What Are Must Use Plugins in WordPress? The plugin system is one of the most powerful aspects of WordPress. The ability to extend the functionality of the CMS quickly and easily is unparalleled in other platforms. Plugins are typically installed and maintained through the WordPress administration interface, and end up in /wp-content/plugins/ in their own folder. There's an entirely different kind of plugin that exists though, and it's called a Must Use plugin.

In this post we're going to take a look at what they are and how they work, as well as, pros and cons of using them.

Big Orange Heart made waves with their first online event back in January of 2021. And, this summer they are upping their game! The global 24 hour conference that starts tomorrow now has over 3000 attendees! But, it's not too late to register! 

Keep reading to learn more about the Summer WordFest Live 2021 speakers and sessions.

Recently I was thinking through the process of making a Travel website. We would have blog posts about specific resorts and then a custom taxonomy called Destinations that would hold things like “Hawaii” and “Canary Islands”. WordPress was built for this kind of thing, so sorting and organizing posts by these Destinations is fast and easy. 

The problem is, when I go to an Archive page of posts about Hawaii for example, our options for information about Hawaii are pretty limited. By default, terms can only have a Name, plain text Description, Slug, and a related Parent.

Let's create popups in WordPress with Popup Maker! Popups are an essential part of the graphical UI of a website. They provide additional content or are used to prompt for some interaction from the user. The main purpose of popups is to make this information stand out, by covering other parts of the graphical interface. 

There are different types of popups, they can be classified for example, according to their content: 

1. Opt-in e-mails
2. Videos
3. Registration forms
4. Images
5. etc

The Popup Maker plugin for WordPress helps developers to embed any kind of content inside a popup window, you can add conditions to filter the content to be presented. 

Keep reading to learn how to use this plugin!

Big Orange Heart has wrapped up the WordFest Live 2021 online event! It was 24-hours long with some pretty impressive numbers to show afterwards.

Keep reading to see the numbers!

Big Orange Heart is making waves in the online event arena with their upcoming WordFest Live 2021 for the global WordPress community! One of the standout things, besides having over 2000 attendees, is the offering of 48 sessions by 48 different speakers over a 24-hour period to accommodate a global audience.

Keep reading to learn more about the WordFest Live 2021 speakers and sessions.

Big Orange Heart has been working for more than nine months to bring a unique experience for people to gather at online. Opting for the term “Festival” over “Conference”, they are hoping to create an experience that reduces the cognitive load that some virtual events have required. They believe tech shouldn’t be the barrier to connect with a community, the WordPress community in this case.

Keep reading to learn more about WordFest Live 2021.

Custom fields have been around for more than a decade, and custom meta boxes nearly as long. Although, it can feel like they’re fading from usefulness in this age of Gutenberg, they still fulfill a very important role in information management in WordPress.

Providing an intuitive interface for your users is key to building something that people will actually want to use.

Let's take a look!

We are excited to be a sponsor for the online, WordFest Live event this year! And, we'll write more about the event in upcoming blog posts, but in this first post, we wanted to spread the word about Big Orange Heart, the non-profit organization behind this free, global WordPress event.

The proceeds from the event will go to help support the organization's delivery of their services - services that since the pandemic have become even more needed worldwide.

Millions of people around the world have lost their jobs in 2020, forced to stay at home, taking their knowledge and wisdom with them. In many cases, these people (maybe you?) could build an online course teaching the skills and knowledge you have. You can provide other people with skills they can use to better their own life, and make enough money yourself to not only weather 2020, but perhaps build a long term business.

To be clear, this isn’t working for someone else or being paid by an employer, but rather building something yourself leveraging what you already know. 

There are already hundreds of stories of people like Yoga instructors making courses and videos at home and selling access to them. Stylists, makeup artists, welders, cabinet makers; people from all walks of life can build their own website and teach what they already know.

This post will give you some real world examples of how people have built their own sites, and then show you what tools they used, so you can learn to build online courses with WordPress, teaching what you already know.

There are many tasks in WordPress that are extremely repetitive. Things that get coded over and over again by developers, even though the result is the same every time.

Custom Post Types are a perfect example. The code to make them is the same in the end, it’s the settings that change each time. Taxonomies and meta boxes are similar. This is why tools like GenerateWP exist. You can simply fill out a form and get a fully functioning code block.

