[ad_1] Delicious Brains, the company behind WP Migrate DB Pro and SpinupWP, has acquired the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin from its creator, Elliot Condon. After 10 years, the plugin has more than 1 million active installs and a thriving business based on the Pro version. It has become an indispensable part of the workflow for thousands of WordPress developers around the globe. The plugin allows developers to easily customize WordPress edit screens and custom field data. In 2019, the Pro version introduced ACF Blocks, a PHP-based framework for developing custom blocks. This came as a great relief to many developers who did not know how they were going to keep pace with learning the JavaScript required to use WordPress’ Block API. General reaction to the news was positive, as ACF fits in neatly with Delicious Brains’ suite of well-maintained developer products. The company’s founders also possess a genuine appreciation of ACF and its importance to the WordPress developer community. “I don’t think WordPress would be where it is today without ACF,” Brad Touesnard said on a recent episode of the Delicious Brain Waves podcast. Condon cited the scale of the project and “technology complexity and user expectation” as factors in his decision to sell ACF. As a one-person team, he was unable to keep up with the growth of ACF over the years. “Stepping away from ACF has not been an easy decision to make,” Condon said. “The reasoning behind it comes from a place of humility. As the number of installs have grown from thousands to millions, the needs of the product have outgrown my ability to develop solutions. The last thing I want to do to this amazing community is unintentionally hold back the project, so something needed to change.” Delicious Brains’ announcement stated that the company will be reviewing Condon’s roadmap for the product in hopes of fulfilling his vision moving forward. “Two of our greatest strengths that we’ll bring to ACF are design (UI/UX) and developer education,” Touesnard said. “We’ll be focusing our initial efforts in those areas. I have a few UI/UX improvements in mind that would make a huge difference to users. We also see a significant opportunity to produce developer-focused content focused on effectively using ACF in your WordPress projects.” Touesnard also confirmed that Delicious Brains will not be making any drastic changes to ACF or ACF Pro, nor do they plan to adjust the pricing of the product anytime soon. “If we ever decide to update pricing in the future, we won’t force existing customers onto the new pricing,” he said. After the initial announcement, there was some confusion surrounding lifetime licenses that originated from a hasty response to a customer inquiry. Delicious Brains has since updated the post to clarify the company’s commitment to ACF Pro’s lifetime customers. “We are committed to honoring lifetime licenses forever,” Touesnard said. “Lifetime license holders will get all ACF Pro software updates forever.” More information on how the acquisition happened, as well as what customers can expect in the future, is available on the most recent episode of the Delicious Brain Waves podcast. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingMonthly Archives: June 2021
10 Wix Alternatives for 2021 (Cheaper, Better, More Flexible)
[ad_1] Wix is one of the most popular website builders worldwide and powers a staggering 160 million websites. Most people choose Wix because it’s easy to use, has lots of features, and there’s a huge collection of templates to choose from. But if you’re thinking about creating a website, you should consider using one of these Wix alternatives instead. What’s wrong with Wix? Well, nothing if you just want to get a website up quickly and you don’t mind paying a monthly fee for it. However, if you want to grow your website, add advanced functionality, improve its SEO, and have full control over your data and content, there are many better alternatives. Bonus: several of these Wix alternatives are a cheaper option too. We recommend these alternatives: For General Websites WordPress (flexible and powerful CMS for creating any kind of site) Gator by HostGator (affordable and easy website creation for small businesses) Divi Theme (adds visual drag-and-drop functionality to WordPress) Webflow (advanced website builder for web designers and agencies) Weebly (simpler and cheaper alternative to Wix) For eCommerce Sites & Online Stores WooCommerce (flexible free eCommerce platform for WordPress) BigCommerce (powerful hosted eCommerce solution) Shopify (Easy-to-use online store builder with lots of tools to maximize sales) For Photography & Art Portfolios SmugMug (Secure and unlimited photo storage and portfolio builder with sales tools for photographers) Format (Stylish online portfolios for photographers with in-built business tools) Advantages of Wix We’re not claiming that Wix is all bad. Certainly, there are millions of people who seem to be happy with using it for their website. So let’s start by taking a look at what makes Wix such a popular choice. Easy to Use Wix’s main selling point has always been how easy it is to use for beginners and that’s certainly true. With its basic site wizard, you can have a site up within minutes. The drag-and-drop builder is very easy to use too, and it’s simple to make customizations to the templates and create your own designs. Great Selection of Templates If you’re not naturally skilled with design or don’t want to spend hours making your website look good, Wix has you covered with over 800 professionally designed templates for pretty much any kind of site. We can’t fault the Wix templates. They really are beautiful and modern designs and there’s something for everyone. Your site certainly won’t look DIY unless you start messing around with them. All-in-one Platform Another big selling point of Wix is that they take care of everything for you including hosting, security, backups, eCommerce tools, marketing, analytics, and so on. You don’t need to sign up for or learn how to use lots of different tools and services. Everything is provided on a single platform. Create a Free Website Of course, a big reason why Wix hosts millions of websites is because you can build a website without paying anything with their free account. This is a good option for small personal sites