[ad_1] Gutenberg 14.4 was released today with long-awaited support for distraction-free editing, to the delight of content editors around the world. It hides all non-essential UI and clears the canvas for a focus on text-based content creation. The mode can be toggled on in the options menu in the top toolbar. Distraction-free mode hides the top toolbar, any open sidebars, along with the insertion point indicator and the block toolbar. source: Gutenberg 14.4 release post The project to improve the editing experience for text-based content began with early explorations in February, which progressed into a PR that contributors have been refining for the last few months. This distraction-free mode is a monumental improvement over the days when users struggled to write with various UI elements popping in and out of view. Another major update in 14.4 is the redesigned pattern inserter. It has been updated to show the categories before rendering the patterns, giving users a more fluid visual preview as they browse the pattern library. Patterns can be dragged and dropped from the preview pane into the canvas. source: Gutenberg 14.4 release post Other notable improvements users may notice include the following: Performance benchmarks show an improvement in loading time for both the post and site editors. Check out the release post to see the full list of all the changes and bug fixes included in 14.4. This release will not be included in the upcoming WordPress 6.1 release next week, but users who are eager to adopt these new features can get them right now in the Gutenberg plugin. [ad_2] Source link
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Everything You Need to Know About the Leading WordPress eCommerce Tool
[ad_1] There’s no denying that if you want to monetize your site or build an eCommerce store with WordPress, WooCommerce is the way to go. The powerful, versatile plugin currently powers over 6.5 million active online stores, making it the global leader in the world of eCommerce software platforms with a total market share of 36.68%. To put that into perspective, the second biggest eCommerce platform, Squarespace Online Stores, enjoys just under a 15% share of the same market. So what is it about this platform that makes it so popular? As you’ll read in this comprehensive WooCommerce guide, the answer is really a combination of things: 1. It runs on WordPress, which itself powers a significant portion of all the websites on the Internet. 2. It’s very easy to set up and use, meaning you can set up a complete online store (see our Woocommerce Tutorial) with practically no technical know-how required. 3. It offers an impressive list of features that can be extended via a variety of top WooCommerce add-ons and integrations, many of which we’ll share with you below. First, however, let’s talk about what exactly WooCommerce does, and how you can put it to work to build your online retail business. What is WooCommerce? At the most basic level, WooCommerce is a plugin that transforms your standard WordPress site into a dynamic online store. Yet to leave the description at that would be to do a disservice to what a rich and extensive tool WooCommerce really is. Via its own core features and many of the third-party extensions that we’ll share with you later, this comprehensive platform gives you everything you need to run your online business, handling everything from sales, shipping, and taxes to advanced marketing campaigns, all without hardly ever having to leave the WordPress environment. Article Continues Below WooCommerce Core Features: Out of the box, WooCommerce offers all of the following: Basic reporting and analytics Customizable eCommerce themes Add products to sell physical, digital, or service-based items Subscriptions Payment gateways Abandoned cart tools Manage orders Manage shipping and taxes Manage customers Marketing tools. The great thing is that if you find any of WooCommerce’s in-built tools don’t offer quite the level of functionality you need, you can always add one of the platform’s own 800+ extensions or one of the thousands of third-party add-ons out there. WooCommerce Analytics and Reporting By default, WooCommerce offers a standard set of reporting and analytics tools that provide that data on things such as: Your best and worst-selling products How many customers you’ve acquired Your inventory levels. All of this is relatively easy to access and make sense of, meaning it may be a good option if you’re just starting off and only have a few orders. However, if you have a lot of data and need more high-level reporting features, the following three extensions are a better option. 