WordPress Tips & Resources

How to Add a Dropdown Indicator to a Genesis 2.0 Navigation Menu Automatically

October 24, 2013 Brian Bourn

Dropdown navigation menus, in previous versions of Genesis were handled with the Superfish script. This added a CSS class to the navigation menus that could then be used to create sub-menu indicators — like arrows. But now with Genesis 2.0, dropdown menus are handled solely with CSS — a decision that we at Bourn Creative are very happy with and prefer. The only issue with this new approach is that the CSS class used to add drop down indicators is no longer added automatically to the navigation menus.

Earlier this week WordPress 3.7 was released, and besides the much-hyped auto-update feature, WordPress now automatically adds a class to any navigation menu link that has a sub-menu. The new class is .menu-item-has-children. This simple change will make styling dropdown menus much easier for theme developers.

Customizing the Genesis 2.0 HTML5 Comment Form

September 9, 2013 Brian Bourn

Now that Genesis 2.0 has been shipped, we are building all of our custom child themes with the new HTML5 markup enabled — and absolutely love the new code base.

On a recent project the design specs called for a customized comment form. I have several code snippets saved for this occasion, but Genesis 2.0 child themes with HTML5 enabled use the native WordPress comment form, instead of the older comment form built into Genesis — so the code snippets I had no longer worked.

This is well documented within Genesis at /lib/structure/comments.php, which shows how older XHTML child themes will use the Genesis comment form for backwards compatibility, and child themes with HTML5 enabled will use the native WordPress comment form.

WordCamp Sessions Are Great, But The People Are Even Better

August 5, 2013 Jennifer Bourn

Every time I come back from a conference or event, someone asks — well, a lot of someones ask: “What was the best part?”

I could tell you that the WordCamp San Francisco (@WordCampSF) sessions I attended as a whole were awesome. And, I could share that the event was well planned, well staffed, and well put together. Or maybe I could fill you in on the coffee, soft drinks, water, lunches, party food, libations, desserts, and free t-shirts that were included for the nominal event fee of only $40.

But honestly, the BEST part of WordCamp San Francisco wasn’t any of those things. It was the people.

Except for ONE really rude guy who was seriously not very nice (there’s always one isn’t there?), everyone I met — from advanced developers to new users — was welcoming, supportive, and nice.

As I shared in my post WordCamps: A Rising Tide Lifts All WordPress Websites, until now I had left the WordCamping to Brian. My perception was that it was only for developers, and that if you weren’t a developer you’d be an outcast — like high school (and sometimes Twitter) with the cool kids and the rest of the community. I won’t lie, there is still some of that happening — some people who act like they can’t be bothered to talk to you because they are so much more important. But these people, speaking from my experience, were the extreme minority.

WordCamps: A Rising Tide Lifts All WordPress Websites

August 1, 2013 Jennifer Bourn

Brian has been attending WordPress WordCamps around the country for a couple of years now, but I just attended my very first WordCamp this past weekend in San Francisco. A WordCamp is a mini conference or workshop all about WordPress with tracks and sessions appropriate for advanced developers, mid-level consultants. And newbie beginners alike.

What blew my mind is that the WordCamp San Francisco attendees were such a diverse mix of designers, developers, business owners, bloggers, employees, freelancers, students, consultants, and more.

You see, I left the WordCamps to Brian to attend because I thought I didn’t belong. I thought that because I am not a skilled developer and can’t talk code off the top of my head, that I would be out of place. But Brian kept telling me that I had to experience a WordCamp for myself to understand what it was about. So we bought tickets for WordCamp SanFrancisco and planned a mini vacation around it.

My perceptions about what a WordCamp was were shattered.

Recap: WordCamp San Francisco 2013, State of The Word by Matt Mullenweg

July 30, 2013 Jennifer Bourn

This past weekend, I attended my first WordCamp — and I have a lot I want to share with you about the experience and the WordPress community, which I’ll do over the next few blog posts.

I want to start with a recap of the WordCamp San Francisco talk I was most looking forward — The State of the Word 2013 by Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress (with Mike Little) and The State of the Word Q&A.

This was the first time I’ve seen him speak and I found Matt (@photomatt) to be professional, charismatic, funny, personal, humble, and engaged with the people who work with it and use it every day. With every word he spoke, he emanated passion for WordPress and the community that surrounds and supports the free open-source software he created 10 years ago. He called out and praised contributors, leaders, and volunteers by name, thanked everyone he could, and expressed gratitude for every member of the community.

