If you’re developing Laravel applications, you’re very likely to use a local development installation. Installing Laravel is not very simple, especially if you’re not familiar with composer or with the command line. In this tutorial, I’ll show you a simple way that will most likely fix the problem.

For this tutorial, I’ll assume that you’ve already got Composer installed (globally).

Before starting, you should determine whether you’re using bash or zsh as a command line shell.

The Elementor page builder is a great page builder for building WordPress websites. It offers a plethora of extra functions to be used by developers. Often, you’ll come across the $query parameter. This parameter is intended to define media queries and can be helpful with functions like add_rules. In this post, I’m going to show you how it works and how you can use it.

This article is a sequel to my earlier article about using the Elementor add_rules function.

Adding a custom update mechanism to your WordPress themes and plugins is very handy. Unfortunately it’s currently quite difficult to do with core WordPress functions. I’ll show you how to use GitHub to add your own custom WordPress theme and plugin update mechanism.

So, how will we do this? First, we create a GitHub repository for our theme or plugin files. Then, we’ll see how to use this and how to version your files.

Elementor is a great page builder, but integrating it in your theme can sometimes come with a few hurdles. One of those is checking whether the editor is active – or if the page is being edited. Depending on that, you might want to load or not load certain stylesheets or scripts. Or perhaps you’ve an other use case. Anyway, checking this is really easy.

To check this, Elementor has a handy function built in,

Have you ever wanted to give your theme users an easy option to control the typography of certain elements? Adding this sort of functionality is not available by default in the WordPress Customizer API, so you’d end up having to write some sort of custom control. Luckily, the Kirki Customizer Framework has a very handy typography control built into it. Learn how to use the Kirki typography control.

To start with Kirki, you need to have Kirki installed on a WordPress installation.

I started this website in the first half of December, 2020, so now it’s up and running for about two months. As I’m myself always interested in the performance and the ‘dashboard’ info of others, I thought it would be a fair to every now and then share a sort of ‘performance report’ here. I’ve compiled some numbers and some screenshots of Google Search Console here, so have fun✌️

I primarily use Google Search Console to get an indication of how my website is doing now.

Who doesn’t love GitHub? And who hasn’t their GitHub account cluttered with forked repositories of projects you’ve long stopped contributing too? Do you want to clean up your account and unfork outdated repositories? Learn how to unfork a GitHub repo the correct way.

How to unfork a repository

Unfortunately, GitHub doesn’t offer an Unfork repository button. Unforking is a manual process which needs to be done by a GitHub employee. But because of the large demand for unforking or detaching repositories,

Gravatar is a great tool for getting avatars and profile images associated with a specific e-mailaddress. By default, if somebody has specified an image for their e-mail, that image can easily be retrieved. If the user doesn’t have an e-mail, Gravatar will return a standard image.

But what if you don’t want that default image? Gravatar has no easy option to check whether an image exists. WordPress has a function for this, called has_avatar(),

When you have a blog, you sometimes just want to link to the start of a specific paragraph. Especially with longer articles, I like to break it up in larger chunks. Unfortunately, the Gutenberg editor doesn’t automatically add an id to every heading it generates. You’d have to do this manually. As this is a very laborious task, especially when you publish regularly, I’m happy that there is an automated way of adding this.

Below a small table of contents for this article,

Custom cursors and hover effects have been advancing steadily on the web for the last two years. It makes a website more sophisticated and gives a certain elegance to it. I’ve been playing with custom animated cursors and hover effects and it turns out that it’s really easy to create a custom animated cursor – without much impact on page load and without huge JS libraries.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a custom animated cursor and implement that on your website.

Whether you’re building a WordPress theme or a WordPress plugin, chances are that you need your users to select a certain category or multiple categories. For example, to apply some functionality or use different styling. You could do this via the WordPress customizer or, for example, in your own admin panel.

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to get a list of all the categories and how to rewrite that list to the format you need.

When you’re developing a WordPress theme, chances are that you want to or need to implement comments. WordPress makes this really easy with the wp_list_comments() function. How do we output the comments in a custom HTML format?