but doesn’t work for most people because the free sites have a Wix domain address and display Wix ads. There are also significant limits on storage, bandwidth, and features. However, Wix was very clever to offer this free option, as I’m sure many users started out on the free plan and then upgraded when they realized its limitations. If you want to build a website but don’t have much money, there are other options. Wix Vs. WordPress Wix has mainly aimed its product at beginners and creatives to date, highlighting the platform’s ease of use and the fact you don’t need any coding skills to create a professional-looking website. However, the brand has since expanded its focus and is now targeting agencies, developers, and those more experienced in building websites. Wix recently launched a bizarre advertising campaign taking a swipe at WordPress. They sent high-profile tech influencers and WordPress users Bose noise-canceling headphones in a box with a “Top Secret” and a note signed from “WP”. Recipients of the headphones were instructed to scan a QR code, which took them to a video of a man calling himself “WordPress” and complaining that Wix was spreading lies and fake news. The campaign left most of the recipients feeling confused about what they were trying to achieve, especially as there was no indication that the headphones were from Wix apart from the shipping label. Wix later uploaded a series of videos identified as part of their “You Deserve Better” campaign, which criticized WordPress as being a target for hackers, needing regular updates, and generating constant errors. While Wix claimed that the purpose of the campaign was to reach an audience that “doesn’t think or know that Wix applies to their needs,” it attracted ridicule from the WordPress and tech community, with users on Twitter calling out the brand for being “unethical” and “tacky”. So why exactly is the idea of switching to Wix such a ridiculous idea for most WordPress users? Let’s take a deeper look at some of the negatives of the platform. Wix Cons – Why You Should Not Use Wix While Wix has some advantages, particularly for those new to creating websites, there are also many downsides. These negatives are the reason why you’ll rarely see a serious business website built on Wix and why most people move away from the platform once their website grows or they’re updating it regularly. Lack of Data Portability Wix is the only CMS to our knowledge that does not allow you to export your content. While there are some limited export functions for products and other data types, the Wix support database states “Currently, it is not possible to transfer blog posts from one site to another.” In basic terms, this means that once you start building a site on Wix, you’re stuck with it. Of course, you can make local backups of your blog posts and website content in a spreadsheet or word documents, but there’s no easy way to export your
Continue readingProduct Redirection for WooCommerce Review: Redirect Visitors Easily
[ad_1] Managing and scaling a WooCommerce shop is not easy. You need to take care of so many things at once, such as inventory, prices, design, constant updating, and whatnot. In between all of this, it’s possible to miss out on smaller tasks like stock running out or hurting your SEO due to deleting a product. To make sure this does not happen to you, Poly Plugins created a plugin to make WooCommerce redirection easier. In this article, I’ll review the plugin in-depth and will check out its features. Review: Product Redirection for WooCommerce Product Redirection for WooCommerce provides a solution for a specific problem that most big products in the WooCommerce space do not provide. Even if there are products that provide a similar solution, they are often bloated with other unnecessary features and end up slowing down the website. And I am sure we all know how important speed is when it comes to growing WooCommerce stores. So, What Does the Product Redirection Plugin for Woocommerce Do? The purpose of this plugin is to help WooCommerce store owners who are not familiar with SEO by allowing them to easily add redirects to deleted product pages. The plugin allows you to prevent deleting WooCommerce products and assigns required redirection instructions and notices for deleted products. This way, you can redirect the traffic you are getting on a specific page to a different one easily. Why is Redirection Necessary? When a user sees a 404 error, most of the time, they just go back and visit a different link, and this is not at all good for the business. Instead, you can lead the user to a different page and tell them, “The product is no longer available. Consider checking our other products.” Once the product is deleted, it does not tell Google to stop ranking it in search results. If someone looking for “AC DC Tshirt” lands on your product page and sees a 404 notice, they will just go back. This will give a negative signal to Google, and it will affect your rankings. On top of that, the increased bounce rate will become another problem altogether. To prevent this from happening, you need to provide proper (301 and 302) redirects. Features of Product Redirection for WooCommerce While exploring and using the plugin, I came across some useful features which I found worth sharing. Here are some of the notable features: You can show a popup on the deletion of a product in the store backend suggesting to add a redirect or a notice. This would help you keep up with things even if you forgot to add redirects. For every product, you can easily add a redirect, display a notice or add a landing page for products. You can show related products under the notice. If any product goes out of stock, you can show an out-of-stock notice and can showcase related products below the notice. Since the product also handles the SEO aspects of redirection, you don’t have to worry; even if you are getting 50,000 hits per month on a product page, they will be redirected to the page you want. Hands-on with Product Redirection for WooCommerce In this section, I will install and explore the plugin’s features on a local WordPress installation. The plugin has two versions: Free and Pro. The free version is available on the WordPress repository, and with the free version, you get the following features: Article Continues Below Warning notice