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Enable/disable comments on all pages or posts at once
Have you ever wanted to turn on comments for all your pages at once? Or perhaps managing comments is too much of a pain, so you decide you want to disable comments for all of your WordPress blog posts easily. Change Posts Individually The most obvious way is, when editing a page or post, to scroll down to the “Discussion” section and check or uncheck the “Allow comments” box. Don’t see the “discussion” section on the page/post edit screen? At the top of the screen on the right side there is a “Screen Options” button. Click it and check the box for “Discussion” to make those settings visible. Change a Group...
Read MoreWhy You Should Never Use Flash for Magazines and Newsletters
PDF is the natural format for material, such as magazines and newsletters, with static content and a fixed page-by-page design. However, there have been several times I notice magazines will show their content on the website using a special Flash plugin. This is a bad, bad idea, for many reasons: Flash is not supported on iOS devices, and is being dropped from Android devices. It’s becoming less popular everywhere. PDF, on the other hand, can be opened on any platform; even smartphone users have a choice of apps for how they want to view them. PDFs are more easily shareable. If one person likes your sample, that person can share it with friends, who can open it...
Read MoreSign Paperwork on your Android or iPhone
Adobe Reader now has eSignature capability. This applies to their desktop program and mobile apps, but the real point is this: now on your tablet or smartphone you can mark up a document. You can add comments, draw over it, highlight or underline or strikethrough text, or sign it. After you add text markup, you can move what you added, change the color, or delete markup you added. It’s saved as you add each signature/drawing/etc., so you may want to make a copy of the file before you open it in Reader. What are the possibilities for this tool? Most of them seem geared for taking notes—highlighting text when studying a document, for example—but there are...
Read MorebbPress causes white screen on website
If you’ve tried to install bbPress and buddyPress on the same website, possibly experimenting with forum alternatives, you may run into some strange behavior. This can occur even if one of the plugins is deactivated or uninstalled. The strangest I saw as the website being completely blank—a white screen. The admin console worked fine, but the website proper did not, and even though display_errors in php.ini was set to “On,” no error messages were displaying. Just a white screen. If I deactivated the bbPress plugin, the problem disappeared. Apparently bbPress 2.0 can have some conflicts with buddyPress. Uninstalling the plugin isn’t enough; a...
Read MoreHow to Use the New Facebook Timeline for Your Fan Page
Facebook is a beautiful place to promote your business. Unless you don’t like change or loss of control; in that case, you’re in trouble. Once again Facebook has changed, affecting fan pages for brands, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs and other organizations. The new Timeline format is designed to showcase your fan page in a visually appealing way, giving you more images to customize to represent yourself and your brand. More than that, it can even show historical information! See the Subway page for a great example of how to use the new Timeline features… you can select entries in the timeline from as far back as the 1960s. I couldn’t phrase the...
Read MoreExclude a Page From Search
In some themes, you may have special pages or posts that only appear in a particular location in the theme—perhaps a blurb on the home page, for example. You may be surprised to see this page appear when people search the posts of your site! There are two main ways to hide specific posts from searches: you can modify the PHP code for your theme, or use a plugin. Write Code to Remove Pages From Search Results WPMods has an excellent tutorial on excluding posts and pages from search. You can see the full explanation on their site, but I’ll copy and paste the relevant code here for those who are comfortable customizing PHP code. Why hard-code it instead of...
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