[ad_1] ഈ ഉപന്യാസം മലയാളത്തിലും ലഭ്യമാണ് Here is Hari reading his own story aloud. I will never forget the day I turned 22. I was officially at the lowest point in life as I woke up that morning. While my peers were employed with multinational companies or pursuing higher education at top universities worldwide, I had just been fired from my first “job” and was broke. Things were so bad that I had even become a pariah in my own family. Setting aside all those negative thoughts, I pulled myself out of my bed and switched on my computer, which lit up with a partly-written blog post on the TinyMCE editor of WordPress 3.0.1. That sight filled me with hope. I felt a strong creative urge to continue writing and started typing away. After completing that post, I leaned on my chair, marveling at my creation. All my negative emotions had now disappeared. I realized that even if I failed in life, I would always have two things with me – my blog and the open source software that powered it (WordPress). And that was all I needed to trudge onward. Little did I know that this open source software (that powers 40%+ of all websites in the world today) would eventually become my raison d’être and give me a life I could never even dream of! Discovering WordPress I was born and brought up in Thiruvananthapuram, in Kerala, India as an only child to engineer parents. Since computers and programming had always fascinated me as a kid, I enrolled in an engineering course with a specialization in information technology after high school. My goal was to take up a career in technology. I even had lofty dreams of pursuing research in computer science. My batch had a four-month break before college started, and during this time, I started working with my friends’ web services startup. One evening, while working on a client’s website, I was introduced to WordPress. It was a revelation. You could create and customize websites from an admin panel without needing to hand-code in HTML! I loved it and wanted to create a WordPress website on my own. However, since I did not have the resources to purchase a domain and hosting package, I did the next best thing – I set up a blog on WordPress.com. As the cliche goes, that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. 🙂 Thriving with WordPress during tough times Soon, the holidays were over, and college started. With high hopes, I stepped foot into one of Kerala’s top engineering colleges. However, within a few days, I realized that I was a misfit in this system. The Indian educational system is designed for rote-learning by default and rejects everyone that does not comply. My ‘radical’ dreams of thinking out of the box, finding knowledge outside prescribed textbooks, exploring the practical side of concepts, and even furthering original ideas – made me an outcast. I was disappointed, disillusioned, and eventually lost interest in academics. To add insult to the injury, my friends kicked me out of the web services startup, which was my saving grace during this ordeal. During this challenging time, it was WordPress that kept me going. Pouring my mind into my WordPress blog helped me survive the trauma of college. Fueled by curiosity, I tried to find practical applications of core computer science concepts taught in college by tinkering with WordPress code and creating mock websites. Slowly I started earning pocket money through freelance projects and Google AdSense. I eventually bought my own domain and moved to self-hosted WordPress. All-in-all, WordPress not only helped me survive college but taught me more than college ever could. By the end of four years, I had learned PHP, MySQL, web designing and development, open source philosophy, and even became a better writer thanks to WordPress! Even as the nightmare called college went on by the side, I collected a bunch of professional accolades. The most memorable ones include being an honorary speaker at one of India’s top engineering colleges, getting a chance to interview Richard Stallman himself, winning an international essay competition, and becoming a freelance journalist with one of India’s national newspapers. Life was challenging but promising! Presenting at NIT Calicut – one of India’s top engineering colleges, as an invited speaker Selected as a runner-up for Mindful Leadership co-organized by University of Dayton, Ohio and Loyola Institute of Business Administration Finding out about Automattic My love for WordPress encouraged me to add a question about Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress, in a trivia quiz that I hosted at an intercollegiate quiz in my third year. The question went unanswered, but while preparing for the quiz, I learned about Matt’s company – Automattic, Inc. Automattic owned WordPress.com and had 30+ employees working remotely from all corners of the world then. Since WordPress was everything to me, working for the company that runs WordPress.com felt like a dream. I believed that I had a real shot at making it to Automattic; since it was a fully distributed company, I could work remotely from India without having to worry about work permits or visas. The “Happiness Engineer” role seemed like a perfect fit for me, and I decided to apply right after graduating from college a year later. A glimpse from the same quiz that I hosted where I would shortly ask that question about Matt that would go unanswered! However, life would have other plans for me. Dreams come crashing down – but not without hope! History teaches us that every misfit meets debilitating failure early on in life. After surviving for nearly three and a half years, my crash came in my final year. Since I lacked the minimum attendance, I did not graduate with my batchmates and was asked to repeat my last semester with my juniors. It was a major blow – not just for my ego, but also for my existence. Nevertheless, I did not lose
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WordPress 6.1 Introduces New Default Theme and Fluid Typography, Expands Design Tools and Template Options – WP Tavern
