One of the things many WordPress beginners often wonder about is if it is possible to edit an image after it has been inserted into a post or page. Yes, WordPress users may do some simple image editing and also edit image properties once the image is already uploaded.
Here’s how this can be done: Continue reading “Basic Image Editing in WordPress”
This weekend we are super excited to be attending, and sponsoring, WordCamp Edinburgh 2017!
WordCamps are community driven events usually running for 2-3 days. In the spirit of WordPress they are organised by community members (our very own Iain Taylor is on the organising team for this one) and feature a schedule of speakers delivering talks covering a vast range of topics that are usually split between two ‘tracks’ so there is a choice of talks to attend depending on what takes your interest.
At some WordCamps there are also ‘contributor days’ which are an opportunity to get involved with WordPress, be it helping with online support, getting involved with developing WordPress core or helping out with marketing. These are a great way for people who work with WordPress to get involved with giving something back to the community.
In addition to this there are always a range of sponsors with stands at WordPress events offering a great opportunity to speak to hosting companies, plugin developers and more.
But of course probably the most valuable part of attending a WordCamp is the opportunity to meet like-minded individuals. With hundreds of attendees at most WordCamps there are a great many people all working with WordPress in one way or another so whether you are looking to build business contacts or simply looking to make some friends with similar interests WordCamps are a great opportunity to do so.
WordCamps are great for anyone that uses WordPress – on any level. Whether you are an end user, a designer, a developer you are almost guaranteed to take a lot away from a WordCamp. Because of the variety of speakers there is bound to be some talks that are of interest to you and you will make new contacts at the same time.
To get an idea of what some of the talks are like at WordCamps check out https://wordpress.tv/category/wordcamptv/ for videos of talks from previous WordCamps.
Here at Ezone we have been attending WordCamps for over five years now and we always come away with useful information that we can apply to our business.
As WordPress specialists it’s extremely important that we keep up to date with latest developments and best practice and we also place a high value on the WordPress community and the importance of contributing to it.
We’re also love meeting talented individuals that share our passion for WordPress and where better to do so than at a WordCamp? It’s a great opportunity for us to make new contacts and to catch up with old friends too. It’s also a good opportunity to meet some of the teams behind WordPress services that we use such as JetPack and WP Engine.
If you are interested in attending WordCamp Edinburgh check out the website at: https://2017.edinburgh.wordcamp.org. At the time of writing there are still 26 standard tickets left, they cost £20 each and that includes all the talks on both days and lunch and other refreshments.
Whatever you do with WordPress we’d recommend you checkout at least one WordCamp as they really are fantastic events.
We hope to see you there!
Keeping your website content organized matters a great deal in terms of:
A well-organized site helps your site visitors to navigate the website quickly and easily and find the information they need. This gives a positive impression especially to people who visit your site who have very short attention spans and expect to be able to access information at the click of a mouse. Continue reading “Organizing Website Content in Pages and Posts”
Since it originated as a blogging platform WordPress has good support for comments and discussion on your posts. In this article we’ll discuss how you can manage comments in WordPress, including choosing where to allow them and moderation.
To enable comments on your WordPress posts go to Settings > Discussion and check the ‘Allow people to post comments on new articles’ box.
This will display a comments box at the bottom of any new posts that you create.
You will notice that it mentions that these settings can be overridden for individual articles. This can be useful if you want to disallow comments on specific posts and can be done within the post editor by scrolling down to ‘Discussion’ and unchecking the ‘allow comments’ box.
It’s important to note that enabling comments in the discussion settings page only affects new posts, not existing ones. You can enable comments individually on each post as mentioned above, but if you have a lot of posts this will take a long time, so a quicker way to do it is to go to ‘Posts’ and select the posts that you want to enable comments on and then select ‘Edit’ from the bulk actions dropdown. You can then select ‘Allow’ from the ‘Comments’ dropdown as shown below:
An important part of managing comments in WordPress is moderation. Unfortunately with comments forms enabled you will inevitably get spam comments. There are a number of options within WordPress to control comments, for example you can set it so that only logged in users can post comments – a useful function for member based sites.
The most simple way to manage comments is to simply check the ‘Comment must be manually approved’ box in Settings > Discussion as shown below. An alternative is to have it set so that not all comments have to be moderated before they appear but you can set up a blacklist of words that will force a comment to be held for moderation before it appears on your site. Similarly you can set posts to be trashed if they contain specific words.
There are a large number of options within WordPress to make managing comments and discussion simple and suitable for your specific website. We’d encourage you to explore the different settings to identify the best setup for your individual website.
One of the things that many beginners find really confusing when creating new content for their website is in using WordPress posts and pages.
