Posts Tagged ‘user experience’

How to add sidebar to single.php (Single Posts) to your wordpress blog default theme

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Until recently, I have used a default wordpress theme which historically is a bit old and used to be a default theme to the older versions of wordpress.
Since however, I’ve went to many updates and on the other hand I do like and enjoy the template I have decided to continue use it for my blog until this very day.

However this nice theme’s default behaviour is a bit weird, since by default the Single opened posts are configured in a way that the usual index page sidebar is missing.
As in the sidebar there are plenty of navigation buttons and search in the blog button, at a certain moment I have realized it’s probably not a good idea that the single.php (single blog posts) open up with the right sidebar missing.

Thus I’ve decided to put back the missing sidebar in the single posts, with a hope that this will be helpful to my readers and hence have positive impact on the overall blog user experience.

Doing so prooved to be rather easy, here is how I added back the right sidebar to my wordpress single posts :

1. Edit blog/wp-content/themes/default/single.php

debian:~# vim /var/www/blog/wp-content/themes/default/single.php

2. In the single.php look up for the code:

<div id="content" class="widecolumn">

Substitute this html code with:

<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">

3. Next find the code: <?php get_footer(); ?>

Right before the get_footer(); php function add in the function;

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

Tadam! Refresh a single post in Firefox and you should see your blog index.php sidebar to show up.

W3 total Cache a nice wordpress “all in one” wordpress Caching plugin

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

w3 total cache logo wordpress speed up w3tc

In my recent question of looking for best ways to optimize my wordpress blog, as well as other wordpress based websites, I’m managing I’ve come across a great plugin called W3 Total Cache or W3TC as it’s widely known among wordpress geeks.

The full caching wordpress solution in face of W3TC is already actively deployed among many major wordpress powered websites, to name a few:
stevesouders.com, mattcutts.com, mashable.com

I gave a try W3 Total Cache and was amazed about the rich caching functionality it provides. Having the W3TC plugin installed adds a whole menu on the left wordpress admin panel reading Performance , clicking on it shows a menu with thorough choices on numerous things which deal with the running of wordpress on the server.
Here is a screenshot on the menus W3 Total Cache provides:

w3 total cache whole wordpress caching pages and sql solution

The plugin has support for html caching, sql caching, CDN, CSS and Javascript compress & minify etc.
To test the plugin adequately I disabled HyperCache and Db Cache . My observations is that with W3TC wordpress renders php and the overall user experience and download times in wordpress are better. Therefore I’ll probably use only W3 Total Cache as a cacher for wordpress installs.
Besides that I had some issues on some wordpress based websites with the Db Cache SQL caching.
On these websites after enabling Db Cache, suddenly page edditing of the created existing pages started returning empty pages. This could be due to the fact that these wordpress based websites was customly tailered and many code was wiped out, however it could also be a Db Cache bug. So to conclude W3TC is the perfect solution for wordpress caching 😉