to not delete products. Custom redirect options: parent category, custom URL. In addition to these features, you get these features in the pro version: Notices on product pages if the product is out of stock. Auto out of stock product management. Custom redirect to landing pages. Recommended products below notices. For this tutorial, we will check out the pro version of the product. Installation and Activation The product installation is simple and straightforward like any other plugin. You can download the plugin once you’ve purchased it. Go to Plugins > Add New. Upload the plugin and click on the Install button. If you do not have Advanced Custom Fields installed, you need to install it as well. However, you might not need to do that in the future, as the devs have plans to remove ACF dependency in the upcoming updates. And of course, this goes without saying; you’ll need a WooCommerce store set up to use this plugin. Backend and User Interface All settings and options are available in a single space in the WooCommerce tab. To access these settings, go to your WooCommerce website’s dashboard. Now click on WooCommerce > Redirection. We’ll be going into a bit of detail here, so sit tight! Here you will see four tabs: General, Out of Stock, License, and Support. General Tab Popup: This triggers a warning popup when you click trash or delete any product. The popup will look like this: Disable Trash/Deletion: When enabled, admins or any other users won’t be able to delete any product. Out of Stock Tab In this tab, you can define what happens when a product goes out of stock. Out of Stock: This check box enables all the options below. Out of Stock Notice: This option lets you set a custom notice when the product goes out of stock. Out of Stock Recommendations: Enabling this option will start showing related products from the parent category. Recommendations Product Count: This option allows you to select the number of products to recommend. Recommendation location: You can select the location for the recommendations. You can select from 9 different locations. License Tab In this tab, you can insert the license for your product. Probably, this is the first tab you’ll visit after installing the plugin. Article Continues Below Support Tab Although it is available as a tab, this option leads you to a new page where you can get support if you face any problems. How to Set Redirects for WooCommerce Products While most options are
Continue readingResources, Week of 24 May 2021
[ad_1] Years ago (maybe a decade – or more, yikes 😬) I used to post links to resources that I found online that I found interesting or useful for other people that were designers, developers, or anyone who was interested in doing something on the web in-general. Case in point, here’s a post from 2010. A broad umbrella, I know. And then I started sharing stuff on Twitter pretty regularly. But I don’t that much more either. So, given that I’ve started keeping a list of things in Apple Notes that I find useful, I thought I might as well return to form and share them here. They will probably have a much longer shelf-life and maybe reach more people between subscribers and tweeting out a link to the post. 24 May 2021 Resources Here’s a list of some of the stuff I’ve been tracking the last few weeks (but am finally sharing this week 🙂): Git JavaScript PHP CSS Miscellaneous Utilities and Tools Until next week (or whenever I have enough to share)! 👋🏻 [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingWordPress Theme Development: Core Concepts (Full Guide)
[ad_1] Welcome! WordPress themes are one of the most important topics that one must understand to be good at WordPress development. Themes underlie the entire visual half of WordPress sites, but often grow to do even more. Because of the visual importance, they’re a great place to dive in if you’re interested in getting to the “code-side” of WordPress. I myself “cut my teeth” on WordPress themes back in 2007 and 2008. WordPress themes were where I started to come to grips with the power (and limits) of PHP, CSS, and HTML. So this course is great for newbies, and those just looking to confirm their understanding of the whole system. An editor’s note before we dive in: 2021 is an exciting year for the future of WordPress themes. For the first time since… kind of forever (that is: the start of WordPress itself)… what themes look like could change pretty dramatically. But today, in April 2021, that future is still a little unclear. And even when that future is clearer (and less likely to change) it’ll still be vital that WordPress developers understand “classic” WordPress themes for a long time. After all, as seasoned WordPress freelancers are well aware, WordPress sites can live for a long time with little more than security updates. So we’ve updated our classic and still vital little free course on WordPress themes as they are in early-2021. Enjoy! Understanding this Free WP Theme Development Course This is an brief introduction to the core concepts of WordPress theme development and comes from the Third Edition of our “learn WordPress development” course Up and Running. We’ve worked hard over the years to write some of the best tutorials on WordPress development, and give them away to readers here at WPShout. Up and Running is our effort to consolidate all that teaching into a single step-by-step resource for people new to the world of WordPress coding. Hopefully, it’s also a little easier to navigate than the mess of links that is this (or any) modern website. This post consolidates a few of that chapters from Up and Running together. While the course is much more exhaustive on both WordPress theme and plugin development than this is, we’re sure this will give you a very solid foundation to start from. The three important concepts of WordPress theme development we’ll cover here are: The WordPress Template Hierarchy Processing Posts with The Loop Adding Functionality with functions.php We’ll take you through each one on the linked articles at the bottom of every section. Those are a very accurate representation of what you’d find in Up and Running. Although on the real course site, it’s a little easier to keep your place. We have a completion-tracking WordPress plugin for that 🤓. Like you’ll find in Up and Running, all of the linked chapters here have a Summary Limerick and Quiz to reinforce what you’ve learned at their end. 