Category Archives: Meetup News

News about and around our regular Meetups

Development, Events, General, Meetup News, Opinion, Tips and Tricks

WordPress General Meetup Notes – Essential Plugins

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In December we talked about essential plugins and where to find them.

WordPress.org should be your first stop to look for plugins. There you can find the Plugin Directory, which lists all freely available plugins. Aside; There’s a new version of the directory coming soon that is even better for discovering plugins! You can also browse the directory from within WordPress itself under the “Plugins>Add New” menu in the WordPress dashboard.

Plugins listed in the directory give a description of what the plugin does, installation notes, and even reviews from other plugin users. You can also see who the developers are and most plugins have an active support forum to discuss issues and feature requests with the developer. One way of determining if a plugin is good to use is to follow  a short checklist.

  • Has it been updated recently?
  • How many sites are actively using it?
  • What is the average rating?
    • What do the reviews say about the plugin?
  • Is the developer active in responding to questions?
  • Does the developer maintain other contributions to the community (plugins, themes, presenting at WordCamps, etc)?

One thing to keep in mind with plugins is performance. Too many plugins can slow down your site. Installing two plugins that do the same thing is also not a good idea as conflicts can happen that can impact performance or down right break your site! This is why having a good development site to tinker with is helpful when managing WordPress.

On to the list of plugins we talked about. I’d love to hear of alternatives or additional items in the comments!

The discussion also covered a few other related tools for managing and monitoring your site. These included:

Thanks to everyone who came out and we’ll see you in January!

Design, Development, Education, Events, General, Meetup News, Reviews, Tips and Tricks

WordPress General Meetup Notes – Page Builders

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In October Alex Miller gave an introduction to page builders. These are plugins that can drastically change how you manage content in your WordPress site. From drag-and-drop layout options, easy galleries and more.

I took down a few notes, which try to cover some of the larger points Alex made through the evening. Feel free to drop a note below if you have any questions or feedback.

  1. Why use page builders?
    1. One reason is that it keep folks from messing up things they shouldn’t be messing with!
    2. It also makes it easy to update content without out having to be a design/layout genius.
  2. Only going to cover WordPress.org page builders – ones that are freely available
  3. Live Composer – https://wordpress.org/plugins/live-composer-page-builder/
    1. Cons
      1. bunch of clutter in the sidebar you can’t remove
      2. navigating tools in live view are a little cumbersome
      3. pre-populates text fields
      4. lots of toolbars, confusing
    2. Pros
      1. lots of tools
      2. can bring up standard WP editor in visual mode
  4. Site origin – https://wordpress.org/plugins/siteorigin-panels
    1. Cons
      1. limited layout options for ‘rows’ (like only bottom margin for each row)
    2. Pros
      1. no clutter in sidebar
      2. easy-to-use visual editor
      3. import/export layouts
    3. Beaver builder – https://wordpress.org/plugins/beaver-builder-lite-version/
      1. Cons
        1. no prebuilt templates for free version
        2. limited media ‘modules’ (called widgets in other page builders)
        3. no gradient support in column/row settings for backgrounds
        4. some default padding/margin are a little weird
      2. Pros
        1. limited modules are really easy to use
        2. responsive design break points can be set per module
  5. General notes on page builders
    1. Once you commit to a visual editor, switching (or going without) will be work – there’s not a lot of cross-migration between these competing tools.
    2. Uninstall might not keep your content!
    3. Beaver builder and site origin does add html and thankfully no shortcodes! Live editor is all inside their plugin – hard to salvage underlying content
    4. Think about what you need. Do you need a page builder (landing page) or just custom post types and ACF?
  6. Beaver builder is #1 pick
    1. good usability, flexibility, and support
Design, Development, Education, Events, General, Meetup News, Tips and Tricks, WordCamps

WordPress General Meetup Notes – Contributing to the WordPress Community

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In September our very own Jen Swisher, the lead organizer for WordCamp St. Louis 2017 shared how you can contribute to the WordPress community. It’s not just about code or design, but there are many ways to get involved. Quite frankly, we need your help!

Check out Jen’s presentation below and join us at our next monthly meetup and get involved!

Events, General, Meetup News, Tips and Tricks

Meetup notes from “What’s New in WordPress 4.4?” for December 2015

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This month we talked about what’s new in the latest release of WordPress, version 4.4. Here’s a few notes from the evening’s presentation.

Little History

First a little history and reminder. With WordPress releases like 3.x and 4.x –  these are generally bigger updates to WordPress that include new features or large changes.

3.4.1 or 4.3.2 are smaller bug and security fixes – these are applied automatically by default. You won’t often find much outward facing in these updates.

Last Few Releases

Here’s a list of the last few releases of WordPress leading up to 4.4 and what they brought to the table.

