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WordPress is an easy CMS to run your blog. So much easy to use that it now powers more than 30% of the web. You can write, edit, and publish your post in a very convenient interface.

However, when it comes to managing multiple authors, WordPress comes short of necessary features. And this is where plugins come into play.

In this post, we gathered and tested a number of plugins that will enhance the capabilities of WordPress for managing multiple authors on your blog. Let’s take a look at the list.

Adminimize

If you have multiple authors working on the site, you might be thinking to hide some items that these authors don’t actually need to see on the admin area. This plugin enables you to hide items from the WordPress admin area such as the menu, meta field, or any other according to your requirements.

Our Todo List

This plugin adds a box on the post editor where you can add a todo list. On each of the list, you can add the keywords, notes, a URL, assign it to a particular user, and set the priority. It’s very convenient for collaborating with multiple authors on a single post.

Simple Author Box

This plugin makes it easy to add an author box where you can show the author avatar, bio, and their social media URLs.

WP User Avatars

This plugin allows users to upload their own image for their avatar on the site. It’s more convenient for your authors to upload their avatars themselves rather than the admin setting their avatar in Gravatar.

Edit Flow

Add a useful editorial calendar to your WordPress with this plugin. You can see the post schedule (weekly or monthly), a custom status for each post, a section for editors and writers to add comments, and many more features that enhance the experience of collaborating and publishing on WordPress.

PublishPress

PublishPress adds features quite similar to Edit Flow with the Calendar, Custom Status, and Notification that improve the overall editing experience with multiple authors. On top of that, it also provides a separate set of plugins to provide more features; one of which is PublishPress Authors

PublishPress Authors

This plugin extends the author management feature in WordPress. For instance, it allows you to add multiple authors on a single post and create guest authors without having to create a real account for them. This plugin is also already compatible with Gutenberg.

Co-Authors Plus

A plugin that extends the Author metabox in the post editor that enables assigning multiple authors to a single post, and creates a byline for guest authors without creating an account for the author.

At the time of writing, however, this plugin does not support Gutenberg natively, so within the Gutenberg editor, it will still appear as a classic metabox.

WP User Frontend

This plugin features a frontend editor and uploader for user profiles which enables users to manage their account and send their post from the site’s front-end rather than from the wp-admin.

If you want to build user-generated blogs like Dev.to or Medium, this is the plugin you’re looking for.

WP Email Users

This plugin allows you to send emails to registered users on your site. The email can be plain or rich text format, with or without attachment. It’s SMTP-ready and compatible with external SMTP services like Sendgrid, GMail, and Amazon SES.

Pre-Publish Checklist

This plugin helps you in preventing an incomplete post from getting published. You can build a checklist and enable it on certain post types. The plugin will remind the author to complete each task before publishing the post.

Editorial Calendar

This plugin adds a calendar that provides a better overview of the posts to be published. You can drag-n-drop a post from one date to another to change the schedule.

WP Revisions Control

Having multiple authors writing posts on your site means you will end up with thousands of revisions. These revisions could contribute to the database size significantly, so it’s always better to control how many revisions you’d like to keep for each post. This plugin can help you to do that conveniently from the WordPress Dashboard.

Edit Author Slug

This plugin allows you to edit the user permalinks. You can change both the permalink base which, by default, is “/author/” as well as the author slug which is default to the author’s username.

Not only that, it also provides greater control over the Author URL and adds an extra layer of security with the author’s permalink changed; making it harder to guess the author’s username.

Author Avatars List

This plugin makes it easy to show a list of the author avatars on a page using a shortcode. It is already compatible with Gutenberg as well as other plugins that add custom type of users such as Co-Author Plus, Ultimate Member, and BBpress.

Molongui Authorship

This plugin features an Author Box which will automatically display the author info, bio, social icons, and related posts, attribute multiple authors in a single post, and attribute posts to guest authors without requiring a real WordPress account.

Members

A plugin that offers extended features to manage members and users in WordPress. Among other things, the plugin allows you to edit the Role capability directly inside the WordPress dashboard, add multiple roles to a single user, clone a user role, add logins and widgets, and make the site private.

Guest Author

As the name implies, this plugin enables you to add a guest user without requiring a WordPress account. A perfect choice, if you need a simple smaller plugin that does this specifically.

Share Notes on Dashboard

Allows you to add a note directly on the WordPress dashboard. As the dashboard is the first page that users see when they are logged in, it is a good place to drop notes, ideas, and todo list using this plugin.

Post Status Notifier (Lite)

A plugin with which you can send notifications to the contributors and authors when their post status changes e.g. when it’s published. The plugin is compatible with all kinds of post types and taxonomies and is integrated with some plugins out of the box, including WP Job Manager and Advanced Custom Fields.

The post 20 Plugins to Manage Multiple Authors WordPress Sites appeared first on Hongkiat.

WordPress empowers more than a quarter of websites on the Internet. However, unfortunately, it also often becomes a target of an attack. If you run your website on WordPress, you should always create a backup and save it on a cloud storage service like Dropbox.

By dint of this post, I am going to show you how to backup your WordPress site to Dropbox. So, let’s get started.

Getting Started

First of all, we are going to look for a plugin. Honestly, I’m not happy with the state of the WordPress plugins in this category, at the time of the writing.

Most of the backup plugins are bloated with overly aggressive upsells and promotions and are shipped with unpleasing UI that doesn’t go with the WordPress admin UI as a whole.

After some deliberation, I’ve finally settled with BackWPUp plugin. Despite the name that’s rather hard to pronounce, it’s a neat plugin and intuitive in use. Once, you’ve installed it, you will find a new menu as seen below.

Creating a Job

Next, we need to create a “Job” within the plugin that defines how the backup should operate. So you name the Job, select what to backup, set the archive type and the name format, and most importantly, select where the backup should be stored. In this case, we should select the Backup to Dropbox option.

Now, we need to connect the plugin to Dropbox.

Connecting to Dropbox

When you select Dropbox to store the backup, the plugin adds a new tab on the Job settings page.