🙃 Core Concept 1 of WordPress Theme Development: The Template Hierarchy The first thing that’ll help you get a sense of WordPress theme development is getting a sense of what all those theme files do. Some of them may be obvious to someone who has done a fair amount of web development, like style.css being the place for your CSS styling rules. But most the work you do in WordPress theme development comes down to understanding the WordPress template hierarchy. WordPress template hierarchy underlies a lot of what’s useful and complicated about WordPress. WordPress themes involve a bunch files. And understanding those files is the key to understanding WordPress development. All the files in the template hierarchy have a few things in common: They have names that end with .php They contain a version of “the Loop” inside of them (see the next section for more about that) They mostly contain HTML and some PHP code Those three bullet points are the core of what makes up the WordPress hierarchy. But there’s a lot more to understand. And that’s what our article all about it tries to help you with. Reading it will get you along the way to being a full-fledged WordPress theme developer: The Template Hierarchy in WordPress Core Concept 2 of WordPress Theme Development: The Loop in WordPress and What it Means For this one, we’ve taken the time to create a custom post. Like the other of these post’s, this is a chapter from Up and Running. The Loop is one of the things that first scared me (David writing this) about WordPress development. The core thing was that it all sounded so ominous. Whether people called it “WordPress loop” of “The Loop”, I knew that WordPress had that complicated concept involved. Later, after I’d programmed more, I realized that this was just a basic “while” loop, a common construct in almost all programs. But before that, it really intimidated me. If you feel like you’ve got it from that description alone, you might not need to read our full article about what the WordPress Loop is and what it means. Other than the syntax which is distinct to WordPress, it’s not much more complicated than that. But if you’ve never done much coding, you probably should be sure to read the whole article. WordPress theme development is really dependent on getting a handle on how “the Loop” works in WordPress. You’ll hear people talk a lot, as you get into theming, about being “inside the WordPress loop” and outside of it. The article covers all of that and more. If you’ve not read it yet, please do: Understanding The Loop: WordPress’s Way of Showing Posts Core Concept 3 of WordPress Theme Development: Adding Functionality with functions.php Plugins are a big topic in WordPress, and I’ve sometimes heard people describe this next focus as “the plugin of a WordPress theme.” I don’t necessarily agree with that description. I also think it actually add confusion to the issue. That said, inside of your WordPress theme’s functions.php is indeed where you write
Continue readingWordPress – The Source Of My Satisfaction And Joy – વર્ડપ્રેસ – સંતોષ અને આનંદ નો સાધન
[ad_1] આ નિબંધ ગુજરાતીમાં પણ ઉપલબ્ધ છે My adventure with WordPress started back in the year 2017. Till then there were many ups and downs and I was clueless which field I will enter into. Right until the end of 2016, I was giving my exams to become a Chartered Accountant (CA) equivalent to CPA. I also love baking cakes and pastries. So, in the first half of 2017, I had started a small homegrown bakery for making donuts. It was interesting but it didn’t give me a sense of satisfaction. I also hosted some small exhibitions of fabrics and fashion apparels. In short, I tried many different fields but I still wasn’t happy from within. So, after giving up on CA (for which I spent a few years) and trying out hands on baking I still did not have the sense of satisfaction and wanted to do something that would give me an identity of myself and happiness. One casual day, my husband Dhruvin asked me to get involve with WordPress in some way or the other. But, I wasn’t sure whether I would get a place in the technical world or not. This was a completely different challenge for me. Introduction to WordPress After giving a serious thought I decided to get started with WordPress. I spent the initial 6-8 months exploring WordPress, learning the basics about the Web, making myself comfortable with it & deciding if this is something I would love to work on or not. I then participated in WordCamp Mumbai 2018. That was one of the few WordCamps I have attended. This WordCamp gave me enough confidence that WordPress is the new sky for me where there is no limit. Finding the perfect role in WordPress Now, that I got familiar with WordPress, the next question for me was what kind of role or a job I would best fit into? I started interacting with a few people in WordCamp (which I miss very badly these days), I understood that I like interacting and engaging with people a lot. So, I thought that the Customer Support role would fit perfectly with my personality. Once I was convinced about this, I got an opportunity to work with Tyche Softwares. They are a plugin development company focussing on niche WooCommerce plugins. This was the first step of my professional journey in WordPress, something that I never imagined I would step into. I started enjoying it more as I would gain immense satisfaction when I helped customers solve their problems. I also tried my hand at the Business Development and Analytics part. I used to analyze customer feedback. The analysis involves creating the processes to improve the customer satisfaction and looking at how to automate a certain task using the tools at our hand. These things help in taking some important decisions on companies’ plugins with regards to new features. About WordCamps I love attending WordCamps. I began attending WordCamps in 2018 and my very first WordCamp was WC Mumbai 2018. Since then, I’ve been going to as many as would fit in my schedule every year. I learn something new at every WordCamp, we deepen existing relationships and start new ones. My first major Wordcamp was WCEU 2019 held in Berlin. It was a memorable one which will be in my mind for ages. I realized that it’s so much fun getting to meet people in real life whom you have only known on social media. WordCamps have also been a great chance for me to learn from others and collaborate on ideas surrounding WordPress. WordCamps have also been a great opportunity for me to travel and/or meet up with old friends, and make new ones. Of course, I also love the learning aspect of WordCamps. I look forward to learning new things and to speakers challenging my way of thinking, and seeing if there are ways I can improve my workflow or productivity or as a person. The WordPress community has taught me that it’s ok if I don’t know everything, nobody does. We are all good at certain things and that’s totally fine! The other memorable WordCamp for me was WordCamp Vadodara that happened in October 2019. I applied as a volunteer & the organizing team was kind enough to give me that opportunity. That entire day, I was taking video bytes of the attendees, helping with registrations, and running around just trying to talk to as many people as I could. I barely got time for my lunch or time to spend time at the Tyche sponsors booth. Trust me, at the end of the day, I felt like I am just made for this! I enjoyed every bit of this experience. After volunteering a few more WordCamps, I applied to volunteer at the first-ever WordCamp Asia, which was to be held in Feb 2020 & my application was accepted as well. Unfortunately, COVID-19 struck just at that time & the event couldn’t take place. I am definitely looking forward to helping the community in all the ways I can. What I do in my free time I love traveling and meeting new people. The idea of travel, packing my bags and disappearing to someplace, lives inside my brain all the time. Whenever I meet someone for the first time or even encounter an old friend, I instantly want to talk about their own adventures. As a kid I was always curious about the lifestyle of people living in the other part of the world. Till date, I love exploring such things. I deeply believe travel makes you richer, not in your wallet, but in your intelligence and compassion. I also love dancing, cooking new dishes and spending time on social media. I love watching cartoons too 😉 Time to take a break The year 2020 has been a year full of surprises. Virus, lockdowns, travel restrictions to many such things. Through all these things was a moment of joy for me
Continue readingBuilding Featured Boxes With the WordPress Block Editor – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] It is a new day with another chase for that elusive block plugin that will bring a little joy into my life. Today’s experiment comes courtesy of the Feature Box plugin by Sumaiya Siddika. It is a simple block that allows end-users to upload an image and add some content to an offset box. The plugin’s output is a typical pattern on the web. As usual, I am excited to see plugin authors experimenting with bringing these features to WordPress users. I want to see more of it, especially from first-time plugin contributors. I was able to quickly get the block up and running, adding my custom content. The following is what the block looked like after entering my content and customizing it. I envisioned myself as a recipe blogger for this test. Inserting and modifying the Feature Box block. On a technical level, the plugin worked well. I ran into no errors. Everything was simple to customize. However, it never felt like an ideal user experience. The first thing I immediately noticed is that image uploading happens in the block options sidebar. Core WordPress blocks have a dedicated button in the toolbar for adding images and other media. I also found myself wanting more direct control over individual elements. How could I change the heading font size? Where were the typical button styles like Outline and Solid Color? How do I insert other blocks, like a list? None of those things were possible. Like many other blocks, the developer has created a system with specific parameters, and the user cannot move outside of them. There are times when that rigidity makes sense, such as when building custom blocks for clients. However, more often than not, publicly-released plugins should be far more open. This tightly controlled block is reflective of how WordPress worked in the past. It was often inflexible, leaving users to what theme and plugin developers thought was best for their sites. The block system is about tossing out these overly rigid concepts and giving users power over their content. The job of plugins and themes is to define the framework the user is operating under. They set up some rules to more or less keep things from breaking, but the users get to strap themselves into the driver’s seat. Their destination is their own. The block would have been far more well-rounded if users could control all of the content in the box. Ideally, they could put whatever blocks they wanted into the “content” area of the Feature Box block. The design would match their theme better too. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post titled You Might Not Need That Block. The premise was that users could recreate some blocks with the current editor and that themers could make this easier by offering patterns. I knew replicating this particular block would be impossible without at least a little custom code. WordPress’s editor does not have a feature for offsetting a block’s position. A theme author could easily duplicate this functionality. Typically, I would create a custom pattern, complete with all the existing pieces in place. However, I wanted to approach this with custom block styles. This would allow end-users to select the content offset from the sidebar and switch it around if needed. Note: For those who wish to learn how to create custom block styles, Carolina Nymark’s tutorial is the best resource. The Cover block made an ideal candidate for this. Because it has an existing “inner wrapper” element, it meant that I could target it with CSS and move it around. The following is a screenshot of the Offset Left style I created: Offset Left Cover block style. I simply replicated the code and changed a few values to create an Offset Right style immediately after. The code is available as a GitHub Gist. It is a simple proof-of-concept and not a polished product. There are various approaches to this, and several Cover block options are left unhandled. Theme authors are free to take the code and run