Tips and tricks by Brian Shim for web developers, bloggers, and WordPress users
Tips and tricks for WordPress and WordPress themes like Divi, Kadence, Oxygen, and more!
Packed with exciting new features, a much faster editing experience, and Elegant Theme’s endorsement to use it on new sites, it might be tempting to use Divi 5 on production sites. But on the other hand, it is still technically an alpha release (not even beta!) and it’s not feature complete. I’ve been playing around … Read more
I had a situation where I wanted to be able to set the background color of a custom post type when displayed as a feed or archive page in Divi. Each post could be a different color as chosen by a custom field of that post. I was using the Divi Machine plugin from Divi … Read more
Recently, a client of mine reported the dreaded “white screen of death” critical error on one of my sites. On the front end, the error message was simply “There has been a critical error on this website.” In the error log, I saw this: Unfortunately, this line was in WP core, not in my custom … Read more
After migrating a Divi site to production using the All-in-One Migration plugin, I discovered that I was unable to edit any sections, rows, or modules in the Divi editor on the migrated site. In the console, I got the error: The front end of the site was fine. I tried all of the usual tricks, … Read more
Like most modern WordPress builders, Kadence Blocks has the ability to display backgrounds with the parallax effect; that is, when scrolling, the background will scroll at a different rate than the rest of the page. Usually, the background scrolls in the same direction as the foreground, but slower, to mimic real life where things that … Read more
Out of the box, the Divi theme mobile menus are not navigable using the tab key, and therefore do not meet accessibility requirements. A quick solution to this is to install the Divi Accessibility plugin, available on GitHub: This works on the default built-in Divi menu. The problem, though is that it doesn’t seem to … Read more
I recently discovered that Divi’s Parallax feature doesn’t work on Safari (on November 2024). When you scroll down, the background image just scrolls with the page like a regular background image. It doesn’t work whether you choose “True Parallax” or “CSS”. It works on all other browsers. According to this Reddit thread, the problem happens … Read more
The Divi theme comes with the Elegant Themes Icon Font which contains 360 cool icons. You can use these icons in the Divi Blurb module, but what if you want to use them somewhere else, like in a Text module or Code module, or sidebar? Turns out it’s easy to do. First, find the icon … Read more
If you’re using custom code to create users in WordPress, you may need to create a password reset link that you can email to new users once their account is created. Here’s how to do it. Creating the Password Reset URL Here’s the code to create the URL: The only thing you need to do … Read more
If you use the Fluent Forms plugin and have it sending notification emails when a form is submitted, you might notice a copyright blurb at the bottom of the email with the copyright symbol and the name of the site: This might seem harmless, but I’ve been asked by multiple clients to get rid of … Read more
Somehow I got in a situation where a page that was supposed to use the WordPress Block Editor got “stuck” and would only allow me to open it with the Divi Builder. When I tried that, it only gave options to start from scratch or a template, which of course I did not do! I … Read more
Someone described WordPress Multisite as the “bastard child” of WordPress, and I think that is an accurate description. I’ve burned many hours dealing with the quirks of Multisite, and this is one of them. If you look at Local WP’s official docs on how to migrate a Multisite to local, you’ll see the painful instructions … Read more
Web Accessibility compliance has become a “must” in today’s world, not only to serve your visitors but also to avoid expensive litigation by accessibility trolls. The Divi Theme/Builder is one of the most popular WordPress frameworks out there, yet, out of the box, it is not accessible, unfortunately. In this article, I’ll give you some … Read more
It’s very common to want to add social icons to a website’s main menu. When using the Divi theme, you can do this by using the Divi Builder to create a custom menu. But, if you’re not already using a custom menu for other reasons, that might be more work than necessary. In this article, … Read more
There are a lot of outdated articles online telling people to use CSS if they want to hide the header or footer of a page using the Kadence WordPress theme. But, there’s actually a much better way to do it that doesn’t use CSS. It actually removes the header or footer from the page for … Read more
It’s a pretty common situation in WordPress where you’re using a custom post type for, say, a feed on a page, but you don’t want individual posts of that post type visible as separate pages. One example of this is a staff page. For ease of maintenance, you might want to create a custom post … Read more
Out of the box, the Divi Slider Module has many gross accessibility violations. The keyboard control is poor because you can’t see what you’re selecting as you’re tabbing through the navigation controls. And, the dot and arrow navigation symbol contrast can be bad. For an example of an accessible slider, check out W3C’s demo. In … Read more
For the life of me, I wasn’t able to find a pre-made Gutenberg block for making checklists. I’ve had more than a few occasions for clients and for my own sites, where I’ve wanted to embed a checklist into WordPress. Usually, I ended up doing it in raw HTML. Not ideal for clients. So, I … Read more
2025 UPDATE I no longer recommend using a Google or Microsoft email account for sending transactional email from a website. The main reason is that I’ve seen these accounts get disconnected for various reasons (i.e., the client changed the password) or sometimes for no apparent reason at all, resulting in no email from the site … Read more
Surprisingly, I wasn’t able to find a native solution online to globally disable commenting on a WordPress website. WordPress doesn’t have a checkbox called “Globally Disable All Comments”. But, a quick and easy solution does exist which does not require a plugin! To be clear, I’m talking about still showing the existing comments, but not … Read more
