wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips

Author Page for Miriam Schwab

What happened to the “search engines blocked” notification in WordPress 3.2?

Miriam Schwab | July 8, 2011 | 8 Comments

WordPress site owners have an option under Settings > Privacy to keep their site open to visitors, but block search engines. Very handy when developing a site, or managing a private site that you don’t want the world to see, but you don’t want to have to deal with logins either. We often use that ... View Post

The ultimate guide to embedding HTML and iframes in WordPress – part 2

Miriam Schwab | April 7, 2011 | 5 Comments

Recently, I wrote about how WordPress users can easily add media like YouTube videos to posts and pages by just inserting the URL of the page the media is on. But that functionality was limited to sites that are oEmbed providers. ... View Post

The ultimate guide to embedding HTML and iframes in WordPress

Miriam Schwab | March 24, 2011 | 8 Comments

Embedding HTML and iframe content in the WordPress editor is annoying – the editor strips out elements so you end up with broken code, or no code at all. Right? Wrong (sort of)! For some reason, it seems that the vast majority of WordPress users are not aware that as of version 2.9 we ... View Post

How to exclude multiple categories from your WordPress feed

Miriam Schwab | January 23, 2011 | 3 Comments

I was searching desperately for a solution for creating a custom WordPress feed that excluded two categories that would be used to offer a unique Feedburner feed to readers. I found posts that explained how to exclude categories globally, but that wasn't relevant since these categories still needed to be available to readers ... View Post

How to install WordPress without a domain name

Miriam Schwab | January 16, 2011 | 33 Comments

This is one of those life-changing, super-awesome tips that I wish I had known about years ago. Note that this only works on Windows, and I've only tested it on Windows 7. Here's the scenario: you've got a client who has a website up and running on their domain name, www.mysite.com. You are creating a ... View Post

Cool plugin: New York Times style “Next Post” slider for WordPress

Miriam Schwab | January 12, 2011 | 8 Comments

Who doesn't think that the slider thingy that appears at the end of New York Time's pages with links to other articles is awesome? I've been coveting something like that for our WordPress sites for a while, and now I've found it, in usual wondrous WordPress simplicity: ... View Post

How to stop WordPress from stripping HTML from embedded iframe

Miriam Schwab | September 19, 2010 | 10 Comments

Update: I found an even better way of embedding iframes and HTML in WordPress, so I recommend ignoring what I wrote here, and checking out The ultimate guide to embedding HTML and iframes in WordPress. It just became too annoying: every time we go back to edit a post that has some kind ... View Post

WordPress turns 7. It was great then, it’s awesome now

Miriam Schwab | May 28, 2010 | 0 Comments

Our little baby is turning 7 – WordPress, my how you’ve grown! But the truth is, I remember when I first started using WordPress back in 2007, and it was pretty good then too. I think that shows how WordPress has strong foundations, even at the beginning. When I first started ... View Post

How to get around WordPress’ limitation on uploading certain file types

Miriam Schwab | March 16, 2010 | 4 Comments

One of our clients needed to upload files via their admin, and kept getting the following error message: “File type does not meet security guidelines. Try another.” This was something new to us, and after doing some research we discovered that WordPress only allows users to upload certain types of files, and any files that ... View Post