4.2 – Bud Powell

  • Customizer came into its own
  • new languages!
  • better plugin installations
  • “Press This” got an update (bookmarklet that allows you to quickly post content from wherever you’re at on the web.)
  • emoji support (really a sneaky update for better Unicode support) for translations

4.3 – Billie Holiday

  • resetting password made more secure
  • menus added to Customizer
  • multisite changes
  • updated editor – switching between visual and text with less “ugh”
  • formatting shortcuts in visual editor
    • * or 1.

4.4 – Clifford Brown

That brings us to our most recent release. One little note, Eric Juden and Joe McGill are two local st. Louisan’s who are code contributors in this release!

  • New Default Theme – Twenty Sixteen
  • Responsive Images
    • supplies the relevant sizes to the browser
    • visitors only get the best image size
    • Built into core so themes and plugins can take advantage (like Twenty Sixteen)
    • Joe McGill!
  • oEmbed for WordPress
    • like embedding a YouTube or tweet, you can now embed WP posts from other WP sites
    • Added new services like Cloudup, Reddit Comments, ReverbNation, Speaker Deck, and VideoPress.
  • Taxonomists – terms now have metadata, just like posts and users
  • Rest API – you can speak to other websites and services using JSON.
    • Create you own endpoints to communicate with WordPress
    • Community member Paul Heirendt had a great video to share explaining APIs!
      • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvQJcBBsi3k
  • Other – few multisite fixes, language updates

Read More

http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_4.4

https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/wordpress-4-4/

See you in January!

Thank you to everyone who came out. Our next general meetup is January 20th. I hope to see you there!

Development, Events, Meetup News, Tips and Tricks

WordPress Meetup West Notes: Dynamic Sidebars and Widgets

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Thanks to everyone for coming out to the WordPress West meet up last night. If you weren’t able to make it or want to review what we covered in the presentation I’ve included the slides and some gists of the actual code used if you’d like to test it out yourself.

We went over registering sidebars, the difference between a “sidebar” and a “widgetized area” (hint: not much), displaying sidebars in your theme, and finally creating a custom widget.

Gists after the break.

Continue reading WordPress Meetup West Notes: Dynamic Sidebars and Widgets →

Events, Meetup News, Tips and Tricks

July Meetup Notes from WordPress St. Louis West – WordPress security using iThemes Security

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Jason Yingling, Developer at Red8 Interactive hosted our first Meetup in St. Charles. The turnout was great for our first event. Thanks to OPO Startups and the rest of the Red8 crew for making us feel welcome. We’re looking forward to the next meetup out west!

Jason talked about WordPress security using iThemes Security, a popular security plugin. Even if you don’t use iThemes Security (and why not? It’s a really good plugin) there are a lot of tips and tricks that can help make your site more secure. Check out the presentation below.

If you’d like to know more, Jason is hosting the August WordPress St. Louis West on the 24th. He’ll be talking about how to go from a PSD to a WordPress template. RSVP today!

Education, Meetup News

December General Meetup Notes – WordPress Custom Post Types with Nile Flores

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December’s General Meetup was lucky enough to have Nile Flores present on Custom Post Types.  Here’s Nile’s presentation.

Nile is a professional web designer and developer from Centralia, Il about an hour east of St. Louis. She covers it all, WordPress, design, SEO and more.
She’s a very active member of the WordPress community and a co-organizer of WordCamp St. Louis.  We thank Nile and everyone who came out for helping to make it yet another great meetup.
For our January meetup we’re going to be talking about theme structure and creating custom themes. Join us!
Design, Development, Education, Meetup News

November 2014 General WordPress Meetup Notes – “How to Get in Trouble with CSS”

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I put together some notes from our General Meetup last month. Thanks for everyone who braved the cold and came out. I had a blast putting this together and am looking forward to Nile’s presentation later in December.

Box Model

First, let’s talk about the Box Model. The best way to approach CSS is to understand that all it does is apply rules to the boxes that make up our webpages.

All HTML elements are containers or boxes. I demonstrated this by using the 3D view in Firefox. (Right-click on any webpage, and select “Inspect element”. The 3D view is the cube icon in the top right of the inspector pane.

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, allow you to define the style of those boxes. Everything from the fonts being used inside, to images, borders, padding, margins, colors, even how text behaves alignment, size, orientation, etc.

Rules

You make these changes this by defining ‘rules’ to those boxes or elements in your CSS.

So let’s say we have an element. It’s a simple div and I want to give it some rules.

<div>
<p>Some text inside that’s a paragraph.</p>
</div>

First give element a name – either an ID or a class.

That element name is called a selector in CSS parlance. We’re saying, for each element named X select

<div class=''demoDiv">
<p>Some text inside that’s a paragraph.</p>
</div>

I can apply rules to that selector in a few different ways.

Three ways to define CSS (There are more, say with JS)

Here they are from worse to best

Inline

<div class=''demoDiv" style="background-color:green;">

In the <head>



In a separate file (also referenced in the head)


<link rel="stylesheet" media="all" href="demoStyle.css">


Why is this the best? You separate the presentation from structure (HTML) from content (in the case of WordPress, what’s in your database). You also can have both documents open side by side. You also don’t have to scroll up and down and up and down. And most importantly, because of CASCADING!