1. Metorik There are a few key reasons why we rate Metorik as the number one reporting and analytics tool for WooCommerce. First, the platform was developed by an ex-Automattic engineer who helped to build WooCommerce in the first place which means that, of all the third-party extensions out there, few understand WooCommerce and its users better than those at Metorik. Second, it utilizes an attractive, clean interface with intuitive navigation and a visual reporting style which makes it much easier to understand your data than the default WooCommerce reporting features. Thirdly, it provides an extensive array of reports on everything from revenue generated and total orders to how much tax you’re paying, to what extent refunds are hurting your bottom line, and more. Learn more about this powerful analytics tool in our comprehensive Metorik review. Pricing: Plans start from as little as just $20 for up to 100 orders per month. Try Metorik 2. Advanced WooCommerce Reporting If you’re happy with the level of data provided by WooCommerce but find the lackluster layout doesn’t lend itself well to gaining quick, accurate insights into your store performance, or if your success is such that Metorik’s order-based pricing doesn’t suit your budget, try Advanced WooCommerce Reporting instead. This popular plugin takes your core WooCommerce data, presents it in a much more easy-to-understand format, and provides you with both more data points and reporting options. Advanced WooCommerce Reporting Cost Advanced WooCommerce Reporting is available for a one-time cost of $45 for a standard Envato license. Try Advanced WooCommerce Reporting Don’t like any of these options? See our guide to the top 9 best WooCommerce reporting and analytics tools for your store. WooCommerce Product Add-Ons It’s hard to criticize WooCommerce’s product pages. Regardless of your theme, you’ll be able to present customers with all the information they need to make a purchasing decision, including dynamic product photos, shipping details, and more. Still, depending on the products you’re offering, you may want to go further and allow customers to personalize your products, upgrade their purchases, or create their own product bundles. If you’re looking for the perfect solution to allow you to do that, WooCommerce Product Add-Ons is the one for you. This feature-rich extension gives customers more flexibility over their purchases by allowing you to add a wide range of extra fields to your products. Elsewhere, you can also offer upsells, customized product packages so that you can sell personalized gift boxes and even a price calculator for more complex orders. See our detailed WooCommerce Product Add-Ons guide to learn more. Pricing: $69 for a single-site license or $119 for use on unlimited sites. Try WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Managing Shipping and Delivery in WooCommerce When you first install WooCommerce, you’ll be able to offer customers multiple shipping options with different rates and assign those options to different regions. This is a great start, but as with everything eCommerce related, you can enhance your shipping process with a number of add-ons, including: 1. WooCommerce Advanced Shipping The WooCommerce Advanced Shipping plugin allows you to use table rate shipping to set an
Continue readingKeep walkin’ soldier Keep movin’ on – முன்னேறிடு முன்னேறிடு
[ad_1] இக்கட்டுரை தமிழிலும் பதிவிடப்பட்டுள்ளது. Over the years, I found myself making less ambitious choices with respect to my studies and career, because I feared that I may not be able to meet the demands of ambitious choices. Eventually, when I quit my Software Engineer position at Novell, it was for the same reason. I could not do justice to my work and my family. This might be a refrain that many women might identify with. After quitting the job, I explored a few different fields for a couple of years. Eventually, I registered for a PhD thinking that I’d fit into the academia. However, by the time I finished it, I was not willing to work at any University. With an Engineering College a few metres away from my home, many of my friends and neighbours suggested that I should try to get a position there, but I was adamant that I shall not go for it, as the rules and restrictions of a typical college environment in South India did not resonate with me. At the Crossroads Due to some nagging health issues and two young children – one a new-born, I was very keen on doing something on my own terms. But my options were minimal. It was at this time, that I felt like a beautifully crafted Veena which got eventually trashed. My favourite Tamil poet Bharathi wrote these lines asking the Supreme power why She chose to craft a beautiful Veena only to trash it. He was referring to the potential and intelligence in him that he was wasting away. He prayed to be empowered to live a useful life. I would repeat his lines and wonder why I couldn’t make something useful out of my life, out of all the knowledge I had gathered, out of all the skills I had spent hundreds of hours to hone. I wondered if I was being stubborn by not choosing the path of least resistance – working for the nearby educational institution. In my mid-thirties, armed with a PhD in Natural Language Processing(NLP), and