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 …
Last updated February 26, 2018 I’ve tried out hundreds of themes, and my experience is “don’t fight the theme.” If you find you are struggling with a theme then it is likely because you chose the wrong theme for the job, or YOU are not flexible enough. Huh? Yes, I don’t know how many times …
Last Updated June 4, 2019 ThemeIsle, a WordPress theme shop that started in 2012 and offers a number of highly rated themes and plugins. Their themes are sold individually in either an annual subscription or an unlimited lifetime option. They used to have a “club membership” model that gave access to all of their themes …
Last updated August 18, 2019 Why Add A Featured Image? If you are writing a product review or a post targeting something specific, then an image of your topic makes perfect sense and finding the right image is pretty straightforward. However, there are many times that the topic is more conceptual and you want the …
Searching for Public Domain Images – List of Best Websites Read More
I spent the weekend testing out page builders, to find one that meets my needs. In the course of testing, I remembered a few things that I had forgotten and I came to a conclusion about the future of WordPress that I would like to share. No, this is not a review post. I may …
I Have Seen the Future of WordPress and It Is Not What you Think Read More
Taking PHP Seriously is a very interesting post that talks about why some large companies are using PHP, some of the shortcoming of the language, and how to use 3rd party tools to overcome those shortcomings. A very interesting read.
In my mind, PHP 7 and free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates are game changers. PHP 7 is significantly faster and Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates lower the bar for small and medium sized sites for using SSL. I recently moved some sites to SiteGround because they offer both of these new technologies for free through cPanel …
Someone recently asked about showing the wiki category in the post meta. Showing the category and tags for wiki pages is something you do in your theme, not the plugin, but it just so happens that we both are using the Divi theme, so I spent some time to figure this out. Note that you …
In this post, I will do a walk-through tutorial on setting up the Uniform Server, show you some of its features, and show how you can easily setup WordPress development sites. I have been using the Uniform Server package on my Windows machine for local PHP programming and for running WordPress development sites. The Uniform …
I have been working on a simple wiki plugin for WordPress named Yada Wiki. It provides a wiki post type, categories and tags, and a table of contents option. The plugin has two easy to use shortcodes, available via buttons on the editor toolbar. The first editor button, that looks like a chat icon, inserts …
Here are some reasons why I like WordPress. WordPress is a blogging and content management platform that is incredibly popular, versatile, and relatively easy to use. It is an open source project and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people around the world working to improve and extend it. You are free to use …
It is not unusual for people to want to add wiki functionality to their website. There is no ‘wiki’ module in the Drupal.org repository. Drupal is often described as a content management platform (as opposed to a CMS) because it provides the tools for building a site that the developer then assembles. This is a …