Plugins
bbPress 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 MoreWhen to Use a WordPress Plugin and When Not To
WordPress Plugins are immensely useful. The fact that WordPress has so many plugins is one of the reasons I, as a web designer, favor WordPress for small business websites. However, it’s important to be aware that plugins come with their own share of problems. Let’s examine the advantages and disadvantages; sometimes it’s better to do without, or to actually hard-code a fix or find another approach instead of using a solution. Advantages of Plugins They’re very easy to install They’re the most user-friendly; as a web designer, I like to set up plugins so the client can easily turn it off or change the settings. Someone else is maintaining...
Read MoreYouTube Sidebar Widget
Plugin Purpose The YouTube Sidebar Widget is a simple tool, but works great for showing a list of videos from a YouTube user or a playlist. Why would you want to do that? Most commonly, to show a list of videos representing your business on your website. Advantages I prefer it to plugins such as Smart YouTube and TubePress for these reasons: YouTube Sidebar Widget works with Conditional Widgets, which is useful if you want to show different lists of videos on different pages. This widget is, I feel, more intuitive for clients. They can just rearrange the playlist in their YouTube account and have their website reflect the changes instead of having to copy URLs over to...
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