Random WordPress Tips – WP Rig, WP Smoother

October 31st, 2018




This is an article simply for the purpose of sharing some valuable WordPress tips and tricks I’m learning on my journey in the WordPress Universe. There are mountains of information on WordPress, and it’s often very hard to wade through, especially for beginners, so I’m hoping this will help people gain some traction in that area.

WP Rig

For our first of our WordPress tips, we have 
WP Rig. It’s a great tool which I’ve just discovered. Its purpose is to help WordPress theme developers create fully custom themes, that are “lighting-fast”. But it’s much more than that. It implements a plethora of task runners to significantly cut development time, while maintaining the very best in current web development and WordPress standards.

There is a free course available on Linkedin Learning which guides you through this whole process. The course is made by Morten Rand-Hendriksen, an industry leader, who also created WP Rig! So you know you’re in good hands.

WP Rig quite surprised me by just how much it can help you out through the entire build process. 
Gulp is used to process manage and optimise all your files and start BrowserSync, which allows you to literally sync a browser window to any other browser on your computer, and even any browser on your network.
Then you have your code checked by WordPress Coding Standards and ESLint.
Progressive loading of Javascript and CSS, and lazy loading of images means that a lot of what you might use a plugin to do, or take time to code in to your theme is built right in to WP Rig.

There is too much to go in to in this short article, but if you are a WordPress theme developer, I would seriously recommend looking in to it.

 

WP Smoother


Number two is WP Smoother. It’s a simple and little known plugin which basically does one thing really well: fading in pages instead of displaying them abruptly.

I had been experimenting with different methods of fading the page in for a while. I’d never really run in to a solution that was too realiable, and I was just messing around with keywords on the WordPress Plugin Directory, when I came across WP Smoother

This plugin did exactly  what I wanted with no hassles. There is a smooth scroll feature also, which I don’t think worked, but that’s not really what mattered to me. I now have a nice fade in effect when each page loads. 

I don’t really see much of a reason not to add this to your website. It’s great for the user experience, making for a much smoother transition between pages. 

Have fun with these useful Wordpress tips! Thanks for reading.

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