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
Welcome to image alignment! The best way to demonstrate the ebb and flow of the various image positioning options is to nestle them snuggly among an ocean of words. Grab a paddle and let’s get started. On the topic of alignment, it should be noted that users can choose from […]
Read MoreDefault This is a paragraph. It should not have any alignment of any kind. It should just flow like you would normally expect. Nothing fancy. Just straight up text, free flowing, with love. Completely neutral and not picking a side or sitting on the fence. It just is. It just […]
Read MorePutting special characters in the title should have no adverse effect on the layout or functionality. Special characters in the post title have been known to cause issues with JavaScript when it is minified, especially in the admin when editing the post itself (ie. issues with metaboxes, media upload, etc.). […]
Read MoreVerify that: The post title renders the word “with” in italics and the word “markup” in bold. The post title markup should be removed from the browser window / tab.
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Another in a series of painless upgrades from WordPress. Double thumbs up for WordPress.org. One big advantage of this version of WordPress is that now I can create and edit posts on my iPad. In the previous version of WordPress the insert media interface was too large for the iPad mini with […]
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Relevanssi – A Better Search plugin breaks the search function in the “Media Library’, “Insert Media panel”, and also the ‘Insert link to existing content” in the hyperlink panel. Relevanssi replaces WordPress default search with a partial-match search that sorts results by relevance instead of the default reverse chronological order. […]
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Q: Why build a website?
A: It’s an extension of your business marketing, reaching new customers and new markets.
Your website design is the key component in your internet marketing ecosystem
Your website and other internet properties are part of your business marketing ecosystem, and an extension of your brand on the internet, and should be viewed in that context and not as isolated objects. You website design should be reinforcing your brand and extending your marketing messages to reach potential customers on their terms.
To help with your website design it’s useful to know what your goals are for having a website and how the website fits with the rest of your marketing.
Here are seven questions that will help you understand what you need for your website:
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No news is good news! I applied the WordPress Upgrade 3.4 from 3.3.2 and so far I haven’t found any conflicts with my themes of plugins on this site. And I use a lot of plugins (currently using 29) since I use this as a test bed to explore plugins […]
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Someone at our recent Weekly WordPress Support Group at TechLiminal in Oakland CA asked about how to create an image map to use as a navigation feature. There are websites that will do this for you and of course you can do this in applications like Dreamweaver and Photoshop. You can also […]
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But, if I deactivate Simple Facebook Connect the Grunion forms show up in the post. Response : (here’s the current discussion thread on the Simple Facebook Connect support forum that I started) Pieter Hartsook: Simple Facebook Connect still disables the display of Grunion forms (included with Jetpack). The contact form […]
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.