Even the average user can see that WordPress is a powerful and flexible platform. But there’s more to WordPress than meets the eye.
Just below the surface, and somewhat hidden away, there is an even more powerful mode that WordPress possesses – a mode called Multisite.
Enabling this mode allows you to turn a single WordPress installation into a network of sites. Thousands of sites, if you like. Hundreds of thousands. Even millions.
There are over 350 WordPress plugins tagged “Share” in the WordPress plugin directory. But most of them, let’s be honest, fall short, with the exception of a handful of excellent winners.
I’d say there are three facets to social integration: Engagement, Self Promotion, and Viral Value. Whilst you can force none of these, there are definitely great tools out there to make it as easy as possible for you and your readers to make noise about your site on social networks.
Without further ado, I present to you the mighty five of WordPress social integration.
Thousands of WordPress websites use Jetpack, but the plugin is not very intuitive when it comes to turning off its modules. The dashboard settings page makes it super easy to activate items with their shiny blue buttons.
However, the button to deactivate a module is actually hidden as a sub-menu item of the “Learn More” button and will pop into view once clicked.
I’m a massive fan of building stuff from the ground up. There are loads of plugins around for everything you could ever wish for in a WordPress blog, but I feel both rewarded and secure when I build features from scratch.
Why bother? Most of the time I don’t want to mess around with a plugin’s UI, or the plugin does way more than I actually want it to do. Without hacking the core files, plugins can be very rigid with what you’re allowed to do.
Not long ago at WPMU DEV, we found ourselves up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Well, we had a paddle, but it just wasn’t a very good one.
The problem was success. The paddle was gmail. The solution was Help Scout.
Check out the video and/or read on for how it panned out… there’s a special offer at the end.
The Problem – Awesomeness
Announcing a free CDN on the web is very similar to shouting “Free Beer!” and that’s exactly what the folks at Cloudinary are up to. The Cloudinary image management service has just released a WordPress plugin that lets you tap into their free cloud storage for your images and take advantage of caching, optimization, image effects and much more.
For the majority of articles I write, I begin with a fresh install of WordPress. It’s the best way to ensure control when you have people following along and doing exactly what you do.
It would be very tedious if for each article I wrote, I had to create an entirely new WordPress instance. That would require a fresh database, the most recent version of WordPress, a new user, etc.
The answer, of course, is WordPress Multisite. (Btw, check out our Multisite guides here.)
It’s about time that the WordPress Admin got some love! It was starting to look a little bit like the Velveteen Rabbit of the web. The good news is that the WordPress elves have secretly been hard at work designing a beautiful new update for the dashboard and we think you’re going to love it.
Hold on to your hats, folks! Here’s a sneak peek:
MP6: A Plugin to Break the wp-admin UI
Responsive Web Design is all the craze at the moment. Watching websites cascade into different layouts as you resize the browser can even be mesmerising.
But there’s one facet of RWD that still remains a (properly) unsolved problem. Responsive Images.
Download the source files (twentytwelve child theme).
If you simply use CSS’s max-width: 100%; attribute, mobile sites will still be downloading full size images. That’s an issue, because if your desktop site has images 920px wide, the mobile version will still be downloading this massive image, making loading time slow.
Enter Picturefill
If you run a WordPress Multisite install, then no doubt you’ve had your hands full trying to manage and/or display posts from across your network.
At WPMU DEV, we’ve built a whole host of plugins that help you do that, everything from Recent Global Posts Widget to Global Site Search to Global Site Tags and many more.
What you might not realize is that all of those plugins rely on a very powerful behind-the-scenes plugin called Post Indexer.
And so today is very good news for Multisite owners because the Post Indexer just got even more powerful.
What It Does
