UI Design Tools: Future Directions Now
There is a big battle brewing between WordPress’s fast evolving Gutenberg SiteBuilder and the top WordPress Pagebuilders. But the battle extends to 3rd party WebBuilder tools like SquareSpace, Wix, Weebly. And just for good measure, add in the JavaScript IDEs like free Mobirise and premium Bootstrap Studio. UI Tool Glossary PageBuilder – Frontend Page/Post only IDEs […]
Gutenberg 1.9 Update: Two Big Promises
Despite WordCamp.US having only 4 of 52 sessions devoted to Gutenberg, the impact of the Gutenberg editor went well beyond Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word presentation. There has been a number of comments post WordCamp.US about Gutenberg’s impact on the broad WordPress Ecosystem. But there also has been two updates to Gutenberg 1.8 and […]
CSI Members’ Websites: Insights Into Small Business Web Development
CSI-Centre for Social Innovation provides co-working space and collaboration tools for Toronto small businesses and non-profits. As of mid-August 2017 CSI had 517 member websites of which 35% are small businesses, 55% are non-profits, and 10% are government or special offices. Given the composition of its members, CSI provides an excellent opportunity to study small business […]
CSI Best Website: GreenMajority.ca
GreenMajority.ca is an example of excellence in small business, non-profit websites at Toronto’s CSI- Centre for Social Innovation. Here is is a screenshot of GreenMajority.ca : What makes CSI-Centre for Social Innovation interesting is that it supplies co-working space and collaboration tools for small businesses [about 35% of members] and non-profit organizations [about 55% of […]
Gutenberg will be THE WordPress Visual Editor
Late October 2017 the latest 1.6.1 release of Gutenberg, the new WP Visual Editor => PageBuilder => SiteBuilder being created by Automattic for WordPress, appeared in the WordPress plugin library. This is about 8 weeks from the previous upgrade and there are clearly many new improvements. But also Gutenberg has a long way to go […]
JavaScript Arriving in WordPress Stealthily
With Calypso and Gutenberg, clearly JavaScript is arriving onto WordPress in a big way. Here are seven reasons why: Gutenberg is not just the new Visual Editor but is the “official” WordPress PageBuilder; But Gutenberg goes beyond page building and is a complete Web canvas builder – header, content, footer, sidebar plus any popups and […]
Scanning Online for WordPress Security Flaws
WordPress Security flaws have been a growing risk to developers and owners alike over the past 3-4 years. As if on cue, a Halloween 2017 security surprise just added a new level of concern about WordPress hacking vulnerabilities. So being able to scan online WordPress websites for security safety has become more important for developers […]
WordPress JavaScript Reactions
WordPress Gutenberg and Calypso are back in the tech news now that CIC Matt Mullenweg has rejected React.js as the core JavaScript library for WordPress. The issue is the Patent Clause in Facebook’s licensing which is less than the Open Source Software’s adherence to unencumbered usage standards as in MIT’s license. So Matt felt compelled by some […]
Post Grid Plugins
Grids are vital UI elements in medium to large scale websites. Think of websites with scores if not hundreds of products or properties or simply posts. Grids go well beyond tabular layouts or even accordion lists. Grids are able to show off all items in varying sorted order and subject to category and/or filters. The […]
WordPress Image Display Using CSS Grid
CSS Grid has taken off in the past year with the arrival of a complete implementation of the standard working in all 5 major browsers. CSS Grid is easy to learn and understand for 3 reasons. First, one can accomplish a lot with just a liitle code. Second, CSS users familiar with Flex layout will find the […]
Gutenberg Page Builder: A September UI Autopsy
Matt Mullenweg has written a detailed post on Gutenberg, the upcoming WordPress PageBuilder plugin. Within the post is a critical commitment by Matt: WordPress has always been about websites, but it’s not just about websites. It’s about freedom, about possibility, and about carving out your own livelihood, whether it’s by making a living through your […]
Elementor: Top WordPress PageBuilder
In the past three years WordPress 3rd party developers have produced some of the best Post and PageBuilders available. And even more remarkable, two of the top ranked Pagebuilders are FREE plugins – Site Origin PageBuilder and Elementor. The OpenSourcery will look at these two largely free Pagebuilders [both tools now have a small set […]
CiviCRM: CMS Integration Example
I discovered CiviCRM this past Tuesday at The Social Impact Meetup at CSI [The Centre for Social Innnovation]. What makes CiviCRM compelling is that it is a complete Customer Relationship Management system integrated well with some of the most popular CMS software – Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. CMS systems have taken off in the past […]
The Gutenberg Post
Here is our Gutenberg Post transferred to theOpensourcery.com See the complete Gutenberg preview and impact analysis here. Below the line is our first post using Gutenberg – note we copied for test purposes the first 3 paragraphs of the WPTavern review of Gutenberg: Gutenberg has been in development for six months and is ready for […]
SquareSpace vs WordPress : A Second Look
A review of SquareSpace vs WordPress in the WPMUDev blog raises the question of whether web development reviews are becoming as partisan as politics. Jenni McKinnon in writing 27 Reasons Why WordPress Crushes Squarespace Every Time has committed to print a yuge number of Trumpian fallacies which knocks the review way off balance. WordPress.com vs WordPress.org Distinction […]
How Much Does a WordPress Website Cost?