with it. These block styles looked far better because they matched my theme. Everything from the spacing to the border-radius to the button looked as it should. Offset Left and Right block styles. The big win was that I had design control over every aspect of the content box. I could select the button style I wanted. I could change my font sizes. The default spacing matched my theme as it should. The problem I ran into with the block style method is allowing users to control the content box’s background color. The Feature Box plugin wins in the user experience category here because it has an option for this. The block style I created inherits its background from the Cover block parent. It may not be immediately obvious how to change it. The other “problem” with the block style is that it does not handle wide and full alignments for the Cover block. That is because I did not take the experiment that far, only replicating the plugin’s layout. I will leave that to theme designers to tinker around with. There are many possibilities to explore; don’t wait for me to provide all the ideas. My goal with this post and similar ones is to show how I would approach these things as both a user and developer. As a user, I want flexibility in all things. As a developer, I want to provide the solutions that I desire as a user. I also want to see plugin and theme authors thinking beyond their initial use case when building blocks, patterns, styles, and more. Lay the groundwork. Then, expand on that initial idea by thinking of all the ways that users might want to customize what you have built. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue reading5 Top-Drawer Pricing Table Plugins Compared for 2021
[ad_1] It might seem strange to say, but pricing is almost an art form. There are lots of books on the subject, though it’s a rabbit hole that’s hard to get out of. For most people, implementing one of the raft of available pricing table plugins can take you much of the way, without deep knowledge on the science behind the concept. It’s no surprise that WordPress offers a number of plugins to help you add a pricing table to your website. The best solutions let you tweak almost every aspect of your tables to ensure they meet your requirements. What’s more, there will be a plugin for you at a price point to suit (naturally). As such, this post will compare five stellar pricing table plugins. We’ll tell you what’s unique about each plugin we feature, and by the end of the post, you’ll know which one will suit your needs best. What a Pricing Table Is (And Why They Can Net You More Income) You’ll have seen pricing tables all over the internet, especially on business websites. In fact, the majority of eCommerce businesses use pricing tables to showcase their offerings. Some can get complex depending on the product line: Though, for the unaware, let’s explain what a pricing table is. It’s a collection of the various tiers and prices for your entire product line. The idea is to make it simple for the customer to see what’s on offer, and make a decision. You’ll often find the following elements in place: Clear pricing, sometimes with a toggle between monthly and yearly costs. A simple comparison of features included in a plan. A Call To Action (CTA) for each tier, so the customer has a clear course of action. There’s more to a pricing table than a simple comparison though. Customization is important when designing a pricing table, as color theory and other factors play a part. The best solutions give you heavy customization options. Some will even pull double duty as a team profile viewer. Regardless, there are a few aspects and elements to look for when choosing a pricing table plugin, and we’ll look at these next. What to Look for When Comparing Pricing Table Plugins Earlier, we outlined some of the key elements of a pricing table plugin. On the positive side, there is a lot of choice available. Though, the downside of this is decision paralysis. Lots of pricing table plugins come with the same core features, so it’s the small factors that will help you make the right decision. We can go further here to discuss how you can compare the plugins you’ve chosen. Here are a few questions to ask yourself: Does the price suit my budget? Can a free solution meet my needs both now and in the future? Am I able to use the pricing table plugin with my favorite page builder? Can I customize the CTA to my own requirements – often using an on-brand color scheme? Are there templates and demos to help me get up and running fast, or provide inspiration? These are fundamental questions that will give you some pointers on which solutions to consider. Of course, you may have specific needs that your chosen plugin has to meet. Only you can decide on the priority of each of your requirements. 5 Top-Drawer Pricing Table Plugins Compared Next, let’s get into the solutions we’ve picked as leading pricing table plugins. Each will have a unique element that sets it apart from the rest. Here’s a quick summary: Responsive Pricing Table. This free plugin is a top-notch solution, that won’t need you to upgrade in most cases. WRC Pricing Tables. If you want a freemium solution, this plugin has a good selection of free features, with a clear upgrade path. Go Pricing. This full-premium plugin has a wealth of functionality under the hood, and can be central to your pricing table strategy. WP Table Builder. If you’re after a drag-and-drop pricing table builder, this plugin will fit the bill. Pricing Table Widget for Elementor. Users of the popular page builder plugin will gravitate to this solution, given the direct integration. Each of our chosen pricing table plugins could fit the bill. As such, feel free to jump around to check out any that looks like suiting your needs. Though, we encourage you to look at the other solutions too – they could offer something you hadn’t considered before. 