Bostonian Adam

Tag: WordPress

  • WordPress 6.0 and what’s new

    On May 24th WordPress 6.0 was released and I’m excited to see the changes and future upcoming additions and improvements to the CMS. WordPress noted that this release has over 600 updates and over 600 bug fixes from more than 500 open-source contributors. I wrote out a quick list of features that came in 6.0 down below, but you can also watch a cool video the WordPress team put out showing what the update is bringing, which is also down below.

    Fun fact that the WordPress team included in their blog post for WordPress 6.0, is that WordPress powers more than 42% of websites worldwide. That is just amazing.

    What’s new

    • Style Switcher, block themes now have the option to change between multiple style variations
    • Expanded template creation, block themes now have new template options for author, date, categories, tags, and taxonomy
    • Writing improvements, selecting text across multiple blocks; keeping styles when changing block type; and customize buttons, tag clouds and social icons
    • Integrated patterns, patterns are now available to use in more places
    • A new color panel, border controls, flex-based container blocks, improvements to the list view, and block locking

    Introducing WordPress 6.0

  • WordPress 5.9: How to easily change blog posts list layout

    So with WordPress 5.9, the theme customizer is gone (don’t worry it is still there for past themes, but not for new Block Themes) and we have the new Block Editor (for Block Themes), which has a lot of promise but needs some polishing. The “Twenty Twenty-Two” theme that comes with WordPress 5.9, is a Block Theme and is now being used on this website as of this posting.

    The default style that the “Twenty Twenty-Two” theme’s homepage uses to list the blog posts is one-by-one in a vertical list. For me, I felt this wasted a lot of space and I wanted blog posts to be listed with two or three side-by-side in rows. So here are the steps to do just that. Don’t worry, no coding is needed to do make this change.

    From list view to grid view

    1. When you’re in the “Admin” section of your WordPress website, on the left-side navigation go to Appearance > Editor (beta).
    2. In the upper left corner click the WordPress logo and the Editor navigation will expand. In the list under “Editor” click “Templates”
    3. On the right-side is a list of templates you can edit. Click the “Home” template.
    4. In the top navigation, click the “List View” icon (the one with three horizontal lines), which will open up a panel on the left-side. You may see a lot of items listed but don’t panic, this is just showing your homepage’s structure (showing which blocks you are using).
    5. In the “List View” column on the left side, find “Query Loop” and click it.
    6. In the center column, above your posts you’ll see a horizontal bar similar to the image below this text. You will want to click the “Grid view” icon as in the image. This will order your posts in a grid format.
    7. On the far right side are the Query Loop settings. If you don’t see the Query Loop settings, make sure you select “Query Loop” in the first column on the left side.
    8. In the Query Loop settings, go down to “Columns” and you can use the slider to change how many columns you want your posts to appear in.
    9. When you’re done making changes, make sure to click the “Save” button in the top right area, and you’re done.

    In conclusion

    That was easy, right? No coding, just using the UI to make your changes. This is huge for WordPress and I’m excited to see what they do in future updates. I think the UI still needs more work but this is a good start.

    What are your thoughts about WordPress 5.9? Are you finding it easier to use than past WordPress versions? Did this quick how-to help you or just confuse you? Please let me know what you think.

  • Sharing resources with you: Building emails, learn Javascript, HTTP vs HTTPS, and move WordPress to HTTPS

    Here’s another “Around the web” blog post where I share some resources I found online that I thought would be helpful to myself and others.

  • WordPress plugins you should use for your WordPress site

    Wordpress logo

    This blog post was going to be a post specifically for my wife with suggestions on what WordPress plugins to use for her sites, but the more I thought about it, these plugins should be used on most/if not all WordPress sites (or similar plugins that provide the same features).

    Below is a list of suggested WordPress plugins that you should use for your web site (for a small-to-medium sized standard WordPress blog, not including a forum or store). Reminder that this is just my opinion and if you prefer different plugins feel free to leave a comment telling us which ones and why.

    The first plugin I suggest is the Akismet plugin. Akismet helps protect your WordPress web site from spam, this is possibly the most useful WordPress plugin ever.

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  • Enhance SEO for your WordPress blog

    WordPress by itself does a good job with SEO (search engine optimization) but you can make improvements to help your site with SEO as there are some nice free WordPress plugins to do this for you. I’ll go over the two plugins I use to help with SEO and getting indexed by search engines.

    The first plugin I use is All In One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert. This plugin helps optimize your site for search engines. The main features this plugin has (as of when this was posted) are:

    • Edit your home page title, description and keywords
    • Change the title format for posts and pages
    • Add webmaster verification codes for Google Webmaster and Bing Webmaster
    • Add Google Analytics ID for tracking
    • Add noindex tags for category pages, archive pages, tag pages, etc
    • Add additional code into the header of posts and pages

    To get and install the All In One SEO Pack plugin on your blog, follow these steps:

    • Go to your “Admin” area of your site
    • Click the “Plugins” link in the left side nav
    • Click the “Add New” link at the top of the page
    • In the search field, type “All In One SEO Pack” and click search
    • The plugin you want should be the first one listed, but find the one named “All In One SEO Pack” by Michael Torbert, and click the “Install Now” link for it and you should be all done

    The latest versions of All In One SEO Pack now includes an XML Sitemaps feature so if you use that feature as well, you won’t need the next plugin I’ve been using, Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold. The main features this plugin has (as of when this was posted) are:

    • Create an XML sitemap that can be indexed by search engines such as Google and Bing
    • Choose which pages (category pages, tag pages, archive pages, etc) to include from being included in the XML sitemap
    • Choose exactly which category pages to exclude from being included in the XML sitemap
    • Change the frequency of how often your homepage, blog posts, categpry pages, etc are crawled

    To get and install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin on your blog, follow these steps:

    • Go to your “Admin” area of your site
    • Click the “Plugins” link in the left side nav
    • Click the “Add New” link at the top of the page
    • In the search field, type “Google XML Sitemaps” and click search
    • The plugin you want should be the first one listed, but find the one named “Google XML Sitemaps” by Arne Brachhold, and click the “Install Now” link for it and you should be all done

    I hope this helps you improve SEO for your WordPress blog. If you have any questions concerning these plugins check out their official sites or feel free to leave a comment and I can try to answer them.