In this setting page, select the “Get Dropbox App auth code” button. This will direct you the Dropbox authentication page, and you will be provided with the authentication code to put it in the field, as follows:

Additionally, you can name the directory in which the plugin will store the backup in Dropbox, as well as the number of backups to keep.

Creating a Backup

There are two ways to create a backup; manually or by a schedule. You can set the schedule from the Schedule tab in the Job settings. For the moment, however, we will just create the backup manually so we can see immediately how the backup runs.

To do that, go to the BackWPUp > Jobs, hover over the Job we just created, and select the “Run Now” option. Now we just need to wait until the process complete. It may take a while if your site is bulky.

Once the backup is complete, you can find it in your Dropbox app directory.

Wrap up

We’ve seen how easy it is to create a backup in a WordPress site, that you don’t even need a developer to it. And I can’t stress enough how important is to backup your WordPress site.

So besides backing up regularly, you should always create a manual backup before changing anything on the website, even before updating the theme or the plugins. Do let us know if this tip was helpful.

The post How to Backup WordPress Site to Dropbox appeared first on Hongkiat.

WooCommerce is one of the most popular e-Commerce plugins in WordPress. In fact, it may also be the most popular platform to run an e-Commerce site. One of the reasons for its popularity is the vast selection of add-ons to extend the functionality.

In this article, we have put together some of the best WooCommerce add-ons. You can find an add-on for payments, shipping, integration to third-party services like MailChimp and Facebook, and more. Without further ado, let’s check them out.

WooCommerce Payments

This plugin is developed exclusively for WooCommerce. It allows you to accept payments with credit and debit cards, manage refunds, and deposit fund to your bank account without the hassle.

Simply install the plugin and connect your site to WordPress.com, and you’re all set. It’s worth noting however that, at the time of this writing, this service works for US-based businesses only.

WooCommerce Gateway Stripe

As the name implies, this plugin enables your site to connect to Stripe as a payment gateway. Stripe is one of the most popular gateway to accept payment with credit cards due to the ease of use and a very comprehensive API.

WooCommerce Invoice & Packging Slip

With this plugin, you can generate the invoice and packing slip to attach to the shipment. The invoice and the packing slip is fully customizable where you can insert custom header, footer, as well as the option to select the paper size. So, if you sell physical products, you’ll probably find this plugin to be useful.

MailChimp for WooCommerce

An official plugin from MailChimp to integrate your WooCommerce store with MailChimp. This plugin can help you optimize your online store sales.

Moreover, it can sync to the Audience in Mailchimp with the purchase data on your site, set up an automation to remind customers about their abandoned cart, and track customers based on their purchase history.

Google Analytics Integration

As the name implies, this plugin allows you to connect your site to Google Analytics. It only requires you to authenticate the site with your Google Analytics account and you’ll immediately view full analytics data from Google Analytics right from your WordPress dashboard.

Booster for WooCommerce

This plugin offers various features Bulk Price Converter, Currency Exchange Rates, Prices and Currencies by Country and a lot more to supercharge your WooCommerce store.

Product Bundle

If you’re looking to boost sales, you can try to create a deal Product Bundle. This plugin can help you create bundle deals of your products in WooCommerce.

Discount Rules

Here’s a plugin that enables you to set rules where a discount could apply. With Discount Rules, you can set a basic percentage-based discounts, or an advanced rule such as applying a discount if the purchase is above a certain price or based on the number of the products in the cart.

WooCommerce Customizer

A simple WordPress plugin that allows you to customize a number of things in WooCommerce store. For example, you can change the text on the “Add to Cart” button for different product types, add the “sales” badge text, set a placeholder image source, and a lot more.

Price Based on Country

This plugin enables you to set a custom price based on the customer countries so you can calculate the price by applying the exchange rate, or manually set the price. A perfect plugin if your e-commerce site deals with customers from many different countries.

WPC Variations Radio Buttons

This plugin adds a nice “select” interface for choosing the product variations on the product page. It provides four selections: the basic HTML select tag, the Select2 library, the ddSlick, and the Radio HTML button.

This plugin can help increase user experience when purchasing the product, and overall may help to increase sales on your e-commerce site as well.

DHL for WooCommerce

An official DHL WordPress plugin. DHL – one of the popular expedition and shipping services in the world. So, if your store provides an option to ship with DHL, you should install this plugin. It can automatically create labels for national or international orders and generate the tracking code as well.

WooCommerce Order Notes

This plugin helps you conveniently manage Notes that are placed on orders. You can browse all notes on one page with pagination, and view of the order it’s connected to.

Facebook for WooCommerce

An official plugin to connect your WooCommerce store to Facebook. This plugin allows you to enable the Facebook pixel, upload your store’s catalog, and create a shop on your Facebook page without any hassle.

Perfect WooCommerce Brands

This plugin creates a new Taxonomy in WordPress where you can add a category for brands along with the brand logo or icons. It’s easy to use and provides custom shortcodes and widgets where you can display the list of this brand nicely within your online store.

Smart Coupons

Enhance the WooCommerce built-in “Coupon” functionality with Smart Coupons. For example, it enables you to restrict or issue a coupon based on the product, category or the user checkout flows including the payment method, shipping method or the number of products in the customer cart.

WooCommerce Product Dependencies

A simple plugin that allows you to restrict purchase to any product based on ownership or purchase of other products.

Smart COD

Not everyone has a debit or credit card to pay right away on your site. Use this plugin to offer a COD or Cash on Delivery to your customer. For some customers, COD provides more convenience as well as trust when purchasing online.

Product Timer

This plugins lets you set products of when it should be visible and purchasable using combinations of time setting. A pretty great plugin to run a Season Sale!

Product Compare

This plugin offers your customers to compare different products side-by-side before making the purchase. It can help your customers in purchasing the right product, thus offering a better shopping experience.

The post 20 Free Best WooCommerce Extensions and Add-ons (2020) appeared first on Hongkiat.

The WordPress CMS has changed the face of our Internet and allowed a surge of new ideas to prosper, and its open-source movement holds a strong presence rooted in software and web development.

WordPress is a blogging platform that has the ability to launch into many other scripts such as web forums, job boards, and even a classic webpage Content Management System.

