WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in use for building dynamic websites today. In an upcoming post, we’ll explain why it’s a good idea to use a CMS for your site and why OSD often recommends WordPress. But first, it might be helpful to understand WordPress from my point of view: the development side.
WordPress updates and how they impact your site
If you’re going to build a site in WordPress, you need to be aware that WordPress releases frequent updates. This is not a bad thing. Code updates improve security and usability for your site.
On the other hand, updates can cause problems in one situation: when your site is built with a static site customization. What’s that? It’s when your site is developed with custom coded “theme.” This theme makes your site functional and beautiful. However, when a WordPress update is released, it’s possible the update may not be compatible with your site theme.
The solution: WordPress plugins
A good WordPress development team knows how to avoid problems with themes and code updates. It’s all about building plugins.
In order to create beautiful, custom sites that don’t rely on themes, OSD has been migrating our code into plugins. This way when WordPress is updated, we can update our plugins – and that, in turn, will update all of our client sites at the same time.
Thanks to plugins, you can be sure your beautiful OSD-built site won’t suffer from update-related downtime, and you will not have to be afraid of the pesky update notice.
The solution: WordPress plugins
Another great thing about plugins is that you can share them with others – which the OSD web development team does. As of today, more than 700 site administrators have downloaded OSD’s plugins.
Keep in mind we’re not sharing private details about our client sites. We’re only sharing a little snippet of code that makes WordPress work better for everyone. We also use plugins that others have developed. It’s the golden rule of development: be good to others and they’ll be good to you!
Check out OSD’s WordPress plugins
If you’re curious, here are some of the publicly available plugins that OSD has developed:
- OSD Remove All WordPress Branding – A quick way to remove almost every mention of WordPress on a site. Download the plugin >
- OSD Exclude From Search Results – Allows the developer to quickly remove a page or blog post from showing up in a site’s search results. Download the plugin >
- OSD Blog Search Widget – Searches your blog posts, but excludes other types of posts and pages. Download the plugin >
- OSD Simple Table Generator – Makes it easy to build tables with custom attributes such as column widths and header formatting. Download the plugin >
- Matt
