Developer Resourcers
Do you have a WordPress problem you can't figure out? Why not let our experts show you how.
We hope these Posts may be useful for you. If you have any feedback, problems, enhancements, or websites where you have used these -- please leave a comment on the post.
Code Snippets are solutions we have come up with to solve website development problems or ways to add enhanced features and functionality.
Some of the solutions are generic to WordPress (and Gutenberg blocks), but most are pertinent to developers working with Genesis themes and Beaver Builder plugins.
We are sharing these in the hope that what worked for us may help you in your development projects.
if you need individual hands-on coaching we are available to help you with your project on an hourly basis.
Developer Resources Posts
Recently a reader raised a question in a comment to a previous post. He was confused about how to move an existing site to Godaddy Managed WordPress Hosting. Having done this several dozen times now I’ve developed some “best practices” and work-arounds I can share.
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Google has started rolling out filtering for Google searches from mobile devices. If you site doesn’t meet the criteria for mobile-friendly, your site won’t show up in the search results no matter how relevant your page is to the search. As more folks are visiting websites using smartphones and tablets […]
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Release Candidate RC1 has been deployed.
I’m trying that out on my Hartsook Letter Staging site. Everything looks good so far, I haven’t found my theme or plugins breaking. You can take a look for yourself at https://hartsook.com. (the link will open in a new window so you can compare 3.8.2 and 3.9 if you want to.
Here’s a link to what wordpress.org has to say about 3.9 RC1
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Admittedly it’s a new product, but currently there is no elegant way to manually backup your WordPress site at GoDaddy WordPress Managed Hosting. GoDaddy does take a nightly snapshot of the files and database and keeps it around for 30 days. If you want to rollback to a previous version, you have to call customer support and get them to do it. But change is coming…
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Hosting your WordPress website on GoDaddy has been strongly discouraged by me and most of the WordPress consultants I know. But GoDaddy has just introduced a new WordPress Managed Hosting plan that may change all that.
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There are several reasons why you might want to copy your website,
you want to make a “sandbox” copy to experiment on, without affecting the public-facing production site
you want to change hosting companies to get a better deal, faster performance or more functionality
having a complete copy of your website is a great insurance policy should something happen to your host and your site is lost.
Jetpack Photon should help I recommend Jetpack-Photon module (deactivate all the other Jetpack modules you don’t use). Photon is an image-only CDN solution using Automatic’s servers. All your images are uploaded to their servers the next time the image is served after you activate Photon. Subsequently the images are served […]
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Using column shortcodes to make 2 columns didn’t work for this post. But I was able to do this on a Page (instead of a Post) using the theme’s 2-column page template.
See the succesful results at: Multi-column video test page
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BackWPup plugin developer, Daniel Huesken has decided to begin offering a “Pro” version beginning with version 3.0 of the plugin. I don’t have a problem with this and in some cases might recommend the Pro version to some of my clients. All the issues I had with the switch to version 3.0 […]
Read MoreHeadings Header one Header two Header three Header four Header five Header six Blockquotes Single line blockquote: Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Multi line blockquote with a cite reference: People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. […]
Read MoreCode Snippets Posts
If you use Beaver Themer to layout single post pages and format the post content using the Gutenberg Block Editor you notice when embedding a video that the “Resize for smaller devices” switch is enabled by default on video blocks. The purpose of this setting is to maintain the original […]
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Let’s say you want to style the dashboard, or hide an element that normally shows when editing a Post using display:none;. Even if you can discover the CSS selector using your browser’s inspector and test out your custom styling, you can’t just copy and paste that into the WordPress Customizer. […]
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The Simple History plugin default history period is 60 days. The log includes not only user initiated changes to the website, but all the automated updates to plugins, etc. This can make the log file pretty large.
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If you don’t use the Excerpt field in your posts and rely on WordPress to grab the first few dozen words of your post content what you usually find is the excerpt when displayed on the front end (usually in some sort of archive or post grid display) will have […]
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RSS readers are somewhat old school in 2020, but the RSS feed that is part of WordPress is used by email services like Mailchimp and Mailerlite to create automated email updates when you add a new post to your website. If you have custom post types though, they are not included […]
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For some client projects I needed to embed javascript code in a page (Post). I used a custom field textarea to insert the code when creating the Post. The problem was the default for text fields was to run them through a sanitizer.php to strip out any type of code […]
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The client wanted to display a list of past events in a scrollable column. This was easy to implement using simple css. The page layout was done with Beaver Builder, but the solution should work for any html container.