[ad_1] WordPress 6.1 “Misha” was released today, named for Soviet-Norwegian jazz pianist Mikhail “Misha” Alperin, who was born in Ukraine in 1956. A founding member of the first Moldavian jazz quartet, and later the Moscow Art Trio, Alperin became known for his distinct and bewitching blend of jazz and folk music. This release is the culmination of a months-long effort to improve the design tooling consistency of WordPress’ core blocks. That means blocks that were missing things like typography, color, and border support have been updated wherever possible to match the support included in other blocks. Design tools and their controls are also now more consistently presented, so users can intuitively know what to expect when customizing their blocks. image credit: WordPress 6.1 About page WordPress 6.1 expands the templates options available for site editing. Theme authors and users can now create page-specific templates, custom post type and post-specific templates, user-selectable custom templates for all post types, and taxonomy-specific templates for categories or tags. With all the new block design and template editing capabilities, WordPress 6.1 has added more sophisticated content-locking capabilities. Block-locking can now be applied to all inner blocks in one click. This applies to containing blocks like Group, Cover, and Column blocks. image credit: WordPress 6.1 About Page Menu management has also gotten a big update in 6.1, with menu controls relocated to their own place in the block settings. The navigation block now offers new fallback options in case the block isn’t pre-populated with inner blocks. If the navigation menu is empty, the fallback behavior is to display a list of available pages using the Page List block. If there are multiple block menus, the fallback is to display the most recently created block menu. This ensures that users aren’t stuck and can more easily understand where their menus will show up. New Twenty Twenty-Three Default Theme with 10 Style Variations One of the most anticipated parts of this release is the new Twenty Twenty-Three (TT3) default theme. This is a new kind of default theme that bundles a curated set of style variations, instead of creating a new theme from scratch. It uses a stripped-back version of Twenty Twenty-Two as the base for a theme that features 10 community-contributed style variations. image credit: WordPress 6.1 About page The theme is accessibility-ready and puts the spotlight on all of the design tools available in the latest release. It is basically a blank slate for further customization, with both rich and minimalist color palettes and multiple typography options. It will be exciting to see what the world of WordPress users builds with the new theme. Fluid typography makes its debut in 6.1. This feature is for theme authors but benefits users and site visitors alike. It allows authors to define font sizes that will smoothly scale between smaller and larger viewports, adapting in a fluid way to varying widths. The best part of the new fluid typography feature is that it can easily be turned on by setting typography.fluid to be true in theme.json and adding fluid to each of the settings.typography.fontSizes with min and max values. If you want to see an example of fluid typography in action, look no further than the new Twenty Twenty-Three theme. Other notable new features and updates in 6.1 include the following: List and Quote blocks now support inner blocks Improved layout and visualization of document settings Support for starter patterns for any post type Filter Themes Directory for block themes in the admin Improved block placeholders that show customization options New system for persisting user preferences across browsers and devices Block-based Template Parts now available in Classic Themes Query Loop block extended to support custom queries Set preset values for padding, margin and block gap WordPress 6.1 includes more than 60 accessibility improvements and 25 tickets dedicated to performance. This release is the result of the tireless efforts of more than 800 contributors from 60+ countries. For a quick visual tour, check out the official WordPress 6.1 promo video: Category: News, WordPress [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingHow to Set Up a WordPress Paywall for Your Content
[ad_1] Lots of WordPress site owners see their content as more than information – it’s money. Taking your hard work and charging for it is a natural progression for many. Because the ecosystem is able to help you bolt on almost any functionality you need, a WordPress paywall is straightforward to implement. You’ll know a paywall through lots of different names, but regardless, it lets you restrict access to your content unless a user pays up. The form of this payment doesn’t have to be cash though: emails, social media mentions, and more can be the currency. There are lots of plugins to help you implement all manner of paywalls on your site too – good news if you have a specific need in mind. In this article, we’ll look at a few options to help you create a WordPress paywall. Before this though, we’re going to give you the lowdown on what a paywall is, the positives and perils to consider, and how to choose the right style of paywall for your site. What a Paywall Is In short, a paywall is a way to restrict access to content on your site. You’ll see this type of content restriction have different names depending on the use case, branding of the company, and more. For example, you might see this called a content locker, gated content, and other terms. It all helps you achieve the same goal. Your content sits on your site as normal, while a plugin locks a certain set of users out of the content you set. You’ll often find this sort of restriction suits informational content, such as a course or tutorial style blog. In contrast, you could also use a WordPress paywall for time-limited and relevant content, such as news and current affairs. Later on, we’ll talk about the different ways you can implement a WordPress paywall. For now, let’s discuss the benefits something like this can give you. Why a Paywall Is Fantastic For Monetizing Your Content and Cultivating a User Community You can see the evolution of self-hosted WordPress through the companion subscription site, WordPress.com. This platform has a free tier for users, which harks back to the early days of blogging: The reason this is relevant is because lots of these blogs went from being personal diary entries to information hubs. At some point, the blogs with heavy