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Pro Blog Design
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Advice for blog owners and designers on making a more attractive, usable and ultimately profitable blog.
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Lessons Learned Running a Small Business in 2011
As 2012 begins, I want to look back over the past year to see what can be learnt from it. Learning from your mistakes is less glamorous than a list of grand New Year's Resolutions (Though I do like those too), but often more effective at ensuring the next year is even better than the last.
With that in mind, what follows are some of the lessons I have picked out from my own 2011. I would love to hear if these resonate with you.
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How to Create WordPress Posts in Themes/Plugins
Recently, one of our clients needed to let visitors create WordPress posts (Or custom post types of course) from the website itself.
In this post, I'm going to walk through some of the WordPress functions I used to achieve this. We'll go over creating the post itself, adding categories/tags, and adding metadata.
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How to Make a Floating Share Box
This is one of the most common questions I get asked; how do you make a floating box with share links?
Today, we're going to see just how simple it can be. We will:
- Set up the current trinity of search (Facebook, Twitter, +1).
- See how to make sure they share the right URL.
- Align the box to the bottom left of the user's browser.
- Hide the box if the user's browser is too small (So it never overlaps our content).
You can see the demo site here (Try resizing your browser smaller).
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Validate Forms in WordPress with jQuery
This article will teach you how to add validation to your WordPress comment forms, using jQuery.
With validation, users can submit their comment and instantly see if they've hit an issue. There is no need to submit the page and get WordPress' default "There is a problem..." page. Instead, errors are displayed inline instantly.
In our example, we will build a plugin which you can drop into any theme and will work instantly.
Just like last week, you can see the finished product in action on the demo site. And you can download the completed files here.
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Load Next WordPress Posts With AJAX
Today, we're going to replace the standard "Older Posts" links on your blog. Our plugin will create a button to instantly load the next page of posts, without reloading the page (Similar to what Twitter used to do at the bottom of profiles)
Click here to load the demo site and see the final project in action.
You can also download the completed files as a plugin here (Just upload and activate it).
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User Friendly Short Codes with TinyMCE
WordPress short codes are everywhere: in practically every theme and many, many plugins. They are extremely useful and provide huge amounts of extra functionality. With all of their greatness, however, there is one major problem with them: they are not very user friendly, particularly for users who are not familiar with programming, especially when a short code accepts more than one parameter. So, in order to help the non-programmer users, we need a new solution.
The ideal solution is one that provides an interface for the user to input all of their short code options without having to enter any "code". This is a pretty common technique used by a lot of developers, but until now, there has never been a good tutorial on it, so we are going to fix that.
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All New Design!
Here's something we've been working on for a while now; an all new design! If you're reading this in an RSS reader, please click through and check it out!
I'd love to hear your thoughts! Nicer than the old version?
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8 Tips to Secure a WordPress Site
Security is one of those topics that comes up time and time again. You hear the advice, you know you should do it, but somehow, you never get around to it.
The tips in this post are designed to help make your WordPress installation safer and less likely to be hacked or spammed. If you're short on time, just start at the top and work down. I've (roughly) ordered them so that the most important tweaks come first.
We also have a great giveaway at the end of this post, from Sucuri.net and Appsumo. Check it out for the chance to win free site security monitoring for a year!
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How to Get Facebook, Twitter, and RSS Counts {WP}
You will have seen blogs showcase their Twitter, Facebook, and RSS counts with typography. With these numbers in plain text, you can style them into your website far more effectively than if you were to use the old-fashioned "chicklets."
Twitter and Facebook make this easy, but you'll need to take an extra step with FeedBurner first. Log in, then click Publicize > Awareness API, and click activate.
All set? Then let's get started!
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Add a jQuery DatePicker to Event Posts {WP}
In previous posts, we set up an events system for WordPress. Users could enter the date of an event, and we had great archives for displaying and categorizing them.
Today, we want to improve the admin end of things. Instead of using custom fields, we'll make a box for the event's date, and use jQuery to let users pick the date from a calendar.
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