We’ll be going over a few ways to get started in plug-ins development for WordPress. The steps are relatively simple and don’t require immense dedication to study. A rudimentary knowledge of PHP would be useful even with a basic understanding of the WordPress file structure and Administration panel.

In this brief tutorial, we’ll be going over the necessary steps required to create a simple WordPress plug-in. The functionality will be used to develop dynamic excerpts based on the number passed into our function call.

You’ll need to upload the plug-in file and activate it from the Admin panel, then follow up by calling our function from whatever pages we want the excerpt to appear. Links to completed plug-in source code is already added later in this article 🙂

Why develop for WordPress?

Plug-ins are a great way to enhance the functionality of your blog by adding extra features. These can be placed anywhere inside your template by function hooks.

Over time the extensibility of WordPress’ plug-in system has allowed tremendous growth and hundreds of developer-submitted pieces of software. WordPress offers explicitly such advanced features in its CMS that unique plug-ins are few and far between.

As a developer, you hold complete control over the backend specifics of your weblog. Hiring a PHP developer to create a system plugin would cost a lot more than you may imagine, and the API is relatively easy enough to work with and learn yourself.

As a secondary argument, developing over WordPress is an excellent practice for tuning yourself into other areas. Building smaller plugins and sidebar widgets in WordPress will help you develop an understanding of how the backend system works.

This isn’t just limited to WordPress, as you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the vast majority of Content Systems.

1. WP folder structure

An introduction to the WordPress folder structure will show the primary app directories. Inside wp-content, you’ll find a plugins directory. Here is where all of your individual plug-ins will be housed, either single files or properly named sub-directories.

For smaller plug-ins which only require a single .php file, you have the option to place this directly into the plug-ins/ directory. However, when you start developing more complicated applications, it’s much more useful to create a subdirectory named after your plug-in.

Inside, you can house JavaScript, CSS, and HTML includes along with your PHP functions.

A readme.txt file can also be useful if you’re planning on offering your plugin for download. This file should include your name and what the plugin does. As the author, you may also consider including details about each revision and which updates have come out.

2. Starting your PHP file

When creating a new plugin, you’ll need to start with a simple PHP file. This can be named anything but should generally reflect your plug-in’s official name.

So for example I have created our base code and have named my file hongkiat-excerpt.phps (save and rename the file to .php).

The first lines of your plug-in must be comment information for the parsing engine.

This is extremely important as WordPress will be unable to process your file without. Below is an example code snippet you can copy and mold towards your own.

<?php /* Plugin Name: Plugin Name here Plugin URI: http://www.yourpluginurlhere.com/ Version: Current Version Author: Name please Description: What does your plugin do and what features does it offer... */ 

The Plugin Name is what will show up in your Admin backend panel when you go to activate. Same with the URI, which will be placed in the details pane inside the plug-ins panel.

Although it’s not required to include a version or description, it does make your plugin look much more professional.

3. WordPress naming conventions and best practices

There are a few ways to actually structure your plug-in.

Many times PHP developers will create an entire class system in order to avoid collisions with functions and variable names. If you are unfamiliar with the advanced OOP functionality of PHP, then it’s best to just write your code in sample functions.

So for our example code, we will write a single function to house our data. We also need to define a few variables which are crucial to implement inside our template files.

Below is an example bit of code taken from our plugin file with the core logic removed.

When writing your sample code, it’s best to follow regulations and guides set up by WordPress. Since there are so many internal functions already defined, you can avoid duplicates by prefixing a label to all your variables and function names.

<?php define("HK_EXAMPLE_CONSTANT", "this is a value"); function hk_example_function( $limit ) { // Some code goes here. } ?> 

In the above example, we prefixed all our setting names with hongkiat.

This can be replaced with any keyword of your choosing usually related to your plugin name. The above code is just sample settings and shouldn’t pertain to our final plug-in.

This is just to give you some insight into how your variable names and function calls should be written.

4. Diving into Filters and Actions

There is another concept noteworthy of mentioning before we jump into our raw code.

Actions and filters are two completely different concepts that relate genuinely to the ways they manipulate plugin data.

These two bits of code come standard within the WordPress API. Filters and actions allow for plug-in developers to update bits of code throughout the WordPress admin panel pertaining to your new plug-in.

This means you could add a new tab in the sidebar or additional settings links for your Plug-in options.

Understanding add_filter()

A filter is used on a bit of text or data being passed into WordPress. With filters you are quite literally able to filter content through your own custom written functions to change data in any way.

For example, you may create a filter to change $the_content which is a variable set by WordPress containing the entire post content of a WordPress article.

For our plug-in we will be taking $the_content and shortening the length of characters into an excerpt.

Filters come in handy when you are writing plug-ins to customize the looks and feel of your blog. These are especially popular when writing sidebar widgets or smaller functions to change how a post should be displayed.

Below is a sample line of code showing how to apply a filter.

add_filter('wp_title', 'hongkiat_func');

Here we are adding a filter into the WordPress page title. Note this code doesn’t relate to our official plugin and is only being used as an example here.

The add_filter function is native to WordPress and used to add a new filter to a variable found within page content.

In the line above we’re targeting $wp_title which contains the title of our current page.

We are then passing this variable into a fake function titled hongkiat_func() which could then manipulate and return a new title tag for whatever purposes.

Understanding add_action()

Actions are similar to filters in that they don’t work on bits of data but instead target pre-defined areas in your templates and admin panel. As an example you can apply an action whenever you update or edit a page’s content.

WordPress offers a comprehensive actions list in their API documentation. Below is a small list of example actions for you to get familiar with some of the pre-defined target areas.

• publish_post – called when a post is published or when status is changed into “published”
• save_post – called when a post/page is created from start or updated
• wp_head – called when the template is loaded and runs the wp_head() function
• loop_end – called immediately after the final post has been processed through the WordPress loop
• trackback_post – called whenever a new trackback is added into a post

Again we can see how simple this bit of code boils down to. If you can understand the difference between actions and filters you’ll be that much closer to building comprehensive, working WordPress plugins.

Below is another line of code initializing an action function on the save_post hook. To clarify again this doesn’t pertain to our current developing plugin and is only used as a piece of example code to understand the add_action() function.

add_action('save_post', 'notify');

So here we see a similar setup to before with add_filter(). We need 2 variables, the first holds the name of our hook we’re targeting.

