Category: WordPress

We spend so much time on NameHero giving advice on which code to add to WordPress. It occurs to me that we haven’t given an explanation so far, about the most common mechanism in WordPress for modifications – actions and filters. So this is a quick introduction to them, why they’re useful, and two examples […]

A few months ago, I was auditing my site and jettisoning some of the additional code and scripts that were loading, slowing things down, and causing conflicts. One of these was a little external Javascript file that was parsing some of my links and adding target=”_blank” to them, to make the links open in a […]

Every now and then, an idea comes along that seems good, but when you think about it a little more, the flaws become apparent. This happened when I thought of moving my CDN to something other than Cloudflare, but then the disadvantages became suddenly apparent once I tried it. But there are other, more disruptive […]

I’ve written before about the insufficiency of 3rd party comment systems like Facebook, and recommended that you stick with the default, native WordPress comment system. Even though there are plugins for comments that make use of your own database, you never know if they’re going to stick around for long or be updated to comply […]

WordPress is a curious combination of the static and the dynamic. The overwhelming majority of WordPress pages are static – they hardly ever change. On the other hand, the entire architecture of the CMS is based on a dynamic database. Pages are generated from scratch each time a request is made. It seems a bit […]

WordPress’s origins as a content management system, have often clashed with its recent metamorphosis into a site builder. One of these conflicts was the awkward way of inserting code into the editor. Because it started out as a way of adding pure content via the WYSIWYG editor, it was considered unnecessary for HTML or Javascript […]

The Jetpack plugin is one of the most staple plugins on any WordPress installation. Ever since its release in 2011, it’s been a runaway hit with millions upon millions of downloads. It’s developed and maintained by Automaticc themselves, and so doesn’t run into any trust issues. I’ve been a staunch advocate of Jetpack for years […]

One of the challenges in creating a content heavy website, is about retaining your visitors. When you have a lot of posts, chances are that a reader will be interested in more than just the current article. Of course, a well-crafted piece of content will have internal links to all parts of your site, and […]

I’m a big fan of responsive WordPress themes – ones that have it built in right from the start. In fact, I’d previously written about how we need to stop using separate themes for mobiles, and instead maintain the same code base for all devices. Unfortunately, sometimes our themes don’t give us that luxury and […]

When Gutenberg came out, it brought with it, a vastly expanded selection of default content types, we call “blocks”. Previously in the TinyMCE editor, we had buttons at the top, each of which represented a different type of content – headings, lists, and those inserted by plugins. In time though, the developers felt that this […]