traffic and users began to monetize their content. This precipitated the evolution of WordPress from a blogging platform into a Content Management System (CMS). When these sites switch to a premium subscription model, the users (or some of them) will come along for the ride. However, it’s a fallacy to think that a paywall will decimate traffic and income. It might seem counter-intuitive, but a paywall can give you a greater sense of community and better quality traffic. Here’s why: The new users you bring in will want to be there, because they have paid to do so. Your existing users will offer greater loyalty to your brand and site, again because they are paying to stick around. Combined, you have two groups of users who see enough value in your content that they will shell out for it. This gives more value to any hits you get behind the paywall, and drips through to your comments sections, social media engagement and promotion, and much more. However, there are some definite negatives to consider if you want to implement a WordPress paywall. We’ll go over some of these next. The Drawbacks of Using a Paywall for Your WordPress Website You’ll want to note a few of the cons when it comes to WordPress paywalls. No system is perfect, and this one comes with its own unique challenges: First, you will have less traffic. However, as we note in the previous section, the numbers hitting your site will be of a higher-quality. Because that traffic expects more from your content, you’ll have to deliver. This can change how you create and deliver content, and will also affect your expenditure. You’ll have to mind that you don’t affect your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) when you implement your paywall. Because the visibility of this content is less, you’ll see fewer backlinks as a result. Advertising on your site can go either way. On the one hand, your paywall and resultant lower traffic might mean ad revenue isn’t as straightforward to come by. However, ads within locked content should perform well because it will offer high targeting. We’d argue that the positives outweigh the negatives in most cases. In fact, you’d likely already know if you want to use a paywall, or if one isn’t right for you. For instance, if your site’s revenue is based around advertising, a paywall doesn’t make much sense. For the classic blog transforming into an information site, you’ll likely want to consider content restriction. How to Choose a WordPress Paywall Model and Architecture for Your Site As you might expect, there are different types of paywall you can implement, and in some cases you can also decide on the architecture you use. For WordPress users, the latter is simple. You’ll use a plugin to implement the paywall, so this will dictate the architecture you use. In most cases, it will be a local setup. This means the functionality to lock content will live on your server. Cloud-based paywalls won’t, of course. As for the paywall model you choose, there are a few to note: Free trials. You’ll often sign up to receive a few days free of unrestricted access. From there, you’ll need to choose a plan. Subscriptions. This is the classic approach to gated content. You’ll ask the user to pay a set amount over a designated period for access to the content. Pay-Per-View. Some sites will let you purchase access to a single article, yet restrict the rest. It’s arguably the least sustainable paywall strategy, but it can help a user to read the content they want. Free trials
Continue readingNavigate Your WordPress Site Like You’re DC’s Flash
[ad_1] The WordPress admin dashboard, also called WP admin, is the mission control for your blogging or business website. It lets you create and manage pages, change styling with the help of themes, add functionality using plugins, and do much more. However, you don’t get any shortcuts or actions for quick navigation, meaning it could take you a while to get around pages and complete specific tasks. That’s about to change, though, because a new plugin offers a fast and easy way to control your WordPress site. CommandBar for WP Admin is a plugin that lets you move quickly through pages, take contextual actions related to the content, and search for anything on your site. It’s designed to boost your productivity with quick actions and shortcuts to get stuff done in the WordPress admin and Gutenberg editor. But how easy is it to set up and configure? And is it really the fastest way to navigate your WordPress website? Get the answer to these questions and more in this hands-on review of CommandBar for WP Admin. CommandBar for WP Admin: Overview CommandBar for WP Admin enables you to find specific pages and content within a few clicks. It’s built to drive step-change improvement in WordPress navigation, from finding an item to editing it in minutes. The plugin works with both WordPress admin and the popular Gutenberg editor, making it easy to control various aspects of your site. Here are the key features of CommandBar: Spotlight-style search: By offering instant search for anything on your site, including posts, images, or even orders and products, the plugin makes navigating WP admin blazingly fast. Pro shortcuts: It’s not just pages, though. All critical actions in WordPress admin, like post creation, are just a few clicks away. Plus, you can add custom keyboard shortcuts for any common task, such as changing a post’s category or inserting an image. Contextual editor actions: CommandBar is useful for editing actions, too. You can jump to recently edited items or take contextually relevant actions quickly while editing a post or page. Hands-On With CommandBar for WordPress Now for the exciting part: I’ll show you how to install CommandBar and use it to control your WordPress website. First, download CommandBar for WP Admin from its WordPress.org directory listing or official website. Then, log into your WordPress dashboard and install it via the Plugins tab. Alternatively, you can search for “CommandBar” in the plugin library and click “Install Now.” Launching CommandBar To access CommandBar in the WordPress dashboard after it’s installed, enter CTRL + K (on Windows or Linux) or ⌘K (on Mac). The shortcut will open CommandBar in a modal in the center of the page. Alternatively, you can click the “Find