Pingdom

Pingdom offers a free package that lets you monitor one website or server and includes 20 free SMS alerts as well as free email alerts.

Uptime Robot

Uptime Robot lets you add up to 50 websites to monitor for free. You’ll get alerts by e-mail, SMS, Twitter, RSS or push notifications for iPhone/iPad.

Tag Beep

tagBeep lets you monitor up to 50 sites for free. The service checks your site every minute and sends free email and SMS alerts to notify you of errors. When errors are detected the service takes a snapshot of the page and saves the HTML.

Service Uptime

Service Uptime alerts you within seconds via email or SMS whenever your website becomes inaccessible or returns incorrect data. A free account lets you monitor one service and will check on your site or server every 30 minutes.

Site Uptime

The free plan at SiteUptime allows you to monitor one website. Their software tracks site failures and logs detailed reports of the uptime/downtime of your website each month.

Site 24×7

The free option at Site 24×7 allows you to monitor two websites at a 60 minute poll interval.

Monitor.us

Monitor.us offers unlimited monitors and email notifications for free.

Uptime Dog

Uptime Dog checks the availability of your website every two minutes to see if it is online and working. It will notify you via email if your site is down. The free account requires you to put a link to their site at the bottom of your site.

100 Pulse

100pulse lets you monitor two websites for free with a minimum interval of 15 minutes.

Internet Seer

Your free account at Internet Seer will notify you of downtime email. The services checks your site once every hour.

Binary Canary

The free service at Binary Canary lets you monitor up to five websites at a 15 minute frequency.

Uptime Spy

Uptime Spy is a free service that provides all of the functionality, quality, and performance of monitoring systems that one might normally pay for. The service checks your website at 1/5/15/30/60 minute intervals and offers TCP monitoring, ping sensitivity control, monitor periods, contact management, and node selection.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Paydirt helps you manage three very important aspects of your freelancing business:

• Clients
• Time
• Invoices

Your recent work is shown in the dashboard with color-coded clients, projects and recent time spent.

If you want to have a successful freelancing business, it’s absolutely imperative that you find a way to manage your time and gain a good grasp of how many hours you’re spending on a project. That’s where the Paydirt Time Tracking feature comes in handy. There are extensions available for both Firefox and Chrome that put time tracking right at your fingertips.

One of the most unique features of Paydirt is the built-in smart reminders for logging your time. The application keeps an eye on the sites you’re viewing and offers timely, contextual, unobtrusive reminders to track your time. It even works well for recognizing when you’re tracking time spent reading and writing emails.

As much as time tracking can be a hassle, it’s necessary for your development as a professional. It will help you to be able to accurately estimate projects in the future. Not only will it help you plan your time better, but you’ll also have a better understanding of what your hourly or project rates need to be.

PayDirt helps you stay organized so you can focus on completing the work that keeps you in business. Take the hassle out of managing your time and projects without sacrificing a professional approach to your work. For $10/month you get:

• Unlimited Clients
• Unlimited Jobs
• Unlimited Invoices
• Unlimited Timesheets
• PDF Invoices
• SSL Security
• Chrome and Firefox Extensions

Pricing at $10/mo per user is very reasonable for an app that keeps you organized and tracks your time to make sure you get paid. Start your 30 day free trial to test drive Paydirt today.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

But today I am delighted to say that the most recent WordPress version has apparently eliminated one of the visual editor’s most frustrating bugs – what I call the “dastardly post-list div”.

You may be able to figure out what the bug caused from the name itself (if you haven’t already personally experienced it) – for some bizarre reason, WordPress used to think it appropriate to wrap the first paragraph after a list in <div></div> tags.

That might not sound like much, but depending upon your theme, it could have some adverse affects. In my experience it removed the top margin and placed the paragraph uncomfortably close to the list content.

But it would appear that the most recent WordPress version has eliminated the bug. I can’t find any mention of it being dealt with in the change log, but since the update I have been unable to replicate the bug. Which fills me with great joy.