Popup Maker is a popular and useful WordPress plugin for creating website popups. The popups can open automatically after a preset time or through a click event on the page or in your menu. But one feature I haven’t found natively in Popup Maker is the ability to tell the page to automatically open the … Read more
Here’s the situation: You’ve created some custom Taxonomies and custom Post Types using the Custom Post Type UI Plugin (or using PHP code). You’re using Advanced Custom Fields (or another plugin) to manage your Taxonomy settings, so you do NOT want those meta boxes to appear in the sidebar of the WordPress editor. I found … Read more
Divi is one of the most popular drag-and-drop WordPress builder themes out there today. As a long time Divi user myself, I was super excited (and envious) when I learned about some of the killer features of Oxygen, a newer WordPress builder that claims to create fast bloat-free code. After building a couple of sites … Read more
Annoyingly, the Oxygen builder doesn’t really provide a built-in search form that pops out when you click a button (like you see in other themes like Kadence or Divi). You have to build it yourself. In my Oxygen version, the magnifying glass search icon is to the right of the menu. When you click it, … Read more
I’ve used MAMP to create local WordPress sites for years. But, I had a hell of a time trying to get it to work with a WordPress Multisite. After a whole day of research, I finally got it to work though! If you want a quick summary of the key points, here are the keys … Read more
Web development clients seem to love popups. They’re always asking me to add popups to websites. My “go to” solution for WordPress popups is the popular Popup Maker plugin. But, as explained in this article, WordPress Popup Maker has had its “popup” custom post type set to “private” since version 1.7. While there are cases … Read more
WordPress Multisite lets you create multiple WordPress websites that all use the same set of themes and plugins. It might appear to be a great way to make maintaining multiple sites more efficient, as you can update the WordPress core, themes, and plugins once, and they are updated for all sites. But in practice, the … Read more
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) is an indispensable time-saving tool for many WordPress developers. But, when data sets become large, ACF queries can take a long time if not done efficiently. Here are some effective ways to massively speed up your ACF queries! 1. Use Local JSON (or Export to PHP) Local JSON is a new … Read more
The Ultimate Member plugin is a formidable package for managing membership on a WordPress site. Surprisingly, however, it does not have a built-in way to import members through CSV file or other method. But, you can still do it using the method I describe here. Install the “Import Users from CSV” Plugin The first step … Read more
Elegant Themes already has a blog post entitled “How to Add More Columns to Your Divi Builder Posts or Pages” which shows how to add more columns to your Divi theme. Currently, the builder maxes out at 6 columns. The blog article’s method works fine if your modules are all equal height as shown in … Read more
On one of my sites, my Divi contact form worked great on desktop but someone told me it didn’t work on mobile. Sure enough, they were right! On my iPhone, I got this message after submitting the form: “Please refresh the page and try again.” In French, the error is “Veuillez actualiser la page et … Read more
WordPress is a great website platform that I use and develop on every day, but, it has its weaknesses. It requires a database that is accessed dozens (or hundreds?) of times every time a page is loaded, which can slow down page load times. It’s kind of a wasteful use of server resources if your … Read more
Many people who use the WordPress Divi Accordion Module want it to start out closed by default. Every WordPress client I have who uses the Divi Accordion has asked for it, and there are many people online asking about it. The way it works now is that the first element of the accordion defaults to open, … Read more
Querying a WordPress database is pretty straightforward using WP_Query or get_posts(). However, I ran into a problem when I was trying to search for all Posts with a certain custom field value that was stored as an array. The Problem I was using the popular Advanced Custom Fields plugin. The field type I was using … Read more
Let’s say you have a page or piece of code that needs to be run regularly, say once a day, or once an hour. It might update a database, import something into WordPress, clear out log files, make a backup, or whatever. If you have access to the server, you can set up what Linux … Read more
Ultimate Member is a very widely-used membership WordPress plugin. It works well, but I’ve come across a number of problems with the uploading of member cover photos on multisite WordPress sites. These were so maddening, I decided to write about them and provide solutions to you! So, here are some things to check if cover … Read more
I had a situation where I needed to create a WordPress Multisite network of sites with each site having completely unique domain names. I found everything I needed by Googling around and I got it to work, but I wanted to document it for later use because there are some “gotchas”. Here’s the procedure. Note, my … Read more
Have you ever gotten this Linux “out of memory” error when working with your WordPress site? If you Google around to solve this problem, almost all of the advice you’ll get is to increase your PHP and WordPress memory limits, or add memory to your server, or to remove plugins. I didn’t want to just … Read more
This article describes how to style the audio player in the WordPress Classic Editor (it uses MediaElement.js). Note, if you upgrade to Gutenberg, these styles will no longer work! The Gutenberg player uses the HTML audio element. If you want to style the Gutenberg player, check out this article. The Basic Shortcode You can invoke … Read more
Here is the scenario: You’ve searched high and low and found the perfect WordPress theme for yourself or your client. But, there’s one big problem: it’s not mobile-friendly. With mobile web traffic soon expected to exceed desktop web traffic, being mobile-friendly is critical. I often have to go through the exercise of converting a non … Read more