Here’s two examples of valid CSS rules being applied to a class and an ID respectfully.


.demoDiv {
rule:options;
rule:options;
}


#demoDiv {rule:options;rule:options;}


Difference between a class and an ID


See that “.” and that “#” – that tells us if something is either a class or an ID.


Does it make sense to identify multiple elements by the same ID? I think not. That’s what classes are for – to classify similar elements.


Cascading


The name Cascading is important! It’s how the browser determine which rules to actually apply. There are many factors at play, and that’s ok. There’s some logic to it al.


We’re going to talk about specificity and inheritance


At this point I’m going to let someone far smarter than I explain it. Check out this article on Smashing Magazine.


The order you put your elements and their styles in your style.css don’t matter.


However it’s best practice to do high-level or ‘global’ settings at the top of your sheet, and put comments in as you go for the various sections.


At the top have global attributes like body, p, a, h3, etc.


Then sections:


    

  • header
    • 

  • navigation
    • 

  • sidebar
    • 

  • etc.
    • 



Order does matter in your rules!


One thing that does matter is the last rule of  a type will over ride the previous.


Example:


background-color: #000;
background: #FFF url(image.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat;


The color (should the image fail to load) will be white because it came last in this set of rules


Ok, what about WordPress!?


Let’s take a look at a CSS file from a theme like Twenty Fourteen


First, inspect and find an element in the stylesheet (using Chrome dev tools)


Child Themes


Even if you want to do nothing but tweak a few styles to an existing theme, USE A CHILD THEME. It’s easy.


If you assume you’re using Twenty Fourteen:


    

  1. Make a folder in your wp-content/themes/ directory. Give it a unique name.
    2. 

  2. Create a file called “style.css”
    3. 

  3. Edit header info to reference the parent theme.
    4. 

  4. Activate your child theme.
    5. 

  5. Edit CSS in that child theme’s style.css file to change (overwrite) the parent theme’s rules.
    6. 



CSS Preprocessors


CSS Preprocessors were touched on at the very end of the night. Basically things like SASS and LESS allow you to define variables to your rules. When you’re ready to publish the preprocessor will render valid CSS from those variables.


Example:


@col-red: #f00;
@col-blue: #00f;
@font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
@font-s: 12px;
@font-m: 14px;@font-l: 16px;


h1 {color: @col-blue; 
font: @font-l @font-family;}


.blockQuotes {color: @col-blue; 
font: @font-m @font-family;
}


Preprocessors also allow for math functions to compute sizes across your entire stylesheet.


@base-size: 10px;


.small {
font-size: @base-size;
}


.medium {
font-size: @base-size * 1.2;
}


.large {
@_large: @base-size * 1.5;
font-size: @_large;
line-height: @_large + 4;
}


A few good reference articles:


    

  • http://alistapart.com/article/why-sass
    • 

  • http://blog.millermedeiros.com/the-problem-with-css-pre-processors/
    • 

  • http://blog.blakesimpson.co.uk/read/37-less-sass-the-advantages-of-css-preprocessing-explained
    • 



Additional Resources:


https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS


—


Photo by Mikel via Flickr – Licensed under Creative Commons

	

	
	




	
	

			
	

				

			Events, General, Meetup News, WordCamps
		

			
WordCamp San Francisco Viewing Party

		

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We’re going to host a free viewing party for WordCamp San Francisco! They’re streaming all presentations across their two-day WordCamp. October 25-26.


This is one of the biggest WordCamps and their schedule is full of awesome presenters.


We’re going to use the amazing public space at Nebula Coworking at the corner of Jefferson and Cherokee St.. There will be two rooms, one streaming the Developer-focused track, the other the User-focused track.


We invite you to join us for both days. The presentations start at 11am (9am Pacific) each day so get there early! You can stay all day and hang out in between sessions, just like an in-person WordCamp. Check out the full schedule and RSVP today!


We’d like to have light breakfast options, snacks and drinks. If you can pitch in, please let us know. We’re also working on finding appropriate sponsorship.


For lunch we’re going to hit the town and enjoy the amazing restaurants along Cherokee. We’re working on getting some recommendations and menus for some of our favorite haunts.


This is a low-key event. Come as you are, relax, and soak up some amazing knowledge.


More details coming soon. Volunteers are needed. Sponsors are needed. Get in touch!

	

	
	




	
	

				

			General, Meetup News
		

			
STLWP Code of Conduct

		

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A Code of Conduct for a community as vibrant and successful as ours might seem rather strange, but we want to put in writing our intent and make public our thoughts on inclusion and equality.


We want to ensure that folks from all walks of life feel included in any of our events or activities.


In the hopefully rare occurance that a jerk sneaks in, we can also point to this in order to help deal with unpleasant situations.


Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with the St. Louis WordPress Community Code of Conduct.


This is a living document and is open to feedback.