I haven’t worked with an abundance of other people’s themes so I’m in no way an expert. I’d say I’ve played with somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 premium, paid themes built by other people. It doesn’t give me a huge range of experience to see all that can possibly go wrong… but I’ve seen a fair amount!
Recommended WordPress Plugins
This is a big old list of my preferred WordPress plugins, what I use them for, and why I like them. Hope you enjoy and find it useful!
Preventing Damage from Hacking, Spam, and Malware on WordPress
I started this as a comment reply to someone operating an e-commerce site, who indicated they were quite frightened of something happening to their site. This was in response to an overall topic where someone posted for help with a compromised WordPress site.
Releasing Functions and Shortcodes mu-plugin for WordPress Developers
So I am releasing a plugin for WordPress. It’s pretty simple and contains helpers, functions, and shortcodes I typically use in WordPress installations. Some useful stuff like phone numbers (which can change, and are a total pain in the butt when they do change). It’s honestly just been very helpful for me to be able to quickly clone this into my WordPress installs, so I figured if it helps someone else… why not. Download Plugin Why mu-plugin I figure a downloadable mu-plugin is probably better than something I put in the WordPress plugin repository itself — at least until I […]
WordPress Content Syndication with FeedWordPress
I was looking for a way to easily move posts from one WordPress installation (hub) to another (spoke), without migrating or moving sites. The export, hub, or sending site is a private “author’s hub” where all posts are written. Import, spoke, or receiving sites are the actual blogs where the content goes public. The hub site needed to retain a copy of the post. Note: There are no SEO concerns here regarding duplicate content, because the sending site is private.
FOLAS Gets a New Website
Happy to announce that one of my local animal shelters has a new website! FOLAS has a complete site redesign live as of today. I created a new custom WordPress website for them after their old site was hacked. Read more in my portfolio!
Web Design and Development Workflow
This is a post describing my workflow for creating a website from scratch. It’s not necessarily right, just descriptive of what I do. If you see any flaws or potential areas of improvement, please let me know. This is primarily relevant to personal projects, where I do exactly what I want regardless of what anyone else wants out of me. This is not likely to succeed in environments where you’re working on a team! Added — this isn’t really step-by-step. Sometimes I’ll go back to Photoshop after doing the colors in code to design some specific things. I definitely doodle […]
WordPress Plugins I Like
Tools Jetpack I’m putting this here because Jetpack does so many things. In particular, I like Sharing, Enhanced Distribution, Monitor, and Widget Visibility. A lot of other stuff is nice — like automatic verification of sites for Pinterest, Bing, and Google Webmaster Tools. Enabling Jetpack and this service on websites makes it ridiculously easy to verify these things. Subscriptions are also nice — and when I have multiple authors, Spelling and Grammar always helps!
Web Development Speed Test
One of my friends needed a website for a business he wants to start. I threw this together for him in ~5 hours. I started around 8 PM and finished around 1 AM, from getting the information to closing down all of my tabs.
Gravity Forms
I really, really like Gravity Forms. It’s powerful and offers a ton of functionality. I’ve developed with Gravity about a year and a half, using it for tons of different things: simple forms, complex forms, credit card payments, user registration.