In this case save_post which means whenever a new post is saved we’re going to call our function defined in the second position (notify()). You could obviously update notify to be whatever function name you’d want to run, however this isn’t required for our current example plug-in.

Finishing our plugin logic

Finishing up on our path we’ll be adding our final function right into our plug-in file. The API documentation is very specific and provides an excellent resource to developers who may hold advanced questions.

The material may seem difficult if you are not familiar with PHP but take your time with the concepts and things will start to flow naturally!

The function below should be added directly after your plugin’s header comment. Alternatively this could also be placed inside your theme’s functions.php file.

The code is used to create dynamic post content based on a limited range of characters.

So for our example we can limit story excerpts only 55 characters long with the hk_trim_content() function. You could easly call this bit of code from a sidebar widget or one of your theme files to replace $the_content.

<?php function hk_trim_content( $limit ) { $content = explode( ' ', get_the_content(), $limit ); if ( count( $content ) >= $limit ) { array_pop( $content ); $content = implode(" ",$content).'...'; } else { $content = implode(" ",$content); } $content = preg_replace('/[.+]/','', $content); $content = apply_filters('the_content', $content); return $content; } ?> 

It shouldn’t be expected that you fully understand all internal variables or functions used here. Just getting a general understanding of how your functions should be written and what an example set would look like is a very good start.

You may also notice we’re using a call to apply_filters which is another WordPress-specific function.

This is another aspect you don’t need to fully grasp but it does help with future programming over WP. Check out the apply_filters reference page for more details and FAQs on the subject.

The core function above is named hk_trim_content(). This only requires 1 parameter named $limit.

This could also be shortened to $lim which should store an integer specifying how many characters to limit your excerpt to. The content is used on full post pages and also static pages (about us, contact).

Therefore, in order to call this function we would need to add the parameter into our template files. This would be placed somewhere possibly in your index.php or loop.php file(s) and will require you to install the plugin first. Example below:

<?php echo hk_trim_content(55); // display page content limited at 55 chars ?>

Installing and running the plugin

I’ve created a sample file for the plugin to demo if you’d like to skip the hard coding.

Simply download this file (save and rename the file to .php) or copy/paste the code into a new PHP document and upload this to your /wp-content/plugins directory.

Once completed you’ll want to access the WordPress administration panel and browse your current set of plug-ins for the demo just installed. Once you activate nothing new will happen, not until we manually add in our function call.

To do this simply navigate Appearance -> Editor and look for single.php.

This file contains all the template HTML/CSS for your basic article post page. Scroll down until you find the_content() and replace with the example code above. This will limit all your article pages to 55 characters no matter what view is being used.

You could also add in this function to similar pages in your templates directory such as search.php or archive.php.

Conclusion

These are some of the basics to get you started working within WordPress development. The plugin system is vast and contains a great deal of internal functionality.

If you already have an idea for a plug-in try it out on a local installation of WordPress to practice these topics.

If you’re still confused by much of the information you can review the WordPress documentation and search for your answer there.

The development community is full of helpful users and the forums hold archives with questions from years back.

The post Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Plugin Development appeared first on Hongkiat.

It is a well-known fact that one of the best ways to engage users on your website and gather significant user insights, is through polls, forms and surveys. For websites built on the WordPress platform, there is an abundance of free plugins you can take advantage of.

However, to save you from the tiring effort of searching the best WordPress plugins for polls and surveys, I have gathered here some of the top choices I’ve come to know, use and experience.

Take a look at the following list of recommendations regarding the most useful WordPress plugins to create forms, polls and surveys, that I have personally created for the readers, and let me know what you think.

WP-Polls

If you’re a WordPress beginner and want to add simple surveys on your blog, then here’s your plugin to create and add polls. WP-Polls allows customizing the polls via templates and custom styles, and along with these options to design polls, it also supports selecting multiple answers and displaying the stats.

It’s powered by AJAX and runs responsive on mobile devices with instant notifications and easy poll management.

YOP Poll

If you’re looking for a simple poll plugin to start with, YOP Poll is the plugin for you. It can be used to run single or multiple answer polls on your blog or website. The plugin allows to display or hide information, sort the information, manage results, view the total votes or voters and set vote permissions.

Moreover, it allows scheduling polls, archiving them and also logging and banning the poll activities easily.

Crowdsignal Polls & Ratings

“Crowdsignal Polls & Ratings”, previously called as PollDaddy, is a multilingual poll maker plugin that helps you create, manage and rate polls within WordPress. You can create unlimited, customized polls in 20 different styles, view results for your polls and also schedule a closing date for polls.

Additionally, you can display or hide the polls’ results to visitors and even embed them on other websites (let’s say for marketing purposes).

Watu

Last but not the least, we have Watu – a super flexible quiz maker that helps you make touch-friendly quizzes and exams. The quizzes can have single or multiple choice questions or open-ended questions, and you can embed them anywhere on your blog or site using shortcodes.

Watu can display answers or participants at the end of the quiz and shows results with a bar chart, and supports sharing the quiz on Facebook.

OpinionStage

OpinionStage is one of its kind all-in-one plugin that helps create a lot of things such as ballots, quizzes, surveys, forms, etc. You can allow visitors to fill the questionnaire anonymously or ask for their IDs, filter results, integrate social networks, etc.

Additionally, this multi-lingual plugin lets you add your own logo, schedule forms to close automatically as well as capture forms’ results and check detailed statistics.

Quiz And Survey Master

If you’re looking for a full-featured and extensible quiz maker, then Quiz and Survey Master is the right choice for you. The plugin helps you create attractive quizzes and surveys with customization and categorization of questions.

It offers features such as scoring methods, email notifications and configuration options to track time, set limits and schedule quizzes, and supports add-ons to enhance functionality.

Perfect Survey

“Perfect Survey” adds the ability to create unlimited surveys form and polls. You can use it, for example, to collect your customer feedbacks of your product or services or, maybe, do a market research.