WordPress is where it is today because of the people — The People That Attend WordCamps — who donate and volunteer their time to work on it, to constantly improve it, to grow it, to teach others about it…

5 Must Have WordPress Plugins We Use On Every Site

February 22, 2013 Brian Bourn

At Bourn Creative we have a stable of various paid and free WordPress plugins that we regularly use on our clients’ sites, depending on needed website functionality. Out of our collection of trusted WordPress plugins, there are five must have plugins that we use on pretty much every custom WordPress site we build — and this past week I shared these five plugins in a lighting talk I gave at the Sacramento WordPress Meetup.

WordPress Plugin #1: Akismet

Why We Recommend the Akismet WordPress Plugin:

Created, managed, and owned by Automattic
Save time with simple comment spam protection
Low monthly fee (still free for personal bloggers)
Download Akismet

WordPress 3.5 “Elvin” Released

December 12, 2012 Jennifer Bourn

WordPress 3.5 was just released and the biggest change that most WordPress website owners will notice is the dramatically changed media center. The media uploader has been completely rebuilt and now makes many tasks much simpler, including creating and managing new galleries.

Here’s a video overview from the WordPress.org blog highlighting 3.5:

What Your “WordPress Consultant” Isn’t Telling You (About WordPress)

November 12, 2012 Jennifer Bourn

So I’ve got a pet peeve! I get irritated when people who need help turn to consultants — supposed experts — for help and are misled or fed incorrect or outdated information simply because the consultant doesn’t know the answer and they don’t want to admit it.

This drives me especially CRAZY in the WordPress world. Lies, myths, untruths, and false information about WordPress is being fed to business owners left and right — and it’s perpetuating false beliefs.

Let me explain. I LOVE WordPress — all of our sites are built for WordPress and I love the fact that it allows our clients to have total control over their websites. But this ability comes at a price. Now anyone can open a hosting account, install a theme, and plop in a custom header can call themselves a WordPress web designer or WordPress consultant. There are even some calling themselves WordPress developers that can’t even read PHP!

Why? Because WordPress is a “Hot Topic” for entrepreneurs who want to start online businesses. And for some, these so-called “Hot Topics” mean easy and fast cash.

How to Customize The WordPress Login Screen With Your Own Logo

November 9, 2012 Brian Bourn

By default, every WordPress login screen looks exactly the same and most of the time that is perfectly fine, but there are cases where customizing the login screen with your logo should be considered.

Recently I created a membership option on a client’s WordPress site using the premium plugin WishList Member. WishList provides options for adding login forms to pages and widgets, but depending on your site’s design and/or front-end strategy, you may not have the ability or want to add a login form to a page or widget. On a different client membership site, we added a custom menu link “Login” that took you to the standard WordPress login screen.

Also, with Wishlist, when a sign in error or lost password request occurs, you are taken to the default WordPress login screen which could possibly confuse your site members.

Soliloquy Slider WordPress Plugin Review

November 5, 2012 Brian Bourn

Soliloquy is a premium slider plugin for WordPress offering ease of use and superior performance. We bought the unlimited developer license and have since used the Soliloquy Premium WordPress Slider Plugin on several client sites and love it.

On multiple sites we’re currently working on — and the new www.fabulousafter40.com that we just took live — we needed the ability to have multiple sliders with different settings on the same site, and to create both image sliders and video sliders (See screenshot at end of article). Unlike many free slider plugins, Soliloquy handled multiple sliders on a single WordPress site with ease, and it is super easy for our clients to use and update.

3 WordPress Security Tips To Help Keep Your Site Safe

October 1, 2012 Brian Bourn

Recently I attended WordCamp Chicago (basically summercamp for WordPress nerds like me), and one of the sessions I attended was titled “WordPress Security: The Nitty Gritty” by Tony Perez of Sucuri Security. Tony’s presentation supported the title and reinforced some web security basics that anyone with a WordPress website can implement in under an hour.

Back Up First!

Like all major changes performed on a WordPress site, be sure to completely backup your files and database before proceeding with the following basic security tips:

How to Easily Add a User-Friendly FAQ Page to Your WordPress Site

September 25, 2012 Brian Bourn

A while back I came across the plugin WordPress FAQ Manager by a very talented developer I follow and heard speak at a WordCamp. I downloaded the plugin recently and spent some time testing it, trying different options, and adding my own custom CSS to change the default appearance.

After reviewing it thoroughly, I like how it works so much that we are using it on several client projects.

WordPress FAQ Manager is a WordPress plugin that uses custom post types and taxonomies to manage an FAQ section (or multiple) for your website and utilizes a simple shortcode for displaying them on a page or post. Once the plugin is installed and activated, you will see the new custom post type available in your dashboard menu. Here you can easily create and manage all of your FAQ lists. Plus, because it uses custom post types, creating the frequently asked question and answer lists is as easy as publishing a blog post, or even easier!

