If you want to put some related posts in a widget you can use the smart YARPP plugin. Or, if you merely want to list posts with matching tags, you can put a function in your WordPress theme. In some ways this is better than the fuzzy logic of YARPP because it gives you more control: you just give posts the same tag, and you know they are related.…
The fad for icon fonts is a little silly, imo. I’m not that crazy about trying to replace all text on an app with a curious little picture. But, icons do have their uses, and I generally load Font Awesome on the sites I build, if I can use the social media, RSS, and gear icons. But seeing Chris Behr’s Nice Things icon set (not a font, just a set of images) I was thinking, cool, how can I use some of these?…
This was a really nice project for me: a cool non-profit group, that wanted an upgrade of its old website to WordPress. Trekkers is an org that takes high school kids on bus tours around the USA. We created a site that had good balance between easy-admin, and rich news content. It has the potential for good community interaction, with lots of leaders and (hopefully) students posting content.…
Twenty Twelve is my favorite of the WordPress default ‘twenty’ themes. Its elegant and responsive. I like the smartphone menu. Twenty Ten is not responsive at all. Twenty Eleven is simply less classy. Twenty Thirteen looks like a good full-screen theme, but I have not yet done anything with it. Twenty Twelve should be a perfect candidate for child-theming. You would think. But the stylesheet is written is a bizarre and complex way.…
Here is my plugin list. Essential plugins: WordPress SEO (by Yoast) or All In One SEO. There is lots of debate over which one of these is better. Yoast’s is more fully featured, All in One is more automatic (set it and forget it). If you are willing to do the work, go with Yoast, and be sure to read his manual. Actually read Yoast even if you are using All-in-One.…
For almost two years I’ve been relying on the G5 firewall from Perishable Press, but I’ve come to believe an .htaccess blacklist is simply not enough. Part of the problem is security flaws inherent in the default WordPress installation, such as: An admin user named ‘Admin’ table prefix is wp_ revealing header information users can choose a non-secure password Better WordPress Security can change the username Admin to something else.…
After you make the front page of your theme responsive (see my previous post), you need to check the other templates. And one area that might break your theme, and resists the simple CSS-media-queries method, is the comments form, typically loaded on the single post template. That’s because forms tend to have fixed widths, and whats more, the width is defined with inline HTML, or at least its defined that way by default in the WordPress comments template.…
I re-designed John Howe’s personal site for him. He was planning a move to Florida when he contacted me, wanting a re-design of his old static website, and conversion to WordPress. He also wanted a ‘Florida’ look and feel, so this is what we came up with. It uses the border-image property to give smooth shaded and rounded borders, and it loads a handwritten font. We discussed his domain—wyriwyg.com,…
The simplest way to put a loop in your sidebar is with Justin Tadlock’s sweet plugin Query Posts. This lets you use the query_posts function, with all of its options, in a widget. However sometimes you might need a loop that does something unusual. I had a client who has a category of posts with natural history photos from near his home. He wanted an image to pop up, randomly selected, from the category.…
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