The plugin features a drag-n-drop interface that makes it intutive to use, also a built-in analytics that allows you to view the data collected from the survey and poll form. It’s an overall a solid and well-designed plugin for WordPress. Easy to use, no ads, no clutter, just perfect.

Contact Form 7

If you’re looking for a simple, flexible and multilingual plugin, Contact Form 7 is just for you. The most-downloaded contact form plugin helps you manage and customize multiple contact forms and their mail templates.

You can easily insert various types of form elements per your needs and also a CAPTCHA to prevent bots from submitting your forms. That’s not all, it even supports few third-party add-ons to extend its functionality.

amoForms

This list isn’t complete without an innovative plugin like amoForms, which allows you to simply create and style multi-page forms using its drag-and-drop interface. It offers various stylized layouts for the visual editor, and allows editing every detail including the appearance and colors of the form fields.

It supports CAPTCHAs to prevent bots, integration with Google Analytics and form submission using AJAX.

Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms is no doubt the ultimate form creation tool in this list that comes without a price. It helps you build regular or complex forms in minutes using its drag-and-drop interface.

Like Contact Form 7, this plugin puts no limitation on creating any number of forms, fields, emails, actions or submissions. Additionally, it allows to customize emails, modify fields and even export them for reuse, and also offers several anti-spam options.

Bonus: More plugins..

Formidable Forms

Formidable Forms is another flexible form plugin which supports premium add-ons to add more features. It helps create unlimited contact forms including multi-column ones, polls and surveys.

You can use its built-in templates or create custom forms using its visual form designing tool. Moreover, you can send email notifications, import and export the templates, integrate spam controllers and create multi-page forms (pro).

Contact Forms by Cimatti

Contact Forms is another simple contact form maker. What makes it unique is that it offers a set of APIs that developers can use to customize and add features. The plugin helps you design forms with various ready-to-use field types, custom response messages and email notifications using its drag and drop WYSIWYG editor.

The plugin also features export utility, advanced filter options and support for reCAPTCHA.

Contact Form by BestWebSoft

If you’re looking for an unsophisticated contact form plugin with shortcode support, then Contact Form can help you create various types of forms, validating form data and sending messages via emails.

You can customize style and content of its forms using pre-build templates, and display them anywhere on your blog or site using shortcodes.

Form Maker

You can’t ignore such a powerful plugin like Form Maker that helps create multi-page forms using built-in templates with customizable fields, styles and themes. You can create highly flexible and responsive forms with its drag and drop interface.

It supports shortcodes for questionnaires, and add-ons to enhance the plugin and add more features.

Contact Form Maker

If you’re looking forward to build smart forms with conditional logic, then Contact Form Maker is what you need. With its templates, you can create simple as well as complex forms having unlimited types of fields.

You can easily add custom buttons as well as Google Maps fields to your forms. Its backend interface is easy to manage, supports integrating PayPal in your forms, and the forms are secured from bots using CAPTCHAs.

Wrapping Up

That’s all about the WordPress plugins that help you create forms, quizzes, polls and surveys to engage visitors and generate leads in easy way. If you’ve already applied this trick and look forward for advanced tricks, check out our guide to create beautiful landing pages and showcase of some of the best WordPress plugins to create landing pages.

What do you prefer to engage and increase visitors on your website? Do you know more such plugins for WordPress? Let us know using the comments.

The post 10 Best WordPress Plugins to Create Forms, Polls & Surveys appeared first on Hongkiat.

Google Docs is the go-to document creation tool for both teams and individuals. It offers advanced editing and collaboration tools for free without any limitations. However, when it comes to moving the document from Google Docs to your WordPress website, it doesn’t play very well. You will lose all the images and formatting in the process. Well, not anymore.

Automattic has recently released a Google Docs add-on that allows you to directly save Google Docs documents as a draft on your WordPress website.

In this post, I will show you how you can use this add-on to save documents in your wordpress.com or your self-hosted wordpress.org website.

Prerequisites

Below are some of the requirements for the add-on to work.

For wordpress.com websites

• A Google account to create documents and connect it with the wordpress.com website.
• Any browser.
• A wordpress.com website with administrator access (i.e. wordpress.com account).

For self-hosted wordpress.org websites

• A Google account to create documents and connect it with the wordpress.org website.
• Any browser.
• Must have administrator access to the self-hosted wordpress.org website (i.e. only the owner can connect the add-on).
• Jetpack plugin must be installed and active in the wordpress.org website. It’s compulsory to make the add-on work on self-hosted websites.

Before following the below instructions, make sure you fulfill all the above requirements depending on your website type.

Install the add-on

Before using the add-on, you must install it and connect it with your WordPress website. To get started, open the WordPress.com for Google Docs add-on page and click on “FREE” to install the add-on.

A Google Docs document will open up in a new window and you will be asked to provide the required permissions. Simply click on “Continue” and then “Allow” to provide the permissions and install the add-on.

Connect your WordPress website

After installing the add-on, you need to connect your required website. To do so, click on the “Add-ons” menu in Google Docs and select “Open” in “WordPress.com for Google Docs” add-on.

This will open the add-on in the right sidebar. Click on “Authorize” button here to start the authorization process.

A new tab will open up where you will be required to login with your wordpress.com account (if not already logged-in). You will be asked to select your website from a drop-down menu listing all the websites that are connected to your wordpress.com account. Just select the required website and click on “Approve” button to authorize it.

The window will close and you will see the authorized website in the Google Docs sidebar. If you like to authorize more websites, then click on the “Add WordPress Site” button at the bottom of the sidebar and authorize it. You can repeat the process to add as many websites as you like.

The authorization process for a self-hosted website is also the same. Just make sure the Jetpack plugin is installed and active and then authorize it using the above instructions.

Save Google Docs documents in WordPress

It’s very easy to save your documents in WordPress as a draft. When you are done editing your document, click on the “Save Draft” in the sidebar next to the website name. The document will be sent to your WordPress website and saved as a “Draft”.

If you need to update the draft, simply edit the Google Docs document and click on the “Update Draft” button in the sidebar.

The add-on will ensure most of the formatting and all of the images are as it is moved to the WordPress website editor so you won’t have to make any changes. Of course, the add-on is still not perfect and may skip some of the advanced formatting (like designs). However, most of the common formatting stays intact.

