Latest WordPress posts from Steve Polito

How to Deploy a Sage Theme to WP Engine

Sage is WordPress starter theme with a modern development workflow. However, deploying a Sage theme can be difficult because of its dependencies, most notably Composer and Yarn. In order to deploy a Sage theme, you need to be able to run both Composer and Yarn on your server. Furthermore, Sage doesn’t officially support hosting at WP Engine. You could deploy Sage via FTP, but this approach is error prone and inefficient. Fortunately, there are services such as DeployBot and DeployHQ that can run these builds, and them push the distributed files to the server. For this tutorial, I am going to be using DeployHQ.

In Defense of WordPress

WordPress is said to power 35% of the internet, yet it seems to get a lot of criticism amongst developers. I’ve been developing with WordPress for roughly 5 years and can empathize with many of the critiques. However, I think that most of the complaints can be attributed to misconceptions and bad first impressions. WordPress is just another technology, and is only as good as the developer it’s used by.

Redirect a Parent Page to its Child in WordPress

Sometimes you need to redirect a parent page to its child page, especially if you need to keep a specific type of menu hierarchy. There are several ways to do this, but I prefer using Advanced Custom Fields. This is because it allows content editors control over the redirect, and also allows for greater flexibility in the future.

Add a Featured Image to the Events Calendar Month, List and Day Views in WordPress

By default, WordPress allows you to assign a featured image to a page or post. However, if you’re using The Events Calendar, you’ll notice there’s no easy way to assign a featured image to the events month, list or day views.

Pro Tip: Use the esc_attr Function to Format alt Tags When Using ACF

If you’re rendering images with ACF, make sure you run the alt text against the esc_attr function. Why? Because there’s a chance that the alt text could contain quotation marks "".

Learning WordPress as a Drupal Developer

I started my career in web development by using Drupal 7 on every project. I just assumed that WordPress could not meet my needs, and that it could not be customized as well as Drupal. However, after working within WordPress for several years, I’ve learned that WordPress can match Drupal’s functionally, and can almost always meet my needs no matter what the project scale.

Unpopular Opinion: WordPress Should Be the First Choice When Building a Website That Won't Be Maintained by a Developer or Agency

I know this article seems like clickbait, so let me try and explain myself before I lose you. In order to understand my viewpoint, it helps to know that I don’t think WordPress is the right tool for the job all the time. Rather, I think it’s the right tool for the job under specific circumstances. It just so happens that for the type of work I do, these specific circumstances are very common. I work for an agency which builds small to medium sized websites that will eventually be handed off to the client.

Create a Bootstrap Theme for WordPress

In this tutorial I will show you how to create a Bootstrap theme for WordPress. If you just want the finished product, feel free to download the theme from my repository.

WordPress ACF Frontend Form Tutorial (With Email Notifications)

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to create a frontend form for a custom post type that anonymous users can fill out. As an added bonus I’ll show you how you can trigger an email to be sent each time the form is submitted.

Modern WordPress Theme Development in 2019

In this article I’m going to show you my personal and opinionated WordPress theme development workflow. The goal of this article is to highlight the power of the WordPress Command Line when combined with automated build tools, along with an organized project structure.

Create a Custom Search Form in WordPress

In this tutorial we are going to create a custom search form in WordPress. Specifically, we are going to add a custom search form on the archive of a custom post type.

Create a Proximity Search in WordPress

In this tutorial we are going to build a store locator using a proximity search. Below is the final result.

Use Dashicons to Create a Social Media Menu in WordPress

There are plenty of plugins that allow you to add social media icons to your WordPress site. However, I always advocate avoiding plugins in favor of rolling out your own solution. Don’t fall into the trap of installing a plugin when you can develop your own solution using the WordPress API.

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