scattered experiences in various areas of software, my other options were minimal. After intense introspection and googling, I realized that I could try a remote job as a last resort. The WordPress ecosystem seemed to be full of remote positions, but I did not have the skills for it. Till then, I had in-depth understanding and command over C, Perl, the Unix OS and the command line utilities. As far as web development was concerned, I had the experience of writing hardcoded html home pages(some of you might remember this era) a decade before. Starting Fresh At this juncture, I had a choice to look for some work with my then skillsets and qualifications, given my constraints, or to start from scratch on web development. I chose to do the latter. The lines from Rudyard Kipling’s If were my mantra in those days. If you can make one heap of all your winningsAnd risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,And lose, and start again at your beginningsAnd never breathe a word about your loss; Of course, I was feeling quite bad about my loss, the loss of NLP from my day-to-day work. But it was important for me to do something with my skills than to be very selective about what I was doing, as I was not willing to compromise on the other conditions. So, I set to work. I started a couple of WordPress sites; One of them, a book review site PlusMinus’nMore, built on WordPress, became quite popular over a few years; I started a social startup named RAPO, to bring people together through books and wrote the application for it; I freelanced – wrote tutorials on WordPress and Linux, offered part-time support and documentation service for themes and plugins. My good friend, who was running her own venture using Zoho, outsourced any HTML/CSS sub-tasks to me; I contributed to WordPress Core and also offered Tamil Translations for plugins and themes. I wrote amateurish plugins and released them. I was willing to do anything to learn WordPress, as a user and as a developer. All of this happened at the comfort of my home, without having to compromise on the care I gave for my children. However, freelancing soon became quite overwhelming because of the administrative overheads. Consequently, I started applying for remote positions. It was difficult to get a break because I was overqualified. It was a miracle that I got into ProsPress Inc. and suddenly, I found myself a remote developer working on WooCommerce Subscriptions. After a couple of years, Automattic happened and I moved over to the Woo Data team. I still don’t do NLP in my day-today job, and my knowledge on the trends in NLP or ML is quite outdated. However, I am keeping my hopes alive and learning a lot on a range of things that I work on everyday – Payments, the Hadoop ecosystem and Functional Programming in Scala to name a few. Today, I have relocated to Dubai thanks to my remote job. I am glad that I chose the WordPress ecosystem because it has given me what I wanted and more. Lessons To Take Away What I learnt from these events and what I frequently remind myself of: The past is gone. The present and future are in my hands. I can always start afresh and find meaning from the rest of my life. It is important to keep choosing what I enjoy doing, without looking for rewards, even if it does not make sense always. I shall be able to connect the dots later. So, my dear reader, where ever you are in the world, whatever your current situation might be, especially if you’re a mom who had a high-flying career which you had to let go off, I hope my story inspires you to remember that the present and the future are in your hands, if
Continue readingThe WordPress Community Isn’t Ready to Leave Twitter – WP Tavern
[ad_1] Elon Musk has bought Twitter in a $44B deal that closed this week, tweeting “Let the good times roll,” on Friday after taking the helm. Musk fired top executives at the company and tweeted an appeal to Twitter’s advertisers to share his motivation in acquiring what is arguably the world’s most important social network: “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,” Musk said. “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.” Musk also hinted at the importance of content moderation, saying “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” The company is forming a council to discuss content moderation, but nobody knows what that will mean for the future of Twitter. Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2022 While some Twitter users have considered migrating to Tumblr, the structure and user base isn’t currently comparable to the Twitter experience. In response to Verge co-founder Nilay Patel’s provocative article titled “Welcome to hell, Elon,” Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg tweeted his support. “This is an unfortunately good summary of why running a social network is so hard, as I’ve learned with Tumblr,” Mullenweg said. “I am wishing Twitter the best and also hope this doesn’t slow down Tesla or SpaceX, which I think are critical to the future.” Patel aptly communicated the weight of the political challenges Musk will face in his commitment to steering Twitter away from becoming “a free-for-all hellscape,” which some think has already happened. If Musk decides to open the doors to unsavory characters who were banned in the past, it may drive the social network into the ground. While the WordPress community has many online gathering places – various Slack workspaces, P2 blogs, and Facebook groups – it has always been Twitter that served as the place for both casual interactions and breaking news. It is the de facto social network for those working in tech. There are many who only use the platform for keeping up with WordPress news and the community. “There’s nowhere else to really go!” WordPress product designer Mike McAlister said. “WordPress people are pretty much exclusively on Twitter it seems.” Apart from the few optimistic souls who think Twitter will be better than ever, many community members expressed apprehension about losing the network they have built over the years. As the closing of the sale loomed, people threatened to leave Twitter on principle if Musk gained control. That day has arrived, but for the most part the WordPress community is not abandoning Twitter. “Twitter has had too good of an impact on my life to just jump ship,” Edan Ben-Atar said. “I’ll stick around for as long as it makes sense. For now, nothing has changed from what is noticeable to the eye.” WordPress designer Dustin Henrich says he is staying but also looking up the people he follows on other platforms. “I’ve made too many good connections, enjoy reading about people’s tech and non tech lives, and learning from some wicked smart people,” Henrich said. “I’d truly be sad if this just all went away.” Decentralized social networking, which has so far failed to gain much mainstream attention, is getting a second look in light of Twitter changing hands. WordPress agency owner Tom Finley is experimenting with using the Activity Pub plugin to set up his site as a private Mastadon server. It implements the ActivityPub protocol for WordPress so readers can see the site’s posts on Mastadon and other federated platforms (that support Activity Pub). Some WordPress community members are flirting with joining Mastadon instances, or have already committed to posting in both networks, but we are not yet seeing a mass exodus flocking to the fediverse. I’m giving Mastodon a try although I’m still sticking around here for the time being. I hate to say it but what about more use of the official WordPress Slack workspace? I often go there if I need to find someone in the community. — Shawn Hooper (@ShawnHooper) October 28, 2022 “We’ve seen this attempted exodus to the promised land many times before,” Ross Wintle said in a post that explains why he isn’t optimistic about people successfully leaving Twitter. “Without a proper mass migration of people and organizations to another service, it doesn’t stick. “You end up with people cross posting to multiple services to reach all the people that they want to reach. And then as a reader I’m checking multiple services and seeing the same things. The signal/noise ratio goes down. And most people get fed up and end up back where they were before.” The most hopeful speculators ask if this could this be the return of blogs. At the moment blogs are not social enough, and there isn’t a critical mass of bloggers eager enough to adopt the protocols necessary to connect their sites in a stream of easily digestible, short updates. Until Elon Musk makes more radical changes, many WordPress community members see no reason to leave Twitter. “For now, I don’t see a reason to leave,” WordPress developer advocate Birgit Pauli-Haack said. “Block, Unfollow, Mute are my friends for curating my feed. I did cancel my subscription to Twitter Blue after 12 months. Being allowed to edit tweets is not worth it.” I’ve been through so many social networks over time as they come and go. I lost count how many people say they are leaving Twitter. I use Twitter primarily for note taking, links, etc. I see nothing about that to change. — David Bisset (@dimensionmedia) October 28, 2022
Continue readingHow to Add Header and Footer Code in WordPress
