Stephen Burge's Blog, page 56

New Class: How to Develop WordPress Plugins

This week's new class is the start of a series. "How to Develop WordPress Plugins" is a step-by-step guide to building your first WordPress plugin.

This week, we're releasing the first 11 videos, and there's much more to come over the next few weeks.

In this class, you're going to build a plugin called "Big ToDo". You can click here to download the completed project. It installs and works just well as any plugin on WordPress.org.

The plugin uses a custom post type, a custom taxonomy and a shortcode for the output. As you build the plugin, you'll learn about the best practices for WordPress development, including how to follow the recommended coding standards.

This intro video gives you a feel for the class and introduces you to the plugin project:



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Introduction to Bootstrap for Absolute Beginners

Bootstrap is the best HTML, CSS and JavaScript framework for any web developer. It will help you quickly produce responsive, clean looking websites. It does this simply by providing you with a ton of pre-built CSS and JavaScript for lists, navigation bars, forms and lots of other web elements.

With Bootstrap you can focus more on the website you wanted, and spend less time wrestling with some of the CSS issues, media queries, and cross-browser compatibility.




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Add Custom Post Statuses in WordPress with PublishPress

PublishPress is a must have WordPress plugin if your blog has multiple contributors. It features several tools that will help you improve your blogging workflow.

Learn in this blog post how to create custom statuses for your WordPress blog posts. This allows you to go beyond the basic post statuses provided in WordPress.



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Lessons Learned from 10 Years of Video Hosting

 

One of the features that our members most often want is to host videos on their site.

As it happens, we've learned a little about how to do that over the years.

We've been hosting video for 10 years, and the technology is almost unrecognizable. In it's infancy 10 years ago, today's video technology is truly amazing.

Here are our four recommendations if you want to host video yourself:



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Poopy.life Provides Unlimited Free WordPress Sandboxes

Are you a WordPress beginner and want to test WordPress themes and plugins?

Last month, the team behind WP All Import launched a site called poopy.life, which allows you to create free WordPress sandboxes.

Yes, that's really the name.

No, I don't know why they called it that.

Yes, it does work really well.



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The Beginners Guide to Joomla Cache Options

Some of our members are trying to make their Joomla sites run more quickly. They've seen caching options, which promise to help speed up their sites. But, there are several caching options available.

This blog post explains what options are available and how you can enable them.

This tutorial borrows from this article by Klas Berlič. All of the detailed technical explanations and image are from Klas, so a big thank you to him.



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PHP Notices, Warnings and Errors on Your Drupal Site

Websites will run into problems. Whether you're using Drupal or any other software, there will be problems at some point.

Drupal runs on PHP and when PHP has problems, it reports them to you. However, often these errors will appear on your site and will be visible to visitors:

However, often these errors will appear on your site and will be visible to visitors:



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Find the Page ID or Post ID in WordPress

Although WordPress is quite intuitive in most cases, there are some things that are not as obvious, such as:
"Where do you find the the page ID in WordPress?"

This is especially useful if you're trying to exclude by Page ID certain pages that appear in the Pages Widget.

This tutorial will show you how to quickly find the hidden Page ID or Post ID in WordPress.



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The Bigger Picture Surrounding the Drupal Controversy

This has not been a fun couple of weeks in the Drupal community.

If you've missed the events, you can catch up with this list of links. There's dozens of articles in that list, plus hundreds more think-pieces, tweets and Reddit posts.

You don't need me to add to another opinion on what happened.

Instead, I'd like to try and situate this controversy into the broader flow of recent events.



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Make Sure to Test Your Site With Adblockers Enabled

Today, we had two of those super-frustrating, but ultimately educational moments in web development. 

We loaded up a new image to our site. It seemed to work perfectly in some browsers, but it absolutely refused to show in others.

Here's how the image should have appeared, on our login screen.



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