With so many membership plugins for WordPress being available, it’s a real challenge to figure out which one to use for a particular web site. Chris Lema has been helping to clarify the matter for some time and now offers an even easier to use aid – a great infographic that guides you through multiple membership options towards a plugin that is more likely to be the answer:
Choosing a WordPress Membership Plugin
“Theme creep” is what I call it when functionality that has nothing to do with the presentational layer of a WordPress website “creeps” into the theme. What this ends up doing is chaining you to a WordPress theme that seemed like a beautiful and great one for your site when you first saw it. Chains you so that in six months or thirty, when you find yourself wanting a visual change of pace you’re left with a terrible choice: your pretty new look or your properly functioning WordPress site.
It’s a very accurate term for crawling over the boundaries of presentation and into the realm better served by plugins. This always makes me feel uneasy about WordPress themes perfectly suited for the task at hand: what if the development stalls, there will be no support for new WordPress features? What will it take going to reproduce the functionality, presuming that the theme permits to edit the code?
Sucuri who are famous for their great security services came up with a Free WordPress plugin to help with cleaning up a hacked WordPress-powered web site:
Cleaning Up Your WordPress Site with the Free Sucuri Plugin
The plugin may not help mitigate consequences of every hack, but it offers a set of steps that are likely to show you where the problem is. It starts with the Sucuri’s free remote scanner, SiteCheck, and ends with resetting passwords and security keys and offers advise on further hardening your WordPress installation.
“Whenever I meet with a new client for the first time, I always tell them this: It’s not important that you like the design I’m going to make for you.
It’s always humorous to see the client’s reaction to this statement. Most look inquisitive, others look downright baffled.
I then expound on my initial statement: “It’s a bonus if you like it, but the main objectives are that your business needs are met and that your customers like it.”
This is how the article by Wes McDowell starts, and it’s not an approach I hear of most of the time. It’s easier indeed to follow client’s personal preferences than to explain to them that their customers are more important, although I am not sure that client’s personal approach is more often connected to paying out of one’s pocket as Wes suggests. Nevermind, it’s small details that don’t affect his main point: the project will be more successful if client’s personal preferences are set aside and the focus is put firmly on the needs of people who will be using the finished product.
A handy tool by Matt Kersley that works as a service at http://mattkersley.com/responsive and also can be installed on your staging server too: https://github.com/mattkersley/Responsive-Design-Testing. The best part of the latter is that all screen widths or device sizes update as you browse in one of them.
Screen size reference for smartphones, tablets, and monitors, complete with popularity: Screensiz.es
Sarah Gooding has a piece of solid advise on how to protect the WordPress installation from clients who can’t contain their urge to tinker with things:
Protecting WordPress from Dangerous Clients
The best part of it is that it does not involve any plugins. All work is done in the wp-config.php file.
Gabriele Romanato wrote an awesome article about using CSS generated content and counters to embellish our layouts with text strings and images and to add automatic numbering. Lots of code snippets and demos to illustrate all that.
Today A List Apart features a very good article on symbol fonts by Brian Suda. It covers the place of symbol fonts in the whole process of improving web site performance, visual and accessibility advantages of their use, new possibilities for ligatures, and possible issues a web designer can run into with symbol fonts.
Stripping a website to its barest form, ignoring for a moment, content which is only text and images, all a browsing experience is, is navigation. It’s clicking links that take you to other pages with more links. The main navigation of your site is such a crucial part of this as it represents the persistent doorway to the most important pages of your content.