anything…” button in the header to launch the plugin. Searching Pages, Posts, Media, etc. Once the plugin is installed, it’ll automatically hook into your existing pages, media, orders, etc. This makes it quick and convenient to find anything you have available in WordPress. For example, you can search for posts by entering their title or keywords in CommandBar: Article Continues Below The plugin also shows a preview of the post content, which can be really helpful for seeing what it’s about and how it’s organized. Plus, you can change the post’s title without having to open the post. Any changes will be reflected under the Revisions section in CommandBar: If you have WooCommerce installed on your site, you can also search for orders using parameters such as the customer’s email and billing address. Navigating Through WordPress In addition to content search, CommandBar offers navigation commands that let you quickly jump between sections of the WordPress admin dashboard. For example, if you type “comments” in the plugin field, it’ll take you to your comments section within seconds. CommandBar ships with some navigation shortcuts already set, but you can set your own shortcuts for going to a specific section. To do so, hover over the section you want to create a shortcut for and click “Add shortcut.” Using Contextual Actions Another thing you can do with CommandBar is take contextual actions. This are small but important actions that let you get stuff done quickly. Let’s say you want to edit the price of a product you created in WooCommerce. Instead of scrolling down the product page, you can just type “Price” in CommandBar to jump to the relevant section. Content Creation with Gutenberg CommandBar has deep integration with the Gutenberg editor, which makes it easy to perform content-related actions. Let’s say you decide you want to add an image to a post. In CommandBar, type the phrase “image” and click “Insert image at cursor” to execute an action. Then, search for and choose a relevant image to insert it in your post. (P.S. You can also add a caption and alt text to an image before inserting it inside your post’s content). And besides adding an image to your post, you can change its title and category, as well as preview it before you hit that publish button. CommandBar also offers quick actions for adding pages, posts, orders, etc. Plus, it keeps track of the pages you visited recently so you can quickly get back to any work in progress. Overall, CommandBar for WP Admin is a really handy tool for sifting through and performing actions on your WordPress website. It’s incredibly fast, too, and doesn’t have any competition at the time of writing. CommandBar for WP Admin Pricing CommandBar is free to use on WordPress websites. You can access all the features discussed above without paying any fee. Final Verdict WordPress admin is powerful and brimming with exciting options. However, navigating it swiftly can be challenging, especially if your admin has bulked up a little over time. Fortunately, CommandBar for WP Admin exists to help you control your site and get stuff done faster than you could ever do on your own. You get a robust search function, handy shortcuts, and contextual editor actions to control all the important stuff that
Continue readingSuccess Looks Different On Everyone, I Guess
[ad_1] Here is Donna reading her own story aloud. At the age of 62, I finally feel like I’ve found success, and I hope I wear it well. It doesn’t wrap me in the look I’d imagined, however. It feels like quality material, sure, but not ostentatious or high-falutin’ or fancy-pants. (Well, maybe there’s the occasional fancy-pants aspect of it, which I’ll be sure to mention at the end of the story). What is Success? One of the definitions that Merriam-Webster presents for the word “success” is “the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence.” My definition of success has always been to live free of poverty. I don’t ask much of success. Just the vision of a life without the constant weight of poverty wrapped around a person’s neck is enough for me to define that life as successful. But of course, there are many ways to define success, and I suppose that makes a big difference in how people view their own lives. I’m a late bloomer to my version of success, although most people would have assumed I’d been this successful for decades. But in every way, WordPress is at the heart of my newfound success, regardless of how or when it happened. I’ve told parts of my story before. In that telling of my tale, what you won’t find is any indication that I was poor – miserably poor – throughout most of it. For years, I’ve joked to my family that I’m great at becoming “industry famous” but terrible at earning money at it. At one time, I was one of the premier Cold Fusion developers in the world, though I doubt CF’ers would remember me all these years later. After that, I was a well-known SEO, although I went by a “forum name” at the time, so my name now isn’t recognizable except to those I’m still friends with. And while I wasn’t necessarily ever WordPress-famous, I wasn’t invisible in the community either. The main reason I was industry famous each of those times was that I spent a lot of my time in the forums or communities where everyone hung out. In my time there, I gave back every chance I got. I’d generally learned my craft from those same types of communities, so once I had obtained valuable knowledge, I answered questions and helped people learn there. Eventually, I would end up being a moderator in most of those communities. So if success is defined by eminence, as Merriam-Webster suggests, or the level of recognition you get from your peers, or the amount of respect you earn from those you mentor, then I was very successful throughout much of my adult life. Eminence Does Not Equal Wealth Despite that version of success or what I called “industry fame,” I could never afford to use any “pro” plugins or tools that weren’t free. I’ve never owned a copy of Photoshop in my life. (I take that back. A friend gave me a nulled version once – a really old version – but I was too paranoid and “law-abiding” to ever use it). Even though my job as a web designer pretty much required the use of Photoshop, I had to settle for Gimp. Priced at somewhere around $600 (if I remember right), Photoshop was about $599 too expensive for me. If a client handed me a .psd file, I’d ask industry friends who owned Photoshop to turn it into a format I could import into Gimp. Of course, that meant there were many Photoshop files I couldn’t work with at all if I needed to access some aspect of the file that Gimp didn’t support. In those cases, I had to turn the job down. SEO was made more difficult without money to spend. Paying even $20 for an SEO tool that would make my work easier was never an option. If it wasn’t free, it didn’t happen. Occasionally, I’d get lucky and win the use of a tool during an online giveaway. You have no idea how excited I’d get when that happened. It always felt like I’d won the lottery. I did attend as many SEO conferences as I could over the years. Industry acquaintances who believed I needed to be there generously paid for some of those conferences. I am forever grateful to those people. Some I managed to scrape up enough money to attend, especially if they were reasonably close to where I lived. Where Did I Go Wrong? So why was I so poor? Why did my version of success elude me for so long? I’m not sure I know all the reasons for that, but I’d like to share some of the reasons that I do know. Some may be helpful to anyone in the same situation; others were personal and unique to me (perhaps). Let’s start with the most obvious. Imposter Syndrome. I did graduate from college with a B.S. in English Education. Back in my day, women were expected to do “women’s type of work,” such as teaching. I really wanted to study Computer Science, but the head of the CS department told my mom that it would probably be too hard for me, so Mom convinced me not to do that. (My mom loved me very much, and I’m sure she thought she was saving me from failure or something, but she was wrong to not trust in me). I graduated and never worked as a teacher a day in my life. (At least not in a formal school situation. Most of my life has been dedicated to teaching others how to do things, however). So instead of teaching, I moved to California, worked as a data entry person for years, and slowly began to teach myself how to code. In those days, we didn’t have an internet filled with free courses to learn from. I would occasionally find an old “How to code in Fortran” book, or something similar, in someone’s garage sale.
Continue readingWP All Import Is Moving Away from Lifetime Licenses – WP Tavern
[ad_1] WP All Import announced it will soon change its business model to annual licenses. The product, which includes free and commercial versions, allows users to import/export XML, CSV, or Excel data and integrates with more than a dozen popular plugins. Since its founding in 2011, WP All Import has been sold with unlimited, lifetime licenses. The product has more than 12,000 customers. In a statement published this week, WP All Import explained that the company went with lifetime licenses from the beginning because most commercial plugins were sold this way when they started in 2011 and customers began to expect it. Some companies have had a rocky transition out of providing lifetime licenses, as the community saw with Delicious Brains’ acquisition of ACF in June 2021. Although they assured existing customers that they would honor their lifetime licenses, a few months later on Black Friday, Delicious Brains began urging them to purchase annual subscriptions. For many companies transitioning away from old pricing strategies, lifetime license holders become dead weight, requiring support without putting revenue back into the company. WP All Import has found success with offering lifetime licenses for 11 years, but the company is making sure its new customers will be paying every year: We are not making this change because because lifetime licenses are inherently unsustainable or support costs are spiraling out of control. WP All Import is a profitable business, support costs generally follow revenue up and down, and lifetime licenses for WordPress plugins are absolutely a sustainable business model. We are moving to annual licenses simply because we will make more money. “While lifetime licenses work, annual licenses are absolutely more profitable over the long term. This is why you see almost every piece of software on earth now being sold with one.” WP All Import is one of the few remaining companies that is still using a lifetime license pricing strategy. The company noted that over the past ten years, the budgets for WordPress projects have grown along with the quality of their software. Generally, the response to the news has been positive. Some are considering purchasing lifetime licenses before they are no longer offered. One customer said he appreciated the honest communication but bristled at the notion that “people just expect to have to renew their software licenses.” “No,” developer Patrick van Kouteren said. “It is being forced upon consumers because it generates more revenue for the business selling it.” Well, that’s honest from WP All Import. But followed by a bullshit statement: “people just expect to have to renew”. No. It is being forced upon consumers because it generates more revenue for the business selling it. pic.twitter.com/U1p0qy4JJt — Patrick van Kouteren (@pvankouteren) November 2, 2022 WP All Import assured existing customers that it will continue to honor their lifetime licenses and offer the same level of support. If the company releases new products in the future, lifetime license holders will be eligible to purchase annual licenses for these products at discounted rates. WP All Import said the company will be making these changes “sometime later this year or next year.” [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingHonest Thoughts + Discount Code (2022)
