Category: Tutorial

Evolving the Design Process

Technology is advancing at what seems like the speed of light yet our design process hasn’t changed much at all over time. The kick-off meeting was held, research has been done and now the design phase begins. If you are lucky, you...

Sharing Sidebars Across a Multisite Network

Sidebars are great. Multisite is great. Doing something once so that it can be shared across an entire network is great, too. So, it should stand to reason that sharing a specific sidebar, or set of sidebars, across an entire multisite network...

Display Likes, Tweets, Page Views, and Comment Counts in Posts

Here at WebDevStudios we do a bunch of heavy lifting for clients. It’s rare for us to install “XYZ plug-in” and call it a day. One client wanted to display likes, tweets, page views, and comment counts, via custom buttons, for about twenty posts on the...

How to Replace WordPress Default Taxonomy Metabox with a Radio Select Metabox

There have been many times we have wanted to use taxonomies as a 1-to-1 ratio with a post or custom post types. This is arguably more effective than using metadata because as Alex King pointed out, using a taxonomy query is more...

How to Set Up SSL with OSX Mountain Lion’s Built-In Apache

There are many tutorials out there, but for whatever reason I couldn’t get it work after a first pass. After a little help from some Twitter friends (thanks @ryandonsullivan & @andygambles!), I was able to pull together all the necessary pieces (read:...

Migrating WordPress Multisite from a Development URL to Staging or Production URL

Migrating a WordPress multisite install involving domain name changes is a bit different than migrating a single WordPress install. Below is a list of places you’ll need to update the site urls to avoid obscure errors like “Error establishing a database connection”...

How To: Quickly grab post fields outside the loop with get_post_field() in WordPress

Time and time again I’ve needed to do something like getting the content for a specific post outside the loop. This usually results in doing get_post( $id ); then grabbing the specific field out of the array. It’s annoying and more work...

Building a Robust Amazon Web Services Cluster with EC2 & RDS

The Amazon AWS outage on April 21, 2011 took many people by surprise. After all, simply having your servers on “The Cloud” solves all of your problems right? The outage that brought down Quora, Reddit, FourSquare, and even paper.li was an eye...