building a new site. From other content management systems (CMS) such as Drupal, Joomla, and Perch, to the recent growth of long form publishing platforms like Medium and eCommerce-specific options like Shopify, WordPress is facing some serious competition. Granted, we may be a wee bit biased, but in our considered opinion, WordPress is still the best choice for most small business websites, blogs, and e-commerce sites. Why? Well, WordPress boasts a number of features that make it user and owner friendly, but four advantages, in particular, make […]

Basic PHP Design Patterns For WordPress Developers

Author

Josh Pollock

Filed Under

Featured

Published

June 21, 2016

2 Comments

Software development is about repeating yourself intelligently by using functions to encapsulate repetitve code, saving you the hassle of writing it out each time. This doesn’t just mean finding a repeatable pattern and going with it, it’s important to find the right pattern. That is where PHP design patterns come into play. While we often think of this in terms of choosing to write a function or class, or to import a library, this approach also extends to application architecture. The architecture of a framework, CMS, plugin, theme, class, or system is often described as conforming to a pattern. Being […]

WordCamp Europe Is This Weekend, Here’s What You Need To Know

Author

Marie Dodson

Filed Under

Community, Featured

Published

June 21, 2016

No Comments

WordCamp Europe 2016 kicks off this Friday, June 24 in Vienna at MuseumsQuartier, and it’s expected to be the largest WordCamp to date. The three-day event features an impressive line-up of sessions Friday and Saturday, with a contributor day Sunday. The three tracks cover a range of topics from community and design to development, business and beyond, including: WordPress: the early years. A co-founder’s view — by WordPress co-founder Mike Little Using the REST API and JavaScript to create better WordPress interfaces — by engineer at Bocoup K. Adam White Managing a Local WordPress Community — by WordPress developer Sergey Biryukov Decision-Making […]

Can VersionPress 3.0 Convince As An Open-Source Project?

Author

Tom Ewer

Filed Under

Community, Featured

Published

June 20, 2016

2 Comments

Version control is a non-negotiable part of any serious development project, but widespread adoption of this technique in the world of WordPress has been somewhat spotty to date. While the platform’s core has used Subversion for some time, sites out in the wild are often put together with little or no version control in place. VersionPress arrived on the scene in 2014 with a vision of bringing an integrated WordPress version control solution to the masses. It’s been making steady progress in that direction ever since, and the software’s recent transition into a free open source project marks an interesting inflection […]

Keep Your WordPress Site Safe With These Four Tips

Author

Neill Feather

Filed Under

Beginners, Featured

Published

June 17, 2016

1 Comment

There are almost 75 million WordPress sites to date, which makes up more than 25 percent of the entire Internet. WordPress is flexible, easy-to-use, and with more than 40 thousand plugins in the repository, it is easier than ever to customize it to fit your needs. With its growing appeal, it’s more important than ever for users to take appropriate security measures. As the president of SiteLock, a website security company, I have seen countless WordPress websites compromised, and it seems like these breaches are becoming more and more prevalent. In 2005, there were 157 million data breaches in the United States […]

Best Free WordPress Plugins For Managing Custom Post Types

Author

Sufyan bin Uzayr

Filed Under

Featured

Published

June 16, 2016

1 Comment

Custom Post Types are a great way to build functionality on your WordPress site. Download plugins to make managing the post types even easier. We have compiled our favorite free plugins that you can download today. Before we begin, this is a great introduction to Custom Post Types. 1. WCK Custom Fields and Custom Post Types Creator WCK, or WordPress Creation Kit, is quite possibly the simplest plugin in this niche. Its interface is straightforward, ridiculously easy to use, and it does what it is supposed to do: lets you create and manage custom post types. You can create custom post types as […]

Introduction To Class Inheritance In Object-Oriented PHP

Author

Josh Pollock

Filed Under

Featured

Published

June 14, 2016

3 Comments

In object-oriented PHP, inheritance is the ability to create a class that extends another class and takes on some or all of its features. This is one of the most useful functions of object orient programming in PHP (OOP PHP). I’ve skimmed over it in several of my recent articles on OOP in PHP, but in this article, I want to take a deeper look at class inheritance, how to use it, and why it’s important. Class Inheritance The first time I tried to write a really big WordPress plugin, I had four main classes that dealt with four different […]

4 Exciting New Revenue Routes The REST API Opens Up

Author

Tom Ewer

Filed Under

Development, Featured

Published

June 13, 2016

2 Comments

With the WordPress REST API still staggering towards the finishing line, now is a great time to dust off the crystal ball and consider how developers might actually go about making money through its commercial use in the future. The next few years promises to bring a flood of new talent into the WordPress ecosystem, cementing the platform’s place as the dominant publishing platform online. We’re still in the early days of this next stage, but it’s already obvious that a much wider world of opportunity is potentially opening up to skilled developers. In this piece, we’ll whet your appetite […]

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