How to Vastly Improve the Accessibility of the Divi Slider Module

Divi slider with white background for dot navigation

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

Globally Disable Commenting in WordPress Without a Plugin

Microphone

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

How to Set Up WordPress Multisite on Your Local Machine with MAMP

Note: since writing this article, I have switched to LocalWP, which is superior to MAMP in practically every way except that it doesn’t easily support Multisite with different domain names pointing to the same Multisite install. I’ve kept the article below for those still using MAMP, but rather than messing with these settings, I’d recommend that you check out … Read more

How to Give a WordPress Popup Maker Popup its Own URL for Sharing

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

Why You Probably Shouldn’t Use WordPress Multisite

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

My List of the Most Useful WordPress Plugins

WordPress plugins

These are life-saving WordPress plugins that I use on many of my clients’ and my own sites.  OK, maybe “life-saving” is a slight exaggeration, but these can definitely cure some of your worst WordPress headaches. I have tested each of these (except where noted) and vouch for their quality. I hope you find them as … Read more

Fix WordPress Ultimate Member Cover Photo Not Uploading

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

Style the WordPress Media Player (Classic Editor Only)

Speaker cone

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  Gutenburg player, check out this article. The Basic Shortcode You can invoke … Read more

Make Any WordPress Theme Responsive (Mobile-Friendly)

WordPress structure

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