If You Haven’t Updated…

What is perhaps even more satisfying is that I actually figured out a quick fix before installing the latest version of WordPress. So if for whatever reason you are not updating to 3.3.2 for the time being, you no longer have to be troubled by this irritating bug.

What I used to do is go into the HTML editor and manually remove the <div></div> tags. That was a pain in the ass, for many reasons. What I discovered however is that if you formatted the paragraph following a list as a header, then reversed the formatting, the <div></div> tags would disappear.

That might sound a little long-winded, but all you have to do is hit Ctrl + 1 (or Command + 1 for Mac users) twice just before starting your next paragraph after a list. It’s a hell of a lot quicker and easier than fiddling around with the HTML editor.

Creative Commons image courtesy of Judith Kallos

Tom Ewer on Google+

I had the opportunity to interview Tristan Gamillis this week about how Paydirt was created and where the team is headed.

1. Your slogan is “Time tracking and Invoicing for freelancers, by freelancers”. How did you decide upon serving this niche?

We’ve both been freelancing since high school and struggled to find billing software that really matched the freelance workfow. Sometimes you’re working at and hourly rate, sometimes at a fixed price, sometimes both, and the scope of a project oftens changes part way through. It’s complex, but any software made to do it needs to be simple. Freelancers need a billing system that’s simple, works with this freelance workflow, and is a pleasure to use. We were scratching our own itch.

Time tracking for freelancers is another can of worms, but I’ll get fired up and excited about that in a moment.

2. What inspired you to create Paydirt?

Many freelancers and partnerships are doing their books in spreadsheets and making their invoices in Word or InDesign because large accounting packages aren’t a good fit. We did too, and it can be a real timesink.

Freelancers also tend not to track their time – at least not dilligently – and often don’t realise how it affects their bottom-line. Even if you’re not billing hourly it’s crucial to track your time so you know if you’re quoting accurately. We wanted to find out why, so we interviewed every freelancer we could get our hands on, and the response was basically unanimous: most recognised the importance of time tracking, and they all said that they forgot to do it. That’s the problem: it’s hard to remember.

We knew we had these problems. Once we realised they were everyone’s problems we set about building a solution.

3. What unique features make Paydirt stand out from the all of the other time-tracking apps?

Time tracking that’s easy to remember! We’ve got extensions for Chrome and Firefox that let you track time straight from the page you’re viewing. They recognise when you’re looking at a page related to your client (it could be their website, a website you’re building for them, an email you’re writing to them, etc.) and add a small notification in the corner which lets you start a timer in one click. It’s helpful to have your time tracker one click away without having to open it or switch windows, but most importantly, it acts as a reminder.

For exmaple, I’ll be busy tinkering on something when an email rolls in from a client: “Can you check out this issue on our website? One of our WordPress Plugins is playing up.” Like a good freelancer I immedately open their site and start working on fixing their issue. This is when I should start a timer for “Website maintainence”, but usually totally forget. But Paydirt notices I’m working for my client and adds a link to start a timer for them, right there on the page.

There’s no code to add to the page or any tricky configuration. Just grab the extension and you’re good to go.

4. What are your future plans for expanding and improving Paydirt?

We’re currently developing mobile apps to help you track time when you’re on the road. We’d even like them to offer similar time tracking reminders based on your location (when you visit your client, for instance).

Other plans include custom invoice styling, expense tracking, and integrating with web services like Basecamp.

We take our queues for development from user feedback, so get in touch and tell us what you’d like to see! We’re always happy to chat.

Conclusion:

The interface really matters when you’re adding new tools to your freelancing toolbox, and that’s one place where Paydirt excels. If you’re struggling with accounting for your hours and your billing is in complete disarray, you need to check out this app and its unique features. We’re excited about where Paydirt is headed and we are planning a quick guide on how you can manage your WordPress freelancing business more efficiently using Paydirt. Follow @paydirtapp on Twitter for all the latest news.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

General WordPress Articles

1. What’s Going On In The WordPress Economy? -In this post, former WPMU.org blogger Siobhan McKeown takes a look at making money with WordPress.

