A site search is an invaluable feature of a website. Whether you’re running an e-commerce site, a brochure site, or a portfolio site for your small business, your sites search functionality is key to getting your visitors to what they’re looking for… and if they find it, then you’re going to get more conversions, more sales, more interaction. So site searches are important, and you’ve got the content ready to go… but to truly serve your visitors you need to understand what they’re after, and that means identifying when they search for things that you don’t have. Imagine this, you have an e-commerce clothes store, with shirts, skirts, t-shirts, shoes etc. Is your site search going to deliver the right results for the following keywords; “pants” “trousers” Whether you’re based in America, or the UK, or elsewhere in the world, it’s possible you’re visitors will have a different understanding of those words than you do. Let’s not forget misspellings and slang. “t-shirt” “tshirt” “tshort” “tee” “polo shirt” You can quickly see that if you’re not aware that folk are searching with these keywords then you’re losing out on converting your visitors. With our latest plugin – Search Insights – you get this information delivered in rich form in your WordPress admin area. As you can see from the above you get a report for the last 1, 7, and 30 days, for all search terms, and importantly identifying which searches had resulted in matches being found. The Search Insight plugin currently supports the default WordPress search, and also the incredible Relevanssi search plugin, with other search mechanisms including SearchWP on the roadmap. As well as the informative admin reports page, Search Insights also sends a daily email report out, meaning you don’t need to remember to log in to your site to stay on top of the searches. Get the insights to increase conversions...
Read MoreWhen it comes to WordPress and widgets, there’s a single question that folk want the answer to; How do I add a widget to my page? There are a few ways to achieve this, ranging from low level code, using shortcodes, right up to using the visual editor. We’re going to look at the simplest route here, one that requires no code, no copying and pasting of shortcodes, and no need to know CSS to have our widgets laid out responsively, in columns. Our Task Let’s say we have a WordPress site, and we want to create a page that has some generic text content, but half way down we also want show some widgets. We’d like to show two in fact, and we’d like them to be displayed side by side on most screens, but one underneath the other on smaller screens. Step 1 – Install the Widgets on Pages Plugin The Widgets on Pages plugin was built specifically for this scenario, and this demo will use that plugin. The demo will also use the Pro version, that includes visual editor support and the ability to arrange widgets in columns (without the need for knowing any CSS). Get Widgets on Pages Now Step 2 – Create a new Sidebar for our Widgets With the Widgets on Pages plugin installed we now have the ability to create an unlimited number of sidebars through the standard admin screens. These sidebars could be used in our theme, through the use of it’s template tags, but they can also be used to add widgets to posts and pages content. I’ve created a new sidebar – or Turbo Sidebar, as they’re known in Widgets on Pages – called Basic Widgets Demo. I have some options that would allow me to automatically add the contents of this sidebar to either the header, content, or footer of all posts and/or pages, but I’m not needing that for this example. Step 3 – Add our Widgets Our new Basic Widgets Demo sidebar is now visible in the standard WordPress widgets admin screen. I’m going to add a couple of widgets, a calendar, and a tag cloud. These add dragged onto the new sidebar, just as you...
Read MoreIt’s with great pride that we release v1.0.0 of our latest plugin, Past Events Extension. Past Events Extension is the ideal addition to your event or conference website if it’s powered by the excellent Tyler Events WordPress theme. And whilst you might think you’re site is running just fine, what if you’re event is in its second or third year? Shouldn’t you be making the most of previous sessions? Videos and photos of past events are key assets when tempting future sponsors These past events and sessions can provide valuable content for your site. Perhaps you have links to the presentations on slideshare, photos of the speakers in actions or the sponsorship booths, or even video or audio recordings of the sessions themselves. These assets can serve several key purposes, if you allow them; Useful content for attendees who were unable to attend. A resource for the speakers to link back to. A sponsorship sales aid, showing potential sponsors what they’re gaining from being a part of your next event This is where Past Events Extension comes in. It adds an extra status to your sessions, allowing them to be saved as a “Past Session”. This means that they remain an post on your site, but will not appear within Tyler’s built in schedule listings. With the free version of the plugin these past sessions can be listed in a predefined page, with no coding required. It’s that simple. This can be enhanced further with the Pro version. With extra meta boxes on the single session edit screen you can add session assets – video/audio links and links to slides. These assets are then automatically included within each single session page. The Pro version also includes a WordPress shortcode that can be used to list sessions. Being a shortcode this means it can be included in any WordPress post or page, giving rise to the option to say, for example, having WordPress pages covering a past event each. Each of these pages could list a recap of the event, maybe a video montage, and then a listing of the sessions from that time (through the configurable Past Events Extension shortcode) followed by a closing section with that year’s sponsors...
Read MoreThe recent release of v1.1.0 of Widgets on Pages brought in a few fixes, for stability and upgrade paths… but most exciting is the inclusion of the visual editor support in our PRO version. Inserting widgets into posts… …It is as simple as “drags, drops, and clicks” The below video shows just how smart this is, and that an author, with a few simple “drags, drops, and clicks”, can insert widgets inline into their posts, and even align them horizontally. https://youtu.be/w2LfCihCqRI As well as adding widgets and sidebars directly into post content, you can also use the plugin’s template tags to automatically include the sidebars into your theme. This, along with the ability to create as many sidebars as you want – through a familiar WordPress interface – means that this is also a super easy way to add sidebars to your themes. So what are you waiting for, start making your Widgets work for you. Check out Widgets on Pages ...
Read MoreWell, it was 7 years in the making, but Widgets on Pages has finally made v1 release. Widgets on Pages is the highest rated way to add WordPress widgets and sidebars into both pages and posts, as well as supporting an easy way to add more dynamic sidebars that can be used throughout themes. After some years of very little change I have re-architected the plugin to make use of a more standard Object Oriented structure (based upon the wonderful WordPress Pluign Boilerplate project). This v1 release also moves towards using WordPress custom post types, as storage places for each dynamic sidebar created by the plugin. Although the plugin was untouched for quite some time I did keep an eye on making sure that it was compatible with each WordPress release, and even though I didn’t make any updates it still kept bringing in the 5 star review… so thanks to you all, and the stability of the WordPress internals. It wasn’t all plain sailing As some of you will have seen, the initial bump to version 1.x did indeed land with a bump. I cannot apologise enough. It seems that everyday is a school day… and even though I believed I had thoroughly tested the upgrade from pre v1.X installs I hadn’t. It isn’t a pleasant feeling seeing upgrade issues when you have an active user base of upwards of 70,000 It turns out that my understanding of plugin updates through the WordPress.org repo doesn’t work as I thought it did. I managed to reduce the number of users that were impacted, and, thanks to the effort of users posting to the support forum, I was able to debug what was up and get some quick fixes in and rollback the stable version. I can tell you now that it isn’t a pleasant feeling see upgrade issues when you have an active user base of upwards of 70,000. If you are interested then this article covers how plugin updates are handled. Onwards… onwards The updated structure and use of CPT was put in place to allow an easier route to delivering some more of the items on the roadmap for Widgets on Pages… and I hope that you...
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