Posts Tagged with “WordPress”

I wrote a guest post for Phase Creative, an awesome WordPress production small business in Sydney.

So, what should you do to ensure that your website is running in tip-top shape? Here is myEssential WordPress Maintenance Checklist. The tasks on this checklist are divided into daily, weekly and quarterly tasks and following this schedule will only take 10 minutes a week with an additional 30-60 minutes per quarter.

Read the full post →

sandbox

You’ve created your WooCommerce store, uploaded all your products and are ready to accept payments via PayPal. But how would you know if PayPal will play nice with your store?

Most people will make a small purchase with a friend’s PayPal account as a live test. But that costs real money and is annoying if you have to test multiple times. This post explains how to test the payment system using the PayPal Sandbox.

The PayPal Sandbox is a place where you can test your shopping cart and other PayPal integrations in a realistic way, except that no money changes hands. This means you can test your PayPal processes in the Sandbox and know they will behave the same on the when you go live.

Read the full article on ClickWP: Test payments in WooCommerce with the PayPal Sandbox

wp10logoIn conjunction with WordPress’ 10th Anniversary I wrote down some reflections on my journey with WordPress on the ClickWP blog:

WordPress is one of the blessings I count every day because it is entirely free to use. It was created freely and given away freely to the world. I am where I am today because of this generosity.

Happy birthday WordPress ♥

Update Nov 2016: I no longer recommend Site5; see: The Sinking of Site5

At the beginning of 2011, I began hosting my websites on Site5. I have been singing their praises and recommending everyone I know to them. Today iThemes publicly announced their endorsement of Site5 hosting (and how terrible Hostgator is too). I’m really excited about the development because iThemes is a major WordPress plugins and themes vendor, so their endorsement confirms my feelings about Site5. Also, the CEOs of both companies have been communicating directly which will hopefully result in even better WordPress compatibility with Site5. Check out the announcement post, Site5 has a 6-month free trial (!) for the iThemes community.

Disable shortcodes for ElegantThemes

Go to ePanel/custom-functions.php and remove:

require_once(TEMPLATEPATH . '/epanel/shortcodes/shortcodes.php');

Updated June 4, 2014

The above code will get overwritten when you update the theme, so it’s best to contain your modifications in a child theme. In your child theme’s functions.php file, add this:

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'add_remove_et_features', 15 );

function add_remove_et_features() {
    remove_action('init','et_activate_features');
    add_action('init','child_activate_features');
}

function child_activate_features(){
    /* activate shortcodes */
    // comment out or delete the line below to disable shortcodes
    // require_once(TEMPLATEPATH . '/epanel/shortcodes/shortcodes.php');

    /* activate page templates */
    require_once(get_template_directory() . '/epanel/page_templates/page_templates.php');

    /* import epanel settings */
    require_once(get_template_directory() . '/epanel/import_settings.php');
}

However I recommend that you don’t use ElegantThemes. Sure they’re cheap, but they don’t offer Automatic Updates which makes their themes pretty insecure and vulnerable to hackers. Elegant Themes finally includes automatic updates as of Dec 2013.

If you want high quality themes with rock solid security and top-notch support, go with StudioPress or WooThemes.

WTOTW: Automatically post selected Instagram photos to your blog with ifttt

My Instagram yesterday got a lot of likes and apparently people are really interested to do this, so here’s a quick tutorial how.

This tutorial will show you how to post *selected* Instagram photos to your WordPress blog, automatically. All you need to do is to tag your Instagram with a hashtag for it to work.

ifttt

The key to doing this is a service called ifttt, which is short for “if this then that”. Basically you tell it to watch for a trigger (if this) and do something in response (then that). See the quick one-page guide on their site. Tip: ifttt is pronounced like ‘lift’ without the ‘l’. Read More »

WordPress Online Business Giveaway

The folks over at WP Pro Business are running an insane giveaway of WordPress-based online business products. Some of the stuff up for grabs include..

Gravity Forms licenses
WPMUDEV Memberships
BackupBuddy licences
Wishlist Member licenses
Standard Theme
Marketeer Theme

and more! The total value of the giveaway is over $9,000! Like I said – insane.

Head on over and enter the giveaway now.

ProBlogger.net published my guest post today. Guess that officially makes me a professional blogger 😀

Custom size featured image thumbnail with fallback in WordPress

Occasionally you may need to display featured images in sizes other than WordPress’ default thumbnail, medium and large sizes. That’s quite easily solved with the add_image_size() and the_post_thumbnail() functions. Unfortunately, there are still 2 problems to be solved:

  • Some posts may not have images at all, or the author forgets to attach a featured image
  • Previous posts don’t have featured images

Here’s a solution that 1) resizes the featured image to the right size, 2) uses the first image in the post if a featured image is not set and 3) falls back to a default image if none of the above are true. Read More »

How to make WordPress bulletproof for clients

This is my talk at WordCon / WordCamp Asia 2011. Here are the notes from my presentation – for my reference and yours. If you enjoyed my ideas here, please Like or tweet this post. Thanks!
Read More »