2. 90 Must Follow WordPress Experts on Twitter – If you want to know what’s up with WordPress, follow the following.

3. The Teaser Model for Making Money with Plugins – A new marketing model for making money off WordPress plugins is emerging.

4. Orange County WordCamp Looking for Presenters – If you’re in Southern California, the Orange County WordCamp is still looking for speakers.

Themes

5. Twenty High Quality Free WordPress Themes

6. Tweny-one Amazing Free WordPress Themes

Plugins

7. 55 Best WordPress Plugin - You’ll find everything from sliders to admin menus here.

8. WordPress Lazy Load Plugins: Easy Way to Improve Your Site’s Performance -Plugins to load only images that are on the part of the screen that’s being viewed.

Security

9. Protect Your WordPress Site with .htaccess – A security tutorial from .Net Magazine.

10. How to Secure your WordPress Pages with SSL – A tutorial on using https:// from WPBeginner.

Photo: Young woman reading a book lying in hammock from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

But sometimes it’s fun to crunch a few numbers and remind yourself of how much ass WordPress really kicks.

The WordPress 'Wow Factor'

So I’ve scoured the interwebs this morning, and dug up some fun little factoids. These data nuggets really illustrate the dizzying heights that the WordPress community has reached. Enjoy!

Some WordPress statistics…

• WordPress 3.3 has been downloaded over 12 million times. This latest version of the software was released on 12 December 2011, making that an average figure of 105,263 downloads per day.
• 16% of all websites run on WordPress in 2012. That’s an estimated 58,000,000 sites.
• Indonesians are the most prolific WordPress users on the planet. WordPress.org is the 8th most popular website in Indonesia. By contrast, it’s the 21st most popular in the United States, and 18th in the United Kingdom.
• WordPress holds 53.8% of the market share for Content Management Systems. Over half of all webmasters using any kind of CMS have chosen WordPress. Joomla, the closest competitor to WordPress in terms of popularity, holds just 9.2% of the CMS market. Drupal sits in third place with 6.7%.
• WordPress has been translated and localized into at least 73 different languages. This has been achieved entirely on a volunteer basis, by passionate WordPress users in all parts of the world.
• There are 19,017 plugins freely available in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Altogether, these plugins have been downloaded over 285,000,000 times, or nearly one download for every citizen of the United States.
• Over 20,000 people make their living with WordPress. Developers, designers, consultants, bloggers and countless other professionals use their WP skills to put bread on the table.
• Speaking of which, WordPress skills are in higher demand than ever. According to the latest Online Employment Report at Elance.com, WordPress programmers rank second place on a list of the 100 most sought-after freelance professionals. Generic PHP programmers rank first.

Over to you – got any fun WordPress statistics up your sleeve? Leave a comment below this article and share your quirky wisdom with crowd.

_{Photo courtesy of Torbein.}

But I look at it a different way. I have known about Hello Bar for a long time, but have never used it. For whatever reason, I have never taken that step from mild interest to “I should really try this out”.

So I figure there are more people out there like me, in addition to those who actually haven’t heard of Hello Bar. So, if you want to berate me for featuring this product, feel free – I have thick skin.

Anyway…

Let’s get on topic. On the face of it, Hello Bar is nothing special – it allows you to place a bar at the top of your site that can be populated with a call to action of some kind. It could be a newsletter sign up form, a link to your latest blog post, a sale notification, or any other number of things.

Believe it or not, this subtle little bar at the top of your site can attract quite a few clicks. And that is where Hello Bar comes into its own, with comprehensive customization and tracking features. Put simply, you can place a Hello Bar on your site, test its effectiveness in converting your visitors, then split test that version against another, then split test the winner with another, and rinse and repeat until you have a conversion machine sitting at the top of your blog.