[ad_1] The WordPress platform does a great job to help those without coding experience to implement just about any type of functionality. However, in some cases you’ll need to add header and footer code in WordPress to help third-party services embed its own functionality. The most typical use case for this is to integrate Google Analytics into your site. However, there are plenty of other reasons you’ll want to do this – you may already know why you want to carry this task out. For this tutorial, we’re going to show you a couple of ways to add header and footer code in WordPress. First though, we’re going to take a look at the sorts of reasons you’d want to do this in the first place. What You Can Achieve With Extra Code in the Header and Footer of Your Site A standard website will break down into a few different components, much like a text document: Header. Your site’s header contains a number of ‘pre-loading’ elements, and details about your Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, encryption, any JavaScript, and more. Footer. This operates in a similar way to your header, but instead ends up at the bottom of the page. Body. Most of the functionality you implement on your site will be within the ‘body’ of your content. This is the primary focus of almost everything within the WordPress dashboard, and the body represents what you see on the page. Servers will load pages in a linear way – the head, body, then footer. This means the code in the header will load first, but footer code will load after everything else. Everyday Code Snippet Use Cases Social media and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools will often need you to add header code in WordPress. This is because those services have to take some priority when a site loads in order to log everything that comes after it. It’s a similar situation with CSS code, because this dictates how your site will look. If this was in the footer, you’d see an array of layout changes before you see the styling. While JavaScript helps us to produce, view, and interact with modern websites, it isn’t a necessary component (in a technical sense.) As such, JavaScript in the footer will give you greater performance in many cases, and if you have that option, you should go with it. In fact, there are many more use cases, and we cover them in more detail in another article on the WPKube blog. However, in a typical WordPress situation, you don’t have access to the header and footer elements of your site. To do this, you’ll need to either get your hands dirty, or call on outside help. How to Add Header and Footer Code in WordPress (2 Ways) Over the rest of the article, we’re going to cover two ways to add header and footer code in WordPress. Both are simple, but we prefer one over the other: You can use a plugin to help you add the code to the right areas of your site. You’re able to add code to your functions.php file, and you’ll need to have extra knowledge on how to access your site’s files. We’re going to look at the plugin option first, for reasons we’ll explain shortly. 1. Use a Plugin to Add Code to Your Header and Footer If you want to implement something in WordPress, a plugin should do the job for you. We’d consider a plugin the default in most cases for WordPress websites. As such, if you want to add header and footer code in WordPress, the Embed Code plugin will be ideal: This is a solution that our sister site DesignBombs develops, and it gives you a quick and painless way to add code either to your site as a whole, specific pages or posts, and even custom post types. To use it, you’ll install and activate the plugin in the typical WordPress way. When this process finishes, you’ll see a new Settings > Embed Code option on the dashboard: On this screen, you’ll spot two text areas: one for the head and one for the footer. You’ll even get a hint as to where the code you enter will sit within your HTML: Using this tool is super-straightforward. Once you enter your code, save your changes. This will add any code here on a global (i.e. site-wide) level. However, you may only want to add code to an individual post or page. You can do this through the Block Editor – the metabox and options you need are at the bottom of the screen: While Embed Code is our preferred method, and one you should use for the minimum of fuss, there is also another way that can get you the results you need. We’ll look at this one next. 2. Add Code Snippets to Your functions.php File Every WordPress installation can access a dedicated functions.php file within its top-level or theme-specific directory. This enables you to add snippets of code to help WordPress use more functionality. However, there are some prerequisites you’ll need to understand and have in place before you begin: You access your WordPress core files – and by extension, the functions.php file – using Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP.) As such, you’ll need knowledge of how this works in order to find your sites files and work with them. We’d also recommend you use a child theme, in order to preserve your changes if the theme in question receives an update. You’ll want at least working knowledge of WordPress hooks, actions, and filters. What’s more, you’ll want to understand how WordPress accesses your header and footer through these hooks. When it comes to using SFTP, WPKube has a selection of articles that you can consider essential reading: You may also want to look at the WordPress Developer hook library, especially those entries for wp_head and wp_footer, although this is optional as you won’t use them
Continue readingWeekly WordPress News: Promote with us!
