No Mo’ Notices – Suppressing notices, about pages, and other nags in popular WordPress plugins

Earlier this week, I wrote a rant post about WordPress plugins that make it difficult to suppress certain admin notices, about pages, and other nags (such as feature pointers).

After filing some pull requests, talking to a few developers, and poking around code on GitHub, I’ve been able to cobble together some solutions for a few popular plugins like WooCommerce and WordPress SEO.

Read more…

We Don’t Need Your Stinkin’ Admin Notices

Over the past few weeks I’ve seen a frustrating trend. Increasingly, WordPress plugins have decided they see fit to add admin notices (those “flash message”-style nags at the top of your dashboard) and about pages (like the ones you see after upgrading WordPress itself)… without making them skippable via code.

You might be asking “why’s that a problem?” And sure, it seems innocuous enough.

The problem is that these messages often make assumptions about user behaviour that just aren’t always true. In the process, they frustrate, confuse, and ultimately hurt user experiences.

Read more…

4 reasons to manage your content marketing with CoSchedule (our review)

You just finished writing up your newest blog post. Now what? Time to make the social media rounds and set up your posts on Facebook. Then Google+. Then Twitter. Even if you use something like Buffer you might have to spend time tabbing back and forth between your post and Buffer to put in the right links and quotes. It may not seem like a lot but that time adds up.

You could be spending that time writing more content and social media posts. With CoSchedule, you can. CoSchedule is an amazing WordPress plugin that makes content marketing intuitive, smooth, and fast by bringing the social media and scheduling tools right to your WordPress dashboard.

Read more…

Code snippet: Hide post meta boxes in WordPress

Meta boxes are the draggable/collapsible boxes on edit pages in WordPress, and in addition to default meta boxes for things like setting the post author, categories, etc., lots of plugins add their own meta boxes.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all these meta boxes. While they can be useful, they’re typically only useful when you actually need them. When you don’t, they just take up space and make it harder to find the features you do need.

Fortunately, WordPress gives you a few ways to hide these meta boxes. I cover three options below.

Read more…

This weekend: WordCamp Philly 2014

Are you going to be in the City of Brotherly Love this weekend? If not, you should be! WordCamp Philly 2014 is this weekend, and I’m going to be debuting a brand new talk.

The conference runs Saturday and Sunday (the 7th and 8th), with Sunday functioning as a WordPress contributor day.

My talk is titled “Make your clients happy with modular themes”, and will reveal—for the first time ever—some of our secrets on how we rapidly build client-friendly modular themes. Here’s the full description:

Read more…