Helpful resources – Amanda Unvarnished

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Read: “How To Big Up Your Theme With Options for Twenty Seventeen” by @abrightclearweb and added some quick thoughts

· 29 Av 5779 (Friday 30 August 2019) · 1 minute to read

How To Big Up Your Theme With Options for Twenty Seventeen by Claire Brotherton

Released mid-2016, the Twenty Seventeen theme is still incredibly popular, with over 1 million sites using it. One downside is that it comes with very limited customizations compared to other themes.

This plugin appears to be an excellent option if you’re using the Twenty-seventeen default theme and don’t have the funds to hire a developer or designer to do customization work.

It never occurred to me to package customizer options for a theme into a plugin. I’m not sure why because I do this for custom post types and other theme-specific code snippets all the time.

The customizer is relatively accessible at this point, so I’ve begun using it more and more on my own sites instead of just leaving all the fun for my clients.

And the idea of packaging customizer options in a custom functionality plugin is one I’m definitely stealing.

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Read: “How to Use Brand Names on Your WooCommerce Store” by @BobWP

Amanda CAARSON

· 12 Tammuz 5779 (Monday 15 July 2019) · 1 minute to read

How to Use Brand Names on Your WooCommerce Store by Bob Dunn

Let your customers search your products using the brands that you resell on your WooCommerce online store with lists an widgets.

This site continues to be an excellent resource for user-centered WooCommerce information. wooCommerce is a very powerful, and very complex plugin, and Bob does a great job highlighting extensions and providing instructions for using those extensions as well as the plugin itself in clear, easy-to-read language. Bookmark his site and check back often if you run your own store.

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Generate clickable email addresses easily and insert them in to your WordPress website, with notes for the Classic Editor and Gutenberg

Amanda CAARSON

· 4 Adar II 5779 (Monday 11 March 2019) · 1 minute to read

The Mailto Link Generator by Michael Mckeever (Mailto Link Generator)

Mailto link code and markup generator with subject, body, cc and bcc. Quickly and easily generate code for those annoying mailto links.

Clickable email addresses which allow your site’s visitors to send you email, (otherwise known as mailto links), can be quite handy, and they’re easy to generate if you type HTML as if it’s your first spoken language. If you don’t do that, they can seem like the hardest thing to create, and you have a couple of options for creating them: Google what you need and then save that information in a place you’ll hopefully remember, or just use this mailto link generator. Simply fill out the form appropriately, generate the HTML you need, and copy and paste. Note that if you’re doing this using a WordPress installation, you’ll want to switch your editor to the code view if you’re using the Classic Editor, or use the custom HTML block if you’re using the editor as of WordPress 5.0. You can also insert your generated mailto links in the custom HTML widget for use in any widgetized area your theme provides. See this post for a complete guide to WordPress widgets, which includes a section on the custom HTML widget.

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Converting png files to jpg files while using a screen reader

Amanda CAARSON

· 18 Tevet 5779 (Wednesday 26 December 2018) · 3 minutes to read

Convert PNG to JPG (PNG to JPG)

Convert your images from PNG to JPG online and for free, applying proper compression methods.

The Problem

By default, WordPress supports png files to its media library. However, some hosts, (including mine), will block some filetypes for security reasons. In my case, one of the off-limits filetypes is png (image) files. You can change this by either employing the appropriate filter through code in either your theme’s functions.php file or a custom functionality plugin, as long as your host is not already using the appropriate filter to block said filetypes. I don’t plan on spending my afternoon trying to guess the priority I need to use to try to get around this. You can allow any filetype to be uploaded through WordPress’s wp-config.php file. If your host is blocking certain filetypes from being uploaded for whatever reason, they will likely not appreciate your using the wp-config constant, because when I say allow all filetypes, I really do mean allow all filetypes, or at least all filetypes supported by your web server software, which is quite an extensive list and really could introduce some security issues due to the way WordPress handles attachments: They’re a post type. Since I find myself in a situation where I need to upload a png file to my site for use as a featured image for a post, I needed a solution that was none of these and that was also accessible to a screen reader user.

The Solution

Dealing with images is difficult when you can’t see them. Converting between image formats without compromising the quality of the original image is also difficult. If you’re sighted, you’d probably open the original file in your favorite image manipulation software, tweek compression rates and other stuff, and then re-save in the format you need. Most image manipulation software is inaccessible however, and so this method is off limits. So, I needed to find a tool I could use.

PNG2JPG meets all my requirements, and it might meet yours as well. It has a very simple interface, including a traditional browse button for uploading files, and it will handle all the background compression for you and return a jpg file which perserves the quality of the image. You can then upload the returned file because it’s likely your host isn’t blocking jpg files since that’s the most common image format and they’d likely lose customers hand over fist, even if they could claim a security reason for blocking that format.

If you find yourself in the same position I did, this tool should hopefully save you a lot of time, at least if you’re converting png files to jpg and you don’t feel like pinging a sighted person who’s good with images and has the right kind of software. Enjoy, and I hope you find it useful.