1. Responsive Pricing Table Our first inclusion on this list is Responsive Pricing Table. It’s simple plugin that does an admiral job of helping you add pricing tables to your website. It’s based around shortcodes, and comes with a wealth of customization options to help you design great-looking pricing tables. You’re able to set a number of essential fields and options for a unique pricing table, such as colors, prices, descriptions, and more. There’s no practical limit to the number of features you can list for each tier, and you’re also able to use custom CSS to style your pricing tables if you have that skill. What’s more, you can make the following changes to any pricing table you create: You’re able to remove or change the currency sign. Fonts can be based on your site-wide choices, or custom for the pricing table. There are also size presets to help you nail your layout. You’re able to highlight any plan as a ‘recommended’ option. This is good if you have a specific tier that will suit a majority of customers. The most remarkable aspect of Responsive Pricing Table is that it’s free. While there is a premium version of the plugin, the $19 price gives you a way to toggle between monthly and yearly billing, and some extra layouts. In other words, it’s not an essential purchase. Responsive Pricing Table is a full-featured plugin that can deliver results. 2. WRC Pricing Tables The WordPress Responsive CSS3 (WRC) Pricing Tables plugin is another free plugin, but this time with
Continue readingDoc Style Commenting for Gutenberg
[ad_1] Have you ever had a situation where you want to collaborate and work together on a blog post draft on a WordPress website, but due to technical limitations, you end up copying the entire blog post on Google Docs instead? As a writer, I often face this dilemma, and to your surprise, even I end up copying the blog post on a temporary Google Docs file so everyone can collaborate there easily. While this challenge has been around for years, there wasn’t a solution in the market that can bring in the functionality of Google Docs collaboration into WordPress. But today, we have a reliable plugin that allows admins and editors to easily collaborate without wasting time moving around the content. The plugin I am referring to is Multicollab. In this article, I will do an in-depth review of the Multicollab plugin by Multidots and will take a closer look at its features. Let’s get to it! The Multicollab plugin is designed to bring the Google Docs style editing capability to the native WordPress editor. With the rapid and constant development of the Gutenberg editor, even basic block plugins are having a hard time keeping up. Amidst all of this, the Multidots team has created a free plugin that works with Gutenberg and allows website users to collaborate on a blog post, just like Google Docs. This means now you don’t have to worry about copy-pasting entire blog posts to Google Docs just for collaboration. Although I can simply say, “it does what Google Docs does in terms of collaboration.” but it will not do justice to the plugin so let’s take a closer look at its features. Article Continues Below Features of Multicollab The plugin allows you to add inline comments to any piece of text in your blog post. You can simply select the text and click on the comment option to drop a comment for that part. Replies and Resolve Just like new comments, you can reply to comments inline. Moreover, if you are done, you can simply mark it as resolved. This is very helpful if you want to add or respond to a particular comment without adding a new one. What if you want a particular user to see and handle the comment? You can simply assign it by tagging them using the ‘@’ sign followed by their name. As you type the name, users with the user roles will show up in a list, and you can select the one you want to assign the comment to. Activity Center Multicollab comes with an Activity Center board which lets you keep a tab on the comment activity of users dropping comments in posts/pages. You can visit the activity center and review all the active comments for your posts or pages from a single place. To make things more organized, the active comments are highlighted with a white background while the resolved comments will have a grey colored background. Moreover, if a comment is selected from the activity center, it is highlighted with blue background. Email Notifications Similar to Google Docs, when you are tagged in a comment, you automatically receive an email notification. This is a much-needed feature as it allows you to stay on top of your content review process. Built for Gutenberg The plugin is built specifically for the Gutenberg editor and works only on WordPress 5.3 or newer versions. You won’t be able to use this plugin with the classic editor. User Roles and Accesses The plugin has different access for different user roles. Super Admins, Administrators, and Editors can view, edit, delete, reply and resolve the comments on any posts or page. On the other hand, Authors and Contributors can view, edit, delete, reply and resolve comments only on their posts. (Source: MultiCollab Documentation) Free to Use Yes, that’s right. The plugin is available for free on the WordPress.org repository. You can even install and activate it on your website directly from the WordPress dashboard. There might be a pro version in the future with additional features, but currently, you only get priority support with the paid plan for $99 per year. Well Documented Well-written documentation is a must for WordPress plugins. MultiCollab maintains solid documentation that covers almost all the aspects of the plugin. If you ever need help, you can find an article on that topic in their documentation. Article Continues Below Hands-On with Multicollab In this section, I will install and use Multicollab on a standard local WordPress installation. Installation Installation of the plugin is pretty standard. You can install and activate Multicollab like any other plugin. Once the plugin is activated, you’d be redirected to the Multicollab settings page on the WordPress backend. This page has a plugin video guide and if you want to test a demo before using it on your website, you can click on the live demo button at the bottom of the page. Using Multicollab Since this plugin lets you add comments in the Gutenberg editor, you need to open a post to use it. Open any blog post in the Gutenberg editor, and you will see the MultiCollab icon at the top right corner of the screen. This icon will open the activity center and settings. Commenting and Collaborating To leave a comment, you need to select a part of the text. Then go to the drop-down icon in the block settings and click on the comment option. (Source: Multicollab) Now, you can write the comment just like you’d on Google Docs and save it by clicking on the save button. If you wish to make any changes to the comment, you can do that by clicking on the pencil icon at the top right corner of the comment box. Next to the pencil icon, you’d see a trash can icon. Clicking on it will delete the comment. To resolve a comment, you can click on the checkbox at the top of the comment pop-up box. Article Continues Below
