Last updated 4/27/2018 A year and a half ago, when Pippin Williams wrote the authoritative review of WordPress page builders, there were several strong contenders. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have seen that the field quickly narrowed to two: Beaver Builder and Elementor. These two giants in the page builder arena have been locked …
Last Updated January 18, 2019. Interested in CSSIgniter? Thinking of making a purchase? This review will give you what you need to decide, you’ll discover the good and the bad, so you might want to read this first. I have summarized the main points in this article. Watch the view for details and to see …
Last Updated November 24, 2018. There are a number of free online services useful for site builders. The four listed below are helpful for checking if DNS changes have been picked up, troubleshooting SSL errors, finding the cause of a site slowdown for speed optimization, and using search engine auto-suggest features to gain insight into …
Introduction If you need a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a physical machine in a server facility then this article isn’t for you. For a high-level view of hosting considerations, see my previous article. In this article I look at two options for WordPress site hosting: SiteGround and Cloudways. These two options cover most small and medium …
As you may know, Astra is a relatively new WordPress theme created by Brainstorm Force. They are the company behind the Ultimate Addon for Beaver Builder as well as a number of other plugins. Upon acceptance, the Astra theme quickly shot up into the most popular theme category on WordPress.org and has become the go-to …
The WPBuilds Facebook group is a friendly and interesting bunch of site builders. Periodically there is a discussion about plugins for creating the “display template” for Custom Post Types. This is a decision, or hurdle, that everyone using Custom Post Types has to deal with. Fair warning, if you are reading this then I assume …
The Not So Skinny on Custom Templates: Toolset, and Beaver Builder Read More
For the past couple of years, we have been hearing about how hard it is to break into the WordPress theme and plugin markets. I think there will be a large shakeup with WordPress 5.0. Plugins especially will have to scramble to be compatible and take advantage of Gutenberg. Some will be slow with updates, …
We are all familiar with FOMO marketing – playing on the consumer’s Fear Of Missing Out to quickly move them to purchase. This might be your standard sale – “buy now or wait until next year to get a good price,” or it might be the even more effective “one time only special.” When you …
A few weeks ago I was thinking to myself that WordPress comments were really a black hole. So I was surprised and intrigued when I received an email from Thrive Themes telling me about their new Thrive Comments plugin. I went over to their website to check it out. In this post I want to …
When Posts Are Not Enough WordPress core supports custom fields and custom post types, but there is no admin UI for managing them and they are not output for display automatically. Typically you would need to create PHP theme templates in order to display them on the frontend. Toolset is a suite of plugins that …
Everyone doing web development or training up in web technologies needs a local test server. You know that testing on a live site is risky. Building websites or evaluating themes and plugins? Yes, you need one too. Are you interested in WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or PHP? If so, and you are running Windows, then you need …
Best WAMP Server for Local WordPress – Laragon is Easy Read More
Having a good backup option for your WordPress site is essential. It helps you recover in the event there is a problem with an update, a user error, or a site hack. I think that we should have backup options built into WordPress core, but for now, we need to use a plugin. This post …
Last updated September 1, 2017. When I was learning to program, I was taught that 80% of the project can be implemented with 20% of the effort. To realize the additional 20% of the features would take 80% of the effort. This is one version of the 80-20 rule. The Pareto principle, as it is …
Last updated August 26, 2017 I recently discovered the WP Builds podcasts. Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley, the hosts, have interviewed some great guests with a focus on topics relevant to site builders and WordPress professionals. The discussions are informal, entertaining, and you get a good feel for the people and an inside view of their world …
I have been involved in website hosting since 1995. I’ve worked for organizations and companies who hosted their own sites. I’ve had clients with Virtual Private Servers (VPS) for site hosting. I’ve used shared hosting for personal websites, the websites of family members, and for a small non-profit. From that experience, here are a few …
WordPress and Drupal are two very popular content management systems that are often compared. The common conclusion to most comparisons is that WordPress is good for blogs or small sites and Drupal is better for big or complicated sites. I believe that conclusion is shallow and that a deeper understanding of the differences is helpful …