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Sometimes you want to present a navigation menu as a horizontal “mega-menu” instead of a hierarchal dropdown menu. This is really simple if you are using Beaver Builder. The mega-menu feature is built in, but is unfortunately hidden. You have to know the secret to turn it on.
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I needed to format a number field (999,999,999), coming from a custom field number-format (no other characters permitted in the number entry field). No “$” no commas or decimal points, etc. to output as a normal currency format. When displaying the number I could add a “$” in front of […]
Read MoreKnowledge Sharing:
How Do You Do That?!
WordPress sites are actually a collection of components from different vendors that must all work in harmony to get the functionality and appearance you want. If one is slightly off-key it can cause havoc with the rest of the site. WordPress Website Coach has experience using dozens of these components on many client sites. We know what combinations of parts work well together and which ones are more problematic.
Getting your site to look and work exactly the way you want often requires some customization of these components. We've done that and want to share some of our tips and tricks with you.
For example would you like to know our Seven questions to improve your website design?
If you need help customizing your WordPress site -- talk to us.
We have experience in PHP, MySQL, CSS, and Javascript that underlies your WordPress website.
Quick Links: Resources we recommend and use
Sometimes you can find a "purpose-built" theme that exactly meets your functional and stylistic requirements. This can save you a lot of time and cost creating the website for your business. But, be careful...
Most of the highly targeted themes are very difficult to modify outside of the range of settings the theme developer provides. Even something you would think was a simple change might require many hours of custom coding and testing to achieve.
Often times it is more efficient to use a general purpose theme that is well supported and highly configurable that can serve as a basis for almost any set of design and functional requirements. This is the approach we use most of the time...
Our preferred platform is the Genesis Framework for the theme and Beaver Builder plugin to manage the page layout.
It's 2017, every site URL these days should start with https:// instead of http://. There are several reasons for adding that SSL Certificate:
- With SSL, your viewer's interactions with your website are encrypted, you may not be collecting credit card info, but forms often have names, addresses, phone number, etc. that nobody wants shared with the guy at the next table at Starbucks.
- The encrypted pages from your site actually load faster than the unencrypted ones.
- Google will down-rank your SEO if you don't have an SSL cert.
- Browsers are increasingly alerting viewers if they are trying to load an "unsecure page". You do not want visitors to your site to wonder if viewing your pages is safe.
- If you are doing e-commerce on your site, you will be required to have an SSL Certificate.
There are several levels of SSL Certificates. The lowest level is a "domain-level" certificate. Issuing this certificate can be automated. Basically, a program checks to see if an email address associated with your domain, is also associated with your website hosting account. If it is, you get an SSL cert for your website and you can do e-commerce, your visitors see the Secure lock, and https:// shows up in their browser.
Many web hosting vendors are now providing domain-level SSL Certificates for free with your account, and it takes only a few clicks and a minute or two to set it up. If your hosting vendor doesn't do this, it's time to switch hosting vendors!
Google provides free analytics accounts. While there are other website statistics services, Google Analytics is easy to add to your site and will over time provide you a wealth of information about what visitors find interesting on your site. It will also tell you for example, what percent of your visits come from mobile devices. That's good information to have when you're thinking about a site redesign to make it more mobile-friendly.
Look at the page-source for any one of your pages and search for "UA-" That's the prefix for Google Analytics tracking number for your account. If you see something like UA-12345678-1, that's it. You have Google Analytics installed. Just log in to your Google account to view the website traffic reports.
It all depends... We can build a simple several-page website from scratch in 8-10 hours if you have your content ready to go.
- What do you want to accomplish with your site? A one-page "brochure" site with your business details and contact information is much easier than an e-commerce or membership site.
- How much content (text, images, video, audio, etc.) do you already have? Is it already on a WordPress website, in electronic documents that your can copy and paste, or do you have to create the content from scratch?
- Do you already have a design in mind for your site? Do you have a marketing and art department that can provide detailed wireframes for all the pages with specifications for colors, fonts, etc? If not we have visual and User Experience (UX) designers that can meet with you to develop a design for you.
- Would you be happy using pre-existing professionally designed layouts for your web pages? That can save loads of time and cost by replacing the stock text and images with your own. Maybe a pre-built coffee shop layout would work just fine for your coffee shop.