Free Twitter Bootstrap Admin Theme For WordPress

by Sarah Gooding June 17^th, 2013 6 Responses

It’s not very often that I come across a WordPress admin theme that doesn’t make me want to poke my eyes out, but this one caught my attention.

Our very own @aristath has created a plugin that brings Twitter Bootstrap styles into your WordPress dashboard. Bootstrap Admin is a clean, minimalist administration theme that totally changes the look of your dashboard with new icons, colors and Bootstrap as the backbone.

After you install and activate Bootstrap Admin, your WordPress dashboard will be transformed to look something like this:

So far Bootstrap Admin includes:

General styling of the WordPress admin area

Plugins

How to Pull Any WordPress Widget into a Post with a Shortcode

by Joe Foley June 17^th, 2013 4 Responses

WordPress does a lot of cool things. But if you’re like me, you often find yourself saying, “I wish it could do that cool thing over here instead of over there.”

pull-widgets-into-posts-horse-pulling-image — Gettin’ ‘em where you want ‘em.

That seems to happen a lot with widgets. There are all sorts of wicked widgets out there, but with a lot of them, they’re limited to the sidebar area.

Wouldn’t it be convenient if you could pull those nice widgets off the sidebar and stick them right in the middle of a post or page?

News, Plugins

WP Super Cache & W3 Total Cache Users: Are Your Sites Vulnerable?

by Joe Foley June 14^th, 2013 10 Responses

Not updating vulnerable plugins is one of the biggest mistakes anyone running WordPress can make. And it seems some of the world’s most visited sites are making that exact mistake. … Are you?

A number of weeks ago, perhaps the two most popular caching plugins, WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache, both updated their code to patch a security vulnerability. HackerTarget.com reports that a quick check of the top 100,000 sites reveals that less than 50% of those sites that run W3 Total Cache have updated their plugins to the latest secure version.

Plugins, Plugins & Theme Tutorials

How to Create Super Cool WordPress Category Pages

by Joe Foley June 11^th, 2013 7 Responses

How important are the category pages on your site? Are they just an afterthought? Are they drab and lackluster? Admit it — could they be a lot more valuable (to both you and your visitors)? Couldn’t they be a lot cooler too, like this guy below?

If you’re like most people, then your category pages are probably in the exact same condition they were in on the day you started your site. More than likely they’re just a list of links to your posts with either an excerpt or the full post showing.

Plugins

Show Only The Best Plugins in the WordPress Dashboard

by Sarah Gooding June 8^th, 2013 2 Responses

When searching for new plugins in the dashboard, it’s not easy to sort the results. You really need to search in a different window to adequately sort the plugins and get a better idea of how they stack up to each other in terms of rankings and reviews.

PlugIntelligence is a new plugin that gives you an intelligent way to filter plugins in the dashboard. Once installed you can use the settings panel to set minimum star ratings, minimum number of ratings and minimum tested versions:

The plugin currently includes the following options to filter plugins:

Plugins

Grab Your Readers and Make Them Pay Attention to Important Content

by Joe Foley May 29^th, 2013 1 Response

Do you have info your visitors REALLY should pay attention to? If so, then an alert box may be just the way to go.

Alert box plugins let you easily bring attention to content by putting it in a colored box. And on most sites, these boxes will stand out as long as you don’t overuse them.

Below we’ve collected five of the better free ones we could find. Each has different styles and different functionality, and so your own particular needs will dictate which ones might be right for you.

Plugins, Tutorials

When You Need WordPress Comments to Really, Completely, Totally Stop

by Patty J. Ayers May 28^th, 2013 2 Responses

WordPress comments make me think of Rasputin, the 19th century Russian mystic.

The story goes that when his enemies wanted to kill Rasputin, they stabbed him, but he survived it. So they poisoned him with a large amount of cyanide – and he survived that too. Shooting him in the back with a revolver slowed him down temporarily, but then suddenly he rose up and lunged at his attackers. They shot him again, and then clubbed him repeatedly, and somehow he still lived. Throwing him into an icy river finally put an end to poor Rasputin.

Plugins

Is Your WordPress 404 Page Killing Traffic & Drinking Your SEO Juice?

by Joe Foley May 23^rd, 2013 2 Responses

A 404 page is the error page that users see when the page they’re looking for is not at the URL they’ve landed on. Some 404 pages are creative, some are useless, and some don’t even exist at all.

Users might land on a 404 page for various reasons – the page has been moved or deleted, they’ve followed a badly constructed link, or they may have typed in the wrong URL.

“Not Found” pages are more than just a nuisance, however, they may be losing you both visitors and SEO juice as well.

Is Your 404 Page Hurting You?

Plugins

Don’t Fall Prey to Hackers With This Super Secure Tip

by Joe Foley May 20^th, 2013 Leave a comment

As the WordPress platform becomes more and more popular, it also becomes a more popular target for hackers, like the surge in attacks that took place just a month ago.

Of course there are a number of very basic things you can do to help protect yourself:

Always update to the latest version of WordPress
Keep your theme(s) updated
Keep your plugins updated
Don’t use “Admin” as your administrator login
Use strong passwords

Plugins, Tutorials

Merge WordPress Tags Easily and Quickly for a Leaner, Better Site

by Joe Foley May 16^th, 2013 2 Responses

In a way, tags in WordPress are like categories. They are meant to group similar topics together in a way that makes them easily accessible (i.e. by clicking on a tag link and seeing all the posts marked with that descriptor).

The problem a lot of people run into is that they end up assigning too many tags to their posts. This defeats the purpose of tags. If you only end up with one or two posts with that tag, it hardly deserves its own “category.”