Category: WordPress Plugins

Fix: Nothing Showing For Popular Posts Widget

I recently ran into an issue with the WordPress Popular Posts plugin where it showed the bullet points for the number of popular posts I wanted to show – but no content.

Empty Popular Posts

Debugging the issue

  • I made sure I had JetPack installed
  • I had plenty of stats – but could not get any data to show. Stats were showing as expected with the JetPack plugin stats view
  • I deactivated/re-activated the WordPress Popular Posts plugin.
  • I turned off caching
  • I tried a number of different configuration options in the widget

I still was not seeing any content though. This then made me think I needed to try something different with the way the list item was formatted. At this point I then noticed that format field was blank. Since I could not remember if that was the default – I looked at the plugin readme file and added in the default (see below).

Default format setting that needed to be re-input
<a href='%post_permalink%' title='%post_title%' >%post_title%</a>

After that was in place and the widget settings were saved – the popular posts once again saved. If you notice something similar – and you are having issues getting content to show AND you know it is not a statistics issue – they the same configuration change I mentioned above. I hope it helps!

Easily Align Fields in Columns with Gravity Forms

Recently while working with Gravity Forms on a project – we needed to set up a large form that would span two columns. Since this is something common – I decided to look first at the Gravity Forms documentation.

Per the documentation I found this:

In Gravity Forms 1.5 we added “Ready Classes”. Using these new classes, you can easily create more advanced alternative layouts for the fields in your forms. Essentially, Ready Classes are class names that you can add to the parent element surrounding each field to take advantage of pre-defined styles included in the default form stylesheet.

By simply adding a new class to your form field (Advanced > Custom CSS Classes) – you can easily create columns (2 or three) without any custom CSS classes to worry about. In seconds – I had the style I needed!

If you are looking to customize the layout for your Gravity Forms forms – do yourself a favor and read the following documentation: https://www.gravityhelp.com/documentation/article/css-ready-classes/ as it will save you a lot of time and frustration.

WordPress Site Management with JetPack

With the recent update of the JetPack plugin – a new feature called “Site Management” has been added.

If you run multiple WordPress sites – the chances are – you are using the same plugins on multiple sites. If you would like to streamline plugin updates – you can now easily do so with the new “Site Management” option in JetPack.

How does this work?

  1. Update to JetPack 3.3 and enable the new feature by clicking “Activate Now” in the JetPack banner (seen above)
  2. Log in to http://wordpress.com/sites to view the sites you have registered, add more if needed.
  3. Choose the site you want to configure for plugin updates and see all plugins listed. Select each plugin to configure it (perhaps some plugins you will always want to update automatically, but others not). There are two options – Active and Autoupdates. (Active = plugin active vs. inactive) Autoupdate (auto update this plugin vs do not auto update the plugin)

While this makes managing plugin updates easier – make sure you consider quality assurance testing. Auto updates or mass updating plugins makes updating easy – but the need for quality assurance testing is still needed and should not be overlooked. Whether you have unit tests or do testing with user scripts – remember to still plan for time/effort after the updates.

Thanks to JetPack for taking this on. I look forward to playing around with this.

Super Charge Your Site With CloudFlare

We have had a few clients recently come to us looking to help “speed up” their site. After tweaking server settings, themes, plugins, etc – we then also recommend something that has produced good results: CloudFlare.

From CloudFlare:

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

Sound good? CloudFlare also claims:

On average, a website on CloudFlare
– loads twice as fast
– uses 60% less bandwidth
– has 65% fewer requests
– is way more secure
All for free!

They have different packages – from free to $20/month. If you have some time – take a look at their site, and give them a shot. We use them here and have been very happy with everything (they even have a WordPress plugin).

SDAC Plugin Update: SDAC Related Content 2.3.1

We just released a new version of our WordPress Related Content plugin. This update is very minor (adds in a div that surrounds all the output) but it will significantly make styling your related results easier.

After you update your plugin – you can control the output by adding something like this to your stylesheet:

#sdac_related_posts h4 {border-bottom:1px dashed #c7c7bb;margin:15px 0 5px 0;padding-bottom:5px;}
#sdac_related_posts ul {margin:10px 0 10px 20px;}
#sdac_related_posts ul li {margin:0 0 3px 0;}

* The code above is what styles the related posts on this site.

bbPress as a Plugin

After completing a site refresh (updated theme, use of custom post type for our portfolio/products), I also decided to migrate from the standalone version of bbPress to the new bbPress plugin. Everything went smoothly and I plan to spend some time customizing the layouts after I read more about best practices. All our forums got imported and are still available at: http://jzelazny.wpengine.com/forums. Watch for some upcoming posts on how to customize this new version of bbPress.

SDAC Plugin Update: SDAC Translate 1.2.5

We just released the latest version of SDAC Translate (1.2.5). This update adds an easy way to use the functionality outside of widgets (if your theme does not support widgets).

Usage:

* You can always use it by using : the_widget(‘sdac_translate_widget’) too (2.8+).

Download the latest version of SDAC Translate from WordPress.org.

SDAC Plugin Update: SDAC Post Slideshows 1.1.1

We just released the latest version of SDAC Post Slideshows (1.1.1). This update addresses a UI fix as well as renames the button from “post-slideshow” to “slideshow”.

Download the latest version of SDAC Post Slideshow from WordPress.org.