Working on Your WordPress Site Behind The Curtains

A lot of times I hear people asking how to best approach fiddling around with certain design elements in their current theme without their visitors seeing any mistakes they make. A different version of the same question is about wanting to implement a complete new design and layout and optimize it to your liking. Also without you bothering your regular visitors. There is a very simple solution for that that requires a only a few simple steps.

Just a Few Steps

The only thing you need to do for this to work is installing the Theme Test Drive. There is a different way of seeing how your site would look like in a new a new theme, by the way. [Read more...]

Adding Pages to Your RSS Feed in WordPress

RSSWe all like to be kept up-to-date on our favorite WordPress sites. The best way to do so is to subscribe to the RSS feed. Unless you’re using a plugin such as Feedsmith which redirects all your feeds to your Feedburner feed, you have a lot of options to subscribe to. You have the general site feed, of course, but also the comments feed and the category feeds. But.. what you don’t have is a feed for pages should you as a company decide to only use WordPress with static pages and not with a blog.

Now a while back this would’ve not been the most interesting problem in need of a solution, but since WordPress is being used as CMS more and more and thus only using static pages, a proper solution is in need. [Read more...]

How To: Create More Flexible Widgets

WordPressThis is not going to be one of those posts about how to widgetize your sidebar because frankly, if by now you still are not using a theme with widgetized aeras you need start looking for one. This post is about how to use those widget area’s in the smartest way possible.

When I say sidebars, I don’t necessarily mean sidebars. Widget areas are of course not limited to the visual sidebars in a theme. Most themes have one or two sidebars and a matching 1 or two widget areas, but some themes have just two sidebars, but a total of 13 widget area’s.

The problem, even with two sidebars, is that you have very little control over which widget goes on what page or post.. or category or archive even. [Read more...]

In Need for Absolute Privacy for WordPress?

Looking for Privacy?You would think that the owner of every single WordPress site out there would want as many visitors as possible, but you’d be wrong.
There are plenty of reasons why you would want to keep a blog as private as possible. Perhaps you’re using it as an project site in conjunction with the awesome P2 theme and you only want the project members seeing the posts and responding or perhaps you have just set up a site for you newly born and you want to share those early updates with just your family. [Read more...]