Migrating to Digital Ocean

I’ve had a number of tiny WordPress sites on shared hosting (BlueHost) for over a decade. It’s been pretty great. Shared hosting has a lot of benefits: it’s cheap, it’s relatively easy to manage, e-mail is included, and there’s basic support.

The drawback is that servers aren’t generally optimized for WordPress performance, and once a site begins to scale in traffic you need to move it to a managed host or a VPS.

droplet-screen

I’ve been wanting to try DigitalOcean (one of the many cloud providers) because my hosting bills have been growing. I still have my basic shared hosting with BlueHost, but I also have large sites on WP Engine, and a VPS with WiredTree. They’ve all been great and have their own benefits, but the idea of consolidating into one provider and reducing my hosting bill significantly is a huge draw. Continue reading

Customizer Panels and Field Types

WordPress 4.0 introduced a few new features for the customizer, including panels and input field types. This post on the Core Make blog explains the updates well- but since I was experimenting with it today I thought I’d post a few more examples.

new-controls

I put together a code snippet that registers a custom panel, section, and then displays a few of the new field types: url, e-mail, password, textarea, date, and range. Arguably the only real useful ones are textarea and range as you’ll see in the notes below. Continue reading

How to Install a Purchased Theme

When you purchase a WordPress theme you’ll generally get a download link for the zip file. To upload this theme to your site involves a couple simple steps.

  1. Log into your WordPress site, and go to “Appearances > Themes” menu item
  2. Click the “Add New” button at the top of the screen
  3. Click the “Upload Theme” button at the top of the screen
  4. Now choose the .zip file that you have of the theme click “Install Now”

Add New

add-new

Upload Theme

upload-theme

Overwriting a Theme

If you are uploading a newer version of an existing theme, you will likely get this message:

“Destination folder already exists. Theme install failed.”

In that case, you will need to temporarily switch themes (perhaps to the default). Find the theme you want to replace, click “Theme Details” and then click “Delete”. Now you can upload the newer version.

Additional Notes

  • If you use WordPress.com, you cannot upload your own themes.
  • If your zip file contains multiple themes, you’ll need to unzip it, and then re-zip each theme individually.
  • Purchase themes only from trusted sources- otherwise you run the risk of getting a hacked version (no fun).