11 Ways to Screw Up Your WordPress Site

September 12, 2012 Jennifer Bourn

As the most widely used content management system on the web, WordPress is a fairly simple, easy to use platform. WordPress allows website owners to make most website content changes and updates without having to learn how to code HTML.

We LOVE the fact that all of our clients can update their own websites and add new pages and content themselves whenever they want — that’s why we build all of our custom websites on the WordPress platform. But as easy as WordPress is to use, you can still screw up your site big time if you aren’t careful!

You see, WordPress gives you access to all areas of your site — content, code, functions, design files — and some of them you just shouldn’t mess with unless you really know what you’re doing.

How to Use the WordPress Next Page Tag to Manage Long Content

August 22, 2012 Brian Bourn

At Bourn Creative we believe that the design and layout of your content is equally as important as the visual look and structure of your WordPress templates. Design is more than how something looks; it is also how a visitor to your site “moves” through your site and are naturally guided to your intended action.

One small part of this design principle is choosing the right way to manage long content, and one way we accomplish this is by using the WordPress “Next Page” tag to break long content into sections that are more easily consumed. The next page tag should not be confused with the WordPress “More” tag used on blog posts to limit the content on blog index pages. Read this article on how to use the WordPress more tag to learn about the differences.

On a recently completed custom WordPress theme, our client had extensive content that was important information to have on one page URL instead of broken over several pages and/or subpages. We decided this strategy based on SEO and site visitor usability. Without the Next Page tag, the content would have created one extremely long page that would seem to endlessly scroll and slow to load.

High Performance WordPress Hosting | WP Engine Review

August 12, 2012 Brian Bourn

Imagine this: Your WordPress website loads extremely fast. It is completely backed up daily and is guaranteed against getting hacked. When there is a WordPress upgrade, your site is updated automatically. You have a magic button to push if anything goes wrong on your site that restores it to normal with one single click — just like Time Machine on a Mac.

Sound like a nerd fairy tale? Yes, but thankfully it’s a real-life fairy tale, and it’s possible for YOU with the managed WordPress hosting company WP Engine.

Quick Side Note: WP Engine is an avid sponsor of WordCamps across the country, supporting the WordPress community and contributing to the success of WordPress with business owners just like you. I’ve had a chance to speak with some team members at WordCamps, and while we really like their approach to WordPress hosting, we also really like the people behind it too — that’s why we are also a proud affiliate.

WP Engine specializes in high performance WordPress hosting.

They have custom built and tuned their servers specifically to achieve performance, scalability, and security for WordPress powered websites. Over the last several months we have launched many of our clients’ new custom WordPress sites on WP Engine and are quite happy with the results.

Organize Your WordPress Pages Dashboard With Simple Page Ordering

June 3, 2012 Brian Bourn

At the last WordCamp I attended there was a great session all about customizing the WordPress backend to make managing a WordPress site easier. This was my favorite session from the entire three days, and we are continually using ideas I learned at the event to improve the usability of the WordPress backend for our clients.

One thing that is less than an optimal in the WordPress backend is managing your pages within the Dashboard. By default WordPress pages are sorted alphabetically, unless you control the ordering using Menu Order in the Page Attributes box within the page editor. It works, but can a be a little confusing.

Keeping the WordPress pages organized in the Dashboard using menu order is what we used to do until we discovered the WordPress plugin, Simple Page Ordering. The speaker at WordCamp Phoenix whose session I was so found of, works for the company who wrote and published this plugin.

WordPress Security Starts With You! WordPress Security Release Update This Week

May 26, 2012 Brian Bourn

“WordPress Security Starts With You!” This is a comment I tell every client during our WordPress training sessions and can’t overemphasize how important this is in maintaining a WordPress website. I tell our clients the following every time:

Ensure that your home/office network uses secure passwords and WiFi is encrypted.
Make sure that your operating system, all software, and browsers are up to date.
Maintain backups of your website and always update WordPress & plugins.
Always use strong passwords and never use one password for everything.

My instructions have been directly reinforced this week by two events within the WordPress and online world.

WordPress Resources No Website Owner Should Be Without

May 17, 2012 Jennifer Bourn

We LOVE WordPress, so much so that all of our websites are built using WordPress at the foundation — more specifically all of the sites we build are custom child themes for the Genesis framework.