Codeable has an interesting infographic about the pricing for building a new WordPress Business website with 6 pages and a blog as shown below. Lets look at some of the key assumptions being made by Codeable about developing this Business Website. First and foremost, Codeable does not define the nature of the 6 pages nor does […]
WordPress Frustration: Plugins Suddenly Failing
Two of the key selling points for WordPress Development is “No coding Required” for most of its Themes and Plugins and “there is a plugin for that” based on its huge 45,000+ library of plugins. But the downside of WordPress can be when when plugins which you have relied on suddenly fail to perform. Such […]
Web PageBuilders Are Essential Tools
How PageBuilder Tools have become essential in web development The combination of no-coding-required UI/UX PageBuilding features plus comparative operational ease of use has made WordPress.org [but curiously not WordPress.com] the best Web design environment for a broad range of business and IT systems. As a result WordPress has risen to a leading Market Share position […]
WIDDE – WordPress Interactive Design/Development Environs
The Emergence of WPIDE-WordPress Interactive Design/Development Environs How WordPress UI Design Caught up with SquareSpace, Wix, Weebly, etc. As a WordPress developer for the past 8 years I have had to contend with the fact that WordPress UI tools have had to play catchup with the interactive, drag & drop and True WYSIWYG capabilities available from […]
Online Website Speed Testing Tools
Speed of website load and operation has been recognized as a very desirable trait for your website. Numerous Studies show that the faster a website responds the lower the boumce rate and the higher the conversions to sales. See the infographics here. Thus it should not be a surprise that faster website speed results in higher […]
NextGen Pro WordPress Gallery Plugin
WordPress Gallery Plugins over the past 3-4 year have become feature rich allowing display of images in thumbnail, masonry , mosaic and justified grid styles with all sorts of added display options. The latest best of breed plugins are delivering more wide ranging features as they attempt to grab acceptance in the image gallery market. […]
Wallace Theme: REST API and Angular 2
Wallace Theme has been featured in WP Tavern as an Angular 2 JS based driven theme with use of the latest REST API. Given the move to the Facebook React JavaScript framework, this is a major implementation alternative touted for its great speed. And if you go to the Wallace Demo website or to our […]
Mobirise JavaScript Website Developer
The last 4-5 years have seen the rise of open, free and popular CSS+HTML5+JS frameworks like Bootstrap, Foundation Zurb and Ink for creating mobile responsive apps for a variety of SPA-Single Page Applications to larger multi-page websites. It should not be a surprise that each of these free frameworks have generated a number of libraries […]
Putting W3CSS into Your WordPress Pages
W3Schools W3CSS is a robust CSS Framework for use in WordPress The following examples show some of the advantages of having a mobile/responsive CSS Framework available to your WP editing. It is like having BootStrap or Foundation Zurb at your disposal. The styling in W3CSS is easy to learn especially if you have used either […]
WordPress 4.6 Review
Its rare that one gets to use a new feature in a WordPress release – but WP4.6 was different. First, I was having problems with a clients site because they wanted their own default fonts to be used in the Admin and outputted pages and posts. With 4.6 they now get that. Even better for […]
WP Simple Booking Calendar
Calendar plugins are vital to a number of scheduling and booking applications. But the problem is that like in the case of Slider and PageBuilder plugins, most of the free calendar plugins have a barebones set of features. Users have to buy a premium plugin to handle their most common use cases: Need for multiple […]
Smart Slider 3: Best New Free WordPress Slider
For the past year I have been recommending Cyclone Slider 2 as the best free WordPress Slider. But that has changed with the free version of Smart Slider 3 contending for the top spot of free WordPress sliders. As we shall see the two sliders are evenly matched so slight differences in features, ease of use, and […]
