Custom CSS for Columns – WordPress Snippet Generator

One of the most basic web design elements are columns. They allow web designers to divide big blocks of content into digestible chunks and increase the layout’s visual appeal. Although it is possible to create custom columns for your WordPress theme’s posts and pages using tables, it’s far from ideal. A much better solution is to create columns using HTML and CSS.

Create a Dynamic Table with these Simple WordPress Responsive Table Plugins

The days of manually inputting data into an HTML table on your WordPress website are long gone. The latest WordPress responsive table plugins will dynamically create tables using information already stored on your website. Creating instant tables in WordPress is now simpler, less fiddly and easier to maintain than doing it the old way.

So today, we bring you the ultimate guide on the best plugins to create fully dynamic, 100% responsive WordPress tables.

Custom CSS for Text – WordPress Snippet Generator

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a markup language that controls how HTML elements appear on a web page. One of the core WordPress theme files, style.css, contains comprehensive stylistic instructions that tells your WordPress theme how to present the content you publish on your site.

We’ve put together this code snippet generator tool to help developers speed up custom CSS styling for text elements. All you need to get started is the name of the selector you want to target. Read on to learn how to identify a CSS selector and how to use this snippet generator tool.

How to Scan Your Website for Malware: A Simple Guide for WordPress Users

In recent years, WordPress has steadily increased in popularity among website owners and bloggers. As a side effect, the platform has become a juicy target for malicious attackers. This, of course, makes increased online security – including knowing how to scan your website for malware – a necessity for website owners.

As a WordPress user, it’s vital that you understand which types of threats you’ll be facing. You’ll also need to become acquainted with the best WordPress security tools out there and learn how to use them. This way, you’ll be prepared for any type of attack on your website and your data will remain secure at all times.

The Google Speed Test: How to Reduce WordPress Loading Times

Low website loading times are paramount to an enjoyable browsing experience. If your website takes too long to load, visitors may outright abandon it, and your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will be hurt as well. However, figuring out why your website feels sluggish and how to improve it isn’t always easy.

That’s where Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool – commonly referred to as the “Google Speed Test” – comes in. This service provides you with a performance score for your website (both its mobile and desktop versions) and several recommendations on how to improve it. Furthermore, since this is Google we’re talking about, you can be certain they know their stuff.

Comments With CSS #1 – WordPress Snippet Generator

If you’re developing a WordPress theme, one of the most important page elements you’ll need to implement is the comments layout. As it so happens, it’s also one of the most frustrating components to develop. Getting the style right is difficult, and messing it up is incredibly easy.

The comments section of a website is a great place for readers to engage with one another and allows website owners to increase user interaction. With this in mind, we’ve put together this simple yet powerful code snippet generator that helps developers add a responsive comments section to their WordPress themes.

AWeber vs MailChimp: Which Email Marketing Service Is Truly the Best?

If you’re running an online business then you’ve probably heard that email marketing is key. Retaining existing customers is more cost effective than attracting new business, and email marketing is a great way to keep subscribers engaged with your brand.

Taking a cue from successful online business, you’ve decided to try it out for yourself. But which platform should you go with to put your email marketing plans into action? In this post, we’ll compare and contrast two industry-leading email marketing services – AWeber vs MailChimp – to help you determine which solution is best for your business needs.

A Beginner’s Guide to the WordPress robots.txt file

As many website owners do, you’ve likely spent countless hours learning the ins and outs of on-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and how to use it to best optimize your WordPress site. And while on-page SEO certainly plays a significant role in your website’s engine rankings, what’s even more important is ensuring that your website allows search engine bots easy and unfettered access to your site.

Fortunately, there’s a pretty quick fix for this universal necessity. Proper optimization of your WordPress website’s robots.txt file (and the creation of one, if necessary) can ensure your website is accessible to and understandable by search engine bots, thus putting you in the best possible position to benefit from increased search engine rankings.

Custom Hooks – WordPress Snippet Generator

The core WordPress software has all the right features in place to deliver basic content management system functionality. Typically, when you need access to advanced features, you go looking for plugins since they are the best way to extend the basic functionality.

From a coding standpoint, the main reason why WordPress can be extended in the first place has a lot to do with hooks. Hooks are a design pattern that allows developers to build upon existing code and are spread all over the source code.

If you’re working on a WordPress plugin (or even a theme for that matter), you may want to make it easy for yourself or others to extend the existing functionality later on. Or you may just want to leverage WordPress’ event-driven architecture. For this reason, we’ve assembled this code snippet generator that helps developers create custom hooks for their WordPress plugins or themes.