Needless to say and we spend a lot of time researching, training, reading, testing, watching, asking, tweaking, and learning all about it so we can answer your questions and provide you with all the information we find! While we’re here to answer your questions, we also know there are an amazing number of incredibly smart WordPress experts that offer free training and educational materials.

Here’s a list of some awesome WordPress resources you may want to check out:

How to Automatically Publish Your WordPress Posts to Twitter Without a Plugin

February 24, 2012 Brian Bourn

In my last post I showed you how to add the official Twitter Widget to your website without a plugin. This post is a follow up to show you how to automatically publish new blog posts to your Twitter account; also without a plugin. The secret to this one is using one of Google’s free services — FeedBurner.

Here’s how to set it up so your blog posts are automatically published on Twitter using Feedburner:

How to Add the Official Twitter Widget to Your Website

February 18, 2012 Brian Bourn

**Updated June 15, 2013**

This post has been updated to reflect the recent Twitter API changes that has stopped the previous code from working. The updated tutorial below will get you back on track!

When building custom WordPress websites and custom WordPress themes for our clients, we are often asked to integrate their Twitter feed into the website sidebar. Many personal brands like to display their Twitter feed in the sidebar to bring more dynamic content into their site, promote their Twitter feed and get new followers, and show the value they provide with their tweets.

We love WordPress plugins, but I prefer to keep them to a minimum when simple code is available, so I’m happy to report that adding Twitter to your website can be accomplished quickly without using a WordPress plugin by instead using the official Twitter widget. The Twitter widget can also be used non-WordPress sites. Only the final implementation on your website will be different.

3 Awesome Uses For The Simple 301 Redirects WordPress Plugin

February 9, 2012 Brian Bourn

Often when designing and building custom WordPress sites for clients we are converting an existing website from HTML, PHP, or another CMS to WordPress. This usually always results in the URLs or permalinks changing from something like yourdomain.com/about.html to yourdomain.com/about/.

If redirects are not done after the new WordPress site is live, any old links from emails, search engine results, or browser bookmarks that are requested will usually send someone to an error page. With the WordPress plugin Simple 301 Redirects, you can easily mitigate the changed URLs/permalinks on your new WordPress site. This is good for your website visitors and for search engines.

The plugin gets its name from the http header status code 301 (moved permanently). A 301 code basically tells search engines, “Hey there Googlebot, this page no longer exists but you can find the new page here. Please update your index and preserve my existing page rank. Thanks, your BFF.”

Keep Visitors On Your WordPress Site Longer With YARPP

February 3, 2012 Brian Bourn

YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) for WordPress is used to show a list of related content at the end of a blog post or in a widget. Out of the box it simply displays a list of related posts after your main content, yet the plugin can be highly customized through its own settings and the use of custom templates.

We like adding related posts at the end of blog posts to entice readers to consume more content as a step in our conversion funnel. We have found through studying our stats in Google Analytics that conversions on our site (like opt-ins, affiliate clicks, etc) are split among visits with one page view and visits with multiple page views. In simple terms, less than half of our visitors opt-in on the first page they land on. The rest read more content first. Displaying related content is an easy way to give visitors what they want.

YARPP can be used without any configuring, but I don’t recommend it. The defaults are not the prettiest and with a few simple changes, the display of your related posts can be greatly improved. Here is a step by step list for our standard configuration of YARPP (after the plugin has been installed and activated):

WordPress Plugins for the Genesis Framework by StudioPress

December 29, 2011 Brian Bourn

***Updated September 30, 2012***

We develop all of our custom WordPress projects exclusively on top of the Genesis Framework by StudioPress, and there a few Genesis-exclusive WordPress plugins we use when creating our custom themes.

For non-Genesis specific plugins, check out our list of our favorite top free WordPress plugins we use that are compatible with most WordPress themes.

Combine the plugins from both lists that you need, along with a Genesis based theme, and you can create a very powerful WordPress site for your business.

WordCamp Las Vegas 2011: 48 Hours of Debauchery and WordPress

December 28, 2011 Brian Bourn

Recently I flew into Las Vegas for 48 hours of nothing but debauchery and open source geekery for WordCamp. (WordPress summer camp for nerds like me). Just kidding on the debauchery; I am getting way too old for that and was in bed by 11 both nights.

The Hard Rock Hotel graciously gave all WordCamp attendees a fabulous room rate, which even after I upgraded to get a better view, still wound up to be less than the cost of my flight. Thanks to the Las Vegas WordCamp organizers for securing this for everyone. This was my first WordCamp, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I regularly watch the content sessions from other WordCamps on http://wordpress.tv, but I was looking forward to meeting and hanging out with other WordPress fans like myself.