[ad_1] We are checking in with your latest dose of weekly WordPress news. This week, We are happy to announce that we will be accepting Black Friday deals from all our Partners and Subscribers and promoting them on our platform for absolutely Free. Have a Deal that you would like us to promote? Make sure to fill up this form – https://wplift.com/black-friday-deals-form Note – We will be reviewing all entries individually before we make them live on our website. Let’s get to all of this week’s WordPress news… WORDPRESS NEWS AND ARTICLES TUTORIALS AND HOW-TOS RESOURCES [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingThe pleasure of being a part of a community – Щастя бути частиною спільноти
[ad_1] Це есе також доступно українською. Hey there! My name is Artemy, and I am from Ukraine. I’ve been working with WordPress since 2018. I specialize in WordPress backend development: I build and support WordPress plugins, third-party integrations, and other cool custom features. If you ask me why I love WordPress and why I decided to stick with it, my answer is the community. There are a lot of different CMS written in PHP and other languages. Still, I don’t know any other CMS with such an active, responsive and enthusiastic community. So in this post, I want to tell you how I became a part of this community. And I hope this post will encourage someone to do the same. How it started I vividly remember my first WordPress experience: I was confused, had many questions, and was desperately trying to understand how to do the most simple things. Back in those days, I was an intern in a small agency in Zaporizhzhya, my hometown. I had basic HTML/CSS skills, and I just started learning PHP development. My senior colleagues helped me take my first steps in web development. They gave me some simple tasks, and I was annoying them with questions. One day, the agency’s director came to me and told me that I’d be responsible for creating a WordPress website for his friend. It was a big surprise for me, and I was like: “Man, I barely know PHP; how would that go?”. But he just said, “Don’t worry, you’ll figure everything out as you go.” Well, he was right. It took some time, though. My first WordPress experience So that’s how I started experimenting with WordPress. My senior colleagues were busy with their own projects, so I had to find answers on my own. The first WordPress theme I built was awful. It was a wild Frankenstein composed of my own “creative” solutions and code snippets I googled somewhere. It worked like crap; it had a lot of bugs, but as people say, “the first pancake is always a bit tricky.” No matter how bad it was, it was my first experience, and I learned a lot about the basic concepts of WordPress. That’s why I believe that learning by doing is the best way to learn something new. Moral: don’t be afraid of doing something awful when you create something for the first time. It’s okay; we’ve all been through this. Why I think that WordPress is one of the best options for beginners It’s nice to have a mentor when you learn something new. Luckily, you don’t need a person sitting next to you anymore. All of us have got the best mentor possible: the Internet. You don’t know how to do something? Try to google it. No wonder some say that one of the most required skills of every developer is to know how to search for information. And from this point of view, WordPress is one of the best options for beginners. Why? Because when you stumble upon a problem, there’s a high probability that someone already asked the same question on StackOverflow. Or on WordPress Stack Exchange. Or on one of the dozens of other forums. If you’re lucky enough, someone already wrote a post about your problem with a great explanation of how to solve it with examples and code snippets. And that’s the most wonderful thing about the WordPress community: we are not selfish. WordPress is an open-source project, so there are a lot of free code and snippets anyone can use. At some point, I became very grateful to all of these people that wrote answers on StackOverflow, wrote blog posts, created free plugins, and other helpful stuff. Hence, I decided to help other people when I’d be able to. And today, I’m happy to be a part of this community as well. In August 2021, I started blogging about WordPress on my website: https://kayart.dev/ I like to think that this way I’m repaying my karmic debts for all the content I have consumed. And it makes me happy to see that people really read my posts, and it helps them solve their WordPress problems. So today, when I face a problem and can’t find the solution, I think: “Well, it might be a great idea for a new post!”