For over a score now, I’ve beaten the war drums for WordPress. I’ve built roughly 50 websites using it — job boards, small business sites, university portals, a website for a monk church, sites for art exhibitions, and a handful that were pulling close to a million monthly users. I’ve also built a few that, … Continued
As we move deeper into 2026, the WordPress ecosystem continues to evolve with increasingly sophisticated tools that make theme development more efficient and powerful. While stalwarts like Advanced Custom Fields Pro (ACF) remain essential (down with Secure Custom Fields) , the landscape has expanded with complementary plugins that extend core functionality and streamline workflows. This … Continued
Want a no-JS way to show/hide content in a clean, semantic, and accessible way? Look no further than the <details> and <summary> tags. They’re built into HTML, work out of the box, and are perfect for FAQs, collapsible sections, and progressive disclosure. What is <details>? The <details> element creates a disclosure widget that users can … Continued
I’ve decided to do a series on HTML tags that are off the beaten path. I’ll start with something that almost any site ends up needing after marketing gets involved: modals. For years, creating modals (aka dialogs, popups, or overlays) has meant reaching for JavaScript libraries, ARIA roles, and custom accessibility code. But HTML has … Continued
There is finally a way to programmatically assign a template to a custom post type in WordPress. Most documentation online talks about how to create new templates either in the Full Site Editor or making custom templates for themes. Neither of these solutions work if you want to make a plugin that creates a custom … Continued
For years my companies website has used WordPress’s password protection function to hide posts that we wanted people to review before going live. I needed a solution that affected the main loop, otherwise I could just use WP_Query arguments. So to hide those posts from the main query we’ve used this code snippet. The snippet … Continued
I’m currently experimenting with Kinsta and it’s local dev environment, Devkinsta for the first time. I’ve been using WP Engine for years and love them 99% of the time. However, I’m currently branching out and using Bedrock, which WPE does not support. Sage10 requires Acorn to work. It’s a framework that lets you utilize Laravel … Continued
It’s been nearly 6 years since I wrote a WP plugin list article. This time around I’m focusing on some small & simple/basic plugins. WP User Avatar Out of the box, WordPress uses Gravatar for users images. This works if you’re a blogger, but falls flat when working on a corporate website that want to … Continued
WordPress has evolved far beyond the blog platform that it originated from. Yet comments are still core feature that come with every install by default and are not used very often. If you plan to not have comments on your site, your theme should not have the comments column in the page overview. Below is … Continued
Recently I started working on modal plugin because haven’t found any of the free plugins that work. One of the features i wanted was a “layout” choice. Here’s the end result, I’ll go over how I did this: Adding The images First Things first, you need to have your images already created and uploaded to … Continued