Another way to manage this kind of code is with a library. A library is a piece of code that knows how to generate that code the same way every time, accepting only a few settings to build what you want.

Following the Custom Post Types thread, there’s an excellent PHP Library from John Blackbourn called Extended CPTs. If you include it with your plugin or theme, you can simply add a few lines of code and get a full Custom Post Type. It can also handle Taxonomies. Another great example is meta boxes. They can be quite complicated, but a library can standardize the code and help remove errors.

BUT!  There's a bit of a problem. 

Let's dive in and take a look at the problem and the solution.

You are online because you want to be found by people over the internet. That is an assumption. However, it applies to most cases. 

To be found over the internet, your site has (is almost obligated) to be registered on at least one search engine - Google being the most important one.

You have to create an XML sitemap for your WordPress site and submit it to Google. There is a Google XML SItemaps plugin which accomplishes this task in a very user-friendly way.

Keep reading to learn how to use this plugin!

Have you ever wanted to add floating action buttons to your WordPress site to boost conversion rates? Perhaps you’d like a call to action button for people to phone you or visit your social media sites.

If so, Buttonizer is a fantastic and super easy plugin to accomplish adding floating action buttons on your site.

Find out how!

It’s no secret that one of the reasons for the great success of WordPress is its extensibility via plugins.

WordPress.org hosts over 57,000 plugins alone.  You could get lost down the rabbit hole if you are not careful.

This post will highlight three great WordPress utility plugins that I’ve found to be extra useful.

Let's take a look.

One of the fastest ways your WordPress site will get hacked is if you don't pay attention. Well ,how do you know when stuff needs attention?

In this video, I want to talk to you about a really simple plugin called Update Notifier that helps to keep your WordPress site up to date.  This Is going to let you know when parts of your wordpress website need to be updated.  Now WordPress updates itself in minor releases but not major releases, and your plugins and themes don't automatically update, so you need to maintain those well. 

If you don't regularly log into your WordPress site, how do you know?

Let's find out!

Blog owners and owners of news sites like to keep their readers engaged. That is, they try to keep the user focused on the content, so they do not leave the site. 

Many blogs make use of an infinite scroll effect, to display posts and articles (custom post types) on their WordPress sites. This technique is used to generate clicks from the reader. It resembles the feed of all known social networks, maybe that is the reason why it is so popular. 

The Ajax Load More plugin for WordPress provides this functionality. You can then enhance it to your liking, through the configuration options available.

Keep reading to learn how to use this plugin!

When I started my career as a web developer, we would use a text editor to write HTML in local files, and then use File Transfer Protocol to copy them to a web server on the internet, and then refresh the browser and wait for the changes to be visible.

We’ve come a long way since then. These days it’s becoming more and more common to run a web server right on your own computer, and not upload anything until the entire site is complete. I recently did a video series for OSTraining, "An Introduction To Local WordPress Development With LocalWP", which not only sets up a local web server, but also helps get WordPress itself setup and configured, as well as providing a number of other tools. Here’s some of what I covered.

In this video, I'm going to show you how you to enforce strong passwords in your WordPress site.

Weak passwords are probably the number one way your site is gonna get hacked, and you've no control of that once you hand that account over to a user.

Well not anymore. Let's go.

in this episode, I'm gonna help you make creating your WordPress posts and pages go even faster. If you're like me, you love the new Gutenberg editor.  Being able to drag and drop all of those different elements into a post or a page is really really easy, but if I'm creating the same kind of content over and over again like a blog with the same layout - say an image, then a paragraph, then a heading,  another paragraph, and then maybe a quote or however you want to basically always create your posts or pages, all that dragging and dropping is really a hassle. 

I'm gonna show you two really simple ways to make that go a whole lot faster: 1) reusable blocks, or 2) a simple plugin.  

Let's go!

Long articles often discourage users from reading the whole text. As a matter of fact, we are all used to scanning over text instead of reading it, when navigating over the web. 

This generally happens because you are searching for some punctual information when you access the internet. 

A table of contents at the beginning of the article proves to be useful in these cases. The LuckyWP Table of Contents plugin for WordPress provides this type of functionality. 

Keep reading to learn how to use this plugin!