I am really excited about this, and have no shame in saying so – Hello Bar has been around for ages, but I have only just decided to take the plunge and I can’t wait to get started.

Integration with WordPress is a piece of cake – you just need to create your Hello Bar, then paste the embed code within the <body></body> tags on your site (if you are running a decent theme, there is usually a box you can paste such code into).

The Catch

It sounds too good to be true, didn’t it? Hello Bar is free – but only up to 25 clicks per month, which a blog of any kind of size is easily going to exceed. From then on there are paid options, with stepped tiers depending upon the amount of clicks you get:

Now I know that a lot of WordPress users baulk at the idea of actually paying for something, but the pricing is very reasonable. First of all, you only pay for results (i.e. clicks). Look at it this way – if you are using Hello Bar to get newsletter subscribers, each one is going to cost you no more than 3 cents. If a subscriber isn’t worth 3 cents to you, you need to take a long hard look at your blog’s monetization method!

The Alternatives

There are plenty of alternatives to Hello Bar, but I don’t think any of them match it in terms of features and functionality. Of course, if you are not willing to spend much (or any) money on a solution such as this, you can pick from one of the free (or less expensive) options. Blogger Mint already did the hard work for me on that front – check it out.

And you could of course always do this yourself – it doesn’t take a great deal of coding knowledge to set something like Hello Bar up. But with it costing so little, I’d rather have it all done for me.

Click here to give Hello Bar a try (free of charge).

Now I must take my leave, as I have some serious tweaking and testing to do!

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Benson Kua

Tom Ewer on Google+

Part 2 of a Series

This post is the second in a series. Yesterday we talked about ”custom fields.”

Today we will go over “custom post types” and also look at how they work together with “custom fields.”

What Are Custom Post Types?

The problem here is that there is a simple answer that 95% of people would be happy with, and there’s a more “technically correct answer” that only the most techie WordPressers would be interested in. Not only is the techie answer more complicated, it usually does little more than confuse the 95% of us who don’t really need all the details. (I know it confuses me.)

SO … that said … what we’re going to do is proceed with the simple and practical answer for most of this post, and then we’ll touch on the more “technically correct” answer at the end.

It’s not that the simple answer is wrong; it’s that the simple answer is really only “part” of the complete answer, but it’s also MUCH more practical for most people. And so if you can grasp the idea of it, then you’ll be much more likely see how you can put it into practice for yourself. And that’s our goal in this series – making this stuff understandable so you can start making it work for you.

Custom Post Types – The Simple Answer

“Custom post types” are as the name suggests: they are types of posts. And, of course, the “custom” part means that they are types of posts that you create from scratch.

You are probably already familiar with the two most famous kinds of “post types” – Posts and Pages.

• A regular Post is one “post type.”
• A Page (like your About Page) is another “post type.”

Examples

Let’s say you ran a food-themed site, and you primarily wrote three types of posts: restaurant reviews, recipes, and nutrition information.

Let’s look at an example of each along with some of the different sections unique to each.

Restaurant Reviews

Some sections unique to restaurant reviews:

• Address & phone number
• Type of cuisine
• Price range
• Hours
• Nearby subways
• Payment Methods
• Special Features
• Reservations

Recipes

These are some of the sections unique to recipes:

• Prep time
• Cook time
• Ready in time
• Number of servings
• Ingredients
• Drink With
• Cooking Directions (Instructions)

Nutrition

Here are some sections unique to nutrition posts:

• Serving size
• Nutrition grade
• Calories
• Total fat
• Cholesterol
• Sodium
• Carbohydrates
• Protein
• Vitamins
• Percentage of daily values

A Different Post Type for Each Type of Post

As you can see from the examples above, we have three very different types of posts. And on top of that, these are not your run-of-the-mill blog posts. For each one you have a lot of different little pieces of information you need to include.

