Support for responsive images was added to WordPress core in version 4.4 to address the use case for viewport-based image selection, where the browser requests the image size that best fits the layout for its particular viewport.
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Systems for managing content are more often than not rather opinionated. For example, most of them expect a certain rigid content structure for inputting data and then have a specific engraved way of accessing and outputting that data, whether or not it makes sense. Additionally, they rarely offer effective tools to break out of the predefined trails if a case requires it.
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WordPress is a wonderfully powerful CMS that ships with many versatile features giving it the flexibility to work out of the box for a wide range of users. However, if you are a professional building custom themes and plugins, sometimes these features can be problematic.
The same features and options that allow off-the-shelf themes to adapt to many different use cases can sometimes also be used to undermine a carefully designed custom theme built for a specific use case.
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A year and a half ago I released my first premium WordPress plugin, Advanced Ads. It’s true that once the plugin was out, my most important task was support. Support is a crucial element that determines not only the success of the project, but also how happy everyone will be, me included.
With this in mind, I constantly optimized my approach to providing support. Let me share with you what I learned. Read on to find out what I learned about support, the four sides that will help you understand each request, which fears of mine proved to be unfounded, what an efficient support system looks like and, last but not least, how to optimize support.
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If you have an e-commerce website, then SSL is mandatory for safely processing credit cards. But even if you aren’t processing payments, you should still seriously consider secure HTTP (or HTTPS), especially now that I’m going to show you how to set it up quickly, for free. Let’s get started.
In short, SSL is the “S” in HTTPS. It adds a layer of encryption to HTTP that ensures that the recipient is actually who they claim to be and that only authorized recipients can decrypt the message to see its contents.
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Editor’s Note: Today marks a special day for WordPress. Powering many websites (and yes, Smashing Magazine is one of them), it celebrates its 13th birthday today. Happy birthday, dear WordPress! Here’s to many more!
Do you remember when you could run a “fast” WordPress website with just an Apache server and PHP? Yeah, those were the days! Things were a lot less complicated back then.
Now, everything has to load lightning-fast! Visitors don’t have the same expectations about loading times as they used to. A slow website can have serious implications for you or your client.
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Anyone who has created a WordPress plugin understands the need to create configurable fields to modify how the plugin works. There are countless uses for configurable options in a plugin, and nearly as many ways to implement said options. You see, WordPress allows plugin authors to create their own markup within their settings pages. As a side effect, settings pages can vary greatly between plugins.
In this article we are going to go over three common ways you can make your plugin configurable. We will start by creating a settings page and create our fields using the default WordPress Settings API. I will then walk you through how to set up your fields with a custom handler. Finally, I will show you how to integrate a great configurable fields plugin Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) into your own plugin.
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This article covers both a theoretical introduction to handling user requests and a concrete application of that theory, particularly, building an advanced search system.
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If you’re looking for some great ways to improve your WordPress workflow, read on for a massive collection of free themes, plugins, tools and tutorials. These resources were all linked via the Smashing Magazine Twitter stream, Facebook stream, and other social-media streams around the Web.
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An increasingly large number of publicly available APIs provide powerful services to expand the functionality of our applications. WordPress is an incredibly dynamic and flexible CMS that powers everything from small personal blogs to major e-commerce websites and everything in between. Part of what makes WordPress so versatile is its powerful plugin system, which makes it incredibly easy to add functionality.
We will walk through how I made GitHub Pipeline, a plugin that allows you to display data from the GitHub API on WordPress pages using shortcodes. I’ll give specific examples and code snippets, but consider the technique described here a blueprint for how to consume any service API with a plugin. We’ll start from the beginning, but a degree of familiarity with WordPress and plugin development is assumed, and we won’t spend time on beginner topics, like installing WordPress or Composer.
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