Shortcodes are a popular feature included in many plugins and themes. However, if you’ve never built your own shortcodes before, you may have no idea how to add them to your own WordPress projects. Thankfully, WordPress’ Shortcode API makes it fairly simple to create your own shortcodes. Doing this will enable users to take advantage of your plugin or theme’s features from any text-based area on their WordPress site. Including shortcodes in your projects is an easy way to build on the functionality you’ve already created, so you get the most bang for your buck. In this article, we’ll talk a bit more about how shortcodes […]
Matt Mullenweg on the Gutenberg Editor, Feature-Focused Releases, and More [Interview]
At WordCamp Europe 2017 in Paris, I had the opportunity to sit down with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg for an interview on feature-focused releases, The Gutenberg Editor, niche WordCamps, and more. During the 2016 State of the Word, Mullenweg announced the move away from scheduled releases, toward a feature-focused process, specifically focusing on three major areas: The Editor, The WordPress REST API, and The Customizer. By eliminating the pressure of a specific release date, WordPress can make more revolutionary changes to the software. The Editor, nicknamed Gutenberg, is a product of the new feature-focused process. The Gutenberg-focused release aims to […]
WordPress Theme Safety – How to Ensure the Theme You Are Using is Secure
Two of the biggest reasons for WordPress’ success is how easy it is to customize and that there are so many free ways to do so. The WordPress directory is full of literally thousands of free themes and plugins and can change the design and functionality of your site in seconds. In addition to that, we have masses of premium plugins and other commercial offerings from high-quality WordPress companies. As a consequence, anyone looking to enhance their site is just a Google query away from doing so. Enter “free WordPress themes” and you are sure to find something for your […]
Introducing Faces of WordPress, the People and Projects behind WordPress
As of 2017, WordPress powers over 28 percent of the internet. The success of WordPress, like all open-source projects, is a testament to the collaborate work of the community that surrounds it. Since WordPress first launched more 14 years ago, tens of thousands of people have participated in the project. While we couldn’t find a specific number indicating exactly how many people have participated in creating WordPress, consider this, in 2016 alone there were 115 WordCamps in over 41 countries and 3,193 Meetups in 52 countries. And, in November of 2016, 17,000 people got together to help translate WordPress into […]
The Best Ecommerce Themes of 2017
In the last 14 years, WordPress has grown from a blogging platform to a full-functioning CMS. In fact, it is often chosen to power an online store. Whether you’re a beginner or expert, you need your site to look amazing, and these themes will make any online store look professional. Storefront Storefront is a perfect WordPress theme for ecommerce sites which is compatible with WooCommerce. It is customizable and gives the ease to choose among several layout and color options along with widgets for ease of use. It’s also incredibly responsive. Discover Discover is a professional, clean, and responsive theme […]
The Future of WordPress Customization is Limitless: An Interview with Jason Marlowe
Agencies understand the benefits of WordPress. Not only is it flexible and free, but it also accelerates time to market and allows agencies to hand over a “usable” project to their clients. Jason Marlowe, veteran web designer and CTO at Market House, understands the benefits of WordPress. We talked to him about why he uses the CMS, his stance around open source, personalized content experiences on WordPress, and more. Marlowe started out with HTML and CSS and then moved to Drupal. From there he jumped to WordPress and never looked back. In the last 6-7 years he’s been working almost […]
There’s No Excuse For Bad Site Accessibility
Recently Automattic hosted an online conference on design and exclusion. Instead of calling it a conference on inclusive design, they flipped the idea around to focus on what conscious and unconscious decisions lead to the systematic exclusion of people. Inclusive design is about a lot more than the web and it’s about a lot more than accessibility. But, as web developers, accessibility – making sure that the HTML we generate can be used by everyone properly – is an important topic. So, I wanted to share four attitudes I think leads to us skipping over this important part of our […]
How to Extend the WordPress Customizer
Way back in 2013, the WordPress 3.4 Green release introduced the Customizer to the masses. If you’re up for a trip down memory lane, here’s the announcement post over on Make WordPress. Not without its fair share of naysayers, the Customizer looked to, and still does, bring accessibility and instant feedback to visual changes you make on your WordPress site. Its humbler beginnings focused on smaller things like changing your site background color or changing your site title, but to anyone who really understood what it represented, it meant WordPress users would have: The ability to preview changes before making […]
Why WordPress Is like Digital Glue
We’ve all made software decisions that have gone on to cost us time, frustration and money. As a business owner, I feel an overwhelming pressure to make sure that our own company uses software that helps us to be effective, profitable, and well-poised for the future. Where we’re using a supplier to deliver a software solution for clients, their performance is equally vital. Making the wrong decisions can feel like a death sentence, and for a business, sometimes it can be. So how can we choose the right software? Well, I think a first step is to understand the macro […]
Solving the Theme Default Confusion: Interview with Primož Cigler
WordPress theme authors spend a lot of time practicing to make sure their theme demos go smoothly so that they can acquire new users and customers. However, this can lead to frustration when customers install the theme and find out the that it is actually quite challenging to replicate the demo. This has been a pain point for me personally. But I realize I’m not great at website design, where as theme developers are, especially with their own themes. I recently spoke with Primož Cigler, the founder of Proteus Themes and the co-author of the plugin One Click Demo Import (OCDI). The […]
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