WordPress Grand Rapids

Our November 2013 meetup topic was WordPress Q&A/Study Hall. We discussed questions and helped each other with our WordPress sites. Here’s a summary of the questions, answers, and other items discussed.

If I missed any, please leave a comment, and I’ll add to the post.

Relational database to relate custom fields

• Posts 2 Posts: Efficient many-to-many connections between posts, pages, custom post types, users
• Pods: a framework for creating, managing, and deploying customized content types and fields

Responsive Mega Menu

• Hide Mega Menu on mobile, display simple navigation instead
• See MSNBC for reference
• UberMenu: user-friendly, highly customizable responsive Mega Menu WordPress plugin

Featured images in Genesis

• For archives, Genesis first looks for a featured image; if it can’t find it, it looks for the first image attached to the post
• Video Thumbnails will set video thumbnail as featured image

Fork a plugin and prevent updates

Must change plugin’s directory name

Breadcrumbs for CPTs

• Create archive and style it as desired
• Set archive to true for CPT, use rewrite API to point to desired page

Image resizing and compressing

Imsanity: automatically resizes huge image uploads

Cool stuff

• Advanced Automatic Updates: Adds extra options to WordPress’ built-in Automatic Updates feature
  
  • Exclude plugins
• MP6: preview future WP admin UI
• Genericons: vector icons embedded in a webfont
• Mentionable: Mention WordPress content with inline autocomplete inside tinyMCE (Topher DeRosia’s plugin)
• Widget Customizer: Edit widgets and preview changes in Theme Customizer, with a control for each widget form in sections added for each sidebar rendered in the preview (Topher DeRosia’s plugin)
• Dependency Minification: automatically concatenates and minifies any scripts and stylesheets enqueued using the standard dependency system
• Query Monitor: View debugging and performance information on database queries, hooks, conditionals, HTTP requests, redirects and more.
• AppPresser: Build iOS/Android apps using WordPress
• Add From Server: allows you to import media & files into the WordPress uploads manager from the web server

Mentions

• GiveCamp Grand Rapids: a weekend-long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software for non-profit organizations.
• The User is Drunk: create UI that’s so good that drunks can use it
• SiteGround: web host
• DigitalOcean: web host
• WPSessions: training sessions by WordPress experts (run by Brian Richards)