I was reading an article on Sitepoint about custom write panels the other day when I got heavily annoyed. The direct reason for this was one of their code examples and the authors apparent incomplete knowledge of the WordPress API’s most basic functions and constants. In that example, he does the following: define( ‘MY_WORDPRESS_FOLDER’,  $_SERVER[’DOCUMENT_ROOT’] [...]

So you’ve switched over to a theme that comes with built-in functionality for titles and meta descriptions. Instead of using HeadSpace2, All in one SEO or another SEO plugin, you’re now using the theme’s built-in SEO functions and input boxes for title’s and meta descriptions. It just seems more logical doesn’t it? Loading one plugin [...]

In last nights episode of the WordPress Podcast we discussed setting up a website for small businesses in WordPress. One of the things I touched on in that discussion is that we outsource a lot of our development work, especially slicing PSD’s to HTML or even directly to WordPress themes, both for Yoast and for [...]

In his previous post here on Yoast, Frederick explained why you should use Microformats to increase the CTR from Google. In the comments of that post, people were asking if there are plugins to easily implement this in your theme. While those are probably a bit hard to do, I though it would be good [...]

I make mistakes. You make mistakes. We all do. And some of these mistakes end up providing our readers with a 404 page. Chances are that page says “Error 404: file not found”. How does that help your visitor? Instead of just identifying the problem, your 404 page needs to offer a solution. In the [...]

Another quick tip to help you optimize your site: sometimes you want to load one or more images in a post in a nice Thickbox or Lightbox. But in most cases, you don’t need to load these scripts, wouldn’t it be cool if you could load these scripts only when you want them to load? [...]

Warning: major geekery ahead! Sometimes you need to see what’s wrong with a WordPress install, and you need to see it fast. I’ve had a set of hacks around for a while to do that, but finally started combining it into a WordPress Debug Theme. This theme is quite simple for now, as it only [...]

One of my colleagues was working on a site for a client of ours, and needed to apply styling to the previous and next post link. As in most of our sites we use Lester Chan’s excellent wp-pagenavi plugin so I dove into that to check how I could style it. Turns out Lester is [...]

One of the things we’re doing more and more of recently is building multilingual, multi domain corporate sites in WordPress. Doing that used to be a fair amount of work, but we’ve been able to make it a lot simpler lately. We start the process with a simple WordPress MU install, to which we then [...]

One of the most annoying features ever in WordPress is the “feature” to convert smilies into images of smileys, MSN style. Where lots of stuff like this is dismissed these days as “plugin territory”, this annoying feature has been in WP since 0.71… Anyway, sometimes you’ll want to disable this feature from within your theme, [...]