Tutorials
Do you build a plugin and want to easily display some general information? Or perhaps you are building a theme and want your customers to keep up with your blog? If you don’t want to build a dedicated settings page, then a simple (or complex, your call) widget on the WordPress dashboard should be enough. It’s very easy and very fast, too!
Do you need to show an extra navigation menu on your WordPress site? Or perhaps you need to show a bunch of links someplace? No matter your use-case, WordPress provides navigation menus that are very easy to create, manage and display. If you like the drag and drop interface of the navigation menus management screen, and you so you figured you’ll create a menu to show them.
However, you neither want to show them in the sidebar (“Custom Menu” widget), nor in the content (“menu shortcode” plugin), and your theme doesn’t quite allow you to display it exactly where you want. What do you do? You need to register a new menu location. Let’s see how.
If you allow registrations on your WordPress site, chances are you need to gather some more information about your users. If you absolutely need this information, the best way to get it is to make it required during registration, otherwise there are slim chances that your users will actually visit their profile page and provide that optional information.
It’s been quite a while now since we’ve completely abandoned vanilla CSS for a CSS preprocessor (more than four years actually) and more specifically for Sass (with SCSS syntax). There are quite a few reasons why we did that, and the main one is improved DX (developer experience) along with easier plugin integrations.
Simply put, Sass used to be (and still is) a much more powerful language than vanilla CSS, especially if you’re concerned with older browser support (i.e… IE ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). I’ve found that the need for variables, conditionals, mixins, rule nesting, along with color functions and all the goodies a preprocessor comes with is much more apparent within the WordPress theming context where you wish to provide multiple color schemes for your theme or tame popular WordPress plugins to match your theme’s design and layout.
That said, I’m not here to sell you on CSS preprocessors right now, this piece is an overview on how we use Sass with Gulp in our theme and plugin development workflow, and how to incorporate the same workflow to your theme, if you so wish.
A well crafted and easy to read font is a great asset for any website. It will catch the readers eye and it won’t tire them while they consume your content. There are many plugins that can help you add fonts to your WordPress site, but perhaps you want to avoid using them and prefer to do this the old fashioned way. It’s pretty easy, let’s take a look.
Landing website pages have been all the rage for a while now and although many of them come with a great design they can also come with a caveat: long body heights. This usually means that after users are done going through our awesome content they are forced into a scrolling sprint back to our website’s header in order to examine more navigation options (which also kinda means our landing page should have more interesting calls to action, but that’s a different story).
One way to mitigate this terrible experience and improve our website’s user friendliness would be to make our header sticky (which we’ll cover in another tutorial), but that’s something that’s not always desirable. Another way, one which we’ll cover in this tutorial, is to add a so-called “back to top” button which stays fixed as we scroll down and smoothly transitions us back to the very top when it gets clicked. This kind of “scroll to top” behavior is so necessary in some use-cases that iOS even has it embedded as a feature in pretty much the core of the OS (by tapping the status bar).
Let’s go ahead and see how simple it is to add this kind of functionality to any website with a simple button.
Are you building a WordPress theme? Perhaps you are extending a theme by working on a child theme? Or maybe, you are building a WordPress plugin that has something to do with the site’s presentation. Chances are, you need to add options into the WordPress Customizer. Options in the customizer are added as controls.
Global, site-wide website notices are a pattern as old as websites themselves, and although they are being abused all the time they do have valid use-cases and are extremely useful in situations where we absolutely need to notify our visitors of something important, e.g. a great deal (as we do here at CSSIgniter), any kind of maintenance message or even the EU cookie law notice!
When the need rises for such functionality the first thing on anyone’s mind would probably be to have a look at the WordPress plugin repo for any suitable plugins, and, well, although it’s justified (there are a ton of plugins for this kind of thing) there’s no reason not to implement it ourselves since it’s so easy and fun.
Without any further ado, then, let’s see how we’d go about building a simple, global, dismissible site-wide notice bar.
Changing permalink structure, changing post slugs, deleting posts or pages, moving your WordPress installation to another folder, or even migrating your site to a completely different server will require you to take care of URL redirects. A redirect lets your visitor, or more specifically your visitor’s browser, know that the page they are looking for has moved and directs them to the proper address. Unhandled changes to any of the above circumstances might result to 404 errors which are not that great for your page’s SEO. Let’s take a look at how we can use a plugin to easily handle such redirects.
Page templates are a great way to present your content in a way that differs from the rest of your WordPress site. For example, a page template might present a page without a sidebar, or display your blog posts in a categorized fashion, which then you can assign as your website’s front page. Most themes nowadays provide quite a selection of page templates, but yours might not, or it might not quite do what you need it to do. Let’s see when and how you should create a custom page template.
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