Continue readingAdd Custom Link to All Posts Screen Based on Post Meta Data
[ad_1] TL;DR: This article outlines the code needed to add a custom link on the All Posts screen that uses a custom piece of post metadata. Note: A few months ago, I wrote an article on how to add a custom view to the All Posts screen. This article is not all together the same, but not all together different. Think of it as a more detailed and perhaps for more practical implementation of the concept. Assume that you have a standard post type or a custom post type and you’re going to simply filter by a headline that you define using a mechanism that allows you to save data to the post_metadata table. For example, let’s say that you have a post and it as a piece of meta data with: a meta_key with the value of article_attribute a meta_value with the value of headline And you want to use this information to add a new Headlines link that automatically filters everything out except articles with that metadata. Here’s how to do it. Custom Link on All Posts Screen Before getting started, it’s worth noting that there are two ways to go about tackling this problem: We could add the link at the top of the All Posts page first and then add the functionality for filtering the data second, Or we can do it the other way around where we add the backend logic first then add the All Posts page link. I’m going to opt to start with the second option. There’s no reason why it has to be done this way. It’s my preference. First, I need to hook into the pre_get_posts hook provided by WordPress. I’m not going to be using any namespaced classes or prefixed functions in this example (given that I’ve covered that content enough on this site), but I’ll have demo plugin for this linked at the bottom of the post. Anyway, I’ll start off by adding an anonymous function attached to the aforementioned hook: add_action( ‘pre_get_posts’, function ( WP_Query $query ) { // … } ); Notice that the anonymous function accepts a single argument which is a reference to the current instance of WP_Query that’s running on the page. If you’re not familiar with that class, then I’d recommend reading any of these articles or the Developer Resources page. In the function, I need to check for the presence of a meta_value in the query string. This is easy to do thanks to the filter_input function provided by PHP. add_action( ‘pre_get_posts’, function ( WP_Query $query ) { $meta_value=”headline”; if ( filter_input( INPUT_GET, ‘meta_value’ ) === $meta_value ) { $query->set( ‘meta_key’, ‘article_attribute’ ); $query->set( ‘meta_value’, $meta_value ); } } ); This hook will look to see if the headline value is key for the meta_value key in the query string. If so, it then adds a meta_key and meta_value to the instance of WP_Query which will instruct WordPress to retrieve all of the posts with just that metadata. After that I need to add a a link to the top of the All Posts page to trigger this functionality. To do this, I’ll leverage the views_edit-posts hook. This function will accept an array of anchors that will be displayed at the top of the page. I refer to these as $views so that’s what the function will accept when I stub it out: add_action( ‘views_edit-post’, function ( array $views ) { // … return $views; } ); Note that it’s important to return the array back to WordPress so that it knows what to render even if no modification is made. First, I need to determine if I’m currently on the custom page. If so, then I need to add the proper attributes to the anchor added to the top of the page: // Determine if we’re looking at the Headlines page. $attributes=”class=”””; if ( filter_input(INPUT_GET, ‘meta_value’) === ‘headline’ ) { $attributes=”class=”current aria-current=”page””; } After that, I need to actually add the Headlines view to the page. This will require the use of several functions: array_push for adding a new link to the list of $views sprintf for securely adding a new string add_query_arg for adding a set of custom query arguments to the current page. The next section of code will look like this: // Build the anchor for the ‘Headlines’ view and add it to $views. array_push( $views, sprintf( ‘<a href=”https://tommcfarlin.com/custom-link-all-posts-screen/%1$s” %2$s>%3$s <span class=”count”>(%4$s)</span> </a> ‘, add_query_arg([ ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_status’ => ‘all’, ‘meta_value’ => ‘headline’, ], ‘edit.php’), $attributes __(‘Headlines’), count( /* … */ ); ); But I’m not done yet. Notice specifically that I’m making a call to count at the end of the function. This is so that I can properly display the number of posts that have this attribute. I’m going to write two helper functions for this then I’ll return back to the sizeof call. Here’s a helper function for finding the number of results that have the specified meta_key and meta_value that we have for this type of post. Notice that I’m using $wpdb to make a direct database call and that I’m specifically using prepare to make sure I do it safely. function get_headline_results() : array { global $wpdb; return $wpdb->get_results( // phpcs:ignore $wpdb->prepare( ” SELECT post_id FROM $wpdb->postmeta WHERE meta_key = %s AND meta_value = %s “, ‘article_attribute’, ‘headline’ ), ARRAY_A ); } Notice that it returns all of the results (not just the number) because this value will be passed into another function momentarily. At this point, we could stop and simply look at the content that’s returned from the query but if we’re just concerned with the post post type, then we’ll need to account for that. Here’s one way to do it: function filter_posts_from_pages( array $results ) : array { $post_ids = array(); foreach ( $results as $result) { if ( ‘post’ === get_post_type( $result[‘post_type’] ) ) { $post_ids[] = $result[‘post_id’]; } } return $post_ids; } With that, we can return this value back to the count function
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