Using Google Fonts in WordPress
The previous post describes the many advantages of using Google Fonts on your website. This post will look at some of the ways of using Google Fonts in WordPress. First, free access to Google fonts is straight forward. Just visit the Google Fonts website, choose one or more fonts and then get the code to access those fonts […]
CSS Hero and Site Origins CSS Editor:Update
At the start of this year, theOpensourcery did a review of twoWordPress CSS Editor plugins that help WP developers make CSS corrections more effectively. Since then there have been notable improvements to the two plugins -especially CSSHero 2.0.. Since both plugins will be a key part of our upcoming May 7 free presentation on WordPress with CSS […]
A Simple WordPress FAQs/Help System
jQuery AutoComplete is already useful for Bootstrap, Foundation and Ink JavaScript frameworks. But I have found a Search Autocomplete WordPress plugin when combined with the Relevanssi Search WordPress plugin and Help pages which makes for a very good FAQ system for your websites. So lets review an outline of how this FAQ system works. First, install Search […]
WordPress Migration Tools
WordPress has good news and bad on WP Migration. WordPress has always had a good set of migration tools; particularly when importing or creating a brand newsite from scratch. This is the good news. But even in the case of imports users have to be cautious: WordPress Importer has 67 low 1-rating reviews and with reason. […]
How Pagelines Caught My Attention
And how JavaScript is becoming main language for WordPress Development Pagelines in 2012 was part of that Wave of WordPress Page Building software that has taken over the WordPress theme market. Theme providers now have a single all-purpose Builder+Theme Designer like The 7, Divi, or X-Theme. Or like Headway and Ithemes, the vendors support their themes/templates with very […]
Advanced Page Manager WP Plugin
A Plugin for Managing Pages and Menus Easily How many times have you had a project in which you have to build dozens of pages and then change those pages throughout the year on a regular Spring , Summer, Fall, Winter cycle. In effect you have almost 4 times the number of pages to manage. […]
Agile, Scrum and WordPress
Agile Methods using the Scrum Process seem built for WordPress Development Agile methods have a manifesto and development methodology which is gaining traction not just in software development but broader project planning. Agile methods are geared to handling the rapid change required in modern project planning but also to accomodate fast changing tools and methods […]
WordPress Edit Annoyances
WordPress Editor has a number of annoyances. This is strange given that that a key strength of WordPress has been its Editor for ease of use and dual modes. Users for a long time have had a choice of working with the WYSIWYG Visual Editor or the HTML-based Text Editor. Many used both. But over the […]
Background Pattern Generator
Greg Priday and his band of mighty WordPress coders has done it again. From their perch in CapeTown South Africa, Site Origins has made big waves in the world of WordPress plugins and themes. But now Greg and company has launched a Background Pattern Generator app that does this novel task in the SiteOrigin style, […]
Best Free Image Gallery Plugin for WordPress
WordPress has left a tremendous gap in support of images and galleries. First, the Media Library is still woefully poor for creating and managing galleries and their various tagged and labelled assets. Nextgen Gallery is a much better and free alternative for managing your media iwhen you have dozens of galleries and albums with hundreds […]
Calypso: New WordPress Music
At a recent WordPress Meetup, convener Brent Kobayashi went around the table and greeted everyone. And for the new attendees coming to learn more about WordPress Social Marketing, Brent warned them that things were moving fast in this area of WordPress and WordPress in general.. Well Matt Mullenweg, the creator and curator of all things […]
Discovered at WordCamp 2015 TO:Geo Mapping Tricks
