Searching for things on WordPress doesn't have to be a long, slow process with multiple page reloads. Thank God. Instant Search & Suggest is a plugin that speeds up the search process by calling up information from posts, pages, taxonomies, and custom post types on the fly. They show up as drop-down suggestions under the search box, of course, but the content area can also be repopulated on the fly. And it can work with just about any theme. In fact, the plugin's author makes the bold claim that it should...
How do I add extra content to a page, from the admin screen, but outside of the main content block? That’s a question you’ll eventually run into with many different CMSs. And it can be a pain. While sometimes, you’ll be able to use a CMS that takes complex page layouts into account (such as Perch, Concrete5, ImpressPages, and the like), it’s not always an option. A massive percentage of the Internet is built on WordPress for a reason after all. I’ve looked for different options over the years,...
Hey WordPress lovers. Every month dozens of incredible free WordPress plugins are released by the community, and we’re here to bring them to you. This seems to be a month of small but useful utilities that only do one or two things, with a few exceptions. So go on. March on down to the list, and get to it! (I'm only a little bit ashamed of that pun.) WP NoteUp ... Notes! Alongside your posts and pages! Use them to remind yourself, or other authors, about things you'd put in a note. That's really all there is to...
You’ve been writing HTML/CSS, and a little bit of JS for an hour now. This next template for your WordPress theme is almost complete. With an unconscious sigh of relief, you refresh the page, and there it is! It’s done. You deserve a break. And then you see it. Something is positioned wrong, or missing. Something’s out of order. Something’s wrong. Awww, hell. Why now? Why me? Why do bad things happen to good... ok, decent people? It’s a bug. It hurts to look at. So, incidentally, does your code....
I can be somewhat fickle about letting other people help me. Sure, if I have a lot of heavy stuff to lift, gimme a hand. If I'm working in the kitchen though, it’s my kitchen…get out! Thus, I’ve always had a complicated relationship with 3rd party services for my web work. I mean sure, my first experience with the Internet came when I was about nine years old and my parents let me create my first e-mail account (everyone else was getting them); I used a third-party service for my e-mail because I didn’t...
Once upon a time, someone decided to see what would happen if you merged a powerful open source PHP framework with a drag‘n’drop content editor designed for non-technical users. As it turns out, you get ImpressPages. ImpressPages began as more traditional CMS, with an emphasis on user-friendliness. The content editor was also drag‘n’drop, but I recall that the rest of the interface seemed confusing to me. It seemed as though they were trying to cram in everything anyone might need in a CMS,...
Welcome, friends, to your first lesson in version control. This article is entirely for non-expert-programmers. If you’re already an expert, this article isn't for you. Shoo. For those programmers who don’t already know it all, readable information can be hard to come by. Most of the things I've read about version control systems like Git and Subversion are written in harshly-accented programmerese. This is my attempt to simplify the concept in plain English for those of us who are just getting...
Brackets has not yet replaced Sublime Text as my primary text editor, but it’s a definite possibility. The quick edit functions are great, it’s always nice to have a color picker handy, it’s light, it’s fast, and it looks kinda purdy. I’ve used it for light editing, as well as a couple of code experiments, so I have a pretty good idea of what it’s like to use it regularly. I have a few issues, of course; getting the live preview to work with a local copy of WordPress seems downright impossible at...