There are some bold new changes in the works for the WordPress dashboard: a responsive design, a font icon set, and a new darker + flatter look. There’s also workflow changes on a number of admin screens, including the themes page and dashboard home.
For folks interested in following along with the progress, check out the make.wordpress.org/ui blog. MP6 and Dashboard can also be installed on a development site to preview all the updates. Continue reading
Full screen background images are a nice feature for a number of WordPress themes. It’s also one of the few theme modifications that can be handled well through a plugin.
The implementations I’ve seen generally use the jQuery script backstretch.js– which handles responsive layouts and large images elegantly.
If you’re not a theme developer and just want to add a full screen background to your site, I’d suggest trying out one of these plugins:
If you are a developer and want learn how to add this feature to a theme, read on.
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On a recent project we needed to add UTM query parameters (for Google Analytics tracking) to all outbound links to a specific domain.
I didn’t feel like updated all the links on the site directly in the code since these campaign query strings might change, so I created a basic jQuery plugin to do this:
jQuery.fn.utm_tracking = function() {
$(this).find('a[href^="http://www.example.com"]').each(function() {
var url = $(this).attr('href');
$(this).attr( 'href', url + '?utm_source=example&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=campaign' );
});
}
There are a lot of great WordPress themes available for free, but you’ll need to be careful about where you get them from. Bad themes with malicious code can bring down your server, alter links on your website, and cause other unsavory problems.
Free themes from reputable sources can be terrific though. Here’s some of the places I’d check first, with a few example themes from each.
The theme repository on WordPress.org is the largest source of free WordPress themes. All themes go through a detailed code review and safe to use on your site. You can browse the featured themes, popular themes, and newest themes.
Some excellent free themes to try in the repository are Expound, Spun, and Bold Headlines.
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Some themes and plugins use custom post types to store data for items like portfolio pieces or testimonials . This can be an issue if you want to switch to a new theme that doesn’t have support for that post type, or your plugin is no longer maintained.
Luckily, there’s a couple ways to convert custom post types to standard post types. I recommend using Post Type Switcher if you just have a couple items to switch. For converting posts in bulk, Convert Post Types is what you’ll want.
Here’s a list of a WordPress theme shops ordered by Alexa rank.
I was surprised to find a few near the top I haven’t heard of before. A few near the bottom are defunct or no longer maintained.
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This is a basic example of how to use AJAX in WordPress in the admin area. It shows how to take a variable from javascript, pass it to a PHP function (altering it slightly), and then pass it back to the javascript.
This assumes you already know how to enqueue javascript, etc. Continue reading
You may have code that relies on certain JetPack functions. If so, there’s a simple way to check if the module you need is enabled:
if ( class_exists( 'Jetpack' ) && Jetpack::is_module_active( 'photon' ) ) : endif;