Remkus de Vries

Adding Pages to Your RSS Feed in WordPress

12 May 2010 by Remkus de Vries 5 Comments

We all like to be kept up-to-date on our favorite WordPress sites. The best way to do so is to subscribe to the RSS feed. Unless you’re using a plugin such as Feedsmith which redirects all your feeds to your Feedburner feed, you have a lot of options to subscribe to. You have the general site feed, of course, but also the comments feed and the category feeds. But.. what you don’t have is a feed for pages should you as a company decide to only use WordPress with static pages and not with a blog.

Now a while back this would’ve not been the most interesting problem in need of a solution, but since WordPress is being used as CMS more and more and thus only using static pages, a proper solution is in need.

[Read more…]

Everything You Wanted To Know About Custom Post Types

7 May 2010 by Remkus de Vries Leave a Comment

By now you should be aware that WordPress 3.0 comes shipped with Custom Post Types. It’s a feature that may not be easy to grasp at first, but it holds almost infinite power over what you can do with WordPress. Custom Post Types are not set in stone as to what they exactly are. It’s more important you realize that they can represent any type of content you want. WordPress already ships with several post types such as posts, pages, attachments and even revisions, so it’s basically up to your imagination what you can do with it.

There are three sources about Custom Post Types I think you all should read to get a better grasp of what it can do for you. I’ve heard people say that the new WordPress 3.0 Custom Post Types feature is really not all that important, but I’d like to show them different by presenting you these three great sources. [Read more…] about Everything You Wanted To Know About Custom Post Types

BuddyPress, Your Next Step?

5 May 2010 by Remkus de Vries Leave a Comment

A while back BuddyPress 1.2 was released and with it came a bunch of new features to transform your WordPress installation into a full fledged community. You may be at the point where adding a social layer to your site is the logical next step to build a better blog. BuddyPress allows you to build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community all based on the power and flexibility of WordPress.

BuddyPress.org has evolved into a lively community and ever since BuddyPress can be installed on a regular WordPress site instead of a WordPress MU installation they have really gained momentum. [Read more…] about BuddyPress, Your Next Step?

How To: Create More Flexible Widgets

30 April 2010 by Remkus de Vries Leave a Comment

This is not going to be one of those posts about how to widgetize your sidebar because frankly, if by now you still are not using a theme with widgetized aeras you need start looking for one. This post is about how to use those widget area’s in the smartest way possible.

When I say sidebars, I don’t necessarily mean sidebars. Widget areas are of course not limited to the visual sidebars in a theme. Most themes have one or two sidebars and a matching 1 or two widget areas, but some themes have just two sidebars, but a total of 13 widget area’s.

The problem, even with two sidebars, is that you have very little control over which widget goes on what page or post.. or category or archive even. [Read more…] about How To: Create More Flexible Widgets

In Need for Absolute Privacy for WordPress?

24 April 2010 by Remkus de Vries Leave a Comment

You would think that the owner of every single WordPress site out there would want as many visitors as possible, but you’d be wrong.
There are plenty of reasons why you would want to keep a blog as private as possible. Perhaps you’re using it as an project site in conjunction with the awesome P2 theme and you only want the project members seeing the posts and responding or perhaps you have just set up a site for you newly born and you want to share those early updates with just your family. [Read more…] about In Need for Absolute Privacy for WordPress?

Everything You Need to Know About WordPress Security

23 April 2010 by Remkus de Vries Leave a Comment

Keeping your WordPress installation secure is usually not something a lot of people spend a great deal of time on. However, I believe WordPress security, tightening up the place should be your first priority every single time you install WordPress. No exceptions.

With the recent Pharma hack, more info about it plus a solution on Chris Pearson’s blog, going round I thought it was time to focus on WordPress security today. There are a lot of things you can do build extra layers of security for your WordPress installation.

There are a few different layers involved to secure your WordPress installation. I shall list them grouped together as much as possible. [Read more…] about Everything You Need to Know About WordPress Security

Menu Management for WordPress

21 April 2010 by Remkus de Vries Leave a Comment

The soon to be released WordPress 3.0 comes with a new menu management, but your theme has to have this capability built in. But what if you’d rather not edit your theme files or simply don’t want to wait for WordPress 3.0? Luckily there are a few plugins out there that will enable you to have a very flexible menu – without the fancy interface though. These are plugins I have used extensively on many sites which required a custom menu.

Exclude Pages

Exclude Pages is a plugin that does exactly what the title suggest. It allows you to specify per page whether or not a page needs to be in the menu or not. This plugin adds a checkbox, ‘include this page in menus’ to your page edit screen. All you need to do is uncheck this to exclude pages from the page navigation so that users won’t see on your site. As simple as that. Do keep in mind that pages which are children of excluded pages also do not show up in menu listings. [Read more…] about Menu Management for WordPress