Web Design
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 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 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...
Read MoreWhy are There Spaces In Front of my Post Title?
Have you ever noticed your site title looks like this? ” My Post | My Website” instead of “My Post | My Website” Somewhere in the PHP code of your website (which you can find under Appearance > Editor), you will likely find calls to the wp_title() function. A sample call may look like this: That results in showing the blog title with a separator (the ‘|’ character) to the right of the title… with a space before and after. In this case, the code is assuming that your blog name would come after that. The problem is when you make a call like this: That has no separator character (perhaps the site only shows the post title, or a...
Read MoreA Better Way to Stop IFrames From Covering Site Elements
Not long ago I discussed the solution I had painstakingly found to the problem of drop-down menus hiding behind YouTube videos. Less than two weeks later, esteve posted a link in the comments to a better solution to Fix YouTube iFrame Overlay and Z-Index Issues. Interestingly enough, I notice that the original problem appears in Internet Explorer 9 and Google Chrome 12, but not Firefox 5. I have tested the following solution successfully in all three browsers. Simply take the normal YouTube embed code, for example: <iframe width="280" height="189" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/GDFUdMvacI0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Then add...
Read MoreHow Do I Tell if my Website is Fast Enough?
Measuring website speed is important for any web designer. Google uses website loading speed to rank webpages, although they state “fewer than 1% of search engine queries are affected.” Loading times matter. Even small differences in load times can cause users to leave your site, or to not spend as much time on your site enjoying your content as they might otherwise. A small difference for people with high-speed connections can be quite profound for people with slower connections. Figuring out how fast your website is is actually more difficult than you might expect! There are many wonderful tools out there; some give you a scorecard with suggestions of what...
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