. Also, I visit StackOverflow, WordPress-related Facebook groups, and other communities where people ask their questions almost every day. Sometimes I find some nice ideas for new content there; sometimes, I help people figure their problems out. I encourage everyone to become a part of the WordPress community. There are a lot of opportunities for everyone. You can help with the translation of your favorite plugins or themes. You can create your own plugin or become a contributor to an already existing open-source plugin. You can write tutorials. You can write reviews helping other people to choose the best option for them. You can help people on support forums. Every contribution, big or small, makes WordPress better. Isn’t it great to understand that you’re a part of it? Anyways, thank you for reading my story. If I inspired you to start contributing to our community, please, write me a DM on Twitter or email me about this. Good luck! Привіт! Мене звати Артемій, я з України. Я працюю з WordPress з 2018 року. Я спеціалізуюсь на backend-розробці для WordPress: створюю та підтримую плагіни для WordPress, сторонні інтеграції, та інші прикольні додаткові фічі. Якщо ви б спитали мене, чому я люблю WordPress та чому вирішив працювати саме з ним, моя відповідь – це спільнота. Існує безліч CMS написаних на PHP та інших язиках. Але я не знаю жодної CMS з такою ж активною, чуткою та сповненою ентузіазму спільнотою. Тому в цьому пості я хочу розповісти, як я став частиною цієї спільноти. І я сподіваюсь, що цей пост надихне когось зробити те ж саме. Як все почалося Я добре пам’ятаю свій перший досвід роботи з WordPress: я був розгублений, в
Continue readingNew Missing Menu Items Plugin Adds Site Building Links to WordPress Admin – WP Tavern
[ad_1] If you are going all in on building sites with the new full-site editing (FSE) experience, then you may have noticed a lack of menu items that will deliver you directly to the tools you need to use. It may be because the Site Editor is still in beta, or because WordPress leadership may still be discussing whether to rename FSE. Perhaps it’s better that users don’t blindly stumble into FSE templates from the main admin menu, but some of these site building features are buried away with no quick access. For example, you are three clicks deep before arriving at Template Parts. Managing reusable blocks is also a tucked away on a separate screen that can be accessed through the post editor but sends you to a new page. If you’re using the block editor, and reusable blocks Do yourself a favor cut and paste this at the end of your website: /wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=wp_block Then bookmark it. — Ben LayerWP & WPDeals.email (@benswrite) October 26, 2022 When LayerWP founder Ben Townsend brought attention to this in a tweet, Roy Sivan responded with a link to a new free plugin that creates quicker access to these menus. Missing Menu Items expands the admin menu with links to reusable blocks, navigation menus, templates, and template parts, so they are all one click away. It adds them to the Appearance menu under the Editor (beta) link: If you are regularly working with Reusable blocks or editing navigation and templates, this plugin will save you some time and help you zip around the editor faster. Missing Menu Items was made by Easily Amused, the creators of Block Styles, a commercial plugin that lets users further customize core blocks with unique styles and boasts “fully responsive block-level design control.” The team will be adding more useful menu links and admin improvements in future releases. Users can contact the development team with menu item requests and they will consider them. Missing Menu Items is available on WordPress.org. Direct support is available for those who have purchased a BlockStyles membership, and community support can be found in the plugin’s forums on the directory. [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingThe Ultimate Guide to Rank Higher in Google
[ad_1] Not sure how to get started when it comes to WordPress SEO? As the world’s most popular way to make a website, WordPress is well-suited to helping you create search engine optimized websites that rank at the top of Google’s search results. However, out of the box, WordPress is lacking in some SEO aspects, which is why it’s important to properly configure your site if you want to rank well. In our ultimate guide to WordPress SEO, we’re going to cover all of the most important tactics to boost your site’s search engine rankings. That includes the following: Let’s dig in! WordPress SEO Guide: Important Sitewide Settings In this first section, let’s take a look at some important sitewide WordPress SEO settings that you’ll want to optimize before working on individual pieces of content. 1. Make Sure Your Site Is Visible to Search Engines The first step in WordPress SEO is to make sure that your site is visible to search engines. If it’s not, Google won’t rank your site no matter how optimized it is. When you’re first building your site, it’s common to block search engines from indexing it because it’s not ready for primetime yet. But once you go live, it’s essential that you turn off this block. To check, go to Settings → Reading in your WordPress dashboard and make sure that the Discourage search engines from indexing this site box is not checked: Once the box is unchecked, Google and other search engines will be able to start indexing your content. 