The Quickest Way to Create Custom WordPress Queries

by Sarah Gooding May 25^th, 2013 3 Responses

When working with WordPress templates for posts and pages, WP_Query allows you to customize and order the information you want to display. The WordPress Query Generator is a new web application, created by the folks at Spruce Interactive. It’s a very useful tool for quickly spitting out customized queries to use in your templates.

The generator lets you easily select post status, type, order, etc via a dropdown menu. You can also type in your own categories and tags.

Here’s a sample query generated:

Community, News

The WordPress Planet Has Been Replaced

by Sarah Gooding May 22^nd, 2013 4 Responses

The WordPress Planet news feed is in some serious need of revamping. In our recent post “The WordPress Planet is Pants – and here’s how to improve it”, James pointed out what everyone was already thinking.

The WordPress Planet has been cluttered with irrelevant content for a long time. As no initiatives to improve it have been made known, the folks at WPLift has taken it upon themselves to create “A Better Planet,” a feed that includes WordPress news sources based on merit and relevance.

Introducing: A Better Planet

Tutorials

Protecting WordPress from Dangerous Clients

by Sarah Gooding May 20^th, 2013 2 Responses

One of the scariest things a developer can hear from a new client is the infamous claim: “I know just enough to be dangerous.” Translation: I don’t really know much but I sure love to tinker with things! This always puts up a little red flag in my mind. However, a seemingly harmless bit of tinkering can have disastrous consequences on a live website.

Freebies, WordPress Themes

The Naked WordPress Theme: A Crash Course For Designers

by Sarah Gooding May 15^th, 2013 2 Responses

Here’s the scenario: You’re brand new to WordPress and you’ve been asked by your client to use it for their new website. You’ve created a beautiful design but have very limited time to learn about how to theme WordPress. You look to the codex but it has more information than you need and it’s difficult to piece it all together.

When you browse the code in the default WordPress theme, you have no idea what any of it does and you are running out of time. You need a crash course in the worst way. You need the Naked WordPress Theme.

"The solution for designers who don't know WordPress"

Multisite Plugins, WordPress Multisite

How To Clean Up Unused Plugins in WordPress Multisite

by Sarah Gooding May 14^th, 2013 1 Response

Do you ever find yourself staring at a long list of installed plugins, wondering which ones are safe to delete? WordPress multisite networks can bulk up on plugins fairly quickly. Every now and then a good old-fashioned spring cleaning is in order.

Checking through each site on your network to see what plugins are in use is simply not an option. The task is much too tedious for a busy site admin like yourself. That’s where Plugin Activation Status saves the day. It essentially performs a plugin audit so that you can get rid of any extra baggage.

Multisite Plugins, Plugins, WPMU DEV

Free Global Product Search Widget For MarketPress

by Sarah Gooding May 10^th, 2013 Leave a comment

We’ve got some great community members at WPMU DEV who are building awesome extensions to our products. The very latest is a free plugin from MarketPressThemes.com that provides a beautiful interface for searching and sorting products across a network of stores.

Solid multisite compatibility is one of the reasons that MarketPress is so popular. There is no better WordPress e-commerce plugin for operating multiple stores with one global shopping cart. This new extension compliments MarketPress’ built-in multisite capabilities.

The MP Product Search Widget plugin features:

BuddyPress, BuddyPress Plugins, WordPress Plugins

Add Privacy Controls To The BuddyPress Activity Stream

by Sarah Gooding May 8^th, 2013 3 Responses

New BuddyPress plugins are being released just about every day, and once in awhile there’s one that stands out with the potential to be universally useful. That’s the case with the new BuddyPress Activity Privacy plugin. It gives users the ability to restrict who can see their activity posts.

Once installed and activated, BuddyPress Activity Privacy adds the following privacy controls to the post update box for members:

Anyone
Logged In Users
My Friends
Admin Only
Only Me

Multisite, Multisite Tutorials, WordPress Tutorials

How To Redirect Nonexistent Blogs in WordPress Multisite

by Sarah Gooding May 6^th, 2013 2 Responses

On a very active WordPress multisite network, blogs can come and go. Perhaps a user hasn’t renewed his membership or simply decided to delete his blog. Other sites may still be linking to that nonexistent blog. The default behavior of WordPress is to direct you to a 404 error page when you try to visit a nonexistent blog. Unless you’ve taken great care to make your 404 error page useful and engaging, the visitor has probably reached a dead end.

News

The Most Exciting Feature of WordPress 3.6: Native Audio and Video Support

by Sarah Gooding May 2^nd, 2013 12 Responses

We’re all eagerly looking forward to WordPress 3.6 with its beautiful updates to Post Format UI and bright new default Twenty Thirteen theme. But there’s one feature that far and away surpasses all the others.

The upcoming WordPress 3.6 release will add native support for audio and video files. This one is a real game changer. We’re going to give you a full introduction to the new capabilities and show you how you can use them on your WordPress site. But first, let’s take a look at how we’ve previously been managing multimedia files.

In the old days…

Solid audio/video support means a better experience for both publishers and readers

Tutorials, WordPress Tutorials

How To Quickly Duplicate A WordPress Database

by Sarah Gooding April 30^th, 2013 1 Response

There are many situations where you may need to copy your WordPress database. The most common scenario would be to set up a development site in order to test new themes or features. In the past you may have exported a copy and then re-imported that to a new blank database. If you want to copy your database onto the same server, then this is probably the easiest way.

This quick tip is based on a phpMyAdmin operations feature, so it won’t apply to you if your host is using something else for managing databases.