Have you been on a date/night out with friends/any social gathering lately? Let me make a bold prediction: At some point, the conversation you were having ceased because the other party was staring onto their cellphone to check Emails, Facebook or “quickly look something up on the web.” If it wasn’t the other person, it was probably you. So am I psychic? No. It’s merely the times we are living in. Cellphones and other mobile devices have become an integral part of our lives. I mean, have you seen the line for the new iPhones? Whether this development is good […]
Improving WordPress Development Workflow with Composer
A dependency manager is one of those magical tools, like a smartphone, that most people (myself included) didn’t know they needed until they tried it, but once they did, they were hooked. A dependency manager wrangles together all of the different pieces that go into a plugin or theme — such as frameworks, JavaScript libraries, jQuery plugins, or even the plugins, themes, and libraries that makes up a WordPress site. There are lots of dependency managers out there, but the standard for PHP development is Composer. Composer is user friendly and works great with WordPress. Keep in mind that one […]
On the Versatility of WordPress
11 years, 4 months ago, the world changed for the better. How, you ask? WordPress was created, published, and released to the public. It spread like wildfire and had millions of users within a couple years. And as the user base of ol’ WordPress continued to grow, so did the capabilities of the platform. What started out as a simple software to facilitate blogging has evolved into an extremely versatile content management system, which can be used to power just about any type of website. Today, WordPress is super flexible and can be adjusted every which way to suit your personal website needs. Evolution […]
The Ultimate Guide to Pages, Posts, Categories, and Tags
WordPress, by default, provides two basic types of content: pages and posts. For the majority of users, that is all they’ll ever need. Every semester in my class, I notice a great deal of confusion when it comes to differentiating between pages and posts, and then categories and tags. So, in this article we are going to clearly define the differences, and show you when you should (and shouldn’t) be using each. As mentioned previously, WordPress offers two main types of content for your website, pages, and posts. These are the main methods by which your content is displayed to […]
Interview with Bob Dunn on WordPress Education
Recent statistics estimate that WordPress is used by a whopping 23.1% of the internet. Given the ubiquity of WordPress, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there’s a growing demand for WordPress education. Whether you’re just starting out with WordPress and need to learn the basics, or if you’re an intermediate developer looking to hone your skills, WordPress users of all skill levels are seeking out new ways to learn. The increasing popularity of WordPress is likely accredited to the advantageous model it was founded on — open source — which allows anyone to make improvements to the software. The open-source model also brings with […]
5 Plugins to Optimize Media Files in WordPress
Managing media is one of those experiences that keeps getting better out of the box in WordPress. But it is also one of the hardest parts of running any website. Images, video, and audio often account for a large majority of your page weight, and ensuring that it is optimized can go a long way towards making your site faster, cleaner and more approachable users. Fortunately, there are several plugins out there that can help you with this. Here are five. Imsanity Imsanity is a plugin with one task in mind. To limit the size of images that are uploaded […]
How Open Source Has Driven the WordPress Revolution
Open source. These two words are the driving force behind the evolution of the CMS that we all know and love, WordPress. Without open source, I highly doubt that WordPress would have gained even half the popularity it boasts of today. What Is Open Source? Open source software, if you want the Wikipedia definition, is software “for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed or modified.” In layman’s terms, this essentially means that WordPress is free for all and you can do anything with it, which includes alteration of the code and customization of […]
How to Make Money with WordPress
Most webmasters will start building websites with WordPress purely for fun; however, after a while they may want to take their hobby more seriously and look for a way to make money from their website. Now, most of you reading this will already have some basic knowledge of the WordPress platform, and we could all use a little extra cash, right? Today I want to introduce some of the best ways you can make money using WordPress. Developing Themes One of WordPress’ main strengths is that it allows just about anyone to throw together a great looking website using one […]
Love Art More Than Money: A Case Against Online Piracy
The Great Bubble Gum Caper When I was eight years old, I stole a pack of sour apple bubblegum from the grocery store, after my mom said she wouldn’t buy it for me. I, a budding Moriarty, took the gum out of the wrapper while she was turned around, and then slammed the sweet morsel into my mouth. I’ll never forget how the sharp flavor made my mouth water. Or how, in the final moments of parental prohibition, my mouth turned into a dastardly wrinkle of a smirk. My mother said “No,” and in response I fired the first shots […]
Installing Twitter Cards on Your WordPress site
In recent years, Twitter has turned from a strictly text based forum to a media rich platform. Tweets containing Vine or YouTube urls, for instance, will automatically display the video underneath the tweet. Along with these new changes, Twitter has added support for bloggers to automatically create customizable previews whenever someone shares one of their links. These previews, called Twitter Cards, can display an image from the post along with a snippet and an easy link to the author’s Twitter handle. Adding Twitter Cards to WordPress Adding Twitter Card support to any WordPress site is a pretty simple process and […]

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