Imagine that you could have different posting screens for each type instead of just going to a regular write/edit screen as you usually do.

For example, in a restaurant review, you could have different fields to fill in for hours, phone number, price, address, cuisine, etc. And then when you hit publish, each little piece of information would go where it was supposed to. (Of course you would need to set the design of your site up for that.)

So for these three very different types of posts, it would be best to set up what amounts to a “form” for each that you fill in.

• When you want to write a review, you fill in the “restaurant form.”
• When you want to publish a recipe, you fill in the “recipe form.”
• When you want to write about nutrition, you fill in the “nutrition form.”

Each “form” in this case is actually a different “post type” … a “custom post type.” 

Custom Fields

To completely understand what a “custom post type” is we need to know how it’s different from the “custom fields” we talked about yesterday.

Now that we have a little more understanding of each, hopefully it’s a little easier to see how they’re different. In short, the “post type” is like the “type of form” you fill out. And the “custom fields” are the “boxes in the form.”

Custom Post Type Menus

As we talked about yesterday in the “Custom Fields” posts, you can add new fields (or new “boxes”) to a regular Post.

With a custom post type, however, you’re making a new kind of Post. And so when you add custom post types, you will see new menus in your admin area that reflect that.

How to Add a Custom Post Type

Although it is possible to manually add custom post types by inserting code in your functions file, unless you’re comfortable coding, I would suggest using a plugin (or a suite of plugins). There are a number of custom post type plugins out there, and some also give you the added benefit of easily hooking up your custom post types with your custom fields. And of course that’s an important step.

The More Fields plugin that was mentioned in the Custom Fields post yesterday also has a companion plugin called More Types. These two work well together. (For details on using the More Fields plugin, see this post.)

There are other plugins that may work well for you too, so you can look around. But just keep in mind that adding a “custom post type” doesn’t automatically add “custom fields” too. Some plugins may combine the two functions. In other cases (as with the More Fields plugin and the More Types plugin), you may have to install separate plugins.

If you would like to add your custom post types manually, you can see instructions for how to do that in the WordPress Codex.

VERY Important Technical Notes

There are a few very important technical notes you should know about custom post types.

Post Templates

As we talked about in yesterday’s Custom Fields post, you need to insert code for your different fields into your theme in order to display the content for that field.

So, for example, if you make a custom field for a restaurant’s location, then you need to insert a piece of code in your template where you would like that address to be printed out on your page.

Because we have now thrown “custom post types” into the mix, that means that each custom post type should have its own template. In that way, for example, you style your review posts to include your review information (hours, location, cuisine, etc.), your recipe posts to include your recipe information (prep time, cooking time, ingredients, etc.), and your nutrition posts to include your nutrition information (calories, fat, carbs, etc.).

There are basically two types of templates you can make for a custom post:

1. Single Template

You can copy your single.php file, make a new file and name it single-(post-type-name).php, and then style it as you like.  For example, for my three new types, I would have the following new templates:

• single-reviews.php
• single-recipes.php
• single-nutrition.php

(These are the names that I gave to my new post types when I created them. You must use the same names of your post types.)

2. Archive Template

You can also create an archive template for your post types. An archive for your post types would be like an archive for a category.

Naming your archive template works in a similar way as naming your single template; however, you will need to add some other code into the template. You can see instructions in the WordPress Codex here.

(For another resource, see the WordPress Codex for naming post type templates.)

Including Custom Posts on Your Homepage

Although custom post types can be like regular Posts, unfortunately, they don’t automatically act like regular posts all the time.

One thing they DON’T do automatically is show up on your homepage. If you would like them to, then you will need to add some code to your functions.php file. (Appearance > Editor > Theme Functions – functions.php)

You can add code like the following below; however, you would insert the name of YOUR post types where I have my post types (reviews, recipes, nutrition). And then you can just keep adding more in the same style if you need to.

