Mark L
WordPress is our favorite content management system for a whole host of reasons. It works as a fabulous framework for everything from eCommerce to Learning Management and has a solid architecture in place that allows it to be competitive with any stand alone web software for any application you can imagine, while still retaining flexibility … Read more
Each website page has a specific address, just like a home or business. In website jargon this is called the “url” or uniform resource locator. The technical details of how typing the url into the address bar (or clicking a link) actually brings up the specific webpage can get a bit complicated. On a simple level it involves back and forth communication between the web browser (Chrome, Edge, etc.) and the server, which is where the website is “hosted” which basically just means where all the files, images, and data for the website live. Along the way there is an “address lookup” which involves things like ip addresses, domain names, and DNS records.
As web developers, we’re often working on the most complex features and integrations that WordPress is capable of. From creating custom website themes to building new plugins, or perhaps linking with a complicated third party API to sync data from another system, we usually are working on aspects of WordPress far beyond what most website … Read more
Two of our favorite plugins for WordPress are the robust and powerful Gravity Forms and the ubiquitous eCommerce plugin WooCommerce. Gravity Forms is a premium plugin that we like so much that we provide a free license to our clients as part of our WordPress Security and Performance Plan. WooCommerce is the backbone of any WordPress eCommerce website, and the core software is free and developed/maintained by Automatic, who are the same folks that started and maintain WordPress itself. Each plugin is wildly popular, and as such there are many add-ons that allow for integration with other software/plugins. In this post we’re going to explore how you can use the WooCommerce plugin: Gravity Forms Product Add-ons in order to leverage the power of Gravity Forms to build intricate and conditionally based product configurations which link to a WooCommerce product, allowing you to then enjoy all of the eCommerce specific architecture that WooCommerce provides.
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.
In the world of WordPress development, there are often many choices on how to achieve a certain function. From block editing tools to form builders there are a bevy of options to choose from, often requiring a keen eye and years of WordPress experience to suss out which is the best for your particular application. … Read more
One of the many wonderful things about WordPress is that its barriers to entry are very low. Anyone willing to roll up their sleeves and spend a bit of time viewing YouTube tutorials can build up a site themselves using the many available WordPress themes and plugins and create and manage their own content. While we certainly recommend working with a professional team whenever adding new features/plugins to a site (especially when needing to modify code), and we recognize that not everyone has the time or disposition to take on the work themselves, we also know there are those who like a “hands on approach” to their website, and for those we present you with a list of useful tools and resources to help along the way.
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.