Free WordPress Hosting: Is It Really Worth It?

by Timothy Bowers February 23^rd, 2012 1 Response

Is free WordPress hosting a cheap gimmick or a genuine budget alternative?

As it is, normal WordPress hosting can be very cheap, especially if you have modest requirements for your site. For a few bucks a month, you can get shared hosting with a reliable provider, and this will serve you just fine, in the early days at least.

Even so, merely “cheap” ain’t good enough for some folk. There will always be the austere penny pinchers who want their hosting, like the WordPress software, to cost nothing at all.

How you can host your own WordPress site for free

Development, Plugins

Get Some Sexy AJAX Functionality With These Free WordPress Plugins

by Timothy Bowers February 22^nd, 2012 Leave a comment

If you pay much attention to trends and developments in the WordPress universe, you’ve no doubt heard something about the web programming technique known as Ajax, and how it can be used to make your WordPress site more dynamic, engaging and downright sexy.

If you haven’t, then it’s high time you got schooled.

The mighty Ajax

Use these free Ajax-powered plugins on your WordPress site

Tutorials

Automatically Change the Date After Editing a WordPress Post

by Timothy Bowers February 21^st, 2012 2 Responses

Ahoy there folks – we’ve got another WPMU reader in need of some assistance. His name is Pedro, and he’s sent us a WordPress question about automatically adjusting the ‘published’ date of posts, after they’ve been updated.

With a bit of luck, some of you fine WordPress masters might be able to send some advice his way. Pedro asks:

Is it possible to automatically change the date of a wordpress post, after an update?

How to change the date of a WordPress post that has been updated

Plugins

How to Add Comment Previews To Your WordPress Site Using jQuery

by Timothy Bowers February 16^th, 2012 1 Response

Adding a preview function to the comment section of your WordPress blog allows your readers to double check what they’re written before they actually post it.

A lot of folk might instinctively call this a useless feature, but I beg to differ. These are a few of the ways that comment previews can help to keep your WordPress blog a cleaner and happier place:

Very handy for writing HTML and code examples in a comment. The author can see whether their code is going to render properly, or look like a horrible twisted mess, BEFORE they hit the ‘reply’ button.

Community

Are You a WordPress Black Belt? Test Your Skills Right Here

by Timothy Bowers February 13^th, 2012 Leave a comment

As many of you are no doubt aware, for the past couple of months we’ve been running a kind of Question and Answer forum here at WPMU.org.

We’ve been asking our readers to send in questions about WordPress, and every few days we have selected the most interesting submissions and published them here on the blog. The wise WordPress geniuses among our readership have then pitched in with their own answers and suggestions.

Test your WordPress skills with these questions from WPMU readers

Multisite Tutorials, WordPress Multisite

Creating an Etsy-Style Network With WordPress Multisite

by Timothy Bowers February 10^th, 2012 11 Responses

Calling all Multisite gurus. Today’s installment of the WordPress Q & A Sessions should be right up your alley.

A reader named Brian has submitted the following question to us:

I want to use WordPress Multisite to create something similar to Etsy and Artfire. How would I completely hide all WordPress admin options in the dashboard (for subdomain sites), and create a custom admin page that limits each store owner to just a few basic storefront customization options?

Thank you!

-Brian

This is a question that we’ve heard from several multisite users over at the WPMU DEV forums. Have you attempted something like this yourself?

Create an Etsy-style site with WordPress Multisite

Themes

Free WordPress Frameworks for Designing Your Own Child Theme

by Timothy Bowers February 8^th, 2012 10 Responses

So you’re ready to design your own WordPress theme, eh? You’ve got some CSS skills under your belt, and it’s time to put them to good use.

If you’re just starting out, it’s highly advisable that you pick a good theme framework, and build your own child theme on top of it. These are the key advantages that a child theme offers:

You’re not developing a new theme from scratch, you’re simply expanding on an existing theme that you already know works well

Theme frameworks for developing your own WordPress child theme

Community, Miscellaneous

If You Could Learn One WordPress Skill This Year, What Would It Be?

by Timothy Bowers February 7^th, 2012 6 Responses

We posed this exact question last week, when we had a couple of free copies of the WordPress 3 Cookbook to hand out.

These are just a few of the many noteworthy responses that we got back from you guys:

“I would like to make WordPress (even more) user-friendly for independent journalists, in order to empower free speech around the globe. I would like to modify the Dashboard with a more simple and social-media oriented layout”.

What WordPress skill would you like to learn this year?

Tutorials

Embedding Videos in WordPress: What Are The Alternatives to YouTube?

by Timothy Bowers February 6^th, 2012 10 Responses

The WordPress Q & A sessions continue! We’re collecting interesting questions about WordPress from our readers, then publishing them here on the blog, in an effort to harvest the best problem-solving skills that the WPMU community can muster. Get involved here – there are glorious prizes and lots of karma points to be won.

Monday’s WordPress Question

Do you know a thing or two about embedding videos in WordPress? If so, take heed, because a member of the WPMU community is in need of some good ole’ fashioned WordPress wisdom.

Alternatives to YouTube for embedding videos in WordPress

Development, Plugins

Apparently ‘Super Cache’ Is The Most Popular WordPress Caching Plugin

by Timothy Bowers February 3^rd, 2012 12 Responses

WordPress caching has been a bit of a hot topic round here this week. We originally received a question from one of our readers, asking which is the best caching plugin to use on a WordPress site. This kicked off a pretty solid discussion, which we then followed up with a second article on the best caching plugins, as voted by our readers.

Finally, I thought we should aggregate the results from both of those articles, and bring a little pie chart lovin’ to your Friday afternoon.

Choosing the right cache plugin for WordPress