We start off this week with a video interview of the WordPress creator by the Wall Street Journal. We end with a post on sliding widget panels. In between, you’ll find this week’s best WordPress posts from across the web covering topics like CSS grid systems, strengthening your community themed site, creating custom widgetized sidebars, and more.
1. Wall Street Journal Interviews WordPress Creator Matt Mullenweg: WSJ.com
This is a short, but good post from the Wall Street Journal – not exactly a bastion of great WordPress information, but this week they’ve got an interesting interview with WordPress creator, Matt Mullenweg, who talks about the future of WordPress and the web in general.
2. Create Widgetized Sidebars for Each Category in WordPress
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could customize your sidebar to display different widgets for different pages, without needing a premium theme or a custom framework? This post shows you how to do just that – automatically creating custom sidebars and widgets for your blog category pages.
3. 20 Plugins for your Community Drive Site: InstantShift.com
InstantShift.com has put together a list of 20 plugins that will help power your community driven website – from the way you structure and display public posts to setting roles and user permissions to making your comments go viral. Viral comments? Yep, you bet.
4. CSS Grid Systems for WordPress Designers: Paulund.co.uk
Designing by grid systems were all the rage in the past few years. Now that responsive and adaptive sites are becoming the norm, planning your site is more important that ever. In this post, you’ll find a list of 20 of the more popular grid systems, several of them built to help you create your responsive web frameworks.
5. How to Automatically Link Twitter Usernames in WordPress: WPBeginner
If you regularly display your users’ Twitter profiles/names on your site you’re going to love this post about automatically creating links to Twitter profile names when the @ symbol is used on your site in conjunction with a Twitter name – like this @wpmuorg. Very cool!
6. 10 Great WordPress Plugins for Restaurants: DynamicWP.net
In this post, you’ll find 10 plugins that help restaurants with everything from putting your menu online to booking tables. We’re partial to our Appointments + Plugin for booking gigs, but this post is a good reference for your eatery.
7. 5 WordPress Plugins for Increased Writing Productivity: Lifehack
We’re big fans of increasing your productivity. It’s one of the reasons we wrote our own article on markdown editors for perfect post box formatting in WordPress. But this post from Lifehack gives you information on 5 plugins that help take care of blog administrative tasks and let you focus on writing.
8. 5 Great WordPress Plugins for Sliding Widget Panels: WPMU.org
In this article, we show you 5 great plugins to add sliding widget panels to your site. The sliding widget adds user interaction to your site and can help tuck away those unsightly, but necessary, administrative web functions. Check out the article to find out more about these 5 plugins.
Give us your best!
That’s it for this week. Check back same time next week for more of The Best in WordPress.
If you’ve found a great resource you think we should know about – please send us a note or leave a comment here.
