SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a way for your website visitors to communicate securely with your website server. SSL does 2 very important things: SSL encrypts the data sent between your website server and your website visitor. This is critical for such information as credit card numbers, passwords, and private user information. For example, if . . . read more
WordPress 4.0 appears to have altered the way the main navigation menu is retrieved. Previously, themes would use: wp_nav_menu(); where they needed the main menu to appear. With WordPress 4.0, this behavior has been altered. Instead you will need to use: wp_nav_menu(array(‘theme_location’=>’primary’)); Without indicating that you need to use the “Primary” menu, wp_nav_menu() will fall . . . read more
Constant Contact Widget is a simple and lightweight plugin that provides a email submission widget for Constant Contact. There are some free Constant Contact plugins out there but I wrote this because I wasn’t satisfied with what was available (too bloated or had cross-browser javascript issues). No advertising or links. Lightweight code (~100 LOC). Ajax . . . read more
WordPress plugin and theme developers may sometimes find the need to output your own open-graph tags, meta descriptions or titles, for specific pages. But one consideration is if your user is running a SEO plugin, such as the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin or the All-In-One SEO Pack. You don’t want your plugin or theme to . . . read more
Its easy to forget to set a featured image when creating a new post or page, and honestly, it may not seem terribly important. But it can be a good idea to make sure this image is always set if you use the featured image in post lists for your theme. More importantly, SEO plugins . . . read more
A great way to make your theme more user friendly is to provide a custom orientation video in the WordPress welcome panel on the dashboard (the top panel on the dashboard)
Have you worked on a WordPress site that is not yet live, and need to move that site to a new permanent domain name? Or need to migrate your site’s domain name? It should be straightfoward to just change the Site Address in your WordPress settings, but take a closer look and you will notice . . . read more
Redirect List is a simple and lightweight plugin that performs HTTP redirection and supports matching of GET query parameters without regular expressions. 301 or 302 HTTP redirect. Specify from and destination urls in a list manually. Does not require creating a custom page. Match url regardless of GET parameters. Match url only if no GET . . . read more
I recently installed Clicky analytics on this website. Now, there is a great Clicky WordPress plugin available, but it was just as easy to take the Clicky code snippet and paste it into a Text Widget that I place in the bottom sidebar (widgeted area). This works for Google Analytics as well. Why not install the . . . read more
Documenting shortcodes is a common task for WordPress plugin developers. You can either use the html entities “[” for “[“and ] for “]”, or use double brackets “[[” and “]]” to escape the shortcode: [shortcode] [[shortcode]] Using the html entities would require going into the Text (HTML) mode of the editor, so using the double . . . read more