NOTE: KEEP the first type that simply says ‘post’ – this allows your regular posts to continue showing up on the homepage.

add_filter( 'pre_get_posts', 'my_get_posts' );
function my_get_posts( $query ) {
if ( is_home() && false == $query->query_vars['suppress_filters'] )
$query->set( 'post_type', array( 'post', 'reviews', 'recipes', 'nutrition') );
return $query;
}

Thanks to Justin Tadlock for the code above. If you would like a lot more detail about this, check out his site here.

Permalinks – Getting Pretty URLs

One last thing to know about custom post types is that they don’t automatically take on your permalinks structure (your “pretty URLs” – e.g. mysite.com/restaurant-reviews/bills-bar-and-burger-review/).

Some plugins will allow you to work with your custom post type permalinks, so just know that’s one thing you may have to look for in the plugin. If you get a plugin that doesn’t do that, you can search for individual plugins that are made for that purpose.

The Technical Definition of Post Types

I said at the beginning of this that I was going to save the “technical definition” of post types for the end because it was confusing. And so here it is.

Custom POST types aren’t simply different types of posts. As an example, WordPress actually has five different post types by default. They are:

• Posts
• Pages
• Attachments
• Revisions
• Nav Menus

I can hear you already, “Nav menus??? A nav menu isn’t a post!!!”

I KNOW. … I TOLD YOU!!!

So it seems that “custom post types” has been somewhat misnamed. A more appropriate name might have been “custom content types.” And so they can actually be a lot more complicated than the way we’ve defined them at the beginning of this post.

For most people’s purposes above, however, the name “post types” suits well enough. Unless you’re a developer and you really understand this stuff, you’ll most likely use them as we did above – to create new types of posts.

More Resources

If you haven’t already, check out the Custom Fields post from yesterday.

You can find more details on post types in the WordPress Codex here.

This is Part 2 in a series. You can find Part 1 – Custom Fields here. You can find Part 3 – Custom Taxonomies here.

Joseph Foley on Google+

“So when you make up a custom post type and you assign custom fields to it, it can be a good idea to associate a custom taxonomy with it as well.”

Oh! The pain of speaking WordPress!

If that sentence didn’t twist your brain, even just a little, then this post probably isn’t for you. (You’ve obviously already had your brain twisted.)

But if you’re like most of us, then these three terms—custom fields, custom posts types, and custom taxonomies—probably don’t just roll off your tongue at the drop of a plugin.

HOWEVER … understanding each of these terms might end up helping you improve your site immensely. When you understand them and how they can work together, then you can begin to appreciate their power. And if you can appreciate their power, then you’re much more likely to try to harness that power.

Part 1 of a Series

This post is the first in a series.

The first thing to know about this series is that it will not go into a lot of the technical details for each function. Rather, it is meant to serve as an overview in order to help you understand the purpose of each on your site. We’ll look at how these three things are different, but also how they work together – and they DO work together.

Today we’ll go over Custom Fields.

Custom Fields

To get a basic understanding, you can think of a “field” as just like any field in a form that you might fill out (either on the web or on paper).

In fact, you are already familiar with WordPress “fields” even if you didn’t know it.  You use them all the time.

1. You use the Title Field to put your titles in.
2. You use the Editor Field to write your posts in.
3. You use the Category Field to put your posts in categories.
4. You use the Tags Field to put your tags in.

And so a “custom field” is just like any of those other fields, except it’s “custom,” of course. You (or a plugin developer or theme developer) can make one up from scratch.

Built-In Custom Post Types

There is a custom fields mechanism built into the WordPress editor. In all honesty, unless you have a pretty good idea about what you’re doing, then using this option (as opposed to a plugin) is a little messy and a little clunky. But we’ll go over it because the basic idea behind it is not that difficult to understand, and if you can understand it, then it will help you understand the power and possibilities of custom fields better (as well as any custom fields plugin you might use).

On Your Write / Edit Page

If you don’t see the custom fields section below your editor, then you probably need to check the appropriate box on your Screen Options panel.