2. Choose An SEO-Friendly WordPress Permalink Structure Your WordPress permalink structure controls the basic format of your site’s URLs. For example, consider these two URLs: yoursite.com/09/2022/cool-blog-post yoursite.com/cool-blog-post The first URL includes the month and year that the blog was published, while the second URL only includes the blog post’s “post name” or “slug”, which is the unique identifier of the blog post – “cool-blog-post” in this example. In the first example, the month and year would be automatically generated based on your chosen permalink structure. For most WordPress sites, using just the post name is the best option. You really only want to include dates in your URL slugs if you only publish time-sensitive content, such as a news blog posting current news. If you post more “evergreen” content, having the date in the URL slug is limiting. For example, let’s say that the URL slug says “2020” but you fully updated the post in 2022. This might cause readers and search engines to think the post is out-of-date even though the content is current. To set your site’s permalinks, go to Settings → Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard: 3. Use Consistent Site URL (WWW vs non-WWW) In addition to your permalink structure, you’ll also want to choose whether or not to use WWW as part of your URL. That is, yoursite.com or www.yoursite.com. There’s no right or wrong choice here. The only important thing is that you pick one and stay consistent with it. For example, here at WPKube, we use www.wpkube.com, and you’ll see that on every piece of content. If you just enter wpkube.com in your browser address bar, you’ll also be redirected to www.wpkube.com instead. To choose your URL structure, go to Settings → General and make sure that the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) use your preferred setup: WordPress will now automatically redirect users to your preferred structure, so there’s no need to set up a redirect at the server level (though you can if you want). 4. Install a WordPress SEO Plugin In order to add a lot of important SEO functionality to your site, it’s essential that you install a quality SEO plugin. There are a lot of good SEO plugins, but we recommend Yoast SEO to most beginners for the following reasons: It’s popular. It’s easy to use. It has a long track record of reliability. The free version works fine for most sites. It’s also the SEO plugin that we use here at WPKube. For those reasons, we’re going to use Yoast SEO for all of the screenshots and instructions in this tutorial. With that being said, here are a few other options you can look at: You can read our Yoast SEO vs Rank Math comparison to see how two of the most popular options compare. Once you install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin, you’ll want to go through its setup wizard to configure some important basics for your site’s SEO. Later on, we’ll also show you how to use Yoast SEO to optimize individual pieces of content on your site. 5. Install an SSL Certificate and Use HTTPS HTTPS makes your website more secure and privacy-friendly by encrypting the data that passes between your site’s server and your visitors’ browsers. You can tell if a site is using HTTPS by looking for the green padlock in your browser’s address bar: While that alone is reason enough to use HTTPS on your site, there’s also another big benefit – Google has used HTTPS as a positive ranking factor since 2014. So not only does it make your site more secure, but it also helps it rank higher in search engines. In order to use HTTPS on your site, you’ll need to install an SSL certificate on your server, which most web hosts offer for free nowadays. If your host doesn’t, you can consider switching to one of the top WordPress hosting providers from our list. Once you’ve installed an SSL certificate, you can enable HTTPS on your site by using a plugin like Really Simple SSL. If you feel comfortable, you can also do it manually, but it requires a little more work. 6. Verify Your Site With Google Search Console and Submit Sitemap Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that lets you manage all aspects of your site’s SEO, including configuring settings and viewing real performance data. For that reason, you’ll absolutely want to set
Continue readingShare your Best Deals For FREE
[ad_1] We are checking in with your latest dose of weekly WordPress news. Last chance to submit your best Black Friday Deals to us for FREE. Grab a spot before we are full! Have a Deal that you would like us to promote? Make sure to fill out this form Note – We will review all entries individually before making them live on our website. Let’s get to all of this week’s WordPress news… WORDPRESS NEWS AND ARTICLES TUTORIALS AND HOW-TOS RESOURCES [ad_2] Source link
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