There’s a never ending discussion about WordPress themes in forums and meetups. Paid vs. free; custom clones vs. child-parent themes; large frameworks like Genesis vs. stand-alone themes like Twenty Eleven. How does someone choose?
Hi, and welcome to my weblog for exploring WordPress possibilities.
I'm Larry Aronson, Web developer and online business strategist.
I use WordPress to help people get their ideas online.
There’s a never ending discussion about WordPress themes in forums and meetups. Paid vs. free; custom clones vs. child-parent themes; large frameworks like Genesis vs. stand-alone themes like Twenty Eleven. How does someone choose?
WordPress is 9 years old today and has announced the availability of the first release candidate (RC1) of the next version, 3.4. I installed it on my MAMP stack and took a first quick look.
Also, last Thursday, PandoDaily inaugurated a series of monthly “fireside chats” in New York City with Sarah Lacy interviewing Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress.
Working With WordPress Hooks
How do you know what WordPress is fetching from your database when someone does a site search? Does it include the custom post types created by your specialty theme or plugins? Did you want it to? Larry Aronson provides a quick and dirty hack for displaying the main SQL query statement in the footer of a WordPress page.
WordPress version 3.3 has arrived and it’s a major release. Where version 3.2 was mostly a bug fix and stability release, version 3.3 introduces new tools for all users from admins to authors and subscribers. I’ve been working with the beta and release candidate versions here on this blog and the improvement that has me most excited is the unified drag-n-drop media loader.
Good News Everyone! The post/page editor is getting an upgrade with the soon-to-be-released version 3.2 of WordPress. This solves the problem of disappearing Google maps and YouTube videos, both of which rely on iframe elements to embed the contents of one webpage into another. Because the current version of WordPress’ built-in editor doesn’t like iframes you have to limit yourself to working in the editor’s HTML mode. Once you switch to Visual mode, the iframe elements are stripped out of your post and the map or video disappears. While this limitation is removed in the next release, one of the work-arounds that WordPress developers devised is worth a second look. A general purpose macro shortcode that saves you from ever having to work in the HTML mode again.
WordPress just released the first beta of the next version of their popular blogging/CMS platform. So, I installed WordPress 3.2, beta 1 on this blog to explore the new features in the Dashboard and took a first look at WordPress’ new theme, Twentyeleven. This post describes my first impressions.
There are a lot of WordPress plugins that will put a Popular Posts widget in your blog’s sidebar. But, they all return different results. Often, the best approach is to just throw a page with a list of permalinks into your sidebar. Here’s how to create a sidebar widget that will display a page featuring the posts you want to highlight.
Every post needs a good picture. A photograph or illustration provides a visual anchor for the post and helps set the mood that you want your reader to be in when he or she reads the copy. But where can you consistently find good images on the Internet that are free to use without violating someone’s copyright. The answer to this frequently asked question is: tons of places – you just need to know where to search. Here a quick guide to finding copyright and permission free images to use in your blog posts.