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
“I never tried to prove nothing, just wanted to give a good show. My life has always been my music, it’s always come first, but the music ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public. The main thing is to live for that audience, ’cause what you’re […]
Read MoreWordPress, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways (in 140 characters or less).
Read MoreThe WordPress Theme Review Team Website
Read MoreOnly one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet. Mark Twain
Read MoreAbbott: Strange as it may seem, they give ball players nowadays very peculiar names. Costello: Funny names? Abbott: Nicknames, nicknames. Now, on the St. Louis team we have Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third– Costello: That’s what I want to find out. I want […]
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Code 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.