In a way, comments define blogging and the whole web 2.0 “movement”. From a personal perspective they represented my first victories in blogging. As a beginner blogger, each new comment I received was like a little thumbs up for my amateurish efforts.
So it’s fair to say that I have a soft spot for comments — although my blog tends to get quite a few these days, I still appreciate the input of my readers as much as I ever did and reply to the vast majority of them.
I love working with WordPress and like many of it’s features. One of the nicest things about WordPress is the ability to change the “look” of it by activating different themes. Another powerful capability is being able to change or enhance the operation of the website by installing plugins.
Commercial distributors of material deemed harmful to minors are required to restrict their sites using age verification. A couple common examples you may have noticed are alcohol product websites or game websites with content not appropriate for minors.
WordPress has a solution for websites that require age verification. The Age Verify plugin automatically adds an age verification form to your site’s homepage, barring visitors from entering if they are not eligible.
Here’s how it looks on the front end:
The plugin allows you to specify a minimum age and offers several additional options:
The City University of New York has been offering its CUNY Academic Commons since 2009, providing faculty and staff with a way to share insights, ideas and passions with their peers. Since its inception, this platform has grown into a vibrant community of members who use blogs, groups, member profiles, discussion forums and wiki pages to contribute to an active community over 3,000 strong.
Now, the wiz kids behind the inception and development of this project have harnessed its power and released it in a new, extremely well-documented and packaged project, Commons in a Box, aka CBOX.
At the end of this column, or rather when I hit the Publish button, my contract with WPMU.org ends. That means you won’t get any more columns from yours truly on this site, which no doubt will make some of you happy.
As people increasingly use mobile devices to view websites, developers are taking proactive steps to make their sites more mobile-accessible by:
Designing responsive mobile themes
Making existing themes more mobile-friendly
And converting websites into mobile apps.
Despite this activity, the development of monetization options for web apps has not kept up. Considering that it is already more difficult to display banner ads on those small mobile screens, a lot of websites are feeling the pinch.
Need a theme to highlight your business? We’ve got thirty free ones here for you.
A WordPress business theme is a theme that generally doesn’t put a blog front and center. It might certainly have a blog element to it, but you won’t see the “latest posts” taking up much (if any) of the screen space on the front page of a business theme — at least not above the fold (i.e. the top part of the site you can see without scrolling down).
Do your eyes ever go googly from looking at a long list of posts in the WordPress post management screen? Sorting through posts can be especially difficult on multi-author WordPress sites where the majority of the content has been created by an author other than yourself.
Color My Posts is a new plugin by WordPress developer Remi Corson. It was created to help you visually see the difference between the posts in your dashboard.
The Color My Posts plugin lets you organize posts in the WordPress admin based on the following criteria:
Post Status
Post Format
Post ID
Post Categories
Post Types
Post Tags
Author
Atom
With more web traffic happening on tablets and phones these days, it’s invaluable for an online business portfolio to be responsive, minimal and effectively eye catching. If you are looking for a WordPress portfolio theme that accomplishes this and much more, right out of the box, you should take a look at Agency. It’s a beautiful free theme offered by EGrappler. Agency was built using Twitter Bootstrap and was designed to be the perfect theme for businesses or creative agencies.
This week on Best in WordPress we bring you posts focused on admin functions and a few tips and tricks for web designer and developers. Of course, we’d never leave out the WordPress newbies, so we’ve also included a few posts about great plugins and a fantastic new jQuery slider.
1. Customizing the WordPress Admin Area for Clients: WPTuts
