WordPress Custom Post Types on Steroids Tutorial

WordPress began primarily as a blogging tool because of the “post” paradigm. You could easily create an online journal of running posts for your website. Over time the system matured with the addition of (static) Pages, and tags and categories for posts (for sorting).
With the ability to create custom fields for posts and pages (later), developers began to bastardize the system to create business websites. This was times both hard to deal with (if you ...

JTPratt: WordPress Developer Blog

Where can I get WordPress help?

Now that WordPress runs nearly 1/5 of the Internet, there are millions of website owners who need help on a regular basis. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rank amateur that knows nothing about posts, tags, and categories, or a dangerous coder trying to figure out how to widgitize a sidebar – at one time or another everybody needs some type of WP help. We’re going to walk through some of the most used WordPress resources and help ...

JTPratt: WordPress Developer Blog

Drop Shadow Box WordPress Plugin Works Great

The Internet has gone through some interesting changes over the last 10-15 years. In the beginning it was all about big flashing, jittering, tickering, content. Then it evolved into Shockwave, Flashy, cartoony, animated designs. It has evolved into a more minimalistic, simplistic design (think “Apple”).
For a long time, websites were just clustered with so much content – at times you were sent into “information overload”. Designers learned the mantra “less is more”, and found that you can do a ...

JTPratt: WordPress Developer Blog

What’s New in WordPress 3.4

WordPress 3.4 has been out a couple weeks now, and if you haven’t already updated (or even if you have) you might be wondering what all the new changes are. We’re going to walk through the new features one by one so you can understand exactly how they work.
One nice thing about new features is that WordPress now has beautiful tooltips when new features come out, as you’ll see in the next item.
Theme Customizer
WordPress has ...

JTPratt: WordPress Developer Blog

Is Dreamhost Down (and a bad webhost)?

We have done client website work on hundreds of webhosts over the years, and we fix 3-5 malware infected or broken websites per week. One thing typically remains constant – we get more virus infested and hacked / injected websites from these 3 webhosts than any other:
1. Godaddy
2. Dreamhost
3. Bluehost
Is it irony that those are 3 of the most popular webhosts online? Are these webhosts more insecure or vulnerable than others? ...

JTPratt: WordPress Developer Blog

3 SEO Tricks for Affiliate Marketing Websites

If you do affiliate marketing and were looking for some SEO tricks to get you better rankings, this post is definitely for you. It is, however, more of “what not to do” then it is a set bunch of tricks. If you haven’t figured it out just yet – Google doesn’t exactly take too kindly to you trying to trick them (or game the rankings). Your best bet is to play it safe and do more of ...

JTPratt: WordPress Developer Blog

Where to Find Free Stock Images and Photos

It doesn’t matter whether you have a business website or a blog – at one time or another you find yourself in need of quality images or photos. It seems like there are dozens of stock photo websites now where you can buy images for $1-10 – with istockphoto being (probably) the most expensive. There actually are places where you can find free quality stock images and photos for download – you just have to know where ...

JTPratt: WordPress Developer Blog

WordPress Access Control Made Easy

Have you ever wanted to restrict access to a page or post, or create a members only website in WordPress? There are lots of great plugins out there that you hear people talking about all the time like Amember, S2 Member, Wishlist Member – some are premium (paid) some are free.
We ran into a situation recently where we wanted to restrict access to an entire website – all but a couple pages. We needed to do it ...

JTPratt: WordPress Developer Blog

13 Amazing Featured Content Slider WordPress Plugins

I can remember a few years back when jQuery sliders and WordPress Featured Content Slider plugins were limited to a few broken versions in the official plugin repository – and the random free code you could copy and paste from the web. Now there are a LOT of great slider and featured content plugins in the plugin directory – in fact 192 of them just for the search term “slider“. Sometimes these are called gallery plugins, carousel ...

JTPratt: WordPress Developer Blog

WordPress 100 Things: WordCamp Columbus

Today I’m giving the presentation “100 Things You Should Know About WordPress” at WordCamp Columbus. I’ve given this presentation once before, with Anthony Montalbano (founder of WordCamp Detroit) at WordPress Ann Arbor. The previous 100 Things You Should Know About WordPress page is here.

Basically it’s 10 slides with 10 things on 10 topics that are about or affect WordPress. Tips, tricks, and best practices are presented – in kind of a rapid-fire format ...

JTPratt: WordPress Developer Blog