At a WordCamp there is inevitably Lecture Regret – that is when you have to make a hard choice between 2 or 3 equally interesting and relevant talks. Jeremy Clarke’s Put a Map on it! appeared to be a lost opportunity. But Jeremy put his slides up on Slideshare.net promptly so some really useful tips […]
Discovered at WordCamp 2015 TO: Making Websites Easy to Update
Dara Skolnick gave a great presentation for WordPress Developers entitled Help Me Help You: Practical Tips for Designers from A WordPress Developer. This tutorial was packed with great ideas on getting Designer-Developer-Client all pulling well together. At one point, Dara asked a telling question – Ask your developer what do they do to make the website […]
Discovered at WordCamp 2015 TO: Content Modeling
Jamie Schmid came to WordCamp Toronto all the way from Portland Oregon. And as you can see from the slides of her presentation she certainly delivered the goods on content strategy. Now the neglected underside of WordPress is how to harness the presentation power of the WP platform. As the maintainer of 5 blogs about […]
Discovered at WordCamp 2015 TO: Duplicator Plugin
During the WordCamp session on Saturday about Systematic Holistic Speed by Paul Bearne, the question of website back-up and migration arose. Ye editor mentioned that Backup Buddy was a premium but very good backup and website migration tool. But another attendee said that Duplicator was nearly the opposite , a great migration tool that could […]
Discovered at WordCamp 2015 TO: WP-Optimize Plugin
During Jessica Gardners talk , WordPress Development for Non-Developers: An Introductory Tour Under the Hood, the discussion turned on how to clean the various database tables associated with a WordPress site. Mary Ann Shew, who had just delivered the lecture before, on Piecing Together the WordPress Puzzle, suggested the inevitable – there must be a […]
Site Origins CSS Editor
SiteOrigin already has a solid 5 star, 500K downloads hit with its free Page Builder WordPress plugin – and it may have topped that with its new SiteOrigin CSS Editor. This is a CSS editor for beginners and advanced users with 2 modes of operation – easy Point & Click CSS edits and Advanced full […]
JetPack Tiled Gallery: A Disappointment
Masonry Image Grids have become very popular in WordPress Plugins because they allow users to post images of varying size all together in a gallery. The images don’t have to be cropped to the same size. Also the masonry layouts allow a variety of information to be added to the image along with a link. Finally […]
Scrolling Down Moves Up
In Website Design getting visitors past the fold line is as vital as getting on the first page in SEO. There are a variety of strategies for attracting users below the fold as described well in this posting. But one of the most popular is vertical scrolling. So now scrolling is becoming mainstream from sport sites […]
RIP Akismet
One of the reasons WordPress became my favorite CMS nearly 10 years ago was Akismet. Back then Akismet eliminated spam like no other plugin. But times have changed: 10 minutes after deleting 2300 spam comments and 156 pending comments on my thePhotoFinishes.com website, Akismet had let in 90 new pending comments of which only 2 could […]
3 Upcoming WordPress Breakthroughs
WordPress has become the most popular CMS in the World – dominating its rivals with 23% marketshare for all websites in the World. In contrast, Joomla at 2% and Drupal at 2% are far behind. As seen in software and app development at Apple, Microsoft, and other vendors, the key to WP’s success is a very strong […]
3 WordPress Visual Page Builders
WordPress has seen an explosion of no-coding, drag and drop Visual Page/Post Builders. These Visual Page/Post Builders bring 5 major benefits to the WordPress design world: 1)They are truly drag and drop, no coding Visual Designers; 2)They should work for both pages and posts but not all do; 3)Most work with any theme which allows for multiple […]
The WordPress UI/UX Development Revolution
This website and its cohort have been underlining the rapid improvements in development tools and plugins available to WordPress Designers in their UI/UX tasks. These tools and plugins are individually accelerating WordPress Design and Development capabilities. But what we shall see is that they are also collectively revolutionizing WordPress Development because of their complimentary effects on […]