Register Post Status – WordPress Snippet Generator

Being a comprehensive content management system, WordPress allows users to choose from a number of statuses to assign to their posts. The post’s status determines how WordPress handles that post on the back-end. By default, there are eight different post statuses you can assign to posts, including:

  1. Draft. Incomplete posts viewable by anyone who has correct permission.
  2. Pending. Posts that have been completed but are awaiting review from someone with publish capability to publish them.
  3. Publish. Viewable to everyone from the front-end.
  4. Future. These posts are set to be published in a future date.
  5. Private. Posts set as private are only viewable by administrators.
  6. Trash. These posts have been deleted (not permanently deleted) but are recoverable.
  7. Auto-Draft. Auto-drafts are post revisions that WordPress saves automatically while you’re writing them.
  8. Inherit. These are used with child posts to determine their actual status from the parent post associated with them.

However, when you find your post drafts getting out of control, it may be time to add custom post status types to simplify your multi-step editorial workflow. Since WordPress doesn’t allow you to integrate additional post statuses by default, we’ve put together a snippet generator that helps you register custom post statuses for your admin panel. Before we begin, let’s take a look at what post statuses are and why you may need a custom post status or two.

8 Essential WordPress Widgets to Supercharge Your Website

It’s no secret that WordPress packs some pretty neat functionality into its core software. Widgets are easily one of the best features it has to offer. They have intuitive interfaces, they’re incredibly handy, and best of all, they allow you to integrate useful functionality to your site without having to modify your theme.

The WordPress Plugin Directory offers all kinds of neat widgets; however, with thousands of options to choose from, separating the wheat from the chaff can be difficult – especially if you’re a newcomer to this field. In this post, we’ll run the rule over eight of the most useful WordPress widgets out there to supercharge your website.

An Introduction to WordPress User Roles

WordPress is a powerful Content Management System (CMS) that offers a wide variety of options for user management. However, not many people pay attention to the platform’s user roles – which is a shame, because they happen to be one of its most robust features. Furthermore, failing to define clear roles can lead to problems down the road, like authors deleting each other’s content.

Fortunately, the WordPress user roles system is relatively straightforward, and it includes several pre-defined types, which should make your life much easier. These roles will enable you to establish a clear hierarchy among your colleagues, prevent users from tampering with your site’s functionality, and protect your site in general.

30 Free Handwritten Calligraphy Elements for Your Sidebar or Blog

As a graphic designer, I’m completely in love with all those lovely handwritten scripts and calligraphy fonts you see all over the Internet these days. Chalk art, flourishes, modern scripts – the trend is fierce, and I’m diggin’ it!

I am an amateur calligrapher. I love destressing at night with some tunes on Pandora, a glass of wine, my dip pen and ink, and writing a gazillion practice sheets. I’ve wanted to start getting more involved with my calligraphy and finding practical ways to use it daily. So that’s why I’ve created this awesome set of 30 free calligraphy elements for your website. All useful blog-related words are written in a fancy handwritten script and then turned into images for you to use however you’d like. These images could be used for titles in your sidebar, featured images, or Pinterest posts… the options are endless.

Register Custom Menus – WordPress Snippet Generator

Embedded in the WordPress feature set is a customizable menu that allows users to create default menus based on published pages and categories, thereby allowing them to create their own menu structure. However, there are times when you need something more robust than the default menu options. You may come across a great theme only to realize it doesn’t come with extra navigation menus right out of the box. Coding a menu structure that not only meets your usability requirements but also matches your theme can be a daunting task – especially if this is your first time with WordPress development. With this in mind, we’ve put together a snippet generator that helps you register custom menus for WordPress themes.

Let’s put everything into context before we introduce the tool and explain how you can use it.

A Beginner’s Guide to the WordPress Dashboard

WordPress is a fantastic tool for content publication and management, but the platform can be intimidating for new users. If you’re using the Content Management System (CMS) for the first time, you may be taken aback by the sheer volume of options available within the WordPress dashboard.

While the dashboard may appear complex at first, things get less intimidating once you get to know its main components. Additionally, studying each widget area and sidebar tab individually will get you a long way towards understanding the platform.

How to Embed Google Calendar in WordPress and Why This Will Make Your Life Easier

Google Calendar is quickly emerging as people’s go-to calendar application all over the world. With exceptional functionality, ease of use, and integration with Google’s other services, this should come as no surprise. In fact, 57% of people surveyed say ease of use is their number one priority when it comes to choosing which calendar application to use. Hence, the reason Google Calendar ranks number one.

Why WordPress Child Themes Are Important (and How to Create Them)

WordPress is a wonderful content management system (CMS) for building blogs and websites, in big part thanks to the myriad sophisticated themes it offers. However, too much tinkering with your themes can often lead to unintended consequences, such as losing your customizations during updates, or even site downtime.

Fortunately, WordPress offers a solution in the way of child themes that allows you to toy with a template safely. Child themes inherit the functionality of the original parent theme and offer several benefits, such as safeguarding against lost customizations. In short, they’re a key tool for customizing WordPress websites safely.