WordPress Codex Night Success and PDX Saturday Codex Party

Last night’s PDX WordPress Meetup Group: WordPress Codex Night was a resounding success. In just under two hours, 130 changes were made to the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users. On the informal WordPress Documentation Team Task List, 49 “things to do” were added which will become deleted files and pages, redirects, new […]

PDX WordPress Meetup Group: WordPress Codex Night

The WordPress Meetup Group in Portland, Oregon, has invited me to tonight’s meetup at the US Bancorps Building in downtown PDX to talk about the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users, and how to contribute. I’ll show them some basics about the Codex and we’ll spend a couple hours working on maintenance tasks […]

A Guide to the WordPress Codex, The Online Manual for WordPress Users

WordPress is so easy, for the most part, you can use it right out of the box. Once you get familiar with the powerful features beyond the most simple post writing, creating Pages and categories, you will probably want to do more. The WordPress Codex is the online manual for WordPress users. It takes you […]

Volunteering on the WordPress Codex

For the past few months I’ve been overcoming my guilt over using WordPress for free by volunteering in the WordPress Forum and by editing and writing on the WordPress Codex, the official site for documentation on using WordPress. I thought I might tell you about it a bit. While the WordPress Codex is based upon […]

WordPress School: Shortcodes

WordPress shortcodes are abbreviated code placed into the WordPress Visual or Text Editors that expands into a larger code structure. As we continue with Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course, it’s time to explore the basics of WordPress shortcodes. The following is the embed code for a Google Map, pointing to one of my favorite […]

Blame WordPress For the World’s Problems

Let’s call this person “wise” using air quotes to give you a description of where they come from in life. This “wise” person confronted to me at a public event to announce that WordPress was evil and must be destroyed. “After all,” he informed me soundly. “While WordPress says it supports freedom of speech, it […]

WordPress School: The Links in WordPress

In Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course today we will explore the most important thing on the web: links. Specifically how WordPress automatically generates links on your site and how you can add these same links within the content and elsewhere on your WordPress site. So far in this course we’ve covered the topic of […]

WordPress School: Excerpts

If you are following along with Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course you’ve been writing posts as part of the article series assignments and other assignments. Go to the front page of your site in the Twenty-Eleven WordPress Theme and take a look. Do you see long posts, one after another, and have to scroll, […]

WordPress School: HTML and CSS References and Resources

In “9 Truths That Computer Programmers Know That Most People Don’t” by Macleod Sawyer, he quotes Ben Cherry and adds the following after: “Under the hood, most critical software you use every day (like Mac OS X, or Facebook) contains a terrifying number of hacks and shortcuts that happen to barely fit together into a […]

WordPress School: HTML and CSS – Identifying IDs and Classes

As we round up the mini-series on HTML and CSS basics as part of the ongoing Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course, and to prepare you for working with WordPress Themes, it is important to understand how to find the right design element to change on a website, specifically within a WordPress Theme. We’ve been […]

WordPress School: Bookmarklets and User Scripts

In the last tutorial in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course covering the web browser, your gateway to the web and WordPress, we covered bookmarks and how to save a web page for later access and reading. In this tutorial, we take bookmarks a little further by exploring browser bookmarklets and user scripts, small but […]

WordPress School: Web Browser Shortcuts

In this section of Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course we are exploring the web browser, our gateway to the web, and how it impacts our use of WordPress. In this tutorial you are going to learn some very basic features and functions of the web browser: The Address and Search Bar The Right Click […]

WordPress School: Blavatars

About a month ago in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course you added a Gravatar image to your WordPress.com test site. A Gravatar image and profile is linked to your email address and displays on any WordPress (and many other services) site in the world when you use that email address to comment. Another visual […]

WordPress School: Header Art

It is time to begin to customize the design elements of your test site in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course. We begin with the header art in the Twenty-Eleven WordPress Theme. When you set up your WordPress test site for this course, you were instructed to set the WordPress Theme to Twenty-Eleven as it […]

WordPress School: All the HTML You Need to Know

In my WordPress community class the other night, we had 15 minutes left when I told the class I was about to teach them how to speak HTML before class ended – well, enough HTML to publish in WordPress. They didn’t believe it. Believe it. It took about 6 minutes. I hope to do the […]