For testing purpose, I created a Google Docs document with dummy text and few images. I also applied most of the common formatting to see how they pass on, including headings, bullet points, bold, italic and underline, etc.

When I opened the draft in the WordPress editor, almost all of the formatting was perfectly migrated except for the text that I color coded. The images were perfectly aligned as well.

I also checked the HTML code of the post and it was perfectly fine without any unrequired entries. You can see it in the screenshot below.

Basic Troubleshootings

WordPress.com websites should have no problem getting authorized. However, many users have faced problems while trying to connect their self-hosted wordpress.org website with Jetpack installed.

The add-on is still new and has many bugs, and it also depends on the “Jetpack” plugin for now.

Many users will face problems based on their website configuration, Jetpack plugin configuration, and other reasons. Below I am going to mention some of the common solutions that have worked for most users to fix the authorization problem.

You can refer to them if you face similar problem.

• Make sure the website you are testing on is at least 3 days (72 hours) old. Jetpack plugin faces problem authorizing domain names that are recently registered.
• Confirm that the latest version of Jetpack plugin is installed.
• Disable all the other plugins except for Jetpack and try. You can re-enable them if it works.
• Disable Cloudflare security if you are using it. You can enable it again afterward.
• Change your theme to WordPress default (if possible) and see if it fixes. It could be a problem with the theme.
• Security solutions are known to cause authorization problem. Try disabling your security solutions temporarily and try authorizing.
• Here is a list of errors that are associated with the Jetpack plugin. If you face any, just follow the provided instructions to fix it.
• Contact Jetpack support if you are still unable to solve the problem.
• You may even have to contact your hosting service to ensure there is no problem at their end. However, I will recommend you to contact Jetpack support first and get their advice.

Summary

WordPress.com for Google Docs add-on is definitely a breakthrough in the WordPress community. You no longer have to spend extra time formatting the document in WordPress or messing with the HTML code.

Although I still recommend you to double-check your imported document to see if everything is moved precisely or not. The add-on is new and it may make some mistakes. However, this should not make you flee, the add-on will keep improving and should be usable for all the users soon.

The post Write in Google Docs, Publish in WordPress. Here’s how. appeared first on Hongkiat.

Many of you, I believe, are familiar with the WordPress login page at wp-login.php. It looks nice, and works fine. But when it comes to creating a website for clients, you might want a more customized login page, so that it integrates nicely with the website design as a whole. In addition, having a customized login page could also give your clients a good impression of your skills.

If this is something that you want to achieve on your site, here’s how you can build a fully customized WordPress login page.

Custom Login Page

First, we need to create a custom page template for the login page. To do so, you can create a new page template and name it – for example – page-login.php. Then, create a new Page from the WordPress backend and set the permalink to login so that WordPress will automatically take the page-login.php template for the page.

The Login Form

Put the wp_login_form tag in the page-login.php page template to display the login form.

 <?php wp_login_form(); ?> 

The following is optional, but could be useful in certain cases. You can configure a few things for the login form, like specifying the redirecting of URL after the user has successfully logged in, changing the ID of the username, and the password input field.

 <?php $args = array( 'redirect' => home_url(), 'id_username' => 'user', 'id_password' => 'pass', ) ;?> <?php wp_login_form( $args ); ?> 

Furthermore, you can also add something aside. It could be your logo and a little description of your site, for example.

 <div class="login-branding"> <a href="#" class="login-logo">Hongkiat.com</a> <p class="login-desc"> Hongkiat.com is a design weblog dedicated to designers and bloggers. We constantly publish useful tricks, tools, tutorials and inspirational artworks. </p> </div> <div class="login-form"> <?php $args = array( 'redirect' => home_url(), 'id_username' => 'user', 'id_password' => 'pass', ) ;?> <?php wp_login_form( $args ); ?> </div> 

Now, let’s make the form nicer with CSS. You can make the CSS up on your own as per your site requirements. In this example, here is how my login form looks like. It has black background, with a blue button, which fits quite well with the Hongkiat.com site theme.

Validation

At this point, the login page is already functional. We can try logging in, and if suceeded we will be redirected to the URL that we have specified in the redirect parameter above. But, there is something that we need to address.

First, the wp-login.php page is still accessible. It would be better to redirect the wp-login.php to our new login page to deliver a unified experience to our clients.

To do so, you can add the following codes in the functions.php of your theme.

 function redirect_login_page() { $login_page = home_url( '/login/' ); $page_viewed = basename($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); if( $page_viewed == "wp-login.php" && $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'GET') { wp_redirect($login_page); exit; } } add_action('init','redirect_login_page'); 

Remember to change the $login_page variable to your own login page (thanks to Montana Flynn for the tip).

Second, the login page can work as expected when we are successfully logged in. But if an error occurs like when submiting invalid user and password combinations, or submitting an empty field, we will also be thrown away to wp-login.php. To solve this issue, add the following functions in the functions.php.

 function login_failed() { $login_page = home_url( '/login/' ); wp_redirect( $login_page . '?login=failed' ); exit; } add_action( 'wp_login_failed', 'login_failed' ); function verify_username_password( $user, $username, $password ) { $login_page = home_url( '/login/' ); if( $username == "" || $password == "" ) { wp_redirect( $login_page . "?login=empty" ); exit; } } add_filter( 'authenticate', 'verify_username_password', 1, 3); 

These two functions perform two tasks. They will redirect the user upon failing, and append a login query string to the URL with the value of either failed or empty.

The last problem is we will also be redirected to wp-login.php when we have logged out from the site. So, we also need to specify the redirecting URL upon logging out, like so.

 function logout_page() { $login_page = home_url( '/login/' ); wp_redirect( $login_page . "?login=false" ); exit; } add_action('wp_logout','logout_page'); 

Error Message

We will display an error message, showing the user when the error occurred, and when they have logged out by using the query string that we have put in the URL. To get the value from the login query string above, we can use $_GET.

Put this code below in the login page template.

