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Blog

My blog is dedicated to sharing my expertise, recommendations, and tutorials on WordPress. If you're interested in developing with WordPress, my blog is a valuable resource that you won't want to miss.

Categories
Travel WordCamp WordPress

WordCamp US 2018

Nashville Part II

Nashville is awesome, this is the second year that I have been able to come here for WordCamp US. I was here for the event last year but this year my friend Evan came with me and it was a lot of fun. There were some great talks on Gutenberg and ARIA which I found very interesting. Obviously this is not how I SHOULD be judging this event but the food they gave for lunch was simply amazing.

In addition to the WordCamp which was very cool and interesting, being in Nashville was fun. The people are nice there and the food was amazing. I have to give a shout out to Hattie B’s (not that they even need shoutouts because they offer such a great product) but I went there and got hot chicken, a nice cold beer and some mac and cheese that would amaze even someone who doesn’t like that stuff.

The State of the Word (delivered every year by one of the founders of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, was great as usual and instructed us to continue learning more about Gutenberg and the cool functionality it brings.

Categories
WordPress

WordPress 5.0 “Bebo”

Say Hello to the New Editor

https://youtube.com/watch?v=72xdCU__XCk%3Fversion%3D3%26rel%3D1%26showsearch%3D0%26showinfo%3D1%26iv_load_policy%3D1%26fs%3D1%26hl%3Den-US%26autohide%3D2%26wmode%3Dtransparent

We’ve made some big upgrades to the editor. Our new block-based editor is the first step toward an exciting new future with a streamlined editing experience across your site. You’ll have more flexibility with how content is displayed, whether you are building your first site, revamping your blog, or write code for a living.

Categories
Web Development Website WordPress

WP Employees

This is a small WordPress plugin I wrote to use for an issue I ran into a lot as a freelancer. Many small businesses want to make a “Team Page” to showcase their staff and make the business more personal. I found myself getting needing to create these same team pages for multiple clients on WordPress.

Ahh, that sounds like an opportunity for me to work some WordPress magic, and use Custom Post Types along with custom fields to generate quick team pages.

So I did just that using PHP, HTML and CSS. The code is available on my GitHub at the link below. Happy WordPressing!

Repository:

https://github.com/brothman01/wp-employees

Categories
Web Development

Development Toolbox

There are many tools for a developer to use to create beautiful WordPress sites, here are a few that I have used and recommend for any budding WordPress dev:

Local Emulator

Laravel Valet, Local by Flywheel, MAMP, WAMP, XAMP

Database Editing Tool

Sequel Pro, phpmyadmin, adminer, MYSQL Workbench

OS / Server OS

Mac OS, Ubuntu, Windows (not the easiest choice but doable)

Browser

chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera

Plugins

iThemes Security, Yoast, WP Optimize, WP Monitor

Categories
Website WordPress

WordPress: How Should I backup My Site?

Backing up a site is an important and often overlooked step, the reason being that it does not add or remove anything visible on the site, BUT if your host ever has a problem, or your server has an issue, or your site gets hacked, etc… a backup is a great thing to have. The plugin, Updraft Plus, allows you to set an automated back-up schedule so that you will always have your site from last week or last month to go back to immediately in case there is a disaster.

Site backups with Updraft Plus are the epitome of “set it and forget it” as the backup process happens automatically on the schedule you configure and store the backups in google drive, dropbox, email or whatever you prefer. Updraft Plus is a great plugin to install for peace of mind especially when managing a web store that needs to be back online as quickly as possible after a problem.

Categories
Travel WordCamp WordPress

I was a WordCamp Organizer!

I was an Organizer at WordCamp NYC 2017! For anyone that was there, I was one of the camera operators and I was an introducer for a few people because someone did not show up so I filled in for them.

Being an organizer for a WordCamp was a fun experience and it is definitely something I plan on doing again in some capacity!

Categories
Travel WordCamp WordPress

WordCamp Boston 2017

Going to WordCamp Boston was especially fun for me because the event was held at Boston University and I went their for some of my college education. The event was very interesting and I picked up some new security tips that I had not previously considered.

I stayed with my Aunt and Uncle who live outside of the city. I felt bad because I had to leave before they woke up and I got home after they went to sleep, but thanks to them all the same for hosting me while I was in town.

Categories
Travel WordCamp WordPress

WordCamp Baltimore 2017

This was SUCH a fun WordCamp. I met my friend Evan there and we attended all of the same talks. It was at this awesome IMET center (apparently it stands for Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology but I did not see anything Marine-y or Environmental-y there, it just looked like an awesome campus). There were some great talks about javascript integration and WordPress sitemap design.

This was a very nice WordCamp, interesting talks all day AND an awesome ice cream party at the end of it all.

UPDATE:

I have now been to three WordCamp Baltimore’s due to the fact that they are great.

ANOTHER UPDATE:

My friend Evan gave a talk about workflow efficiency at WordCamp Baltimore and it was clearly the best talk at the camp, so shout out to Evan!

Categories
Web Development Website WordPress

WordPress: Advanced Custom Fields or ACF

This powerful plugin is a great way to graphically add beautiful fields and data to every post of a certain type, extending the already-rich WordPress functionality in a great way that I personally love and use all the time.

ACF allows you to make logical rules about when certain fields are shown, which post types they are for, how they are accessed, conditional logic for given fields and a whole lot more. There are not enough good things for me to say about this plugin.

There are plenty of other ways to add fields to WordPress posts since it is such a useful functionality but this uses easy-to-create logic rules to add fields where they are needed instead of relying on code which many of the other solutions do which is limiting.

The ACF pro version also allows for the creation of custom blocks for the Gutenberg editor. I will not explain all of the nuances of block creation, but ACF is a great way to graphically achieve a lot of great things in a WordPress site without having to write much code! (although values given into ACF are accessible via code too!)

Categories
Web Development Website WordPress

WordPress: Better Search Replace

This next plugin is a great tool for anyone building or migrating a WordPress site. As we know, WordPress sites are all based on databases that are usually created just for them.

Better Search Replace (BSR) allows the user to search all or certain tables in their database for a word or words and either erase them or change them to something else. If a company with a WordPress website was just purchased by another company and the name was changed, no problem. This plugin can find all instances of the old name and replace each one with the new name.

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