Author Archives: Christine Rondeau

Christine Rondeau 8:27 pm on May 16, 2013  

Time to ditch Your WordPress?

The section Your WordPress on the forums might have made sense at the beginning when few of us were using WordPress, but now that it’s so popular, there are better avenues for someone to “Strut their stuff” and get feedback.

These days this section contains mostly spammers and moderators tend to give that section less attention. In my opinion, this section is not worth keeping, but I may have not considered something.

Care to voice your opinion filling out the survey and/or leaving a comment?

Christine Rondeau 1:53 am on January 17, 2013
Tags:   

Troubleshooting WordPress Training

Following my discussion earlier this week with Jen and to clarify what was mentioned in her post, I’ve been thinking of ideas for what a “Troubleshooting WordPress Workshop” could look like.

Two years ago at WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Toronto, Kathryn Presner led a 3 hour workshop and gave beginners a primer about WordPress walking them through the dashboard, etc… Myself and Ruth Maude were on hand to help people with questions.

Perhaps 3 hours is  too long for a troubleshooting workshop, but having a longer session would be useful for folks to ask question, play with code, etc…

A  very rough outline of what could be covered would be:

  • Installation Issues ( localhost and self hosting )
  • I can’t find/reset my password what do I do?
  • Overview of FTPFTP FTP is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol which is a way of moving computer files from one computer to another via the Internet. You can use software, known as a FTP client, to upload files to a server for a WordPress website. https://codex.wordpress.org/FTP_Clients. and phpMyAdmin – why these are great troubleshooting tools
  • Ack! White screen of death
  • Theme/PluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party errors
  • Incompatibility with themes/plugin
  • Media Images are not showing up, how can I fix this?
  • I’ve upgraded my site and now it’s borked
  • My site is slow
  • I’m making changes and nothing happens
  • I change the site url and now I can login to my admin
  • Help me change the width/colour/font???? How do I do this?

These are just off the top of my head right now. Before doing anything, I would want to go through the troubleshooting info on the codex, but having been on the forums for a while, I’ve answered a combination of these questions, once or twice. 😛

I would also like to give the participants the opportunity to submit their specific issues before they come. Hopefully once they’ve been through this, they would be more comfortable coming to the forum and offering help.

Let me know if you have any suggestions, comments.

 

#training

Christine Rondeau 10:19 pm on October 30, 2012  

I just spent a few hours making some…

I just spent a few hours making some edits. I found quite a bit of info that was incorrect so made changes. I also tried to use the same standards from page to page as in use bold instead of “” when highlighting some words. I covered all the pages from 06 to 08 except MultisiteMultisite Multisite is a WordPress feature which allows users to create a network of sites on a single WordPress installation. Available since WordPress version 3.0, Multisite is a continuation of WPMU or WordPress Multiuser project. WordPress MultiUser project was discontinued and its features were included into WordPress core.https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network.. I don’t do Multisite (terminator voice)

Christine Rondeau 12:22 pm on August 28, 2012
Tags: ideas   

It’s 5 am and here I am not…

It’s 5 am and here I am not being able to sleep because I have a couple of ideas about the forum. 🙂
I thought I would pass them on and see if we can discuss these later, (maybe at the wpcsWPCS The collection of PHP_CodeSniffer rules (sniffs) used to format and validate PHP code developed for WordPress according to the WordPress Coding Standards. May also be an acronym referring to the Accessibility, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, etc. coding standards as published in the WordPress Coding Standards Handbook.?)

I find myself repeating 2 things over and over again in the forum. 1) Please provide a link to your site 2) …making a child themeChild theme A Child Theme is a customized theme based upon a Parent Theme. It’s considered best practice to create a child theme if you want to modify the CSS of your theme. https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/. would be good idea. Here are some instructions….

1) Could this be “solved” by adding a text field when people first submit the thread? The field could be optional, but at least if it’s there, people might use it.

2) When theme developers submit a theme, it might be a good idea, to provide a folder for the child theme with the styles.css ready to go with proper commenting and instructions on how to get started. Not sure if this would fly by the theme reviewers. I noticed that Emile’s theme – Responsive – has a folder for custom templates with instructions on how to use it. There are tons of tutorials on child themes, yet so many questions about them. This might encourage them to get started.

Anyway, these ideas were in my head and keeping me up, back to bed. 🙂

#ideas