Many of our clients offer whitepaper PDFs on their site to generate leads. Therefore, our clients don’t want people to find their whitepaper PDFs from a Google search. Rather, they want to get people’s email address first before giving access to their whitepaper. The easiest way to hide a PDF uploaded to WordPress from search engines, or to noindex it, is to do the following: Install and activate the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin  Upload the PDF to the media library Edit the PDF in the media library. Depending on how your media library looks (tile view or list view) here’s how to find the E ..read more

Our client sells a product for smartphones. Therefore, customers need to first select the brand of their phone, eg. Apple or Samsung. And then they need to select the phone model, eg. iPhone 7 or Galaxy s8, respectively. Attribute setup Here’s our attributes setup in our WooCommerce product: Variations setup Here’s our variations setup in our WooCommerce product:   Frontend select dropdown menus Here’s how our product dropdown select menus look in the frontend First, you select a phone brand: Then you select a phone model, depending on which phone brand you choose: But what happens i ..read more

If you absolutely must use Placeholders in your forms, even though it’s really not good for accessibility, in particular for users with visual impairments, then here’s how to do it with Gravity Forms, our form builder of choice. Step 1: Add this php code to your functions.php file: add_filter( ‘gform_enable_field_label_visibility_settings’, ‘__return_true’ ); Step 2: In Gravity Forms, click on the Appearance tab for your field.Fill out the Placeholder and set “field label visibility” to “hidden”. Here’s a screenshot: Here’s a screenshot of how our form looks in the front-end. This post ..read more

I am currently using version 5.4 of the Jetpack plugin and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where to activate my favorite modules in Jetpack which are: Monitor: Jetpack Monitor will keep tabs on your site, and alert you the moment that downtime is detected. Tiled Galleries: for beautiful photo galleries On the Settings page, under Security here’s what I see: I don’t see anything about Monitor. Only after I wrote to their support team, did I find the magic door that leads to all the modules. On the bottom of the Jetpack Settings page, there is a magical Debug link. Click ..read more

As much as I love me my Gravity Forms, setting up the notifications can be really time consuming and not so straightforward! We have a site that has a donation form where people can donate one-time, monthly, or yearly.   I assumed that if you have a notification for “Payment Completed” that you would get a notification about all donations. But you won’t! You need to set up two notifications. The first notification is upon the event “payment completed”. This is for one-time payments. You don’t need to set up conditional logic for this form since it only sends a notification for one ..read more

After updating WooCommerce to 3.0, clicking the Add to Cart button on a grouped product page led to an error page in Chrome that said: This page isn’t working Chrome detected unusual code on this page and blocked it to protect your personal information (for example, passwords, phone numbers, and credit cards). Try visiting the site’s homepage. ERR_BLOCKED_BY_XSS_AUDITOR Here’s a screenshot: First, I looked through all the template files that needed updating by going to: WooCommerce > System Status > Templates and saw that the file woocommerce/single-product/add-to-cart/grouped.php ..read more

A while back, some of our clients asked how they can best present a PDF on their website other than just a link. So we searched for a WordPress plugin that would embed a PDF into a post or a page, but couldn’t find one that was clean-coded and lightweight…so we built our own: Simple Google Docs Viewer The plugin is easy to use, and you can embed a doc in a WordPress post or page with a simple shortcode. Here’s an example of how a PDF looks when embedded onto a post with the plugin: Depending on the size of your file, it might take a few seconds for the PDF to appear. Unfortunat ..read more

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Wix, WordPress, the Open Source GPL license, marketing and PR. Because I came out strongly in favor of Matt Mullenweg’s position regarding GPL on that post, many may have deduced that I think WordPress is the best website platform and always the best choice. I don’t. In fact, when clients approach us about building their websites, I often tell them that we-and-WordPress are not the right choice for them, and they should consider using a hosted site builder like Wix, Weebly or Squarespace. There are essentially three issues I look at to determine ..read more

Over the weekend, WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg called out Wix for using some of WordPress’ Open Source, GPL-licensed code in an improper fashion in their new mobile app; and also for ripping off the WordPress brand by calling Wix “WixPress.” Here’s Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami’s response, and here’s why it’s problematic: Wix should have provided GPL attribution Matt said Wix should have provided proper attribution to WordPress for the code used in the mobile app. Abrahami does not address this. Yes, Wix has released over 200 Open Source projects on Github, but doing a good thing doesn’t r ..read more

Our love for Gravity Forms(aff) continues. Yes it costs money. And yes, its worth it. This time it’s because of how we integrated Gravity Forms with Salesforce. Goal: Capture leads from the website, including the Adwords and Google Analytics parameters, and pass them to Salesforce. Plugins  you’ll need: Install Gravity Forms. Install the Gravity Forms for Salesforce Addon Plugin. This is not an official Gravity Forms plugin, and doesn’t have much support, and isn’t actively updated, but… it works, at least for now. Install the Gravity Forms Prepopulate plugin. Also, n ..read more