Blog Exercises: Ingredients of a Well-Designed Site

I was asked by a student in my WordPress class recently what defined a “professional blog,” one that met all the criteria for a well-designed, well-formed site that met web standards. What a marvelous question! We brainstormed all the elements that make up a web standard site, and mixed in personal preferences of the students […]

WordPress School: The Article Series

To help me teach you WordPress from the inside out in this free online course, we’ve been focused on creating a five-part article series to learn the various WordPress content features and functionality. Each article offers you the opportunity to dive into how WordPress works right out of the box, focusing on the content and […]

WordPress School: Video

Images and video are the most common content published in WordPress and the web in general. In today’s tutorial from Lorelle’s WordPress School you are going to learn how to embed a video into a WordPress post as part of the ongoing work on the article series. In the first article in the five-part article […]

WordPress School: Images

In the previous Lorelle’s WordPress School tutorial we covered preparing images for uploading to WordPress. Today’s lesson is on how to upload and embed the images in posts and Pages. As a reminder, the sequence and data required for uploading an image to WordPress is: Using the Media Uploader in a post or Page, the […]

WordPress School: Image Preparation

In the assignment for Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course today and over the weekend, you are to work on preparing images for uploading to WordPress. You will be adding a variety of images to your WordPress test site such as images to accompany your posts and Pages, portraits, images for galleries, design elements, sidebar […]

Blog Exercises: Mashups

One of my favorite odd-ball mashups is the movie Moulin Rouge! Released in 2001, the movie features Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, and an outstanding cast of top notch actors singing their way through a Bollywood-style production set in a 1899 France cabaret. There are few original songs in the film. Instead they used pop songs […]

WordPress 3.6 Released – Update Now

The long awaited WordPress 3.6 is out and ready for download for self-hosted WordPress users. Those on WordPress.com or managed WordPress installs, you should not have to do anything. WordPress.com has been using many of the new features of WordPress 3.6 already and is automatically updated. Managed WordPress hosts will advise you as to a […]

Blog Exercise: Inspired by Photography

We are all inspired by photography, a picture that motivates and inspires, that moves us, sometimes to the point of changing our perspective on a subject or on our life. With all of the power found in photography, over the next few weeks I will be offering Blog Exercises with the emphasis on getting you […]

Blog Exercises: Fix Images in Your Content

One of the most popular help requests on the WordPress forums is how to make the post text wrap around images. I wrote “Wrapping Text Around Images” in the WordPress Codex as a starting point many years ago. I explain it further in “How to Add Images in Your Post Content” on Lorelle Teaches, going […]

Check Out the New Media Manager in WordPress

WordPress.com users were greeted with a new Media Manager over the weekend. This is the new media uploader coming in WordPress 3.5 when it releases December 5, 2012. For most of us, this is a long-awaited, dream come true. The clunky WordPress Image Uploader is gone, replaced with one more visual and easy-to-use. The announcement […]

What You Most Need to Know About WordPress

At the recent WordCamp Portland 2012, I was asked by several attendees to cover the basics of WordPress and we came up with What You Most Need to Know About WordPress. Here are the “notes” from that unconference presentation. The Difference Between Categories and Tags I hear this question at WordCamps, from readers, students, and […]

Time to Break WordPress This Summer

In Want to Break and Remake WordPress? on the Blog Herald, I summarized this year’s WordPress/Google Summer of Code, an exciting annual project that brings together the top WordPress Community experts with college students from around the world dedicated to making and breaking WordPress so we all benefit. When I read the cute announcement by […]