 $login = (isset($_GET['login']) ) ? $_GET['login'] : 0; 

The above code will check whether the login variable contains value, otherwise it will set to 0. Then we will display different notification messages based on the value of $error, like so.

 if ( $login === "failed" ) { echo '<p class="login-msg"><strong>ERROR:</strong> Invalid username and/or password.</p>'; } elseif ( $login === "empty" ) { echo '<p class="login-msg"><strong>ERROR:</strong> Username and/or Password is empty.</p>'; } elseif ( $login === "false" ) { echo '<p class="login-msg"><strong>ERROR:</strong> You are logged out.</p>'; } 

And below is what the error message looks like.

Conclusion

There are several things that we could do to improve our login page such as adding Lost Password link, Register Link, and a personalized error message. But, at this point it is now functioning well enough for our users to login and logout, and it could also be a good start to create a more advanced login page.

We hope that you find this tutorial useful.

The post How to Build A Fully Customized WordPress Login Page appeared first on Hongkiat.

Readability, minimalism and good user experience are common things that a premium WordPress theme should have. Usually, in case of a church websites, not much attention is given to the design aspects. However, a modern church WordPress theme can accommodate latest design trends and useful information for its users.

There are also a number of other useful elements a church website may need, such as church calendar, an attractive blog for sharing messages and if your church is collecting donations, you may need a suitable way to collecting them online. Following collection of WordPress themes have all the necessary elements and even more for a modern church.

Premium Themes

Grace

Grace is a nice clean template for churches, Christian prayer groups, charity and non-profit organizations. It has a useful easy event calendar to notify visitors about upcoming church events.

• Preview theme
• Get theme

Jesus church

This church theme is user-friendly and readable. It has a beautiful combination of soft color scheme and nice typography.

• Preview theme
• Get theme

HelpingHands

HelpingHands is a powerful charity and donation theme for WordPress. You can easily edit the site and collect donations with PayPal or other payment processing systems.

• Preview theme
• Get theme

Salvation

Salvation is a nice church WordPress theme with pink colors. It features an event management system, a donation form, and custom widgets.

• Preview theme
• Get theme

Christian church

Christian church theme comes with everything you may need for a modern clean church website. It has even Bootstrap functionality, audio player and video integration, several sliders to choose from, and archives.

• Preview theme
• Get theme

Adore Church

Adore Church is an SEO-optimized WordPress theme with an event calendar and a blog. It has unlimited color options, 150 line icons, and Google fonts to customize the design for your own needs.

• Preview theme
• Get theme

Right Way

Pure white background and slider images with floating light are amazing for a church website. Main website content is divided into three columns and combined with images.

• Preview theme
• Get theme

Angel

This amazing theme for charity organizations and churches features nice image background, donation form, donation counter, about us area, image gallery, and easy contact form.

• Preview theme
• Get theme

If you look forward to increasing sales and conversions on your blog or website, landing pages are one of the best tools to go for. They interact with the customers, bring in leads, and market your product all without needing you to be around for the action to happen.

But not all of us have the design skills, budget and/or the designer to build one. However, if you know how to work a plugin, you can still get your own landing page or coming soon page.

Here are 10 WordPress plugins that let you create and manage landing pages, track and respond to leads, build forms, create auto-responders and generate conversions.

Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder consists of a set of content modules that assists in building layouts of the landing pages. It also supports third-party widgets and shortcodes for creating layouts easily. Moreover, the plugin supports almost all WordPress themes.

Beaver Builder is optimized for mobiles and tablets, creating responsive landing pages, for better user experience on mobile. The plugin also allows developers to build custom widgets using the plugin system.

The “pro” version gives you access to additional documentation and superior support for extending the builder through custom modules.

WordPress Landing Pages

WordPress Landing Pages lets you design a landing page for your site with its visual editor, which enables you to view changes on the fly. You can clone the old splash pages, run A/B tests on the conversion pages, and extend the plugin using third-party add-ons.

The plugin lets you opt from several custom landing page designs or implement your blog’s theme on the landing pages. It’s built with the best inbound marketing techniques that help you gain and convert high numbers of leads.

You can also install WordPress Calls to Action, and WordPress Leads to implement and use a lead generation system.

Landing Page

Create lovely landing pages and switch between themes to find the right design for your page. All the steps include auto-optimization and require zero coding knowledge. On top of that, you can even run A/B tests. It also supports MailChimp subscription forms out of the box.

The plugin also offers integrated SEO features to help boost your sales. And you can also create email newsletters straight from your WordPress dashboard for building eye-catching HTML emails for your leads or subscribers, also in the mix, sales, and coming soon pages.

Unbounce

WYSIWYG builder offers effortless page editing and instant previews. 80 landing page templates optimized for responsiveness. Run A/B tests, integrate the plugin with leading marketing tools like MailChimp, HubSpot, SalesForce, etc.

Coming Soon by Supsystic

Build a responsive coming soon landing page with ready-made professional-looking templates. The building can be done with drag-and-drop, and further customization is possible with custom CSS and HTML.

Aitasi Coming Soon

A coming soon landing page builder which gives you responsive, professional-looking designs. Add a company logo and social icons, change the background color, and customize the style of the page to suit your branding.

Elementor

This is one of the most popular page builders in the WordPress ecosystem. It features its own page builder interface that allows you, the user, to simply drag-n-drop elements or modules the Buttons, Texts, Images, Columns, and sections to create a nice-looking landing page.

Even more so, you can drop-in the pre-built templates, which is a huge time safer to create the landing page.

Page Builder by SiteOrigin

Page Builder by SiteOrigin allows you to compose a page by simply drag-n-drop widgets right from the WordPress post or page. It integrates well with WordPress and also built with developers in mind.

Developers can quickly build a custom widget as well as a pre-built template using the API that they’re already familiar with.

AtomicBlocks

AtomicBlocks is a WordPress plugin that registers additional blocks to Gutenberg (WordPress’s new editor interface).

It consists of pre-built components, like the so-called Spacer and Divider, Call-to-Action, and it also now comes with Pre-designed page layouts, which makes creating a nice-looking page layout on WordPress using Gutenberg a lot easier and faster.

Getwid

Getwid is a collection of comprehensive Gutenberg blocks and unique pre-built block templates to help you quickly build a beautiful landing page on your Website with the new editor in WordPress.

