Tips for web developers, bloggers, and WordPress users
These are life-saving WordPress plugins that I use on many of my clients’ and my own sites. OK, maybe “life-saving” is a slight exaggeration, but these can definitely cure some of your worst WordPress headaches. I have tested each of these (except where noted) and vouch for their quality. I hope you find them as … Read more
I recently had to figure out how to generate PDFs using PHP. There are tons of solutions out there, free and paid, with pros and cons. This is a summary of what I found out during my research, however, it’s by no means comprehensive. I basically stopped when I found solutions that satisfied my requirements. … Read more
This is the easiest way to set up reliable emailing from your website Setting up reliable email sending from a website can be kind of a hassle for web developers – at least it was for me. For brochure sites, the web hosting company’s server email might be OK, but for any website requiring reliable … Read more
Website accessibility is getting more and more important these days. One of the key factors in web accessibility is the ability to access all of the features of the website with the keyboard. If any element is clickable with a mouse, it needs to be reachable by keyboard using the tab key and return/enter to … Read more
Surprisingly, I wasn’t able to find a native solution online to globally disable commenting on a WordPress website. WordPress doesn’t have a checkbox called “Globally Disable All Comments”. But, a quick and easy solution does exist which does not require a plugin! To be clear, I’m talking about still showing the existing comments, but not … Read more
After years of being a satisfied customer of Siteground, I finally had to find a new host because my sites were outgrowing their GoGeek shared hosting plan. I guess that’s a good problem to have. Although I love and still recommend Siteground for their shared hosting, and I knew they offered VPS hosting, I wanted … Read more
Popup Maker is a popular and useful WordPress plugin for creating website popups. The popups can open automatically after a preset time or through a click event on the page or in your menu. But one feature I haven’t found natively in Popup Maker is the ability to tell the page to automatically open the … Read more
Here’s the situation: You’ve created some custom Taxonomies and custom Post Types using the Custom Post Type UI Plugin (or using PHP code). You’re using Advanced Custom Fields (or another plugin) to manage your Taxonomy settings, so you do NOT want those meta boxes to appear in the sidebar of the WordPress editor. And, you’re … Read more
Divi is one of the most popular drag-and-drop WordPress builder themes out there today. As a long time Divi user myself, I was super excited (and envious) when I learned about some of the killer features of Oxygen, a newer WordPress builder that claims to create fast bloat-free code. After building a couple of sites … Read more
I recently switched one of my blogs from Divi to the Oxygen Builder, mainly because I’d heard about how lean and fast the code was. I’m really happy with the result, but it took some effort to build some of the native Divi elements in Oxygen. One of these was Divi’s main menu search icon. … Read more
I have a client who was having chronic server downtime on GoDaddy. A customer support rep pointed me to the Resource Usage page on cPanel which showed the CPU was maxed out. When I investigated the Apache logs, I discovered that several of the sites on the server were under DDoS (distributed denial of service) … Read more
My local web development tool of choice for Mac is MAMP. I’ve used it to create local WordPress sites for years. But, I had a hell of a time trying to get it to work with a WordPress Multisite. After a whole day of research, I finally got it to work though! If you want … Read more
MAMP is my tool of choice for developing websites locally on my Mac. But, when I started using it out of the box, my local URLs were of this form: That was fine for most of my local sites. Occasionally, I’d have a problem when a site used root relative links, but I just lived … Read more
My web development clients seem to love popups. They’re always asking me to add popups to websites. But, as explained in this article, WordPress Popup Maker has had its “popup” custom post type set to “private” since version 1.7. While there are cases where that is indeed the right thing to do, it excludes popup … Read more
WordPress Multisite lets you create multiple WordPress websites that all use the same set of themes and plugins. It might appear to be a great way to make maintaining multiple sites more efficient, as you can update the WordPress core, themes, and plugins once, and they are updated for all sites. But in practice, the … Read more
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) is an indispensable time-saving tool for many WordPress developers. But, when data sets become large, ACF queries can take a long time if not done efficiently. Here are some effective ways to massively speed up your ACF queries! 1. Use Local JSON (or Export to PHP) Local JSON is a new … Read more
As a frequent blogger, I depend on spelling and grammar checking, especially because I’m not a very good proofreader of my own content. So, I was surprised and dumbfounded when I found out that Automattic’s own Jetpack spell checker did NOT work with their new Gutenberg block editor! After looking online, I saw that one … Read more
Moving a domain name from one registrar to another can be tricky, especially if it’s something you don’t do often. If the domain is attached to a live site, doing it wrong could result in downtime. I wrote this guide for myself, to remind me of some of the gotchas associated with migrating a domain … Read more
When you post a web page in a Facebook feed, Facebook will attempt to find the thumbnail image from your site’s metadata. If found, Facebook will cache that image so that it doesn’t have to re-load the image from your site every time it shows up on a Facebook feed. This works great until you … Read more
The Ultimate Member plugin is a formidable package for managing membership on a WordPress site. Surprisingly, however, it does not have a built-in way to import members through CSV file or other method. But, you can still do it using the method I describe here. Install the “Import Users from CSV” Plugin The first step … Read more
