Building a Better Web - One Site at a Time.
In this article I explain how to add custom contextual help content to the WordPress dashboard.
If you’re a WordPress developer, you can make your clients more self-sufficient and effective by adding custom contextual help content. And that can make you more valuable to your clients.
Even if you’re not a WordPress developer, this article may be of interest.
Your blog’s landing page (aka Blog Archive) is like a magazine’s table of contents. Both have the same purpose: to grab the reader’s attention and to steer him or her to content of interest.
WordPress supports three methods for displaying blog post summaries on archive pages: automated excerpts; excerpts defined by the placement of the WordPress more tag within the body of a blog post; and manual excerpts. Which method should you use? In this article I explain why manual excerpts are always my go-to method.
Photo (image) galleries are common and popular elements for many Web sites; for some, they’re downright essential. In this article I focus on how FooGallery PRO allows you to create galleries quickly and easily using “Media Tags” as the datasource for a gallery.
I’ve been using and liking the free version of FooGallery for years. Working on several client Web sites with multiple image galleries, I looked for more efficient ways to create and maintain those galleries. The datasource feature of FooGallery PRO is a game-changer. Read on for an explanation of how this works, with detailed instructions and screen captures.
Mai Lifestyle Pro, a popular Genesis child theme, supports banner areas after the header. Banner areas with banner images — much like featured images — can add interest to a post and provide subliminal context. However, the default behavior of the banner area presents a potential problem. Namely, if you want to display the banner area on only some posts, there’s no quick and easy way to hide the banner area from the posts on which you don’t want it to appear. But there’s a solution, involving just a few lines of code.
Warning! Strong Testimonials is my go-to WordPress plugin for displaying testimonials. I use it on my own site and on many client sites. Today, after updating WordPress to version 5.4 — and updating Strong Testimonials from 2.40.1 to 2.40.2 — on one of those sites, the WordPress dashboard crashed. The error message: By downgrading back […]
I’ve installed Live Chat on the Web sites of a number of clients. Most of those clients — especially those who hadn’t used Live Chat themselves as “consumers” — initially pushed back when I suggested they offer this particular form of customer service.
They had lots of common preconceptions. Now that I have a fair amount of experience as a Live Chat “agent” under my belt (I provide Live Chat support on behalf of most of these clients), I can tell you that most of those preconceptions were misconceptions.
If you’ve ever embedded a PDF file or other downloadable file in WordPress posts or pages using the standard “Add Media” button, you probably know what a pain it can be if and when — but most likely when — that file needs to be updated.
You can’t just upload the newly updated file to the Media Library and expect “voila” to happen.
Even if the updated file has the same filename as the original, WordPress will rename it on upload rather than replace the old one with the new one. (I’ve tried a plugin that offers this replacement functionality, but it wasn’t user-friendly and fell short in other ways.)
So I made my own plugin.
If your blog includes articles about Web sites you have built, here’s a simple way to automagically and uniformly show “Visit Web Site” links at the end of all such posts. Sure, you could do this the old-fashioned way (hard coding the link), but there’s a better way. (Hint: You get to use that “Custom Fields” feature.)
Whenever you’ve entered identical content in more than one place in your WordPress Web site, have you wished there was a better way? Well, there is. In fact, there’s a plugin for that: the amr shortcode any widget WordPress plugin. This has become a standard plugin for all of the sites I build. Read this post to find out why and how it’s used.
Many Genesis child themes natively implement what I call dynamic linear gradients over background images in homepage sections. The effect is that as the visitor scrolls down the home page, the background image gradually changes appearance, typically getting increasingly darker. This blog post shows you one way to implement dynamic linear gradients over background images in Genesis themes that don’t natively support the effect.