So you want to get creative, huh?  Whether you're a student, freelancer, or company looking to add a creative department, one thing is for sure - you are going to need software to get that creative genius out of your brain and onto the page or screen.  Here's the problem.  The most popular/obvious programs can be expensive, and often require one heck of a computer system to run them. So, the more you search and research - the more you might feel like your creative dreams have reached an impasse due to massive dollar signs. 

Don't dispair.  It's Open Source to the rescue!

Open Source means the software is 100% free for personal and commercial use!  That's right.  You can use these programs to create items just for you, to be sold, or given to your clients for their marketing purposes without any worry of legal issues over the software.  Also, with open source you can rest assured that your every move and use of the software is NOT being tracked and recorded as it is with paid-for programs. Bonus!

In this blog, we will give you a list of FREE, open-source software alternatives to get your creative dreams rolling again.

One of the most significant turning points in the history of WordPress is when version 3.0 came out in 2010. It included Custom Post Types, which allowed a developer to create entirely new kinds of content, manage how the administrative interface looked, and create unique templates for rendering the content on the front of the website.

A great, albeit simple, example of this is a Staff Listing. If you think about what a staff listing needs, it includes:

• A page listing all of the staff (or a page with pagination if there are too many)

• A single page for each staff person, with relevant data like phone number, office location, email address, etc.

• The ability to organize staff into groups, like departments, locations, etc.

A combination of a custom post type, meta fields, and custom taxonomies can create these pages, plus the administrative interface, in 30 minutes or less. Here’s how I did it.

People tend to express and understand things better by using pictures and images. Sharing pictures through social networks like Instagram has become an everyday part of our lives.

The Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed allows you to embed the feeds of your own Instagram accounts in your WordPress site. The plugin provides multiple display options. 

Keep reading to learn how to use this plugin!

Over the years, we've relied on RSS feeds for many different tasks.

Ten years ago, we used RSS feeds to create news sites, pulling in articles from multiple different sources.

Five years ago, we set up RSS feeds to automatically send our updates to social media.

Now we still use RSS feeds. In 2020, we use RSS for some of our software projects. Github provides RSS feeds for our plugin releases. We take the release information from Github and import it to our sites to show our changelogs.

Several years ago I suddenly got an automated message from my web host telling me that my account was using too many resources, and I would soon have to upgrade. This surprised me quite a lot, since the only thing on there was my blog, which was small, and I never wrote, so no-one ever visited.

I contacted support and asked them what had caused the error message to send. As it turns out, a bot was trying to break into my WordPress login form. It was simply trying usernames and passwords in a classic brute force attempt to guess a username and password combination. The problem was that it was trying over 100 times per second. This means that my login page was loading 200 times per second, once for the form, and once for the failed login notice. My server was melting.

Page builders, page builders … you’re all pretty. Can’t we all just get along?

Say you have limited web design experience, you need a website, and you’re on a budget. You’ve decided a WordPress page builder is right for you. Congratulations! You’ve just stepped into a hornet’s nest of "mine is better than yours because …"

Much like the tribe wars between Mac and PC devotees, page builders have their tribe wars too. People like what they like, and they’re comfortable staying with what they know. And let’s face it, learning something new is time-consuming, and sometimes hard, depending on your experience. But time moves on, technology advances, and what worked really well before might not work well anymore, and so you have to look for new solutions—better solutions. This is where I am.

You need a web site. You’re not a coder. You’ve dabbled in Wordpress enough to know that the blog you created years ago when it was all the rage doesn’t make you a webmaster.

Enter page builders. A page builder is not to be confused with a SaaS site (Software as a Service) like Wix or Square Space. SaaS sites are fine for the complete beginner, but you know how Wordpress works, and you know just enough about site building to be dangerous, but not enough to build without a little visual guidance. You’re creative, by golly, and you will not be constrained! Much.

If this is you, then page builders can be the answer.

Finding the best WordPress event calendar for event management can be a challenging task.

If you are a website owner and plan to create events for conferences, meetings, webinars, online classes and so on, there is a lot to do. Publishing the created event in an informative way, registering the participants, managing the different time zones, prices, and venues can all make everything much more complicated.

This is where you need the best WordPress event calendar possible. Whatever website you run, you need a modern and versatile event management system.