[ad_1] Considering using the Blocksy theme to build your WordPress site? In our hands-on Blocksy theme review, we’ll help you decide if this multipurpose theme is right for your site. If it is, we’ll also share our exclusive Blocksy discount code, which will get you 10% off your purchase. Blocksy is a lightweight multipurpose theme that you can use to build literally any type of website, from blogs to business websites, portfolios, eCommerce stores, and more. In general, I think that it deserves a spot on the list of top options that use this lightweight, multipurpose approach. It’s packed with well-designed Customizer options to help you easily customize your theme. For more advanced users, it also offers strong tools for custom layouts, conditional content, and more. And for WooCommerce stores, you get tons of advanced features. There are a few downsides. For example, while all of its demo sites look amazing, the quantity is pretty limited when compared to similar themes. But overall, Blocksy is a great theme and you certainly won’t be disappointed in using it for your site(s). To help you understand why I say that, here’s everything that we’ll cover in our Blocksy review: ⚙️ Exploring Six Key Features in Blocksy: How to Use It To kick off our Blocksy review, let’s look at some of the most notable features and what it’s like to use Blocksy. 1. 25+ Importable Demo Sites To get started with Blocksy, you can either design your site from scratch or import one of Blocksy’s 25+ pre-built demo sites. While only having 25+ demo sites is a bit limiting when compared to other themes that are offering 100+ sites, the demo sites all look amazing. Basically, while the quantity might lag other themes, the quality is top-notch and equal to or above all the other themes I’ve looked at. You can browse the full collection here: Some demo sites are built with both Elementor and Gutenberg (and a few support Brizy), while others only support Gutenberg. When you import a demo site, you can choose to import just the Customizer settings or the demo content too. If it supports multiple builders, you can also choose your preferred builder. Overall, the demo import process has a very nice wizard, which includes setting up a child theme for you: And just like that, you can have your site looking like the demo in under a minute. 2. Very Detailed Customizer Options To control the general design of your site, you’ll use the native real-time Customizer, along with tons of built-in options. You can use these options to control your blog layouts, colors, typography, headers, footers, and so on. In general, you get a ton of options, so I can’t show you everything. But let’s take a look at some of the most notable areas… Header and Footer Builder To control your header and footer, Blocksy gives you a drag-and-drop builder inside the Customizer. You can use a bunch of different elements to add content to the header grid. You can also use the options at the bottom to customize your header for different user devices: You’ll also get additional options to customize the overall header, as well as individual header rows and elements. Blog Layouts You get a bunch of options to control the layouts for both individual blog posts and your blog archive pages. Blog archive options: Blog single options: Blocksy also has some nice touches, such as giving you dedicated options to customize comments sections, author pages, and category pages. Colors You can set up a unified global color palette to keep consistency. If needed, you can then adjust individual colors when working on specific parts of your site. Typography To control typography, Blocksy has a nice system that lets you set up typography for different types of text: You’ll also get typography options in some other areas, such as dedicated options for the post title, excerpt, and other details. You saw some of these in the blog archive screenshots above. 3. Page-Level Controls In addition to the Customizer options, Blocksy also offers detailed page-level controls that let you control the layout of your posts/pages on an individual level. This gives you full control over the canvas, which is great for both using the block editor or integrating with page builder plugins. Here’s what you can do: Hide the page title. Choose different page layouts. Adjust the background color. Adjust the spacing. Hide other page elements (featured image, share box, header, or footer). Here, you can see all of the Blocksy page-level controls: 4. Conditional Headers, Footers, and Sidebars (Pro) With the free version of Blocksy, you can fully customize your header, footer, and sidebar…but you can only have one version of each element for your site. With Blocksy Pro, however, you can create multiple designs and use conditional rules to display each one. This lets you optimize those elements for different parts of your site. For example, you could create a custom header for a certain post type or for blog posts in a certain category. Or, you could create different headers for anonymous users vs logged-in users or even users with different roles, which is especially great for membership sites, online stores, and online courses. For example, with headers, you’ll get an option to add a new header inside the header builder: You can then design that header just like you created your global header. The one addition is that you’re able to set up conditional rules for that header to control when to use it: Pretty dang useful! 5. Custom Layouts/Hooks, AKA Content Blocks (Pro) Blocksy Content Blocks are a more advanced feature that helps you customize your site. With Content Blocks, you can create three types of custom designs: Custom content that you inject at different spots in your theme using hooks. Popups that you can display on your site. Custom theme templates, such as designing a custom single post template. If you’re a casual user, you
Continue readingWordPress Black Friday & Cyber Monday Deals (2022)