At the time of writing, the plugin consists of 40+ custom blocks and 35+ templates.

The post 10 WordPress Plugins to Create Landing Pages Easily appeared first on Hongkiat.

BuddyPress — the “social network in a box” for WordPress — is the most powerful tool for creating communities or social networks using WordPress. The plugin unlocks various social networking capabilities for users like creating profiles, sending messages, building connections and groups, and many more.

BuddyPress comes with tons of features for creating a rich community or social network website powered by WordPress. However, you require a killer theme and some add-ons for BuddyPress to build a social network that tests the limits of your imagination. And it’s not easy to find them — not the best ones.

That’s why I’m going to introduce you to the best ten add-ons for BuddyPress that brings additional or better features to BuddyPress. Let’s get going!

rtMedia for WordPress

A full-featured media solution for WordPress and BuddyPress, rtMedia allows your users to post media to activity status updates — just like Facebook. It adds new media tabs under BuddyPress Profiles and Groups. Also, it lets the users create collections (more like albums) to organize their photos and videos.

rtMedia avails a responsive lightbox, video player, and upload screen that works across all device sizes. Its privacy features allow users to control the visibility of media files and albums. Last but important, you get to customize its every aspect, thanks to its rich templating system and a wide variety of settings.

Activity Plus Reloaded

Another plugin for enhancing media capabilities for BuddyPress, Activity Plus Reloaded adds Facebook-like features to your social network. With this plugin, the users can attach photos, videos, and web links with their networks — just like Facebook. It adds quick-share or upload options to the activity stream.

Your users can also embed videos from video-sharing services including Vimeo and YouTube. Also, it lets them embed web links like any modern service, i.e., the web link is shown along with its title, description, and thumbnail image.

iFlyChat – WordPress Chat

iFlyChat is one of the best chat solutions for WordPress and BuddyPress. It adds real-time chat features to your community or social network, which then helps in boosting the user engagement in your network. The users can privately chat with each other and chat in groups or public chat rooms — like Facebook.

Its best feature is “chat moderation” — you can moderate the chats including link spamming and swearing in the chats. And the complete chat history is saved until you as the admin or moderator delete them. But that’s not all, it allows the users to send emojis, share files, video-chat with others, surprisingly!

However, it limits the features — especially the concurrent users using the chats — in its free plans. Its free plan allows just ten users, but you can opt for its paid plans, which offers support for 60 to 300 users and more features.

BuddyPress Global Search

Another one of the crucial plugins, BuddyPress Global Search adds global search functionality in your community or social network. Thus, it allows every user to search for every component of BuddyPress — pages, posts, and custom post types like activities — all from a unified search bar showing live results.

BuddyPress Global Search is easy to set up as well. You just need to install this plugin and every search box works as Global Search. It shows the results in a tabbed interface — live results auto-styled per your default template.

Broadcast Live Video

Broadcast Live Video adds support for live video in your community or social network website. It allows users to broadcast live-streaming channels on your website via various sources like webcam, video playlists, and desktop or mobile encoder apps. The best part is it supports both desktop and mobile.

However, this plugin works directly through your web hosting, so your hosting platform must support streaming services. Fortunately, it also means that you get complete control and ownership of the live-streaming content.

BuddyPress Docs

BuddyPress Docs adds Google Docs-like capabilities to BuddyPress, i.e., your community or social network website. It brings collaborative workspaces — part document editing, part shared folders, and part wiki — to your network. Then, it’s not the best part; it even offers the users complete privacy levels.

The docs are linked to your users or user groups with support for tags and taxonomies. The users can manage filterable and sortable document lists — all created using the TinyMCE (the well-known editor shipped with WordPress). Moreover, it helps users avoid losing content or overwriting documents. Last but important, you can check out a doc’s revision history like Google Docs.

BuddyDrive

As BuddyPress Docs brings Google Docs-like capabilities, BuddyDrive brings Google Drive-like capabilities to your BuddyPress. The plugin allows your network members to share files and folders in an easy way. Moreover, it offers numerous privacy settings like BuddyPress Docs and Google Drive.

A user can just upload a private document, share it with friends or user groups, or share it publicly with everyone in your community. Surprisingly, it also allows securing a file or folder using a password to share with added security.

BuddyPress Edit Activity

BuddyPress default features don’t allow editing activity posts after a user creates them. With this plugin, your community users can edit their activities long after they create them. Also, this time limit is customizable through the WordPress Admin. It’s easy to set up: install the plugin and it will do the rest.

Spam Destroyer

You as a blogger or website owner don’t like spam, right? It’s also true for your community members or social network users, but it’s not easy to stop spam — at least using traditional methods. Spam Destroyer helps you stop automated spam (i.e., bot-based spam) on your website without obstructing real users.

BuddyPress Registration Options

BuddyPress Registration Options doesn’t follow nomenclature. Unlike its name, it doesn’t focus on registration options but moderation options regarding user registration. The plugin helps you moderate new user registrations in your community or social network, which helps fight spam and other abuse.

You can block or restrict new users to their profiles only; they can’t visit all of the community until they’re approved. It allows customizing messages and email notifications to tailor them per your community or social network.

Bonus: Youzer

Youzer is one of the best plugins for enhancing user profiles on BuddyPress or WordPress. It adds several powerful add-ons and features to user profiles, which lets you create Facebook Timeline-like profiles to your social network. It brings social wall, groups, messages, notifications, and whatnot to your website.

Also, it adds activity stream, social login, emoticons, and groups and members directories to BuddyPress, making it a powerful community or social network. Then, it offers multiple color schemes, header styles, and profile widgets along with privacy settings and support for showing custom advertisements.

Though you can download and try the plugin for free, Youzer doesn’t avail a free plan, unfortunately. But it avails a big list of features, making it worth a try.

That’s all; you may not require all of these plugins for creating your dream community or social network using BuddyPress and WordPress. That said, you must decide and get the plugins that add or help add the feature you’re looking to provide to your users. Or the ones you need such as Spam Destroyer.

Did you find the list helpful? Did I mention one of your favorite plugins for BuddyPress? Write a comment below or tweet to me at @aksinghnet.

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