Widgets & Plugins

Position or Move the Captions in Soliloquy Lite Slider

October 20, 2015 by Marcy Diaz 11 Comments

Although there is much debate over whether sliders are a good choice for a website, this tutorial is not meant to argue the merits, but just to help you position the captions in Soliloquy slider to best suit your image. The Soliloquy Lite WordPress plugin is a good choice for a basic, light, easy-to-use slider, and can easily be upgraded to Soliloquy, the premium version, if more features are required. The other benefits of using this slider is that clients can easily change the images, the text, and the pages or posts that are linked. It’s much easier and simpler to control than some other slider plugins.

This WordPress tutorial shows you how to position or move the captions in Soliloquy Lite Slider to the left or the right, lower and upper corners, so that the caption is visible, but doesn’t detract from the image. This way you can position the caption text where it is best for your images. Similar CSS can be used with other sliders, as well.
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Display and Style WordPress Tag Cloud Widget with Categories Too

October 13, 2015 by Marcy Diaz 2 Comments

WordPress comes with two widgets for displaying your tags and categories. Depending on the number of blog post tags and categories, you can use these widgets as they are. But you can also style your list of tags or categories, so they are more useable by your readers. This tutorial shows you how to display and style WordPress Tag Cloud widget to add buttons for both post tags and categories.

New Site Icons for WordPress and Genesis to Download

September 8, 2015 by Marcy Diaz 2 Comments

WordPress 4.3 now has a feature to make it easy for you to add a site icon or favicon to your website, and this feature is supported in Genesis 2.2. The favicon is the little image that identifies your website in the browser bar and bookmarks. It’s also a site icon because the same icon will now be used as an app icon when saving a website on a mobile device. And if you change themes, you won’t have to figure out how to upload your site icon again.

For the new site icon, it’s best if you can upload an image that is 512px square. You can also upload larger images because you will be allowed to scale and crop, but it’s probably best if you resize before uploading. If you upload a smaller image, it will scale to 512px and be blurry.
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Hide Sidebar Widgets on WordPress Pages and Posts

August 19, 2015 by Marcy Diaz 4 Comments

WordPress widgets are used to add extra features or functionality to your theme. They are added to your theme sidebars or widget areas, including footer and after post areas. Some of the widgets are included with the theme, such as Recent Posts or Search widgets, and others you or your website developer will add using plugins. They can include videos, email newsletter signups, social media follow, recent posts, display your Instagram images, a brief about you, shopping carts, and calls-to-action, almost any functionality.

So you’ve added some cool widgets to your sidebar or footer. What happens when you don’t want to show one of them on a particular page? What if you want to hide sidebar widgets on some WordPress pages and posts? Or what if you want to show a different widget, depending on the post category?
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Fix MailChimp Form Connection Untrusted Browser Error

August 11, 2015 by Marcy Diaz 4 Comments

If you’ve recently changed your website to use HTTPS with an SSL certificate, you know that you have to do a bit of tweaking to make sure all “assets” also load securely. While this tutorial details how to fix HTTPS/SSL errors for MailChimp signup forms giving connection untrusted or connection not private warnings in the browser, the information may apply to other newsletter services or links to other services or affiliates, as well.

Using the Featured Custom Post Type Widget for Genesis

June 9, 2015 by Marcy Diaz 13 Comments

Genesis themes come with the Genesis – Featured Posts widget which you can use to add a grid of posts to your home page or add some recent posts to your sidebar. This works great for normal posts, but what if your theme has custom post types, like events, portfolio items, or testimonials?

Jo Waltham (Callia Web) has improved the original featured posts widget to add custom post types and custom taxonomy. You can find her Featured Custom Post Type Widget for Genesis on GitHub. This means that you can still easily add extra content to widgets in your home page or sidebar.
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Move Genesis After Entry Widget to Inside Post Entry

March 31, 2015 by Marcy Diaz Leave a Comment

The Genesis After Entry widget area is normally added after a single post entry and before the comments section. But you may want to have an after entry widget area inside the post entry content area. This tutorial shows you how to move the after entry widget area.

You can move the after entry widget area easily. For this tutorial, I’m using Genesis Sample child theme, but gave it a darker gray background, so you can more easily see the post content area. I also added a blue background to the after entry widget.
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Add Genesis After Entry Widget to Pages and Custom Post Types

March 24, 2015 by Marcy Diaz 11 Comments

Most Genesis child themes now add the After Entry widget area to the bottom of single blog posts. It’s added after the blog post and before the comments section. The most common use for this widget area is to add a call-to-action, such as a newsletter signup box. But often business website owners need an after entry area on pages or custom post types, such as their portfolio or testimonials pages.

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Add HTML – Images and Links – to Text Widgets Without a Plugin

October 7, 2014 by Marcy Diaz 2 Comments

WordPress posts and pages use the TinyMCE editor, so you don’t have to write HTML in your posts and pages, unless, of course, you want to. But the Text Widget is still, well, text.

This tutorial will show you how to use the WordPress WYSIWYG editor from a Page to add HTML to a Text Widget without actually writing the code or using a plugin.

Suppose you want to add a thumbnail image, some text, and a link to a Text Widget, like this. Genesis Sample theme sidebar is on the left and Twenty Fourteen sidebar is on the right. No additional styles were added; this is the theme default for both.
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Remove Category Base from WordPress Permalinks

September 30, 2014 by Marcy Diaz 6 Comments

Leaves by Petradr from Unsplash.com

WordPress adds a base of /category/ to the all the category archive permalinks. This means that your category links look like this:
http://example.org/category/uncategorized/

For the most part, that’s a good thing. If a category and post or page have the same slug, they won’t interfere with each other. But sometimes you need something else, so this tutorial shows you how to change the category base or remove it.
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