As you’ve most likely noticed over the past few weeks/months, there are a lot of brute force attack attempts happening pretty regularly. Bots are trying over and over again to login to just about any WordPress site, using any credentials they can come up with. While there are many ways to combat this, one of […]
Quick Tip: Checking for Filters and Actions
November 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Within WordPress, every once in a while you’ll need to see if a specific callback has been added to a specific action or filter. For instance, in my case, I needed to temporarily remove the callback that inserted the “Sharing” buttons via JetPack on some content I was re-purposing. In order to do that, I […]
Quick Tip: Genesis Easter Egg
September 13, 2013 by Leave a Comment
This has already been somewhat documented throughout the Web, but for those that don’t know about it, Genesis includes an “easter egg” (it’s documented as such in the code) that allows you to turn any static page into a post archive. To do so, edit the “Custom Fields” for the page. Add a new custom […]
Quick Tip: Assigning Admins Within Multisite
August 5, 2013 by 1 Comment
Anyone with a large multisite installation has probably been there before; when you set up a new site, you set yourself as the main administrator just to get through the setup process, but then you want to hand it off to someone else. You go to Settings -> General in the administration area and put […]
Quick Tip: Getting Feeds With More Than One Tag
August 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment
In most normal circumstances, when you want to pull a feed from your WordPress site, you’re simply looking to pull one of the following: The main feed (all posts) – http://www.example.edu/feed/ A specific category – http://www.example.edu/category/your-category/feed/ A specific tag – http://www.example.edu/tag/your-tag/feed/ A specific term in a custom taxonomy – http://www.example.edu/your-taxonomy/your-term/feed/
Tracking Events With Google Analytics
July 31, 2013 by 1 Comment
Recently, we have been having a lot of discussions about the usefulness of various areas of our website and site template. As part of that discussion, we naturally decided that we needed to gather some data before we could make any kinds of decisions. There were a handful of things we wanted to track throughout […]
WordPress, Accessibility and Higher Ed
July 5, 2013 by 1 Comment
Accessibility is a hot-button issue in higher ed. In many cases, the Web team is passionate about ensuring equal access for everyone, but no one knows quite how to go about it, and the administration isn’t willing to provide the necessary financial resources to make it a priority. At that point, the question becomes “What […]
Some Recommended WordPress Plugins
June 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Last year, Eric Juden, Jesse Lavery and I hosted an open discussion at HighEdWeb on using WordPress as a content management system. As part of that presentation, the three of us prepared a Google spreadsheet listing some of our favorite plugins. Keep in mind that this spreadsheet is currently almost a year old, but much […]
Quick Tip: Caching and Site Maps
June 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Earlier this week, I discovered that some of the XML site maps being generated by various WordPress installations were sending 404 headers, making them basically useless to Google. After some digging, I found that the culprit was my implementation of W3 Total Cache on those sites. Basically, I had W3 Total Cache configured in the […]
Quick Tip: Finding Shortcode Usage In Your Site
May 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment
We’ve all had those days when we’ve decided that we needed to remove an old plugin, but we need to figure out where that plugin might be in use before we can figure out how to solve the issues that were supposed to be solved by that old plugin. In a lot of cases, this […]