Category: Support

WordPress Custom Menus – Adding a top level menu item

WordPress moved from a blogging platform to a CMS and website building tool when it released its custom menu feature back in June 2010 with WordPress 3.0.

Custom menus give easy control over the structure of page menus. Over the releases since 3.0 WordPress have improved the usability of the Custom Menu administration screen, found in Appearances>Menus.

Whilst being easy to use in many ways with drag and drop positioning, there are one or two tricks that are not obvious.

This short video demonstrates how to create a menu item, with sub menu items, where the top level menu is not actually a page.

Transcript:

“On this demo WordPress website, I have a fairly typical menu structure, with a Home page, About page, Services and Contact.

Under Services I have a couple of pages, one called First Services and Second Service.

But this is not actually how I want the site to look, because I don’t want the top menu item to link to a page at all, I just want it to be a holding menu item. So to achieve that, we need to go into the menu editor, and you will see here the typical setup with each item, Home , About, Services all pointing to page.

What we need to do is create a dummy menu item called Services, and we use the LINKS for this.

Now it is important that we put in the hash (#) or gate (#) symbol into the URL otherwise there will be problems on touch screen devices if you just leave this blank. And then we put in the text that we want to have for the menu item, and we add that to the menu. You will see that we have a custom menu item at the bottom here for Services.

We no longer need the page Services one, so we click on the little arrow there and then we remove Services.

Drag into the right position, drag these across into the correct place, and we save the menu.

With that done, we return back to the main site, we can see that the menus work as we expect, but if we click on Services nothing happens, but click on First Services we go to a page.

Obviously you can go and tidy up and remove your unneeded page, Services, leaving you with the menu structure as you need it to be.”

31st December 2013
WordPress Blogging tips – issues with layout & format

As part of the support we provide our clients we get a vast array of questions relating to WordPress, but there is one that keep cropping up which if you don’t know how to resolve can be very frustrating, so we thought we’d write a few words explaining how to fix it.

If you find that the bullet points are out of alignment you can’t get any breaks in between your paragraphs & that you cut and pasted from a word document (which most do) this is more than likely your problem.

It’s simple to fix; > delete the blog post content > cut and paste again from word with one difference > Click on the ‘w’ paste into the box and insert.

Doing this will strip out all the unnecessary word press code which will mangle your blog post.

28th November 2013
Locally cloud based collaboration

Locally like to keep our clients informed and at times it is necessary to collaborate at various planning stages of a project. We use a variety of cloud based tools to help us communicate.

One of our favorites is GoalScape Connect ( see https://www.goalscape.com/ ). Whilst originally designed as a goal setting tool for, it has proved invaluable both for setting strategy and for managing projects (both classic & agile).

You don’t need a licence for use to share reports, however is you want to collaborate and share updates with us you will need to subscribe. There is a free 14 day trial on this page https://www.goalscape.com/

20th September 2013
What is your login username to your WordPress website?

You’re not going to tell me right…of course you’re not!

But did you know unless you’ve taken the necessary steps (or your hosting company/web developer has) a hacker can find out what your username is in a few seconds?

By simply adding the string /?author=(number) to the end of you domain will result in your username being displayed if not protected. Most sites have no more than 2 registered usernames so botnets typically search up to 10 numbers e.g.

https://mywebsite.co.uk/?author=1

https://mywebsite.co.uk/?author=2

https://mywebsite.co.uk/?author=3

etc.

In the screen grab below I’ve added the extra string…

I press enter and… tadaaarr! As if by magic the username ‘test1’ appears in the URL string!

Try it out on your own WordPress website, you may need to keep going up in numbers depending on how your website was built, but it should be under ten. A sure sign that this hole has been patched up by your web dev is that you get nothing back, or an error message or even locked out of that site.

We’re protected

I wouldn’t bother trying on our website, as we are protected and you will find yourself blocked from our website for a month and don’t try it on anyone else’s website without permission, as hacking is illegal and your intentions may be misunderstood.

You’re not protected – now what?

OK so you’re site isn’t protected – anyone can find out what your username is, so what?

Did you hear about the botnets attacking WordPress sites with the username ‘admin’ in the news? Once they have a username half the battle is won, they can run scanners like https://wpscan.org/ – to try hundreds of variations of popular passwords in minutes, once they’re in – it’s not worth thinking about.

Fix it

This hole can be plugged, it’s important that it is fixed as your website is at risk, ask your web developer they should be able to to help – if not get in touch and see what web design Surrey can do.

Our clients are protected as it’s one of a number of security services we provide.

19th August 2013
Adding Text and Image Links to WordPress Posts and Pages

A question often asked is can I add links to sites other than my own? With WordPress this is very easy and like everything, it is even easier if someone shows you how.

I have created a short video demonstrating adding a text link and also a image link to a page or post within WordPress 3.6.

It shows how the link can be created and also how to set it so the link opens in a new browser tab. It is always recommended that when send a visitor of yours to another site that a new tab is opened, that way the visitor can find your site again more easily.

Take a look at the video.

15th August 2013
Adding YouTube Videos to your Posts and Pages

Adding an embedded YouTube video to your WordPress pages and posts on a Locally site is nearly as simple as adding an image.

The first step is to get the image you want to display for the user to click on, this could be a still from the video or anything else you fancy. You may want to embellish the image with a ‘play now’ type of button, using your favorite image editor.

Here are a couple of play buttons you could use. Right click and select ‘save image as’ on one if you want to download it.

Then use your favorite image editor (we like paint.NET, it is free and well supported, you should be able to find the download here )

You can see it all in action on a video we put together using the techniques described below.

So first you need to prepare the image that you will use as the still from the video. you could use a screen grab of the actual video or anything else that is relevant, and then overlay your ‘play button’.

Then using the standard WordPress ‘add media’ button, upload your image and put it in your post or page where you want it to be, just like any other image.

Next you need to find your YouTube video and its ’embed’ code, you can find this under the video, if you click on the ‘share’ link and the ’embed’ link. We don’t want the whole ifra

me code, just the URL, copy that and go back to your WordPress image editor and replace the link. What you are looking for is something like ‘www.youtube.com/embed/CbtGMqLZUdA’ and you put an ‘https://’ at the front to give you ‘https://www.youtube.com/embed/CbtGMqLZUdA’

There is one more thing that needs to be done to the link, essentially to ensure the video plays when it opens up and runs in HD. We need to add “?rel=0&wmode=transparent&autoplay=1&hd=1” to the end of the URL.

So the final link you will have is along the lines of ‘https://www.youtube.com/embed/CbtGMqLZUdA?rel=0&wmode=transparent&autoplay=1&hd=1‘ except that string in the middle will be different and should be your video’s id.

The last step is to go to the ‘advanced settings’ tab of the image editor and scroll down to the ‘advanced link settings’ and give the ‘CSS class a value of ‘youtube’.

Save the image and update your post and page, then view it and check it all works, if you got it right the video should pop up and run when you click on the image.

(note to WordPress user that are not using Locally, this won’t work for you without a couple of technical changes to your WordPress theme)

15th August 2013