Mark L

Custom Post Type UI and Advanced Custom Fields Pro can combine to provide near limitless possibilities for customizing your WordPress content. Watermelon Web Works is hear to help you utilize these two wonderful plugins to help create and display content on your new or existing WordPress website.

WordPress is an incredibly powerful and ready to use content management system right out of the box.  What really sets it apart though, is that its code infrastructure creates a basic framework that makes it easy to add additional functionality via plugins.  Add this to the enormous popularity of WordPress, and you create an environment where thousands of brilliant minds are working to create plugins to perform an ever expanding list of functionality for WordPress users.  Event management, learning management systems, forums, and of course eCommerce are just a small sampling of what WordPress is capable of when you pair it with the right combination of these wonderful plugins.  More recently, a growing number of development teams have been working on an exciting new tool:  support ticketing systems built on the WordPress framework.  In our experience the most robust among these is WSDesk.

WordPress is the world’s leading content management system, and as you would expect, it has loads of built in easy to use features to help you publish your site content how and when you want.  However, it surprisingly does not have a method out of the box to schedule content updates to your posts or pages.  When we recently needed to enable this feature for a client, I quickly looked to the WordPress plugin repository which is among the greatest advantages of using the platform.  Thousands of plugins are available to expand upon the base set of features for everything that you can imagine: eCommerce, event management, user forums, learning management, and the list goes on.  Virtually anything you can envision doing on a website typically has at least three or four very well supported, feature rich, and heavily used and vetted plugin alternatives to choose from depending on your specific needs.  This is why we were rather surprised to find the available options for the relatively simple and presumably common task of scheduling content updates to be decidedly slim.  Even many of our old friend content management systems that time has passed by, such as Website Baker, offered this feature out of the box in a simple to use format.  After some deeper digging we finally found a plugin based solution that, though not installed on that many sites (600+ as of this writing), had some very quality positive reviews and a well established legacy so we decided to give it a closer look and try it out.  The plugin we chose is Content Update Scheduler by Infinitnet.

Virtually all websites these days feature some sort of popup message designed to get the user’s attention and/or follow through on some kind of call to action.  These can be to sign up for a newsletter, agree to terms of use, to feature new products, services or content, or for any number of other reasons.  Your initial reaction to reading the above may very well be: “Yeah, those things are really annoying.”  And you’re not all wrong. They certainly can be annoying and oftentimes are.  But more importantly, research shows they are effective.  So the goal should be to maximize their effectiveness while minimizing the annoying factor.  Choosing to not use them altogether simply because you’ve been to a lot of sites with popups that annoy you will cause you to miss out on opportunities to actually improve the experience for your website users, and also ultimately improve your bottom line.  However, the purpose of this article is not to convince you of the utility or best practices with popups.  For a very thorough discussion on that, check out Sumo’s excellent write up.  What I want to share is the best method for setting up popups for your WordPress website, and for that the tool I most recommend is the Popup Maker plugin.