The wp_list_comments() function can take over fourteen arguments, so you would think: choices enough! But unfortunately, there is no parameter with which you can modify the HTML output. You can of course apply CSS, but sometimes you do need a different HTML output to accomplish a certain design.

I love WordPress Multisite. It allows you to get a new WordPress site up and running within minutes. Especially if you’re a developer and want to test a new theme (version) on a plain installation, this is really handy. Or if you are a company and you need a new site, e.g. for a project.

WordPress Multisite works with both subfolders and subdomains. Subfolders are sites created at domain.com/newsiteslug and subdomains are subdomain.domain.com.

When developing WordPress themes that use the Elementor page builder, you’ll sometimes want to add additional CSS to the stylesheet of a page. Elementor provides an extremely large amount of functions and hooks, but examples are scarce. In this article, I’ll give an example of adding CSS to an Elementor stylesheet.

How do CSS stylesheets work in Elementor

For this tutorial, I created a very simple page in Elementor. This page only contains a title.

For beginning WordPress developers, it can be difficult to grasp the concept of the WordPress the_content() function. In this post, I aim to explain the_content() in relation to WordPress single.php and page.php template. I’ll also explain how it is used by Gutenberg, Elementor and other page builders.

What is the_content() exactly?

First things first, what is exactly the the_content() function? The the_content() displays the content of a certain page or post. You know that pages and posts are of course editable by users.

The WordPress customizer is a great way to add theme options to a WordPress theme. The controls in the customizer are added in sections or panels. This allows you to structure your theme options. But when you have several extra panels or sections registered, things can start to become a bit unclear. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to easily add icons to panels in the WordPress customizer, which greatly improves the look and feel of the customizer.

The <head> tag WordPress generates is not tailored for performance, but only to suit the biggest audience possible. This means that on every optimised page, there are at least several tags and scripts redundant. Luckily, there’s an easy way to clean up the WordPress header tag and increase performance on your WordPress site.

1. Remove the generated by WordPress tag
2. Remove the RSD link
3. Remove the WordPress REST API link
4. Remove the WLW Manifest link
5. Remove shortlink

1.

Enhancing your WordPress theme with customizer options means a great increase in user experience. In a lot of cases you would want to conditionally output CSS. In this tutorial I’ll show you the best way to conditionally output CSS from the WordPress customizer.

To accomplish this, I’ll be using the Kirki customizer framework. I highly recommend this framework to every WordPress theme developer, because it saves you tonnes of time configuring the customizer.

The WordPress customizer is a great tool to add options to your WordPress theme so users can customize it. There are many frameworks that allow theme developers to add options to their theme, usually in a specific admin panel. Kirki is a framework that allows you to add controls to the customizer, in a simple, fast and easily maintainable way.

In this guide, I’m going to introduce you to Kirki and explain how it works.

When building a WordPress theme, it’s likely that your theme depends on one or more plugins. This can be plugins like page builders or a custom theme plugin. Some plugins are required for the theme to function properly and some plugins you’ll only want to recommend.

One of the more popular ways to let people know that certain plugins are required/recommended is by using the TGM Plugin Activation library. This is a simple library that takes care of displaying a pop-up,

If you are a WordPress theme developer, you’re likely to spend hours making your theme customisable via the WordPress customizer. Adding settings, connecting them to controls, trying not to lose the overview. Kirki is a simple and free framework, that allows you to quickly add more than 30 advanced controls with a simple syntax. All the controls are beautifully designed and specifically optimised for the WordPress customizer.

There are several very good reasons to consider Kirki as your go-to framework for quickly building and adding customizer settings.

The Elementor page builder is the world’s best WordPress page builder and is used by millions of people. Integrating Elementor in your WordPress theme is easy and free, and doing so brings your theme millions of potential customers.

This tutorials explains how to integrate Elementor with your WordPress theme in a few simple steps. I’m going to go over some basic concepts and techniques that are important when using Elementor in your theme.