Elegant Themes already has a blog post entitled “How to Add More Columns to Your Divi Builder Posts or Pages” which shows how to add more columns to your Divi theme. Currently, the builder maxes out at 6 columns. The blog article’s method works fine if your modules are all equal height as shown in … Read more
Stock photography can be expensive. And randomly grabbing licensed images from the Internet can cost you thousands of dollars if you’re found violating a copyright and threatened with legal action (this happened to someone I talked to at a Meetup). Filtered Google Search You can find free legal images through a filtered Google search, but … Read more
I had a very common problem for which I could not find a good CSS solution. Namely, I wanted my website footer to extend to the bottom of the browser window, regardless of how much (or little) main body content I had. What I wanted was this: What I was getting was this: There are … Read more
I have a client who wanted pages to fade in on load and fade out when leaving. This effect also hides some of the messiness that can appear in the browser (partially loaded images, JavaScript, etc.) as the site is loading. I thought this would be simple. There are lots of documented solutions online, which … Read more
On one of my sites, my Divi contact form worked great on desktop but someone told me it didn’t work on mobile. Sure enough, they were right! On my iPhone, I got this message after submitting the form: “Please refresh the page and try again.” The form didn’t submit, even after refreshing (and even if … Read more
WordPress is a great website platform that I use and develop on every day, but, it has its weaknesses. It requires a database that is accessed dozens (or hundreds?) of times every time a page is loaded, which can slow down page load times. It’s kind of a wasteful use of server resources if your … Read more
In mid 2016, Microsoft announced that they were no longer going to support Windows Live Mail. This was bad news for me, because I had been a long-time user of Windows Live Mail, dating back to when it was called Outlook Express. I used it not only for email, but for my calendar and contacts. … Read more
Many people who use the WordPress Divi Accordion Module want it to start out closed by default. Every WordPress client I have who uses the Divi Accordion has asked for it, and there are many people online asking about it. The way it works now is that the first element of the accordion defaults to open, … Read more
Querying a WordPress database is pretty straightforward using WP_Query or get_posts(). However, I ran into a problem when I was trying to search for all Posts with a certain custom field value that was stored as an array. The Problem I was using the popular Advanced Custom Fields plugin. The field type I was using … Read more
If you look up how to increase your PHP max file size, most sources will tell you to change the upload_max_filesize setting in your php.ini file. Well, I did that and it still wasn’t working for me on my client’s shared GoDaddy Linux hosting. So, I called them up and found the un-publicized “secret” way to … Read more
Let’s say you have a page or piece of code that needs to be run regularly, say once a day, or once an hour. It might update a database, import something into WordPress, clear out log files, make a backup, or whatever. If you have access to the server, you can set up what Linux … Read more
Ultimate Member is a very widely-used membership WordPress plugin. It works well, but I’ve come across a number of problems with the uploading of member cover photos on multisite WordPress sites. These were so maddening, I decided to write about them and provide solutions to you! So, here are some things to check if cover … Read more
When I first started monetizing my websites using Google Adsense I was surprised that there wasn’t an obvious way to see which pages were generating my income. This seemed like a critical piece of information for any blogger or site owner! Of course, there is a way to get this information, but it not given … Read more
Let’s say you have two completely different primary domains, say, example.com, and purchase.com, and you want to track them as a single site on Google Analytics. For example, if a user goes from one site to the other, you want that visitor to show up on the same Google Analytics report and not count as … Read more
I had a situation where I needed to create a WordPress Multisite network of sites with each site having completely unique domain names. I found everything I needed by Googling around and I got it to work, but I wanted to document it for later use because there are some “gotchas”. Here’s the procedure. Note, my … Read more
I had a client who wanted to map a domain name directly to a WordPress Page, and not show the WordPress URL. For example, let’s say you had a WordPress blog with this Page:http://myblog.com/my-first-post/ But let’s say you want the URL of that post to be http://airplanesarecool.com. Of course, you could do a simple redirect, but … Read more
Comments are a really important part of any blog. They give you important feedback about your work, and give you invaluable information about what people are looking for. I’ve gotten ideas from some of my most popular blog articles from the comments. So, it’s important to encourage comments on your blog whenever possible! Here are … Read more
I recently decided to do a fresh survey of the most popular commenting services out there so I could use it on my highest-volume blog. My “must haves” as far as commenting systems are concerned were: Ability to do threaded comments (replying to comments) Support for anonymous comments (not requiring sign-in) Ability to easily subscribe … Read more
It’s important to keep your version of PHP updated on your web server in order to get the best performance, minimize memory use, and for the best security. In this article, I’ll describe how I updated from PHP 5.3 to PHP5.4, but the process should work for more recent versions. Note this will require command … Read more
Have you ever gotten this Linux “out of memory” error when working with your WordPress site? If you Google around to solve this problem, almost all of the advice you’ll get is to increase your PHP and WordPress memory limits, or add memory to your server, or to remove plugins. I didn’t want to just … Read more