Category: Helpful resources

There are 29 posts filed in Helpful resources (this is page 5 of 5).

Lots of people have lots of questions about WordPress.

Sometimes, the answer is quick, and only requires a little bit of direction to get you on the right path.

Enter: Ask Me Anything

Ask Me Anything is a weekly chat session that will take place every Wednesday at 7PM Eastern using both the TeamTalk conferencing system and the hashtag #wpama on Twitter. The server address for TeamTalk is 4.onj.me, the ports are 10334, and Ask Me Anything will take place in the “Ask Me Anything” channel. You can ask me anything on the following topics:

  • General WordPress setup and configuration
  • The Genesis framework and StudioPress child themes
  • WordPress.com
  • Finding the right WordPress plugin to meet your needs
  • Finding the right WordPress theme for your site
  • Finding the right hosting
  • General hosting questions
  • Finding the right domain for your site
  • Web accessibility

What’s Not Included?

There’s only a few things that aren’t included, mainly because they would limit the ability of others to get their questions answered:

  • Specific plugin or theme setup/configuration
  • Code snippets
  • Specific hosting configuration instructions

What’s it going to cost?

The only thing Ask Me Anything is going to cost you is the time it takes to ask your question and the time it takes to answer it. Other than time, it’s completely free.

What if I can’t make it for the live sessions?

If you can’t make it for the live sessions, no worries. Each Friday, the session notes wil be posted with links to participants’ websites if they exist. Plus, any questions we can’t get to during the sessions will be posted as free tips/tutorials on this site that you’ll be able to browse through and implement when you have the time.

How long will AMA sessions last?

AMA will last one hour each week, and I’ll answer as many questions as I can get to. Any questions I don’t get to will be answered in upcoming sessions.

Can I ask questions outside AMA?

Yes, you can. Just use the #wpama hashtag and I’ll answer your questions during AMA sessions.

I’m looking forward to sharing knowledge with you during Ask Me Anything. Let’s make this fun, informative and engaging together. Until Wednesday.

The providers of the Conductor plugin have compiled an extensive guide to developing with WordPress. There are links to free and paid tutorials, as well as podcasts and books, and they are accepting submissions to the guide through comments to the post. The guide highlights best practices and is pretty thorough so far. If you have development resources, free or paid, why not go over there and add them? I have not checked to make sure all of the listings are accessible, specifically the paid ones, and I do not think the books are available on Bookshare. Most of them are, however, available on Kindle, which you can use accessibly if you have an iPhone, iPad, or iPod current model. The guide is an excellent resource whether you’re just getting started with development or have any level of experience in that area. It’s definitely worth adding to your bookmarks/favorites if you’re interested in development for WordPress in any way, whether that be for themes, plugins, or core code.
JavaScript: The Right Way is a guide intended to introduce new developers to JavaScript and help experienced developers learn more about its best practices. It is a project hosted on GitHub that gathers together tutorials, tips and tricks that show both beginners and seasoned developers the best way to write their code so they can get things done.

It can also be used as a free JavaScript course, because it starts at the beginning. It doesn’t cover everything yet, but because it’s hosted on GitHub, that means that multiple people can contribute. Content version control in action.

You can find the tutorial here, and of course add it to your bookmarks if you want to consume it.

You’ve written a stellar piece of content. Your visitors are commenting like it’s going out of style. They hit “post comment” and look through the list of comments to find there’s. They get a message saying “your comment is awaiting moderation”, and they have no idea when you’ve approved it that their juicy comment is showing up.

You can fix this

Emailing your visitors to let them know their comment is approved is something you probably don’t have a lot of time to do. It’s one thing if there are only a few of them, but when you start getting a lot of interaction, it’s just not practical. Make WordPress do it for you. Go get the Comment Approved plugin by by Neils van Renselaar.

It’s simple to use. Once you activate the plugin, you’ll find its settings in Settings > Comment Approved. Check the box to enable the “comment approved” message, and whenever you approve a comment, your visitor will get an email letting them know you’ve taken care of that for them.

The plugin comes with a couple of shortcodes, but you can customize the message using HTML. It’s a great way to award first-time commentors with a free ebook or other promotional item.

Version control: It’s one of those handy tools developers use to keep track of changes to a project. It also makes it easier to “code in the kitchen”, as it were, by allowing for small changes we may have come up with while, say cooking dinner or cleaning the house to be made and noted, so that we can come back later and decide if we want to keep the little change, or roll it back without having to dig through lines and lines of code to find and delete it. But did you know that Git (or any other method of version control, for that matter), can also be used for design, and even content writing?

I first came across version control in the form of Murcurial while working on a project last year with Monica that involved adding content to a hand-coded site. To be honest, at first, I thought the owner of the site was crazy for insisting on version control for a hand-coded, relatively simple site, but after having switched my own processes over to version control from plain-old work-as-you-go text files, I’m thankful I was introduced.

So how do you, as a content writer or designer, implement version control? There’s an excellent post over at Flywheel that will get you started. It lays out some reasons why version control, (specifically, Git), is a good for designers, and provides some free resources for getting started. Admittedly, the concept took me a while to get used to, and I ran into some issues while getting everything initially set up, but once I got rolling, I’ve never looked back.