[ad_1] If you were looking to build a business website, start an online store, or simply improve your existing website, there is no better time than now. With this year’s WordPress Black Friday deals, you can avail your favorite plugins, themes, hosting, and services for a fraction of the cost! Ready to get massive savings on Elementor, Divi, managed WordPress hosting, and lots more? In this post, we’ve curated all the best 2022 Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals and promo codes from across the web. Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2022 Deals: Plugins, Hosting and Themes Below, we’ll divide these 2022 WordPress Black Friday deals into three main categories, which you can click to jump to: Promoted Deals Grab your spot here Editor’s Pick These are our featured WordPress Black Friday deals that we love: Plugin Deals Elementor Deal: Up to 50% off; Elementor’s most popular plan, Expert, is at a 30% discount Validity: November 22 – December 2 Coupon Code: No coupon code required Elementor is our favorite page builder plugin and what we used to build this site. Check out our Elementor review. Get This Deal WP Rocket Deal: 30% OFF on new licenses. Validity: November 23 – December 1 Coupon Code: No coupon code required Get This Deal Article Continues Below Barn2 Plugins Deal: 30% OFF ALL plugins (annual and LIFETIME) Validity: 19 November – 30 november Coupon code: No coupon code required Barn2 Media makes some great plugins like Posts Table Pro, WooCommerce Product Table, WooCommerce Private Store, and more. Go to Barn2 Astra Growth Bundle Deal: Up to 63% Validity: November 22 – December 3 Coupon Code: No code needed The Astra Growth Bundle gives you access to all Astra Pro features, 180+ Starter Templates, WP Portfolio plugin, Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder, Ultimate Addons for Elementor, Convert Pro plugin, Schema Pro plugin as well as access to all of Asta’s future plugins. 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Continue readingLearning to Build Block Editor Blocks, Part 2
[ad_1] I ended the last article with a functioning block that shows one thing in the editor and another thing on the frontend. The reason for doing so was so we could see how to put together the basic foundation of a plugin for the Block Editor. Now that we’re at this point, it’s much easier to start talking about things related to the Editor, things related to the frontend, how to start serializing data, how to start reading data, and so on. But because I’m trying to do this entire series as a backend engineer creating blocks – which is generally delegated to frontend development – I want to take it step by step. In the last article, I wrote: [T]he thing we’re going to look at doing next is adding styles for both the frontend and the editor and some basic functionality to the block. As I continue to write about learning to build block editor blocks, we’ll continue with looking at adding styles to both the backend and the frontend. In this article, we’re going to cover: adding controls to the block in the editor so we can control its placement within WordPress itself (or even remove it from the editor), ensuring what we see in the editor is what we see on the frontend Like last time, there are going to be things we have to dive into that will require reference material and links to external resources. But consider that part of the journey of learning to build blocks. Block Editor Blocks: Editing and Saving (Or Viewing) The first thing I want to mention is, as I wrote about in the first article, the two functions with which we’ll be working are edit and save. Personally, I think the functions are unfortunately named. It’s not that they don’t represent what they do, but they don’t represent just what they do. In other words, they do more than just allow us to edit and save content. 💭 A Digression on Function Names edit actually isn’t all of that bad since that’s the function responsible for allowing us to actually edit content. But save is overloaded. Not only does it read saved content, it renders it, too. And, as we’ll see in future posts, other functionality. So if you’re used to thinking in terms of how backend functionality works then you wouldn’t be far off in thinking something like: edit is for editing the content that’s saved in some type of data store, save is where the data is sanitized and written into said data store, read is where the data is retrieved and validated before displaying it, and render or display is a function for finally displaying it to the user. But that’s now how blocks work. At least, not at the time of this writing. Instead, we just work with edit and save. So that’s what I’m going to use in the rest of the article. You can read more about this in the Reference material at the end of the article. 🗺 Where We’re Going For starters, we’re going to do the following: add functionality to allow the block to be manipulated within WordPress, write styles to style our block, introduce them to the editor, introduce them to the frontend The reason for doing this is to give a concrete example as to how various files and functions play a role in block development. Granted, there may be a time in which you want something in the editor to appear one way and not on the frontend but the goal I’m working towards with this series of articles getting functionality added to the editor and presentation the same across what the author sees and what the user sees. Functionality Recall that in the last article, the edit function looked like this: edit: () => { return ( “This is content from the editor.” ); }, And this was sufficient for the demo but it only renders a string. Let’s make it a little more advanced such that it renders an HTML element. To that though, we’re going to have to get more into WordPress-specific block development. As usual, I’ll link to all of this in the reference material at the end of the article but I’ll explain each step as I work through it. First, I’m going to add some functionality to my block. Specifically, I’m going to the block the ability to be removed, to be moved, or to more generally be modified the in the context of the editor. To this, I need to add a few things. At the top of index.js, I need: import { useBlockProps } from ‘@wordpress/block-editor’; Then, in the edit function, update it to look like this: edit: () => { const blockProps = useBlockProps({ className: ‘tm-block-demo-container’ }); return ( <div {…blockProps}> This is content from the editor. </div> ); } Obviously, there are a few things in the code above that aren’t yet explained (such as blockProps and className) but I’ll get the explanation momentarily. Styles Let’s introduce some basic styles to the Editor. For example, let’s have the block include the following: a background color, a border and border color, a specific font color, a specific width, some padding First, let’s create an index.scss file in the src directory. This file will belong with other files like block.json, block.php, and index.php. Before adding any styles, though, we need to make sure we have the proper selector. So at this point, go ahead and write the following code in index.scss: .tm-block-demo-container { color: #fff; background: #0d63fd; border: 1px solid #0a58ca; font-weight: bold; padding: 0.5em; width: 100%; } Then in the same file, include the following (I like to place it above the registerBlockType function call): import ‘./index.scss’; The Code Thus Far Note at this point, the following is happening in the code: We’re now using @wordpress/block-editor which is a package that allows us to work with blocks within the context of the block editor (it