Posts and pages are two different ways you can publish content on WordPress. They seem to look the same on the website, but both content types function very differently. Continue reading “Key Differences Between WordPress Posts and Pages”
This week we are doing an overview of WordPress 4.8 (named Evans in honor of the Jazz musician William John Evans) which was just released at the end of last week. Some updates primarily fix or add features that you only really notice as a developer, but WordPress 4.8 brings a load of great updates that will be appreciated by both developers and users.
So what’s new?
WordPress 4.8 adds a number of widgets as well as massively improving the text widget. Let’s start by looking at the new widgets:
Image Widget:
WordPress 4.8 introduces an image widget that allows you to easily add images to your widget areas by selecting the image from the media library. Image widgets were not native to WordPress before (although the Jetpack plugin did add one, it wasn’t as intuitive, since it didn’t use the media library), so this is a welcome addition.
Audio Widget:
The new audio widget lets you select a audio file from the media library and it will be embedded in a player in your page. This is a great feature for podcasters and musicians alike.
Video Widget:
Similar to the audio widget this widget lets you select your video file from the media library and embed it in your widget area making it super easy to add video to your website.
The Text Widget:
This update is one that I have wanted for a long time as from a usability perspective the text widget was very difficult to use without knowing html. WordPress 4.8 adds a rich text editor to the text widget, making it easy to add links, make text bold, format lists and more making it a great improvement for end users.
Another interesting feature of WordPress 4.8 is an improvement to links in the rich text editor. Your link is now highlighted in blue and you can adjust the text that your link covers, making it much easier to edit text in and around links without linking the wrong part of the text.
As you can see from the above screenshot the linked text is surrounded by a blue background. As you edit the text that is linked the background expands around it, making it really easy to tell where your link starts and ends.
WordPress 4.8 also introduces a new panel in the WordPress cms dashboard (the page you land on when you login) that tells you about upcoming events near you and also news relating to WordPress. This feature is probably most useful to those working with WordPress and that want to get involved in the WordPress community. It also tells you about meetups in your area – these are a great way to get involved with the community regardless of what you do with WordPress, be it design, development or as an end user working with it every day.
There are a number of improvements for developers working with WordPress in this release. This includes improvement of accessibility, the removal of core support for WMA and WMV videos files, a text editor javascript api and a number of other updates that you can read about in more detail here: https://wordpress.org/news/2017/06/evans/.
If you are one of our clients you needn’t do anything, we have already upgraded you to WordPress version 4.8 so you can log in and start enjoying the benefits straight away.
If you are not sure what version of WordPress your site is using you can easily check by going to the WordPress dashboard in the content management system and looking in the ‘At a Glance’ panel:
While translating your website can be tricky, translating it into a language that is read from right to left can seem even more daunting. The good news is that the WordPress cms has excellent built in support for different languages as well there being a number of excellent plugins to help.
In this post we are going to look at how to create right to left websites in WordPress, covering both the use of existing themes and those that are created from scratch.
To make your website read coherently from right to left you will usually find that simply switching the direction of the text is not sufficient, you will want to switch the entire layout of the website so that those viewing the site from right to left have the equivalent experience of those viewing from left to right. .
If your website is built on a pre-built theme then it may have built in support for right to left, or rtl, layouts. There are a couple of ways that you can check this:
You will see that the WordPress dashboard will now display right to left:
If you now go to your live site it will display with a reversed layout if it supports rtl languages and even if it doesn’t it will change your text to read from right to left.
2. If you are a little more technical you can quickly check if your theme supports rtl by looking to see if there is a rtl.css stylesheet. This will be contained in the root of the theme (usually located in /wp-content/themes/theme-name/ ).
3. There is also a plugin called RTL Tester which you can use to test your site in rtl layout without having your visitors see it on the live site. It is available in the WordPress Plugin Repository.
If your website uses a custom theme that doesn’t have rtl functionality you will need to add it to the site. This is not a difficult process, although it can be time consuming:
There is some really useful information and examples about the above procedure here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Right-to-Left_Language_Support
If your website is in several different languages then you probably use a plugin such as WPML (which is the standard plugin that we use for multilingual websites). In this case you obviously don’t want to change the site language in your WordPress settings as the site will not always be using just one language. So long as you have an rtl.css stylesheet you shouldn’t need to make any other changes, selecting the country from your language selector will add the rtl declaration to your page header prompting the site to use your rtl css.
Changing your WordPress password frequently is one of the best ways to keep your website safe and secure. Security “best practice” recommends changing all your passwords every 30 or 90 days. Continue reading “2 Easy Ways to Change your WordPress Password”
Did you know that you can schedule posts in WordPress? This means that rather than having to publish your post right away you can write it when you have the time and then schedule it to automatically publish on a specific date and time. Continue reading “Schedule Posts in WordPress”
One of the simplest ways to help increase the security of your site is not to use “Admin” as your administrator username. It’s the default username in WordPress and everybody, including would-be hackers, know this.
Continue reading “Change WordPress Default Admin to Keep Your Site Safe”
