WordPress, Blogging & Tech Tutorials

First Look At WPMU’s Appointments+ WordPress Plugin

WPMU is a mainstay of the wordpress community. As their name suggests, they began as specialists in blogging about and writing plugins for wp multiuser setups (now known as Multisite). These days they cover pretty much all aspects of WordPress. If you’ve ever Googl-ed anything about WordPress, chances are you’ve landed on their blog at some point. Through their offshoot Premium WPMU Dev, they also have a killer suite of plugins and themes that they are always adding to.Their plugins are generally well thought out, well-coded and they have support. Most of their plugins are just $19, or you can get an “all-you-can-eat” membership which is great for developers and people that build a lot of WordPress sites.

I recently took their Appointments+ plugin (aff. link) for a test drive. Online booking and scheduling is an area in which WordPress is still a little lacking. There are numerous solutions out there, but not really a killer one yet. When I first tried Appointments+ I wasn’t sure how it would stack up, and while there’s probably room for it to grow, as I tried a couple of other popular solutions I realized that it’s actually pretty decent. Now I haven’t used it consistently for a long time, so these are just my initial impressions. When I have it running on some live sites, I’ll report back how it holds up over time.

Making Twenty Eleven Behave

The current default theme Twenty Eleven is generally a good starter theme for many bloggers, but it does have a couple of annoying quirks such as not placing a sidebar on single posts, even if you select it as your…

Having Problems With Missed Scheduled Posts in WordPress?

The in-built post scheduling feature of WordPress is super-handy....until it starts not to work. Then it is a cause of huge headaches. I've yet to find a clear cut answer as to why it happens, but sometimes WordPress will fail…

How To Change The Fonts On Your WordPress Site

An extremely common request by WordPress users is how to change the font in their posts, pages and themes. Many themes, especially premium ones, provide a set of options in the dashboard that lets the user easily modify the fonts the theme is using. But in cases where the theme does not provide this functionality, it can be implemented by using plugins (of course!!).

This tip is geared for non-technical WordPress users who want some extra control over their site’s appearance by selecting from the vast library of Google Fonts. If you are a WordPress theme developer that wants to include Google Fonts in your theme, you’ll want to read up on how to enqueue the fonts into your theme, and how to provide a theme options panel for your users.

Here are 2 plugins to consider for your font-y needs:

Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins For Beginners

Ah contact forms….such as a standard feature of a website aren’t they? One would think that WordPress would have tons of great, easy-to-implement choices for this. And indeed there are TONS of choices, it’s just that most of them have pretty cryptic interfaces, especially for newbies.

For contact forms and anything data collection oriented I prefer Gravity Forms but it’s not free and for some bloggers there really wouldn’t be any point in buying it. But a basic contact form is something most WordPress users want so it’s important to find a good, simple and easy to use solution. And by “easy to use”, I mean something that can be figured out by a new blogger fairly easily. Not the kind that’s “easy to use” once you’ve spent hours figuring it out.

So I’ve done some testing of some of the most mentioned contact form plugins – the ones that show up in the plugin directory search, along with ones mentioned by other bloggers. Honestly, most of them made my skin crawl. They called themselves things like “fast” and “easy” (which sounds like a recipe for a great time) but hurt my brain to look at them. Instead of list them anyway (it is, after all, my job to filter the chaff on your behalf), I’ve picked just a couple that I think are actually useful.

Should You Use the Jetpack WordPress Plugin?

What Is Jetpack?

Jetpack is a plugin created by the team at WordPress.com. It is one super-plugin that contains a whole suite of features – mini-plugins, if you will. It was created to make available to self-hosted WordPress users some of the convenient features that WordPress.com users enjoy. Some of the features that Jetpack includes are: