There are several things useful in a longer document:
Previously I described one method to add custom widgets areas by copying and modifying theme files:
Now I’d like to describe another possibility when it comes to adding widgets area above or below a post or page – by adding the_content filter.
Previously, I have created a maze generating code while learning Python. Later I enhanced it with animation and marking special cells. All of it was done in rush, to solve the problem. Now I spent some time improving the quality of the code by encapsulating code into classes, using “private” methods and fields and separating concerns. The exact steps I took can be viewed in the GitHub repository or read here.
…I once had a desire to provide a list of shortcuts on the home page for my blog’s new users. I didn’t like the default WordPress’ blog page to be just a list of posts. I didn’t think that sidebar widgets grouping posts by date, category or tag would be helpful enough to grasp the versatility of the topics I cover here. I wanted to display a clear list of links with what a user can read about.
…I am using a free theme that provides only one widgets area – a sidebar. In its paid version, though, there is also another widget area – footer. The theme displays a copyright message in the footer and provides no method (in the free version) to change or remove it.
Currently, I would like to change the copyright message and add a link to the Privacy Policy page. In the future maybe I will want to put something else. So I could have either hardcoded the text and link into my theme or I could create an extensible solution.
I decided I would add a new widget area in the footer. The contents of it could be configured using WordPress’ Theme Customization feature (Appearance > Customize > Widgets).
…I can’t live without two tools: Excel and Trello. There are some WordPress plugins that help manage the editorial calendar and publishing workflow (CoSchedule at $80 a month, PublishPress at $77 a year), but… they cost a lot!
On the other hand, I don’t say Trello is the best place to keep posts’ workflow, because you have to duplicate some information between WordPress and Trello. In my case, it’s the title, link, basic category and some statuses.
…I wanted to create a child WordPress theme. All online tutorials were as simple as create two files and add several lines of code:
To my surprise – it didn’t work. To be more specific, it almost worked, but the child theme did not look exactly the same as the parent – some margins, fonts and colors were different. After several experiments, it became apparent that these problems were caused by Bootstrap being loaded after the parent’s style.css file.
Let’s see what exactly is happening to the parent and child stylesheets.
…I like the new visual editor Gutenberg in WordPress, but some of its limitations are really annoying. One of the biggest – inability to set a header in a table. The other problem is that the generated tables are not responsive, i.e. in a phone they will either be extremely squeezed or scrolled horizontally, neither being usable. A common solution is to convert the table into a list. I’ll present several plugins and workarounds for tables.
…If you want to show source code in a page or blog, create examples of running HTML/CSS/JavaScript code, or sample React/Angular/Node.js applications – you can use external services that allow hosting, versioning, embedding and even running applications.
I have checked several of them and each solution has both advantages and drawbacks. I don’t think it is possible to select a single service and use it for all cases, because they were created to fulfill different needs and different complexity.
In this article I present Github Gist, Codepen, JSFiddle, Glitch and StackBlitz, giving examples of what they could be used for.
…Since my blog is about coding – I have to show the code! There is nothing except simple preformatted text available out of the box, so I had to resort to other solutions. One option is using external source code repositories and another is using a WordPress plugin to beautify code.
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