Continue readingFinding My Place In The World
[ad_1] Tämä kirjoitus on luettavissa myös suomeksi. Here is Timi reading his own story aloud. From a young age, I’ve been interested in computers. That probably comes from our family tree, as my grandad was a home appliance repairer and father has had a career related to the Internet since the early 2000s dot-com boom. I remember looking at schematics of different household appliances at our grandad’s repair shop. Thinking how on earth the television game shows, where you could send a text message to “throw” a ball towards the goal on the virtual background behind the host, do work. Spending time at the computer, going thru different websites and being impressed by those. Father being head of e-commerce for a hairdressing industry chain and seeing the growth of e-commerce during the mid-2000s. At that time I was in primary school and didn’t understand much of what all that was about. And surely wouldn’t have even guessed that someday I would have a career in IT. Getting familiar with the Internet Sure, back in the days, you had MySpace, virtual horse stables, guestbooks, IRC-Galleria, and different “website builders”… everyone explored the possibilities of these tools and technologies. You almost weren’t cool if you didn’t. So of course I built a few websites mainly just for fun, like almost everyone else of my age at that time. I also purchased my first domains and made a few sites public. One of those, for a scout group, was “coded” with excel. That’s how I started learning HTML and CSS. When secondary school started, I did get really interested in sewing, and light-and-audio equipment for live productions. And politics. Copyright, patent law, freedom of information and net neutrality were hot topics around that time in Finland. I felt that the Internet I had grown with, was threatened. The Pirate Party movement had just landed in Finland and they were defending everything I believed in: open access to information and people’s online rights. Despite my young age, they welcomed me, so I got involved with registering the party for elections and in general. They used IRC for all the communications, and soon I became frustrated because of missed conversations due to shutting off the computer and thus signing off from IRC as well. That led me to assemble, install and run my first home server so I would always have IRC on. Of course, the new server intrigued me and almost invited to try out hosting the websites myself. That way I learned the basics about Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL. My interest in these things was understood by only a few classmates and for everyone else, I was a bit of a weirdo. Because of that, I didn’t make many friends from the same age group with me – and that stays true to this day. Finding WordPress At some point in all this, I found WordPress. It was around 2009 and version 2.8 when I installed WordPress for the first time. I immediately started looking for ways to modify and extend the website. One thing lead to another. Soon I had installed WordPress quite a few more times, and even helped one of my friends to set up a website for their parliamentary election campaign. For getting the timeline right in this post, I looked up my old websites and found out that in 2010 I had published a guide on how to translate WordPress into Finnish and even offered some theme translations to download. And yet I still didn’t think that IT, servers, websites or WordPress could be my career. When secondary school ended, I applied to study live production. Like audio and lights in concerts and all that stuff. Didn’t get selected for that school, because of the low numbers on the diploma. That was devastating. But little did I know. The third school I applied to, selected me and there I was, going to study multimedia for three years. Photography, video editing, design and a little bit of web development. The most inspiring and toughest times of life at the same time Looking back, this was one of the most pivotal points in my life. Three years in that school taught me how to be creative with design and boosted my self-confidence in coding skills. Starting almost from the first web development classes, teachers saw my skills and encouraged me to continue coding. I started helping other students during the classes, as most of the web development stuff was already familiar to me. I really enjoyed the print design classes, photography and school in general after a long time. I had also become active in running one of the few Internet cafes in Helsinki that were left in the early 2010s. At the time, we were one of the few places which served only vegetarian food, had open wifi and laptops available for customers. As I was interested in tech and some knowledge, the natural thing was to be involved with maintaining those laptops and the website for the cafe. Some same founders of that cafe cooperative had founded another cooperative in the early 2000s, to offer reasonably priced hosting and email services for associations and other NGOs. After some time, they invited me to join and soon I started helping with server upkeep and customer service. I would also make a number of websites with WordPress for our clients. For the first time in my life, I was getting some money from doing things on the Internet. I started to feel that I had found what I want to do in my life. Then my partner at the time did get severely ill mentally. That started to affect me as well, and the last year of school with one half at on-the-job training and another half at school doing a bigger final project was very emotional and filled with deep worry. During that year we broke up and that led to depression. I didn’t go to school.
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