The boxes allow you to name a new field and then insert something into the value box. You can then display what goes into the value box by putting code into your theme.

Compare It to Your Post Title

As you can see in the screenshot above, the custom fields mechanism has two sections — the “Name” section (the field name) and the “Value” section.

As mentioned before, think of the box for your title at the top of any regular post. You might think of the “field name” for that as being “Title,” and the value is whatever you title your post (for example: “My Summer Vacation”).

Your theme already has the code inserted for the title box. Basically it says, “Get the ‘Title’ and put it here.” So when you enter “My Summer Vacation” in the box and hit publish, the words “My Summer Vacation” get printed where the code is.

The difference with “custom fields” is that because these are “custom,” you are making up both the field name and the value of it yourself. And, of course, you will also need to insert the code into your theme yourself.

A Very Basic Example

As a VERY basic illustration, let’s say I want to print some extra text at the bottom of my post that’s not part of my post. Let’s say I would like to use this bit of text on a lot of posts but not all the posts; therefore, I make a custom field for it, so I can add it when I like.

I make a new field, and I title it “My Text.” Then I fill in the value with my text, in this case, “This is my test text. Let’s see if it shows up when I put the code in.”

I then insert my code for the custom fields into my theme at the bottom of my post.

<?php the_meta(); ?>

(Note: As mentioned, this is a VERY basic example. You can both control the output in a more complex way as well as include lots of other things besides text. However, the code you will need to achieve more sophistication may also need to be more sophisticated.)

More Permanent Custom Fields

You can also put more permanent custom fields on your editing screen if you like. By that I mean you can permanently include a box on your screen that looks like your categories box, or your tags box, or your title box, or even your main WYSIWYG editor box. You can use drop-down menus, radio buttons, and more.

For example, you might get a plugin that lets you assign a rating for something (restaurants, movies, etc.) from 1-5 stars. Over on the side of your screen under you Tags box, you now have a drop-down menu that lets you choose how many stars you’d like to give what you’re reviewing.

Let’s say you choose three stars. The plugin (or you) inserts code into your theme that basically says, “Get the value inserted for the ‘Rating’ field.” In your case you chose three, and so the plugin goes and fetches an image of three stars and displays it wherever the code was placed (maybe at the top of your post, for example).

Make Your Own Permanent Boxes

While a plugin that you activate may add a permanent custom fields box to your write/edit screen, you can also get plugins that let you create your own boxes. There are a number of these plugins out there (search “custom fields plugin”), and because of the control and power they offer you, many are very popular. As an example, the other day I went over a custom fields plugin called More Fields.

In that example, I set up a box for restaurant reviews. Here’s a screen shot of a drop down menu I created with that plugin that was meant to give an opinion of the restaurant’s food.

Custom Boxes Only When You Want Them

Permanent custom fields are nice, but the problem is you might not want them all the time. For example, it would be nice to have them when you write a restaurant review as in the example above, but if you only write restaurant reviews 20% of the time, they just take up space. And you might want that space for other “permanent” custom fields boxes.

The solution to this problem is to create “custom post types.” And so that’s what we’ll go over in Part 2 of this series.

In the meantime, you might want to play around with some custom fields to really get the hang of the idea. You might even want to download a plugin and do it that way. You can follow the post mentioned above for the More Fields plugin.

This is Part 1 in a series. You can find Part 2 – Custom Post Types here. You can find Part 3 – Custom Taxonomies here.

(If you’d like to check out more technical information on custom fields, you do so in the WordPress Codex.)

Photo: Recycling Symbol 3D from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

What you may not know is that the honey badger is also a WordPress aficionado. I say aficionado, but you may in fact not want to take on board any of the “advice” that WP Honey Badger offers.

As much as you don’t want to eat snakes, you don’t want to use WordPress like WP Honey Badger does. Because WP Honey Badger doesn’t care about WordPress best practice - but you should.

Tom Ewer on Google+